810 nobumi iyanaga
in the first scroll. Although I cannot go into details in the limited
scope of this essay, these lineages are not only completely different
from those found in documents emanating from the real Tachikawa-
ryū, they are also altogether aberrant. For example, the dates of the
listed monks are not consistent, and their Shingon branch affiliations
(Ono-ryū or Hirosawa-ryū) are randomly distributed and utterly con-
fused. Any learned Shingon monk of the period would have easily seen
that these lineages were forgeries—and Shinjō himself does not fail to
notice the inconsistencies (Moriyama 1965, 541–42).
The word “Tachikawa-ryū” occurs twice in the first scroll, both
times in the autobiographical part of the work. First, Shinjō writes that
in 1239, at the age of twenty-five, “he received the three abhiṣeka from
the master Ashō of Hosono in the country of Ecchu (
): they were the ‘secret yugi,’ the ‘[body of the] natural out-
come,’ and the ‘body of the dharma’ (himitsu yugi tōru-hosshin sanshu
no kanjō )” (Moriyama 1965, 531). He
also writes that on that occasion he “copied all the secret works of
the Tachikawa-ryū.” This certainly means that Shinjō received at that
occasion a transmission of the Tachikawa-ryū. The second occurrence
of the word appears in the following passage (Moriyama 1965, 532).
Sometime after the summer of 1250, Shinjō had an opportunity to
visit the temple of a monk of his acquaintance, Kōamidabutsu
, in Akasaka, Echizen. He was repeatedly invited to this monk’s
cell, where he found a big bag full of books. Kōamidabutsu opened
it and took out many scrolls, more than a hundred in all. Shinjō dis-
covered that they were mainly orikami (folded pieces of paper
containing secret ritual texts) of the Tachikawa-ryū, which were in cir-
culation in Ecchū. However, among these scrolls, there were seven or
eight containing what Shinjō referred to as “those Three Inner Sūtras
(kano nai-sanbukyō ) and oral traditions of Kikuran
” (Moriyama 1965, 532). Shinjō writes that it was then
that he saw these texts for the first time and found them very unusual.
He borrowed the scrolls to take back to his room and copy them, but
there were details in them that were unclear to him.
These two passages show that many texts of the real Tachikawa-
ryū circulated in Echizen and Ecchū (modern-day Fukui and Toyama)
around the mid-thirteenth century. Among them could occasionally
be found some famous texts of “that teaching,” but Shinjō does not
confound the texts of the Tachikawa-ryū with those of what he calls
“that teaching.”