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般若波羅蜜多心經註解

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Text ID
KR6c0141
Date
1378–1378
Dynasty
明

Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng zhùjiě 般若波羅蜜多心經註解

Annotated Explication of the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra by 宗泐 (註) and 如玘 (註)

About the work

The early-Míng imperially-decreed commentary on the Heart Sūtra (Xuánzàng’s short-recension version, T251 = KR6c0128), produced in Hóngwǔ 11 (1378) by the Línjì Chan abbot Zōnglè 宗泐 (1318–1390) and the Tiāntái scholar Rúqǐ 如玘 (1320–1385), prefaced by the Hóngwǔ 洪武 emperor Zhū Yuánzhāng 朱元璋 in person. The Taishō head-note 「[cf. No. 251]」 marks the dependence on the parent sūtra.

This is one of three companion-volume commentaries commissioned in the same year — the Diamond Sūtra and Laṅkāvatāra commentaries by the same pair — together constituting the Hóngwǔ programme of authoritative state-Buddhist scriptural exegeses. One fascicle.

Prefaces

The work opens with the Hóngwǔ emperor’s own preface — the celebrated Yùzhì xīnjīng xù 御製心經序 — a unique document of fourteenth-century imperial Buddhist ideology. Its argument can be summarised: (i) the cosmos has long had Two Forces (二儀) and Ten Thousand Things (萬物); the ruler is to the people what the lawgiver is to the law, and Confucian sāngāng wǔcháng 三綱五常 (“three bonds and five constants”) together with the five punishments suffice to govern most. (ii) But there are stubborn wicked men who, even in the face of fire and abyss, will not turn back from evil. For these the Buddha of the Western Region called Śākyamuni came forth from the world to release them from the courses of suffering through the teaching of compassion, forbearance, and “clarification of mind to establish destiny” (明心以立命). (iii) Today’s people misunderstand Buddhism as mere “empty void” (法空虛而不實), but in fact “the Buddha’s teaching is real and not empty — it precisely seeks to remove the emptiness of foolish delusion and to establish the reality of original nature”. (iv) The Heart Sūtra’s repeated talk of “emptiness” (空) refers only to the six emptinesses of phenomenal characteristics (六空之相) — the emptiness of the speech-aspect of the mouth, the form-aspect of the eye, the sound-aspect of the ear, the smell-aspect of the nose, the taste-aspect of the tongue, the pleasure-aspect of the body — and these characteristic-emptinesses are not the emptiness of true reality but the imagined characteristics of false thought. (v) The emperor then enumerates rulers who fell into the kōngxiàng 空相 trap — King Mù of Zhōu, Emperor Wǔ of Hàn, Xuánzōng of Táng, Wǔ of Liáng, Tài Wǔ of Northern Wèi, the Last Ruler of Lǐ (Southern Táng), and Huīzōng of Sòng — concluding that several (Liáng Wǔdì, Sòng Huīzōng) lost their lives by mistaking the imagined “Buddha-heaven realm” for an attainment available through delusional thought. (vi) The genuine path is to govern well, not to seek transcendence through false meditation.

The preface is a remarkable hybrid of Confucian governmental moralism, Chan-style xíngzhèngshì polemics against the kōng misreading of Prajñā, and dynastic exemplary historiography. It functions as an imperial gloss on the entire Heart Sūtra, embedding the commentary’s interpretation in a state-Confucian frame.

The commentary proper by Zōnglè and Rúqǐ then proceeds line-by-line through the Xuánzàng text in a relatively spare zhù style, emphasising the zhēnxìng 真性 (true nature) reading consistent with the imperial preface. It draws moderately on Huáyán and Tiāntái citations but is markedly less elaborate than the Tang scholastic commentaries (T1710, T1711, T1712).

Abstract

T1714 is a primary source for late-fourteenth-century state-Buddhist policy and for Hóngwǔ’s personal religious-political vision. The pairing of a Línjì Chan abbot (Zōnglè) and a Tiāntái scholar (Rúqǐ) under direct imperial commission marks Hóngwǔ’s programmatic effort to produce cross-school authoritative commentaries that would standardise scriptural reading across the Míng saṅgha. The deliberately moderate length and the avoidance of partisan school-doctrine in the body of the commentary (in contrast to the very partisan Tang Yogācāra and Huáyán readings) reflect the imperial supervisor’s preference for scriptural utility over school controversy.

The composition date is firmly fixed at Hóngwǔ 11 (1378) by the Yùzhì xīnjīng xù’s own context and by parallel evidence in the Míng tàizǔ shílù 明太祖實錄 and Zōnglè’s biography. The work was widely reprinted through the Míng dynasty as part of standard Buddhist study sets and reappeared in early-Qīng monastic libraries. It enters the Taishō through Japanese-edited witnesses.

Translations and research

  • Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1993) — institutional context for the Míng Buddhist programme that begins with these Hóngwǔ commentaries.
  • Chün-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hung and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia, 1981) — broader context of Míng Buddhism though primarily focused on the late Míng.
  • Edward Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1995) — for Hóngwǔ’s religious-political programme.
  • Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China (Oxford: OUP, 2008) — peripheral but useful for the seventeenth-century reception of the early-Míng commentaries.
  • Modern Chinese scholarship: 《明太祖宗教政策研究》 and works on Hóngwǔ-era Buddhist administration.
  • Kenneth K. S. Ch’en, The Chinese Transformation of Buddhism (Princeton, 1973) — short discussion of the Hóngwǔ commentaries.

Other points of interest

The Hóngwǔ preface is a unique document in the history of imperial Chinese commentary on Buddhist texts: no previous emperor (with the partial exceptions of Liáng Wǔdì’s reading of the Lotus and Sòng Huīzōng’s Daoist patronage — both of whom Hóngwǔ pointedly cites as cautionary failures) had personally written an extended doctrinal preface of this character. The preface’s characteristic move — defending Buddhism against the charge of “emptiness” by recasting it as a doctrine of zhēnxìng available for state-Confucian governmental use — would shape Míng Buddhist apologetics for the next two centuries.

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