Jifei Ruyi's Calligraphy 即非如一 in The San Diego Museum of Art

Copyright by The San Diego Museum of Art

My friend Diana Chou is right now Associate Curator of East Asian Art at the San Diego Museum of Art. She showed me a rare piece of Jifei Ruyi's calligraphy in the SDMA collection. I did a little bit research and documented it here as a note for future research. The image is kindly provided by the San Diego Museum of Art and used here with permission. All rights reserved. 

This is the first poem by the Chinese Chan Monk Jifei Ruyi 即非如一 (1616-1671) in his "Songs for the Twelve Peaks of Mount Huangbo" 詠黃檗十二峰, probably written in Feb. 5, 1661 (seventh day of the first month 孟陬人日) when he was in Japan. The full text is as follows:

寶峰

形山啟自檗山翁

鎮國之名今古通

富貴潑天無取捨

大家都在寶林中

黄檗即非書於伊井

This poem is included in Complete Records of Chan Master Jifei (Jifei chanshi quanlu 即非禪師全錄),Juan 16, compiled and published in 1694.It is also reprinted in Shinsan kōtei Sokuhi zenshū / Hirakubo Akira hen 新纂校訂卽非全集 , ed. by Hirakubo Akira 平久保章編. kyōto-shi: Shibunkaku Shuppan, Heisei 5 [1993]京都市 : 思文閣出版, 平成5 [1993]，第二卷，第893頁，“詠黃檗十二峰”，第一首。

According to Hirakubo Akira, an album entitled "Songs for the Twelve Peaks of Mount Huangbo" (Huangbo shi'erfeng shi 黃檗十二峰詩) is extant and preserved in Kenshoji in Mie 三重縣見性寺. This album includes a painting of Huangbo Monastery in Fuqing, China by Xie Tu'nan 謝圖南 whose name is identical with a Southern Song bureaucrat. The painting is followed by Jifei's preface, his twelve poems, and a postscript by his disciple Xinghe 性合, probably Chinese monk Hualin Xinghe or Xingying 化林性合/偀 according to which the poems could have been composed in 1646 when Jifei was still in China. (See also a Japanese site on Xingying.) It is not clear if this piece of calligraphy in the SDMA collection is related to this album. (Shinsan kōtei Sokuhi zenshū, vol. 1, p. 5.)

A digital version of the text included in the Jiaxing Buddhist Canon 嘉興藏 can be accessed through the CBETA collection.

http://tripitaka.cbeta.org/zh-cn/J38nB425_016

The Obaku Tetsugen Canon is the first Chinese Tripitaka in the West

I am writing a paper for the Third International Conference on the Chinese Buddhist canon.  The title of my paper is "Finding the First Chinese Tripitaka in Europe: The 1872 Iwakura Mission in Britain and the Mystery of the Obaku Tetsugen Canon in the Indian Office Library." The discovery I made is that the Obaku Tetsugen Canon 黄檗/鐵眼大藏經 is actually the first Chinese Tripitaka which was brought to the West and it was sent by Iwakura Tomomi 岩倉具視(1825-1883) in 1875.

The story is like this:　 The Obaku edition was carved by Tetsugen based on the main section of the Jiaxing canon 嘉興藏 which is a reprint of the Northern Ming Canon 明北藏. Tetsugen received this Jiaxing edition from the Chinese monk Yinyuan Longqi 隱元隆琦(1592-1673), the founder of the Japanese Obaku Zen tradition. It was the most popular edition during the Edo period.

In the mid-nineteenth century, because of the discovery of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts, European scholarship on Buddhism was greatly advanced.  Therefore, there was a need to find the Chinese Tripitaka as well. In 1872, the Iwakura mission arrived in Britain. Samuel Beal (1825-1889), a professor of Chinese and a chaplain at University College, through his personal connection, made a request to Iwakura about sending a Chinese canon to England. Iwakura kept his word after he returned to Japan and the whole set of the canon arrived at the Indian Office Library in 1875.

Samuel Beal made a English catalog of the received books in 1876 and Max Müller's (1823-1900) Japanese student Nanjō Bunyū 南條文雄 (1849-1927) translated its entire catalog into English in 1883. However, Nanjō didn't mark in the title page that this canon is actually the Tetsugen canon carved in Japan. It still reads as the Chinese Tripitaka of the Great Ming Dynasty.