Duōluóyè jì 多羅葉記
Notes on the [Sanskrit Letters as Written on] Tāla-Palm Leaves by 心覺 Shinkaku (撰)
About the work
A three-fascicle Siddham scholarly treatise by Shinkaku 心覺 心覺 (1117–1180), a Shingon-line scholar of the Ninna-ji 仁和寺 lineage in mid-Heian Kyoto. The title — Tara-yō-ki — names the work after the tāla-palm leaves (多羅葉, Skt. tāla-patra) on which Sanskrit-Brāhmī texts are traditionally written in India, with Shinkaku invoking the Indian materiality of the writing-system as a doctrinal emblem. The CANWWW catalog gives the alternative title Shittan yō-ki 悉曇葉記; both are attested in the manuscript tradition and refer to the same work.
The opening folio is a celebrated demonstration page matching the forty-eight Siddham letters to the forty-eight characters of the iroha poem in classical Japanese — illustrating the Japanese phonological-mnemonic match between the iroha syllabary and the Sanskrit anuvyañjana order.
Abstract
The three fascicles cover: (1) the Siddham letters and their Japanese-iroha correspondences — this is the work’s distinctive contribution, providing the first systematic Japanese mnemonic for memorizing the fifty Siddham letters by matching them to the iroha sequence; (2) mantra and dhāraṇī applications — including the standard Shingon esoteric corpus; (3) doctrinal-cosmological correlations — each letter mapped to its proper garbha- and vajra-dhātu maṇḍala position.
The work is distinctive in its Japanese-pedagogical orientation. Earlier Siddham works (Kūkai, Annen, Junnyū, Myōkaku) had been written largely for monastic specialists who could be assumed to have already mastered the Siddham basics. Shinkaku, by contrast, is aiming at a broader monastic audience and uses the iroha-correspondence as a mnemonic bridge between the lay-Japanese phonological order and the specialized Siddham order. The pedagogical innovation made the Tara-yō-ki one of the most-copied Siddham works of the later Heian and Kamakura periods.
Date. Composition in Shinkaku’s mature career at Ninna-ji, c. 1140–1180.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div25.xml, T84N2707) records the work as a 3-fascicle treatise by Shinkaku under the title Shittan yō-ki with no internal toc sub-list and no related-text cross-references tabulated.
Translations and research
Critical edition: Taishō vol. 84. No English translation. Major studies: R. H. van Gulik, Siddham (1956); Yamanaka Yukio, Nihon shittan-gaku no kenkyū (Hōzōkan, 1981); on Shinkaku and the Ninna-ji Siddham tradition: Kashimoto Yasushi 樫本泰士, Heian kōki Shingon shūgaku no kenkyū 平安後期真言宗學の研究 (Daizō shuppan, 1992).