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金剛暎卷上

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Text ID
KR6c0106
Date
736–800
Dynasty
唐

Jīngāng yìng juànshàng 金剛暎卷上

Diamond Reflection, Upper Juan by 寶達 (集)

About the work

A one-juan mid- to late-Táng Buddhist scholastic sub-commentary by Bǎodá 寶達 of the Jīngdì Qīngfā dàochǎng 京地清發道場. The catalog title preserves the juànshàng designation indicating that only the upper juan survives — the lower juan(s) are lost. The text is a sub-commentary on Dàoyīn’s Yùzhù Jīngāngjīng xuānyǎn (KR6c0105) — i.e., a third-order layer in the chain: Xuánzōng’s imperial annotation KR6c0100 → Dàoyīn’s xuānyǎn exposition KR6c0105 → Bǎodá’s Jīngāng yìng sub-commentary. The title’s yìng 暎 (= 映, “reflection / illumination”) signals the work’s role as a reflective gloss on the prior xuānyǎn. Recovered from Dūnhuáng and preserved as T85 no. 2734. notBefore set to 736 (after the establishment of the imperial annotation + Dàoyīn’s xuānyǎn); notAfter = 800 (broadly, by Dūnhuáng-corpus standards). Catalog dynasty 唐.

Abstract

Bǎodá opens with a programmatic outline of the work’s hermeneutic frame: zànyáng jīng zhù lüè qǐ wǔmén 贊揚經注略啟五門 (“the Vajracchedikā annotation is to be praised by briefly opening five gates”); these are: (1) gradual-teaching’s arising (漸教興由門), (2) two further “suspended discussion of the sūtra’s meaning” gates (前四懸談經義), and (3) the gate of “proper exposition of the sūtra-text” (第五正釋經文). Bǎodá notes that one could expand each mén into two sub-divisions, yielding ten gates. The body of the surviving juan presents the apparatus of the first several gates — preliminary doctrinal context, the Yogācāra-school framework (yī liǎnglùn míng jiàoyì 依兩論明教意 — “based on the two śāstras [Vasubandhu and Asaṅga], to clarify the teaching’s meaning”), and the systematic context for reading the xuānyǎn. The lost lower juan(s) presumably contained the sequential sūtra-text exposition itself. The text is a precious witness to the highly stratified Táng-court Buddhist commentary culture that produced multi-layer commentary chains as imperially-mediated scholarly production.

Translations and research

  • See entry KR6c0105 for the principal modern studies of the Dàoyīn / Bǎodá Dūnhuáng commentary chain.

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