The ''Genkō Shakusho'' (元亨釈書) is the first Japanese Buddhist history. It was written during the
Kamakura period
The is a period of Japanese history that marks the governance by the Kamakura shogunate, officially established in 1192 in Kamakura by the first ''shōgun'' Minamoto no Yoritomo after the conclusion of the Genpei War, which saw the struggle bet ...
in Classical Chinese by the famous Rinzai monk
Kokan Shiren
Kokan Shiren ( Japanese: こかんしれん, Kanji: 虎関師錬; 9 May 1278 – 11 August 1347), Japanese Rinzai Zen patriarch and celebrated poet. He preached Buddhism at the Imperial court, and was noted for his poetry in the Literature of the ...
(1278–1346) and in total consists of 30 scrolls.
[Foguangshan 1989]
Kokan Shiren wrote the ''Genkō Shakusho'' in 1322; the literal translation of the title is the "
Genkō Era Buddhist History." In the introduction to the work, Kokan wrote that he was shamed into writing it after the Chinese monk
Yishan Yining
Yishan Yining (一山一寧, in Japanese: ''Issan Ichinei'') (1247 – 28 November 1317) was a Chinese Buddhist monk who traveled to Japan. Before monkhood his family name was Hu. He was born in 1247 in Linhai, Taizhou, Zhejiang, China. He was ...
expressed his surprise that no such history existed in Japan.
The book was first published between 1346–1377.
[Muller 2019] It covers a span of seven hundred years in Japanese Buddhist history and biographies from its introduction into Japan until the late Kamakura period. It was accepted into the Buddhist Tripitaka during the
Nanboku-chō period
The Nanboku-chō period (南北朝時代, ''Nanboku-chō jidai'', "North and South court period", also known as the Northern and Southern Courts period), spanning from 1336 to 1392, was a period that occurred during the formative years of the Mur ...
.
Structure
The Genkō Shakusho has three divisions:
# Biographies scrolls 1–19 with four hundred and six titles of monastic and secular biographies
# History scrolls 20–26 covering seven hundred years Buddhist history until the late Kamakura period
[Soka Gakkai 2019]
# Gazettes scrolls 27–30 covering ten different other types of histories
Notes
References
Sources
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Further reading
{{cite book , last=Ury , first=Marian Bloom , title=Genkō shakusho, Japan's first comprehensive history of Buddhism : a partial translation, with introduction and notes , publisher=Stanford University , year=1971
14th-century books
History books about Buddhism
Kamakura-period books about Buddhism
Kamakura-period history books