Xīfāng zhǐnán chāo 西方指南鈔
Compass to the Western [Pure Land] compiled by 親鸞 Shinran (編)
About the work
A six-fascicle anthology of teachings of 源空 Hōnen 法然 — sermons (go-seppō 御説法), exchanges (mondō 問答), letters, and short doctrinal pieces — compiled by 親鸞 Shinran in Kōgen 1 / 1256, when Shinran was 84. The title — Saihō shinan-shō, “The Western Pure Land Compass” — characterizes the work as a practical guide to the Hōnen-line Pure Land path. Note: the catalog meta inadvertently includes a closing-bracket stray character in the author field (親鸞]); the correct reading is 親鸞 (Shinran), and this is the conventional Shinshū tradition. The work is one of the principal Shinran-period witnesses to Hōnen’s authentic teaching, distinct from the Hōnen-school traditions (Chinzei, Seizan, etc.) that developed after Hōnen’s death in 1212.
Abstract
The six fascicles preserve a corpus of Hōnen-attributed material in three principal categories: (1) vernacular sermons in classical Japanese, on the standard Pure Land topics — the Eighteenth Vow, the senju-nenbutsu doctrine, the relation of nenbutsu to other practices, the deathbed doctrine, aku-nin shō-ki; (2) doctrinal letters and exchanges with Hōnen’s chief disciples — including Seikaku 聖覺 聖覺 (Shinran’s senior fellow-disciple) and Shōkū 證空; (3) short essays on the central Pure Land questions.
The work is doctrinally significant for two reasons: (1) it preserves a Shinran-curated Hōnen-corpus at a time (1256) when the various Hōnen-school traditions had splintered, and provides Shinran’s own selection of what he considered the authentically Hōnen materials; (2) its vernacular Japanese sermon-material is one of the earliest substantial witnesses to late-Heian / early-Kamakura Japanese sermon style — i.e. it is an important text not only for Shinshū studies but for the history of Japanese prose.
Date. Internally Kōgen 1 / 1256, when Shinran was 84, in his late-Kyoto period. The compilation overlaps in time with KR6t0367 Ichinen-tanen mon’i (1257) and KR6t0368 Yui-shin-shō mon’i (1257), all from Shinran’s final productive decade.
Authentication caveat. Some material in the Saihō shinan-shō parallels material attributed to Hōnen in the Chinzei-line Hōnen shōnin gyōjō zu and other Hōnen-school anthologies; some does not. Modern Hōnen scholarship (Ōhara Shōjitsu 大原性実, Ishii Kyōdō 石井教道) has used the Saihō shinan-shō as one of the principal non-Chinzei controls on the authentic Hōnen corpus.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T83N2674) records the work as a 6-fascicle anthology with no compiler attribution explicitly and no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.
Translations and research
Critical edition: Shinshū shōgyō zensho, vol. 4. No complete English translation; partial selections in Ueda & Hirota, The Collected Works of Shinran (1997). On Hōnen and his sources: Sōhō Machida, Renegade Monk: Hōnen and Japanese Pure Land Buddhism (UC Press, 1999); Mark L. Blum, The Origins and Development of Pure Land Buddhism (Oxford UP, 2002); Ōhara Shōjitsu, Hōnen kyōgaku no kenkyū (Ryūbunkan, 1956); Ishii Kyōdō, Senchaku-shū no kenkyū (Sankibō, 1963).
Links
- CBETA online
- Compiler: 親鸞 (Shinran)
- Subject of the compilation: 源空 (Hōnen)