808 nobumi iyanaga
It is difficult to determine the reasons for these suspicions of the
Tachikawa-ryū. They possibly stemmed from the fact that the tradition
was founded by a “criminal” who ended his life in suicide. Another
possibility is the name itself: it indicates a locality in Kantō, far from
the central regions of culture, which were all located in Kinki.
From the account in the Juhō-yōjin shū, it is clear that people from the
central region had little regard for the countryside and its inhabitants.
This fact may have been enough to make the Tachikawa-ryū suspect
for most people.
- “That Teaching” as Described in the Juhō-yōjin shū
The Juhō-yōjin shū mentioned above is practically the only source
describing “that teaching.”^4 In fact, it is one of the very few medi-
eval documents that mention “Tachikawa-ryū” at all. This in itself was
sufficient for representatives of the later orthodoxy to denigrate the
Tachikawa-ryū as “that teaching.” From what we read in the Juhō-
yōjin shū, however, this seems wrong; rather, the Juhō-yōjin shū
suggests that its author, Shinjō, himself received a transmission of
the Tachikawa-ryū lineage. As we have already noted, the teaching
described and criticized in this work is never named; Shinjō consis-
tently refers to it either as “this teaching” or “that teaching.”
The main aim of the whole work is to prevent Shingon practitio-
ners from trusting in a special teaching that claimed to be the most
secret and the most authentic teaching for attaining buddhahood
within the present body. The author says that “this teaching” is wide-
spread throughout the entire country, but is especially prevalent in the
countryside. He even claims that “nine out of ten Shingon masters in
the countryside believe that this [teaching] is the essence of mikkyō”
(Moriyama 1965, 554). The first question in the work is most impor-
tant from a doctrinal point of view, and indeed it is practically the only
passage in which the doctrinal tenet of “that teaching” is described:
Question: Recently, felicitous sūtras called the Three Inner Sūtras (Nai-
sanbu-kyō ) have spread throughout the world. In earlier
times, these sūtras used to be transmitted only among the abbots of [the(^4) The Juhō-yōjin shū was edited by Moriyama 1965, 530–71. This text is available
online with some annotation at http://www.bekkoame.ne.jp/~n-iyanag/buddhism/
tachikawaryu/juho_yojinshu.html. It is also partly translated into English in Sanford
1991a.