Dà āshélí shēngmíng xìtú 大阿闍梨聲明系圖
Genealogical Chart of the Great Ācārya Shōmyō [Lineage] [compiler unknown]
About the work
A single-fascicle genealogical chart of the shōmyō transmission lineage from the Tang-Chinese origins through the Tendai-Ōhara gyo-san masters to the late medieval period. The work — anonymous — provides the canonical genealogy of the Tendai-Ōhara shōmyō tradition and serves as the principal lineage-document for the school’s institutional self-understanding.
Abstract
The chart traces the shōmyō transmission through approximately 30–40 generations of teachers, beginning with: (1) Cáo Zhí 曹植 (192–232), the legendary Chinese poet-composer who is held to have founded the fanbai 梵唄 (Buddhist chant) tradition at Mt. Yú in Shāndōng; (2) the major Tang-Chinese transmitters; (3) 最澄 Saichō (767–822), who brought shōmyō to Japan and established the Tendai tradition on Mt. Hiei; (4) Ennin 圓仁 (794–864), who brought additional shōmyō material from his second Tang trip; (5) 良忍 Ryōnin (1072–1132), who founded the Ōhara gyo-san tradition; (6) the principal Ōhara masters through the medieval period — including Shōnyo 聖如, Tannen 湛然, 長惠 Chōe, 宗快 Shūkai, and many others.
The work is musicologically and historically essential for reconstructing the institutional history of the Japanese Buddhist musical tradition. The medieval shōmyō lineages took their genealogical self-understanding very seriously — the transmission kuden was held to require an unbroken master-disciple chain back to the founding teachers, and the genealogical chart documents that chain.
Date. Anonymous compilation. Conservatively c. 1300–1500 on the basis of the latest masters included.
Structural Division
The CANWWW entry (div25.xml, T84N2718) records the work as a single-fascicle anonymous text 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: Imatomi Yū, Tendai shōmyō no kenkyū (Hōzōkan, 1991); Sawada Atsuko, Nihon shōmyō no kenkyū (Iwanami, 2009).