Zhuànshí chāo 撰時抄
The Anthology on the Choice of the Time by 日蓮 Nichiren (述)
About the work
A single-fascicle doctrinal treatise by Nichiren 日蓮 日蓮 (1222–1282), composed at Minobu in Kenji 1 / 1275, when Nichiren was 53. The Senji-shō is one of the Five Major Writings of Nichiren Buddhism. Its central theme — the choice of the time — addresses the temporal-historical dimension of Buddhist soteriology: what teaching is appropriate to what age? Nichiren argues that the mappō age, specifically, is the age in which the Lotus Sūtra alone is the complete and effective teaching.
Abstract
The treatise opens with the celebrated dictum: “In learning Buddhism, the most important thing is to know the time” (夫れ仏法を学せん人は時を知る事第一の事なり). Nichiren’s argument is that the Buddhist Dharma is not timelessly applicable in a single uniform form, but is rather historically calibrated: each successive age — the shōbō (true Dharma, 1000 years), zōbō (semblance Dharma, 1000 years), and mappō (latter Dharma, 10,000 years) — has its own appropriate teaching.
The argument is structured around the four-fold sangha (shi’i 四依) and the historical succession of Buddhist masters — Indian, Chinese, and Japanese — each of whom is shown to have been correctly matched to his own age. The Indian Mahāyāna treatises (Nāgārjuna, Vasubandhu, Asaṅga) were appropriate to the shōbō age in India; the Tiāntái synthesis (Zhìyǐ, Zhànrán) was appropriate to the zōbō age in China; and now, in the mappō age in Japan, the Lotus Sūtra and its true exponent (Nichiren) are alone appropriate.
The work is doctrinally important for the systematization of Nichiren’s jisō-ron (時相論, “doctrine of historical timing”) which is one of the most distinctive features of Nichiren Buddhism among the Kamakura new schools. Shinran’s Pure Land mappō doctrine and Dōgen’s Zen mu-mappō doctrine occupy contrasting positions on the same question — Nichiren’s answer is the most aggressively historically-calibrated.
Date. Internally Kenji 1 / 1275, at Minobu.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div29.xml, T84N2690) records the work as a single-fascicle treatise by Nichiren with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.
Translations and research
English translations:
- Burton Watson (trans.), in Selected Writings of Nichiren (Columbia UP, 1990).
- SGI (eds.), The Writings of Nichiren Daishonin (1999), vol. 1.
Major studies: Jacqueline I. Stone, Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Hawai’i, 1999); Tamura Yoshirō, Nichiren Shōnin (Kōdansha, 1973); Asai Endō, Nichiren shōnin kyōgaku no kenkyū (Heirakuji, 1976).