Jīngāng jīng cǎiwēi yúshì 金剛經采微餘釋
Supplementary Glosses to “Picking the Subtle from the Diamond Sūtra” by 曇應 Tányìng (述)
About the work
A one-juan supplementary volume to Tányìng’s principal Vajracchedikā commentary KR6c0052, gathering glosses and digressions that did not fit into the main verse-by-verse exposition. Its title-character yú 餘 (“remainder, surplus”) signals the format: comments lemmatized to specific phrases of the sūtra and to specific points in the Cǎiwēi, expanding on textual variants, polemical alternatives, and bibliographic excursus. Preserved in Xùzàngjīng X24 no. 465; notBefore / notAfter aligned with the parent project (1132 preface; 1163 revision colophon).
Abstract
The opening lemma is itself a substantial gloss on the sūtra title: Tányìng addresses the popular variant Fóshuō Jīngāng bānruò (佛說金剛般若, “the Diamond Prajñāpāramitā spoken by the Buddha”) and rejects the prefatory 佛說 as a later interpolation, citing the doctrine that scriptures may be spoken by five kinds of speaker (五人說: Buddha, bodhisattva, disciple, deva-immortal, transformed person), with 佛說 properly affixed only to those texts spoken by the Buddha alone. He proceeds to a comparative bibliography of the six Chinese translations of the Vajracchedikā — 鳩摩羅什 Kumārajīva (什公; cf. KR6c0023), 菩提流支 Bodhiruci (魏菩提流支; KR6c0024), 真諦 Paramārtha (陳真諦; KR6c0026), 達磨笈多 Dharmagupta (隋笈多; KR6c0027), 玄奘 Xuánzàng (大唐奘法師; KR6c0029), and 義淨 Yìjìng (大周義淨; KR6c0028) — distinguishing two title-types: those that read 金剛能斷般若 (Dharmagupta — 喻法立題, “figure-and-doctrine title”) versus those that read 能斷金剛般若 (Xuánzàng, Yìjìng — 單法立題, “doctrine-only title,” with vajra now the object cut by prajñā). He notes critically that the Korean monk 元曉 Wǒnhyo 海東曉師 (元曉, 617–686) had followed the Xuánzàng reading and dismisses both as inferior to the Asaṅga (無著論) reading vindicated by Kumārajīva’s translation. The remaining lemmata gloss specific phrases (bǎiliàn bù xiāo 百鍊不消 “smelted a hundred times yet not melted away,” etc.) along similar comparative-philological lines. The supplementary form, less common than the kē + zhù (outline + commentary) pair, marks Tányìng as a self-conscious editor: rather than burden the main commentary with digressions, he set them aside in a designated companion volume.
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The bibliographic survey of the six Chinese Vajracchedikā translations in the opening lemma is among the more compact and explicit such surveys in Sòng Buddhist exegesis, and prefigures the modern philological consensus on the four-versus-six recension question. The rejection of the Fóshuō prefix is doctrinally significant: Tányìng is policing the boundary between fósuǒshuō (佛所說, Buddha-spoken) and fóyìndìng (佛印定, Buddha-authenticated), a distinction central to the Tiāntái theory of the jiàoxiàng 教相.