Buddhist Spiritual Foundation and Power in Heijo-kyo

Exploring the Significance of the Hosso Sect

Hardly anyone pays attention to it now, but there was once an age when the thought known as Yuishiki [唯識] swept across its era and commanded overwhelming influence. Because it became the operating system on which the golden age of the Nara period (710–794) was built, its spiritual inheritance may still run beneath the ground of Japan even today. Holding that thought, this time I want to look at the background of the era that became the soil for Yuishiki to spread through Japan.

Yuishiki is an advanced form of Buddhist scholarship that clarifies the structure of mind. The thought itself has its source in Yogachara. This school arose in India around the fifth century and is known in Japan as Yugagyo-ha [瑜伽行派]. The Indian brothers Mujaku (Asanga) and Seshin (Vasubandhu) of the fourth and fifth centuries are regarded as the figures who brought it to completion.

The school set out at the moment these brothers took the inner observation of India’s ancient meditators who sat in meditation and forged it into an exceedingly refined analysis of mind rather than reading it through religious explanation. From the very start Yuishiki carried the aspect of an intellectual movement for laying bare the structure of mind, and its temper is more that of scholarship than of religion. This way of investigating the mind as a matter of study is what resonated with the elite of the Nara period.

The theory rested on two works. One was the Sandhinirmocana Sutra that lays open the deep layers of how the mind works. The other was the Treatise on the Stage of Yoga Practice that Mujaku systematized. Building on his brother’s achievement, Seshin wrote two works of his own. His Thirty Verses on Manifestation Only condense the entire system of Yuishiki into a single text. His Twenty Verses on Representation Only mount a sharp refutation of belief in the reality of an external world.

At the core of the claim lies the idea of “Yuishiki-Mukyo” [唯識無境]. This is the insight that everything we take for the reality of an external world is nothing but a representation drawn out by Shiki [識]. Nothing exists as an object apart from Shiki. The Shiki of Yuishiki means the workings of the mind. This thought crossed from India to China through the seventh century journey of Genjo (Xuanzang).

Genjo (602–664) was a monk of the Tang at the height of its prosperity. In search of Buddhist scriptures he traveled overland to India and studied under Kaiken (Śīlabhadra, 529–645) at Nalanda Mahavihara. Kaiken was the central figure of what was called the Yogachara in India, and when the thought passed from him to Genjo, a thread was born that would draw the teaching eastward across the continent.

Genjo acquired the teaching of the Yogachara and carried a great mass of Buddhist texts home. Back in China he rendered an enormous body of sutras and treatises into Chinese and made an immense contribution to the monks of the Tang. Above all, The Treatise on the Demonstration of Consciousness-only that he compiled around Dharmapala’s interpretation of Seshin’s Thirty Verses became the standard of East Asian Yuishiki.

The Cheng Weishi Lun is the work in which Genjo selected and compiled the theories of ten representative scholars who had commented on Seshin’s Thirty Verses. It is a culminating work of the Indian Yogachara packed with teachings crucial to Chinese Yuishiki.

At this time Genjo also transmitted Inmyo [因明] (the study of Buddhist logic and demonstration), and this would later carry an important wing of the religious movement Japan came to call the Nanto Rokushu [南都六宗]. From here Genjo’s chief disciple Kuiji (632–682) organized and established the school as a formal sect. It came to be called Faxiang from the sense of fathoming the marks and forms of all dharmas, and in Japan the same characters are read Hosso. Japanese Yuishiki was practiced under the name Hosso, and it began by taking over Kuiji’s teaching almost exactly as he had left it.

The Yuishiki teaching had been polished and refined in the Tang, yet it did not reach Japan in a single transmission. It came in four stages and was gradually integrated. The first to bring Yuishiki was Dosho (629–700). He had studied abroad as a member of a mission to the Tang. Dosho entered the Tang in 653 and studied directly under Genjo. When he brought the heart of Hosso back to Japan, he set up a meditation cloister at Gangoji in Nara as his base.

Gangoji stands today within the city of Nara, but it was originally in the Asuka region to the south. This was because in Dosho’s lifetime it was Asuka rather than Nara that flourished as the capital of Japan.

Dosho did more than transmit Yuishiki to Japan. He traveled through the regions and devoted himself to public works such as digging wells and building bridges over rivers. What I personally find fascinating is that he is remembered as the first person in Japan to be cremated.

Chitsu and Chitatsu came next. In 658 they crossed to the Tang on a Silla ship and received the teaching from Genjo and Kuiji. Chitsu is said to have been one of the most renowned monks in Japan of his day. After returning he built temples, and in 673 he is said to have been appointed to the leading monastic rank of Sojo. Because almost no records survive from this period, most of his deeds remain unclear.

Next was the Silla monk Chiho. He is said to have come to Japan around the turn of the eighth century. Before that he had crossed to the Tang and studied under the eminent Tang monk and Faxiang successor Zhizhou (668–723). Last came Genbo (?–746), and this is the most important figure in the history of Japanese Hosso.

Genbo crossed to the Tang at the beginning of the eighth century and studied under the same Zhizhou who had taught Chiho. He returned in 735 carrying more than five thousand scrolls of sutras and treatises along with many Buddhist images. By this era the capital had already been moved to Heijo-kyo in what is now the area around Nara city, and this became his base. After his return, the lineage that Genbo transmitted to Kofukuji became the mainstream of Japanese Hosso. This context is the key, and I want to read out its meaning from here.