Jīngāng jīng lüèshū 金剛經略疏
Concise Commentary on the Diamond Sūtra by 元賢 Yuánxián (述)
About the work
A one-juan concise Vajracchedikā commentary by Yǒngjué Yuánxián 永覺元賢 (1578–1657), the leading early-Qīng Cáodòng master and second-generation fǎsì of 慧經 Wúmíng Huìjīng 無明慧經. The work was composed in 辛巳秋 = autumn 1641 (Chóngzhēn 14) at Bǎoshànsì 寶善寺 in Jiànníng 建寧 (Fújiàn), where Yuánxián was visiting on his return journey from Wù 婺 (Jīnhuá area). The trigger was a request from 心石 Xīnshí Shī 心石師 to review a Jīngāng dúméng 金剛凟蒙 (“Diamond [Sūtra] Beginner’s Primer”) that Xīnshí was preparing — a commentary aligned with the 宗密 Guīfēng Zōngmì + 子璿 Chángshuǐ Zǐxuán Huáyán-Tiāntái synthesis tradition. Yuánxián found himself unable simply to defer (“依他作解。因人成事而巳”) and composed his own lüèshū. notBefore / notAfter = 1641. Preserved as X25 no. 482. Catalog dynasty 明.
Abstract
The preface (No. 482-A) is an unusually frank document of the late-Míng commentator’s predicament. Yuánxián catalogues his disenchantment with the existing commentary tradition: those that follow the Asaṅga / Vasubandhu śāstra are jǐnyú èrlùn zhī gěténg ér bù néng zì tuō 絆於二論之葛藤而不能自脫 (“entangled in the kudzu-vines of the two śāstras and unable to free themselves”); those that ignore the śāstra yāo lěi xiōngyì, yuè zōngqù ér wéi fózhǐ 妄逞胸臆，越宗趣而違佛旨 (“recklessly assert their own breast, exceed the school’s tendency, and contravene the Buddha’s intent”). The “several dozen shū on the Jīngāng” all leave the careful reader unsatisfied. Yuánxián’s own response, having taken on the editorial revision of Xīnshí’s primer, was to compose a fresh concise commentary that attempts to navigate between the two failures.
The body of the lüèshū presents the sūtra in a tight Cáodòng-flavoured Chán reading: the doctrinal anchor is xīnjìng běnjìng, xiàngsè yuánxū 心鏡本淨，像色元虗 (“the mind-mirror is originally pure, image-color is essentially empty”), with the sūtra read as the Buddha’s pòyǒu zhī fǎ 破有之法 (“teaching that breaks ‘being’”) within the Mahāprajñāpāramitā corpus. The commentary is brief, doctrinally focused, and aimed at the moderately-trained reader — fitting Yuánxián’s broader pedagogical practice as the foremost teacher of his generation in the southeastern Cáodòng line.
Translations and research
- For Yuánxián’s life and Cáodòng lineage see Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China (Oxford UP, 2008), which treats him at length as the dominant Chán teacher of the early Qīng.
- His Yǒngjué quánjí 永覺廣錄 collects the broader corpus.
Other points of interest
The 1641 setting at Bǎoshànsì in Jiànníng — three years before the Manchu conquest — locates this commentary in the last full year of normal monastic publishing under the Míng. Yuánxián’s frank diagnosis of the failure of the existing Jīngāng commentary tradition both encapsulates the late-Míng commentarial overload (he names the eight-hundred-plus Táng-period commentaries 唐初疏此經者多至八百餘家 elsewhere in the corpus) and signals the editorial cleansing impulse that would shape Qīng-period Chán scholarly publishing.