Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Obaku Archbishop Ven. Kondo Hiromichi's 近藤博道 Inauguration Ceremony in Oct. 27, 2015


On Oct.27, 2015 (today), a new Obaku Archbishop Ven. Kondo Hiromichi近藤博道 will be inaugurated as the sixty-second abbot of Manpukuji. I am always fascinated by the ritual ceremonies of the Obaku sect in Japan and wondering how much have been preserved since Yinyuan's time. The agenda below shows the basic structure of the ceremony still maintains some elements from the seventeenth century. It will be a great topic to do religious and ethnographic research. The inauguration ceremony of the Sixtieth generation abbot Sengoku Taizan 仙石泰山 on Oct. 28, 2001 has been put on Youtube and a link is provided below.

黄檗宗管長近藤博道大和尚晋山式



来る十月二十七日 (火) 黄檗宗大本山萬福寺 第六十二代堂頭、黄檗宗管長近藤博道大和尚晋山式を挙行いたします。
08:00総門より晋山 三門祝問 諸堂巡拝
09:00維那 上堂第一請東方丈寿位の間にて
受付開始大殿横テント
10:30来賓・賀客・役位は順次法堂に入堂法堂
11:00祝國開堂式
12:00本堂前にて記念撮影 祝辞 鏡開き
祝斎各斎会会場にて
14:00散会予定

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Imperial Palace (Edo Castle) Yinyuan Visited in 1658


Ote Gate of the Tokyo Imperial Palace from which Yinyuan might have entered, photo by Jiang Wu
During my recent trip to Japan, I stayed at Grand Arc Hanzomon Hotel which is next to the imperial palace, old Edo Castle. I was unable to get in but this is the place Yinyuan visited when he had an audience with the fourth Shogun Ietsuna 徳川 家綱  (1641 – 1680) in the winter of 1658. I have a very detailed description of this meeting of a Chinese monk and the Japanese rule in my book Leaving for the Rising Sun, pages 128-131. I know the palace has been changed a lot after the Meiji emperor took it over. But maybe we can find some interesting things preserved in their archive.
Overview of the Palace from Grand Arc Hanzomon Hotel, photo by Jiang Wu
Overlooking the Palace from Ote Gate, photo by Jiang Wu

The Korean Gate高麗門 , photo by Jiang Wu

Map of Places Yinyuan visited in Edo City, created by Jiang Wu

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Special Exhibitions at Manpukuji Archive

Painted by Chen Xian, Inscribed by Yinyuan

黄檗山萬福寺 http://www.obakusan.or.jp/   

記事 文華殿 (2015/10/14) Today!
文華殿 昭和47年(1972) 黄檗文華の殿堂として、その宝物・資料の収蔵保管と展示のために、開山隠元禅師300年大遠諱を記念して建立されました。

収蔵品には、隠元禅師の画像を多く描いた喜多元規の作品をはじめ、しばしば寺に出入りしたという伊藤若沖 (じゃくちゅう) や池大雅の名画があり、さらに隠元禅師の遺品や中国伝来の品々も多数保存されています。
一般公開は、年2回 春と秋に特別展を約1ヶ月間開催しています (月曜休館)。

秋季特別展のご案内

黄檗山萬福寺文華殿 秋季特別展(40)
『黄檗の文華』-明清文人趣味の系譜-
〔同時開催〕仏教書フェア-京都・報音舎協賛
 
〔講演会〕『明清文人の生活空間』 京都大学人文科学研究所助教 髙井たかね氏
日時:11月15日(日) 14:00
場所:第一文華殿ホール(要電話予約)
 
会期:平成27年10月21日(水)~11月30日(月)
休館日:毎週火曜日(但し、11月3日は開館)
開館時間:9:30~17:00(入館は16:30まで)
入館料:一般:300(250)円、高校生:200(150)円、中学生:100(50)円
※( )は30名以上の団体時、別途入山料が必要となります。

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Yinyuan, Mu'an, and Jifei's Calligraphy Folding Screen at Tokyo National Museum



Tokyo National Museum has a magnificent folding screen of Zen words (Zengo Byōbu 禪語屏風) featuring the calligraphy by Yinyuan 隱元, Mu'an 木庵, and Jifei 即非. No other information about its origin so far.


Wednesday, October 7, 2015

Obaku monk's long scroll at Tokyo National Museum


Displays in a national museum in any country are not a small matter. They are reflections of a nation's historical memory. During my recent stop in Tokyo, I went to Japan's National Museum at Ueno Park to see how the Obaku art by immigrant Chinese monks is displayed. To my surprise, Yinyuan and other Chinese monks' works are featured prominently as the art of Japan. One of them is this long scroll of calligraphy by eighteen Chinese monks led by Yinyuan. Apparently, Yinyuan and these Chinese monks wrote at the same time on a long piece of paper. It must be a magnificent event. This piece of art has been adorned by late Edo Confucians as well and became the collections of Saitō Setsudō  斎藤 拙堂(さいとう せつどう) and Koga Seiri 古賀 精里(こが せいり).








Saturday, October 3, 2015

New Book on the Chinese Buddhist Canon Available for Sale now



"Bringing together leading specialists in the Chinese Buddhist canon, Spreading Buddha's Word in East Asia makes a major contribution to our understanding of both the textual and the social history of one of the most impressive textual projects in the history of the world." — John Kieschnick, Stanford University


"The Sinitic Buddhist canons rank among the largest bodies of sacred literature ever produced by any religious tradition. The compilation, editing, and publication of these massive collections required a commitment of money and manpower that was the medieval equivalent of the moon landings of the 1960s. This ground-breaking volume gives these canons the sustained attention they have long deserved from the scholarly community and will help to demonstrate that they are among the preeminent cultural achievements of the wider Sinitic world." — Robert E. Buswell, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

"One measure of the maturity of a discipline is its critical awareness of its sources. This collection of nine expert and ground-breaking essays on the Chinese Buddhist canon, augmented by a magisterial preface by a doyen of the field and by two eminently useful bibliographical appendices, marks a genuine advance in the study of Chinese Buddhism. All students of Buddhism in China have necessarily been explorers and exploiters of the vast textual treasury of the Chinese Buddhist tradition, but they have not always been fully aware of the nature, the scope, the formation, and the limitations of great resource on which they draw. Now, with the appearance of this quite essential book, they have a reliable map and a guide to what is arguably the largest single collection of authoritative texts of any of the world's great religions. All who study Chinese Buddhism must be grateful to Professors Wu and Chia and their colleagues, and must keep this book of theirs ever handy as they pursue their research into scholarly territory now more clearly mapped." — Robert M. Gimello, The University of Notre Dame

Preface, by Lewis Lancaster

Acknowledgments
Conventions
Introduction, by Jiang Wu and Lucille Chia
Part I: Overview
1. The Chinese Buddhist Canon Through the Ages: Essential Categories and Critical Issues in the Study of a Textual Tradition, by Jiang Wu
2. From the "Cult of the Book" to the "Cult of the Canon": A Neglected Tradition in Chinese Buddhism, by Jiang Wu
Part II: The Formative Period
3. Notions and Visions of the Canon in Early Chinese Buddhism, by Stefano Zacchetti
4. Fei Changfang's Lidai sanbao ji and Its Role in the Formation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, by Tanya Storch
Part III: The Advent of Printing
5. The Birth of the First Printed Canon: The Kaibao Edition and Its Impact, by Jiang Wu, Lucille Chia, and Chen Zhichao
6. The Life and Afterlife of Qisha Canon, by Lucille Chia
7. Managing the Dharma Treasure: Collation, Carving, Printing, and Distribution of the Canon in Late Imperial China, by Darui Long
Part IV: The Canon Beyond China
8. Better Than the Original: The Creation of Goryeo Canon and the Formation of Giyang Pulgyo, by Jiang Wu and Ron Dziwenka
9. Taisho Canon: Devotion, Scholarship, and Nationalism in the Creation of the Modern Buddhist Canon in Japan, by Greg Wilkinson
Appendix 1. A Brief Survey of the Printed Editions of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, by Li Fuhua and He Mei
Appendix 2. The Creation of the CBETA Electronic Tripitaka Collection in Taiwan, by Aming Tu
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jiang Wu is professor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Arizona. His research interests include Chinese Buddhism, especially Chan/Zen Buddhism and the Chinese Buddhist canon, Sino-Japanese Buddhist exchanges, and the application of GIS tools in the study of Chinese culture and religion.

Lucille Chia is professor of history at the University of California at Riverside. Her research interests include Chinese book culture, most recently the history of Buddhist publishing in imperial China. She is the author of Printing for Profit: The Commercial Publishers of Jianyang, Song-Ming (960-1644) and coeditor of Knowledge and Text Production in an Age of Print: China, 900-1400.

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Kaifukuji 海福寺: Another Famous Obaku Temple during the Edo Period

Obakushu Kaifukuji

It is a pure coincidence that we discovered the famous Obaku temple Kaifukuji 海福寺 was next to Rakanji. It was founded in 1628 and was first led by the then Soto monk Dokuhon 獨本性源, who was later converted to Yinyuan when he arrived in Nagasaki. Dokuhon accompanied Yinyuan to Edo for his audience with the shogun Tsunayoshi. He thus changed his temple Kaifukuji to the new Obaku sect and asked Yinyuan to be the symbolic founder. During the Edo period, it was one of the two "contact temples" (furegashira 觸頭) for the Obaku sect and a "famous attraction" as well. (The other was Zuishoji 瑞聖寺.) We found Yinyuan's memorial pagoda and other relics for later Obaku abbots. We talked to the young abbot as well and learnt a lot about its history.  The original place was in Fukagawa 深川 and the temple was moved here in 1910 (Meiji 43).
Memorial Pagados of early abbots, shot by Jiang Wu

After reading the temple history I was given, I realized that the temple structure also kept relics from another Obaku temple called Taiunji 泰雲寺 which was founded by the famous Obaku nun Ryonen了然 (1646-1711). She was a lady in waiting for the retired Emperor Gomizunoo's wife Tofukumonin 東福門院 but was converted to Obaku. She was famous because she burned her beautiful face to show her determination of conversion. The temple was original located in Shinjuku but was an abandoned temple in the late Bakumatsu period. Therefore the temple plaque wrote by Yinyuan's disciple Mu'an 木庵 and the main gate were moved here. It is funny that because the plaque was so big and the character "ji" 寺 has to be cut to mount the plaque.
Plaque for Taiunji by Mu'an, photo by Jiang Wu
Obaku nun Ryonen has attracted some attention from Western scholars because she represented exemplar Zen women. See Engendering Faith: Women and Buddhism in Premodern Japan by
Barbara Ruch, Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2002.



Yinyuan's Memorial Pagoda, photo by Jiang Wu


Main Gate, originally from Taiunji, photo by Jiang Wu
The temple also preserved a bronze bell cast with inscriptions by Yinyuan.
Bell with inscription by Yinyuan, photo by Jiang Wu