Jīngāng jīng zhùjiě 金剛經注解
Annotated Diamond Sūtra by 孚佑帝君 Fúyòu dìjūn (註解)
About the work
A unique one-juan early-Qiánlóng (1736) Buddhist-Daoist syncretic Vajracchedikā commentary attributed to the deified 呂洞賓 Lǚ Dòngbīn under his Yuán-Míng-Qīng official deification-title Fúyòu dìjūn 孚佑帝君 (“Imperial Lord of Faith-Protection”). DILA explicitly notes that this is a translator-compiler’s pen-name, not literally Lǚ Dòngbīn: the work is a product of the early-Qiánlóng fújī 扶乩 (planchette) milieu, in which Buddhist sūtra commentaries could be produced under deity-attribution and circulated as immortal-revealed rather than human-authored. Prefaced 大清乾隆元年律次夾鐘之月 = Qiánlóng 1, 2nd-month = 1736-03 / 04 under the alternate name Chúnyángzǐ 純陽子 (another standard Lǚ Dòngbīn appellation). Preserved as X25 no. 503. notBefore / notAfter = 1736. Catalog dynasty 清.
Abstract
The preface (No. 503-A) frames the Vajracchedikā as the universal scripture yǐ wúniàn wéi zōng, yǐ líxiàng wéi zhǐ, yǐ duànchú tānwàng wéi gōngfū, yǐ qīngjìng nièpán wéi jiūjìng 以無念為宗，以離相為旨，以斷除貪妄為功夫，以清淨涅槃為究竟 (“with no-thought as its basis, with leaving-marks as its tendency, with severing greed-and-falsity as its practice, with pure nirvāṇa as its ultimate”); circulated from India to China and jiā zhì yī biān, dǐnglǐ ér gòngfèng zhī (“kept one volume per household, with veneration and offering”); the prefacer’s disciple 黃正元 Huáng Zhèngyuán (a Mǐn-zǒngróng 閩總戎, “Fújiàn military command,” styled Tàiyī 泰一), feeling that ritual recitation without comprehension fēi xīn zhī suǒ zhī, mù zhī suǒ àn, fēi yì zhī suǒ huì (“not what the mind knows, the eye merely peering at the unintelligible”), invited the Lord’s annotation. The body of the commentary presents the sūtra in a Daoist-Buddhist syncretic register characteristic of the fújī tradition: terms like xìngmìng 性命 (nature-and-life), qīngjìng 清淨 (purity), and wúwéi 無為 (non-action) are deployed as bridge-categories.
Translations and research
- For the fújī / planchette religious-literary tradition through which “deified-immortal” sūtra commentaries circulated, see David K. Jordan and Daniel L. Overmyer, The Flying Phoenix (Princeton, 1986); also Vincent Goossaert’s studies on Qīng Daoist publishing.
Other points of interest
The text is the second of two Xùzàngjīng commentaries attributed to the Fúyòu dìjūn pen-name (the other being a Bānruò xīnjīng zhùjiě, X26 no. 576), and is closely paralleled by KR6c0082 Jīngāng jīng zhùshì of 溥仁 + 子真 — another planchette-mediated Vajracchedikā commentary of the same Kāngxī–Qiánlóng decades. The two works (KR6c0082 and KR6c0091) together represent the small but distinct fújī-mediated Buddhist commentary stream that the Xùzàngjīng editors chose to canonize.