Jīngāng jīng zhù 金剛經注
The Diamond Sūtra: Annotation by 俞樾 Yú Yuè (註)
About the work
A two-juan late-Qīng (Guāngxù-era) Vajracchedikā commentary by Yú Yuè (1821–1907), the most influential late-Qīng kǎozhèng (textual-evidential) scholar and director of the Gūjīng jīngshè 詁經精舍 academy at Hángzhōu. The author’s preface (No. 506-A) is dated 光緒九年十月 = November 1883, signed Qūyuán jūshì Yú Yuè shū yú Wújiāng zhōu zhōng 曲園居士俞樾書於吳江舟中 (“Qūyuánjūshì Yú Yuè wrote this on a boat in Wújiāng”). notBefore / notAfter = 1883. Preserved as X25 no. 506. Catalog dynasty 清.
Abstract
Yú’s preface is a remarkably clean methodological statement: he had read the Vajracchedikā “three times over” and concluded that the great purport of the sūtra lies in the Buddha’s instruction to Subhūti (yīng rúshì zhù, rúshì jiàngfú qí xīn 應如是住，如是降伏其心) — zhù (abiding) and jiàngfú (subduing) being not two but one operation directed to a single mind, the Anuttarā samyaksaṃbodhi-citta. zhù is the substantive moment (shí); jiàngfú is the emptying moment (xū); jí zhù jí jiàngfú, shì yǐ wú shí wú xū 即住即降伏，是以無實無虗 (“simultaneously abiding and subduing — therefore neither substantive nor empty”). This single hermeneutic principle organizes the commentary throughout. The body proceeds verse-by-verse; the apparatus is kǎozhèng-disciplined — Yú approaches the sūtra with the same evidential rigor he brought to the Qúnjīng píngyì 群經平議, attending closely to grammar, lexical force, and the implicit structure of 鳩摩羅什 Kumārajīva’s Chinese. The work is one of the rare instances of a major late-Qīng textual-critic applying kǎozhèng method directly to a Mahāyāna sūtra, paired with the more strictly-philological KR6c0095 Jīngāng jīng dìngyì.
Translations and research
- For Yú Yuè’s life and kǎozhèng method see Hung-lam Chu and contributors, esp. on the late-Qīng evidential-scholarship tradition.
- The two Yú Vajracchedikā commentaries are sometimes paired in modern Chinese surveys of late-Qīng lay-Buddhist scholarship; see Lán Jífù 藍吉富 and others.
Other points of interest
The boat-composition setting — Yú on a boat in Wújiāng — places the work in the late-Qīng literati-Buddhist itinerant tradition, in which travel between Sūzhōu and Hángzhōu by canal-boat was a standard scholarly setting for composition. Yú’s choice of the Vajracchedikā as a text worthy of kǎozhèng treatment also signaled a re-positioning of the sūtra: from a devotional / Chán-meditation text into the canon of texts amenable to evidential-philological analysis.