On the enduring legacy of Tiantai 天台 educational books in Premodern Japan: the [ <i>Tendai enshū shikyō goji</i> 天台円宗四教五時] <i>Nishidani myōmoku</i> 西谷名目 and <i>Shishi yaolan</i> 釋氏要覽 (Śākyamuni [Buddha’s] essential teachings)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How did premodern East Asian Buddhists learn about the history and teachings of the Buddha? Its conspicuous self-image as an authentic branch of Chinese Buddhism in Japan, the great Tendai tradition 天台宗 (Ch. Tiantai) – both atop Mount Hiei 比叡山 and below it at Miidera 三井寺 – preserves several educational books that generations of Japanese Buddhists have considered to reflect an educational curriculum from Song China (960–1279). In this article I introduce and provide an overview of the Tendai enshū shikyō goji 天台円宗四教五時 Nishidani myōmoku 西谷名目 [Guide to the Perfect Tendai Tradition’s Four Teachings and Five Periods, according to the Nishidani Approach], which is preserved in multiple editions – with sub-commentaries – from the Edo 江戸 period (1603–1868) and earlier and references an early-eleventh-century Chinese exegetical compendium called the Shishi yaolan 釋氏要覽 [Śākyamuni (Buddha’s) Essential Teachings, T no. 2127]. I show how, according to Tendai Buddhists who followed the teachings of many teachers who studied in China across more than 400 years, the essential teachings of Buddhism are best conveyed through what we might call a Tiantai lens of scholarship.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".