人本欲生經註

Rénběn yùshēng jīng zhù 人本欲生經註

Annotations on the Sūtra on the Origin of Human Birth-Lust by 道安 (Dàoān, 撰)

About the work

A single-fascicle interlinear commentary by Dàoān 道安 (312–385) on Ān Shìgāo’s archaic Eastern-Hàn translation [[KR6a0014|Fóshuō rénběn yùshēng jīng 佛說人本欲生經 (T0014)]] — itself a Chinese rendering of the Mahānidāna-sutta (DN 15 / Madhyama-āgama 97), a foundational discourse on the twelve nidānas of dependent arising. Dàoān’s commentary is set in fine-running gloss directly under the sūtra-text segments and operates at two registers: lexical glossing of Ān Shìgāo’s archaic Hàn-Buddhist vocabulary (e.g. 微妙本句倒, “the very-subtle sentence is inverted”), and substantive doctrinal exposition correlating the twelve nidānas to the four noble truths, the nine abodes-of-consciousness (九止), and the eight liberations (八解).

Prefaces

The text opens with Dàoān’s own preface, which is one of the most consequential of his early prefaces. It states (in part):

“The Sūtra on the Origin of Human Birth-Lust illuminates the twelve nidānas and constitutes thereby the four noble truths. Běn 本 (root) is avidyā; yù 欲 (desire-and-lust) is tṛṣṇā; shēng 生 (birth) is saṃsāra. The text takes three of the twelve as a heading and uses them to denote causality. Beings in saṃsāra are tossed and adrift across the three time-divisions, fluttering in the nine-fold abode-of-consciousness, knotted into the eight bonds. Of the twelve nidānas as they relate to the nine abodes: from the first the human is also the deva; the four noble truths inspect the nine abodes, and the eight liberations correct the eight perversities. When perverse and correct have been distinguished, then there is nowhere one cannot be at peace. When the inspection has been done, then there is nowhere one cannot rejoice. … This jīng appears to be a translation by Ān Shìgāo, rendered into Jìn-language. Its words are ancient, its meaning subtle, its principle delicate; those who can see the beauty of its inner hall and the riches of its courtyard are few. Whenever I take up its text I cannot put it down. What I cherish and turn over is the wonder of the three-fold contemplation; what I dwell on with thought is the formula of the cessation of saṃjñā. So in my leisure I have ventured to draw up brief notes; where the meaning is unaltered but the wording differs, I add no further gloss.”

The preface is the source of the conventional attribution of T0014 to Ān Shìgāo (Dàoān himself flags the attribution as inferred — 似 “appears to be” — rather than documented).

Abstract

T1693 is among the earliest substantial works of Chinese Buddhist exegesis to survive intact and is the only one of Dàoān’s Ān-Shìgāo-commentaries whose preface survives in full. It is generally placed in his Xiāngyáng period (365–379) — the same intellectually fertile period that produced the Zōnglǐ zhòngjīng mùlù 綜理眾經目錄 catalog and the bulk of his prajñā-school exegesis — though the upper bracket allows for the possibility of completion in early Cháng’ān (379–385). The work is doctrinally important for two reasons: (i) it is the locus classicus for Dàoān’s correlative scheme aligning the twelve nidānas with the four noble truths, the nine abodes, and the eight liberations — a synthesizing move that defines a particular Chinese reception of Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma; (ii) the preface itself is an early Chinese Buddhist statement of philological method, in which Dàoān consciously distinguishes lexical from substantive commentary and refuses to gloss where two texts agree in sense though not in wording.

The Cháng’ān-period Buddhist commentarial register here — interlinear glosses set immediately beneath the sūtra-text — is among the earliest documented in surviving Chinese Buddhist literature, and is a structural ancestor of the later zhùshū 注疏 commentary form.

Translations and research

• Tang Yongtong 湯用彤. Hàn Wèi Liǎng-Jìn Nánběicháo Fójiào shǐ 漢魏兩晉南北朝佛教史. Shanghai: Shangwu, 1938. Chapters on Dàoān’s Xiāngyáng commentaries.
• Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China. 3rd ed. Leiden: Brill, 2007. (Discussion of Dàoān’s exegetical method.)
• Itō Takatoshi 伊藤隆寿. “Dō-an no Ninpon yokushō kyō chū ni tsuite” 道安の『人本欲生經註』について. Bukkyō kenkyū 仏教研究 25 (1996).
• Ōchō Enichi 横超慧日. Chūgoku Bukkyō no kenkyū 中国佛教の研究. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1958, vol. 1.

Other points of interest

The text is a primary witness for reconstructing Ān Shìgāo’s Hàn-period vocabulary, since Dàoān’s glosses repeatedly disambiguate archaic Hàn-Buddhist terms whose meanings were already obscure to fourth-century readers — for example suǒgēng 所更 = sparśa, liù shuāi 六衰 = the six sense-bases, xiǎngmiè 想滅 = saṃjñā-nirodha. Modern attribution scholarship of the Ān Shìgāo corpus relies heavily on Dàoān’s glosses here.

Links

• CBETA online text T1693
• Kanseki DB
• 道安 DILA (Eastern Jìn)
• Dazangthings date evidence (160, 385): CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924–1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. dazangthings source 1