Get started

WorkYongming Yanshou

Zongjing lu

A hundred fascicles built from three hundred scriptures and treatises, arguing that Chan and the scholastic schools teach one mind.

by Yongming Yanshou3,047 passages held

  • Chinese, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
宗鏡錄
Original language
Chinese

Report a rights issue

Overview

Yongming Yanshou made this book by staging arguments. At the Yongming monastery in Hangzhou, capital of the southern kingdom of Wuyue, he gathered monks learned in three scholastic schools of Chinese Buddhism, Tiantai, Huayan and Faxiang, the school of consciousness-only, set them to question one another, and weighed what they said against the teaching of the one mind. The result, completed in the early 960s in a hundred fascicles (scroll-length chapters), is a treatise built largely out of quotation, and its author says so: opening the last section, Yanshou counts the sources he cites as a hundred and twenty sutras, a hundred and twenty sayings of the Chan patriarchs and sixty treatises by sages, three hundred works in all. The opponent is a slogan. Chan described itself as a separate transmission outside the scriptures, and Yanshou, himself a Chan master in the line of Fayan Wenyi, answered that the mind Chan points to is the same mind the scriptures describe, so that study and awakening cannot be rivals; the title's mirror is that mind, reflecting every teaching. Qian Chu, the king of Wuyue, wrote a preface and kept the book in his own quarters. It waited a century for print, until the Chan master Yuanzhao Zongben brought it out in the Xining era (1068–77). It then entered the Song canon and left its mark across Song Buddhism and on Neo-Confucian learning. The Chan master Huitang Zuxin made an abridgement in 1096, and the Qing Yongzheng emperor had the full book reissued. Later Chan histories, the Japanese Rinzai ones above all, pushed Yanshou to the margin for valuing scripture.

Key concepts

What does Yanshou mean by the 'one mind'?

The single awareness behind every experience and every teaching, the source the book's title names. Yanshou says he takes the one mind as the source and lets it reflect all things like a mirror. Each school's doctrine, each sutra's message, is then an image in that one mind rather than a rival claim. The book's hundred fascicles are an attempt to show every Buddhist teaching returning to it.

What is the storehouse consciousness?

The deepest of eight layers of consciousness in the consciousness-only school, the one that keeps the seeds left by every act and thought and from which experience grows. Yanshou calls it the eighth consciousness. The book's word for how acts leave seeds there is perfuming: each deed scents the storehouse the way incense scents cloth, and the scent later ripens into the worlds a being lives in.

How can the one mind be both deluded and pure?

By being one thing seen from two sides, as water and waves are. Yanshou says that water is waves without having the look of waves, and waves are water without losing their look as waves. Mind joined with deluded thought is called the storehouse; the same mind, unchanging, is called suchness, things as they truly are. The ordinary mind, stirred and confused, is never a different mind from the Buddha's.

What does 'nothing outside the mind' mean?

That there is no world standing apart from awareness and waiting to be known. Things appear as consciousness shapes them. Yanshou's example is the same water: gods see a jewelled ground, fish a home, humans cool water, hungry ghosts pus and fire, because the minds seeing it differ. Yanshou keeps this from becoming a private fantasy by insisting that the mind in question is the one mind, the same in Buddhas and in every being.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The Mirror of One Mind

Every teaching the Buddha gave, Yanshou holds, is an image in a single mirror. If that is so, the quarrels between schools are quarrels between reflections, and the question is how to see the glass and not only the pictures.

The preface states the plan: take the one mind as the source and let it reflect the myriad things like a mirror. Yanshou's mirror does nothing, yet shows a square thing square and a round thing round, and all things in turn mirror one another, like glasses facing glasses. He borrows Huayan's net of the god Indra, each jewel holding every other, to say that one moment of mind contains the whole. The opponent is any school that takes its own image for the mirror.

  • one mind
  • mind
  • suchness
  • buddha-nature
  • interpenetration
  • nonduality
  • emptiness
  • perception
  • buddhahood

Enter a dialogue

Chan Inside the Scriptures

Chan called itself a transmission outside the scriptures, and Yanshou, a Chan master, answered with a hundred fascicles of scripture. Whether awakening needs learning, or learning only clouds it, is the quarrel the whole book is built to settle.

Yanshou lets the objector speak first: the school of the patriarchs cuts straight in with a single sword, so why broad learning, when many words hide the point as stirred water dims a pearl? His answer is that the mind Bodhidharma transmitted is the mind the sutras describe. Words are a raft, and their nature is already free, so words can be used to cure the fixation on words. He mocks meditators who chase sharp repartee and guard a foolish Chan, and scholars who know texts and never enter.

  • language
  • wisdom
  • skillful means
  • epistemology
  • awakening
  • liberation
  • middle way
  • nonattachment

Enter a dialogue

The World as Consciousness

What a dreamer sees is vast, yet the dreamer never left the pillow. Whether waking life is any different, and what follows for karma, rebirth and the self, is what the consciousness-only material in the book works through.

Here Yanshou leans hardest on the Faxiang school of consciousness-only. The worlds of past, present and future are what the eighth consciousness, the storehouse that keeps the seeds of every act, turns into appearance. Yet he will not let the storehouse be a second, lesser mind: joined with deluded thought it is called the storehouse, unchanging it is called suchness, and both are the one mind. His objector presses the cost: with nothing outside mind, who teaches and who is taught?

  • consciousness
  • consciousness-only
  • mind-only
  • karma
  • rebirth
  • dependent origination
  • causation
  • delusion
  • ignorance

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
3,047
distinct concepts
1,137
by passages held, corpus-wide
#11

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “emptiness” and “nonduality”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
emptinessnonduality277
emptinessmind182
buddha-naturenonduality153
mindnonduality153
consciousnessperception127
buddha-natureemptiness122
buddha-naturemind110
meditationnonduality95
emptinessmeditation88
meditationmind82
emptinessperception80
consciousnessemptiness73
consciousnesskarma72
consciousnessmind66
mindperception58
nondualityperception57
emptinesskarma54
consciousnessnonduality48
buddha-naturemeditation47
karmaperception43
consciousnessmeditation41
buddha-natureconsciousness35
karmamind33
buddha-natureperception30
meditationperception28
karmameditation23
buddha-naturekarma19
karmanonduality14

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Wanshan tonggui ji (萬善同歸集)

    A companion to the Records of the Source Mirror, turned from doctrine to practice: what the one mind means for chanting, merit and the bodhisattva's deeds.

     ZH
  2. Zongjing lu (宗鏡錄) you are here ZH
  3. 唯心訣

    Shortest of his works on this shelf: a single fascicle that turns the teaching of the Records of the Source Mirror into a checklist of errors.

     ZH
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works