The career of the scholar monk Soshun Hotan 僧濬鳳潭 (1659-1738) can be regarded as an epitome of the Buddhism during the 1650s to 1750s of the Edo period. For eight years he worked with the Obaku Zen master Tetsugen 鉄眼 and assisted in printing and publishing the Obaku edition of the Tripitaka. Later he traveled around famous temples to collect old Buddhist texts, and studied Kegon and Tendai doctrines. He claimed himself as a Kegon monk who had inherited the tradition of Fazang, although his Kegon studies were marked by a very strong Tendai coloration. In his work Iron Wall with Cloud Scraps 『鉄壁雲片』, a critical tract against The Record of the Blue Cliff 『碧巌録』, he employed the Tendai notion of six stages 六即 to interpret the fivefold relations of absolute and relative 曹洞偏正五位 of Soto Zen in an original way. Focusing on this original exegesis, this paper reveals that, on the one hand, Hotan affirms the stages of practice, while on the other hand, he emphasizes the nature of original realization 本証 that the fivefold relations have, and maintains that every stage is identical with Buddha in the ultimate sense.
