Chronicle
Zen in Medieval Vietnam
Thiền uyển tập anh
Anonymous · 1337
Synopsis
The lives of the masters of Vietnamese Chan, arranged by lineage: the one that a monk from southern India founds in 580 at the Pháp Vân temple, the one that a Chinese man from Guangzhou opens in 820, and a third, later one. Each entry follows the same order: the monk's origin, his entry into religion, his master, the exchanges of questions and answers that made his reputation, the verses he left, his death. The whole is part chronicle, part poetry collection and part repertoire of dialogues.
Context
The book has not one author but several: Vietnamese scholarship recognises in it the work of four monks who passed the material down from master to disciple, one of them having presented the lineages to the queen mother in 1096. A date can be read in the last entry, the year đinh sửu of the Khai Hựu era, that is 1337: some see in it the year of composition, others the year of printing. The oldest surviving printing was cut in 1715 at the Tiêu Sơn temple, in the Bắc Ninh region, by a monk and his disciples.
Who it is for
Brief entries, written in classical Chinese. One enters through a life or a lineage, not from beginning to end, and a few bearings on Chan Buddhism are needed.
Prizes and reception
The oldest continuous source for the history of Vietnamese Buddhism, and the main one for everything before the fourteenth century.