Seonwonjejeonjipdoseo of Bokcheonsa Temple

The Seonwonjejeonjipdoseo is a work from the later years of Chan Master Gyubong Jongmil (圭峰宗密), the fifth patriarch of the Huayan (Hwaeom) school in China, and consists of the preface he wrote for the full 101 volumes of his own work, the Seonwonjejeonjip. As the Seonwonjejeonjip itself no longer survives, its contents can only be inferred through the Seonwonjejeonjipdoseo. At a time when the Seon (meditation) and Gyo (doctrinal) schools were mutually hostile, Gyubong argued from the standpoint of the Huayan school for the unity of Seon and Gyo, reconciling the Buddhist community of the day. The representative works expounding this unity are the 101 volumes of the Seonwonjejeonjip and the two-volume Seonwonjejeonjipdoseo written on it. Of these, the printing blocks of the Seonwonjejeonjip were lost at the end of the Yuan dynasty and no longer survive, so only the two-volume Seonwonjejeonjipdoseo remains. It is not certain when the text was transmitted to Korea, but since Byeogam Gakseong (碧岩覺惺, 1575–1660) wrote a one-volume commentary on it, it appears to have been introduced before his time. The text accorded well with the Korean spirit of combined practice of Seon and Gyo and circulated as widely as in China, being studied as one of the subjects in the Sajipgwa (Four Collections) curriculum at monastic seminaries. The Seonwonjejeonjipdoseo held at Bokcheonsa Temple is a woodblock-printed edition produced in 1579 at Sinheungsa Temple on Jirisan Mountain. It shows the early form in which the text was transmitted to Korea, making it a valuable resource for the study of Korean Buddhist history, and, being printed before the Japanese invasions of 1592–1598, it is also an old and bibliographically precious item of national heritage value.

AI Translation

Where it is

Region

Yeongdo-gu, Busan

Designation

Provincial Tangible Heritage · 시도유형문화유산