The Sandōkai is a poem by the eighth Chinese Zen ancestor Shitou Xiqian

Shitou Xiqian

Shítóu Xīqiān was a 8th-century Chinese Chán Buddhist teacher and author. All existing branches of Zen throughout the world are said to descend either from Shitou Xiqian or from his contemporary Mazu Daoyi....

 (Sekito Kisen, 700–790) and a fundamental text of the Sōtō

Soto

Sōtō Zen , or is, with Rinzai and Ōbaku, one of the three most populous sects of Zen in Japanese Buddhism.The Sōtō sect was first established as the Caodong sect during the Tang Dynasty in China by Dongshan Liangjie in the 9th century, which Dōgen Zenji then brought to Japan in the 13th century...

 school of Zen

Zen

Zen is a school of Mahāyāna Buddhism founded by the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma. The word Zen is from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chán , which in turn is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as "meditation" or "meditative state."Zen...

, chanted daily in temples throughout the world.

Title

The poem's title, "參同契", is pronounced Sandōkai in Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

 or Cāntóngqì in Mandarin Chinese

Standard Mandarin

Standard Chinese or Modern Standard Chinese, also known as Mandarin or Putonghua, is the official language of the People's Republic of China and Republic of China , and is one of the four official languages of Singapore....

. The characters, in particular the first, 參 (san or cān), can have several quite different meanings, and therefore the poem's title is susceptible to a variety of interpretations and translations.

English translations of the title, some more and some less literal, include "Merging of Difference and Unity", "Merging of Difference and Equality", "Agreement of Difference and Unity", "Harmony of Difference and Sameness", "Harmonious Song of Difference and Sameness", "Identity of Relative and Absolute", "Harmony of Relative and Absolute", "Harmony of Difference and Equality", and "Ode on Identity".

The title of the Sandōkai is the same as that of a 2nd-century Taoist

Taoism

Taoism refers to a philosophical or religious tradition in which the basic concept is to establish harmony with the Tao , which is the mechanism of everything that exists...

 text on alchemy

Alchemy

Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...

, which is also known as the Zhouyi Cantongqi; in reference to the Taoist work, "參同契" is often translated as "the Kinship of the Three".

Text

Text commentary

Toward the end of his life Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu Suzuki

Shunryu Suzuki was a Sōtō Zen roshi who popularized Zen Buddhism in the United States, particularly around San Francisco. Born in the Kanagawa Prefecture of Japan, Suzuki was occasionally mistaken for the Zen scholar D.T...

Roshi gave a series of lectures on the Sandokai. These are captured in the book Branching Streams Flow in the Dark.

External links

• Sandokai medieval Japanese and translated into English
• Suzuki's Lectures and commentaries
• Various English translations of the 參同契 – CAN TONG QI (TS’AN-T’UNG-CH’I)