Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng huányuán shù 般若波羅蜜多心經還源述
Returning-to-the-Source Exposition of the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra (anonymous; Dūnhuáng manuscript)
About the work
A one-fascicle anonymous Tang-era Heart Sūtra commentary preserved among the Dūnhuáng manuscripts and admitted into the Taishō canon as T2746 (Vol. 85 — the Dūnhuáng-materials volume). The Taishō head-note “[cf. No. 251]” cross-references the Xuánzàng short-recension parent text (KR6c0128). One fascicle, anonymous.
The genre marker — huányuán shù “returning-to-the-source exposition” — suggests an integrated commentarial method that traces each Heart Sūtra phrase back to its doctrinal source-context within the larger Buddhist scriptural and contemplative tradition.
Prefaces
The witness is fragmentary in places (marked □ in the digital text where the manuscript is damaged) and lacks a formal preface. The commentary opens directly with a brief gloss on the jiào-rén shòu chēng (“name received in relation to the person”) of Avalokiteśvara, and proceeds line-by-line through the Heart Sūtra.
The body unfolds the Heart Sūtra through a four-truth contemplation analytic: (i) guān súdì xūwàng yǒu (contemplating the conventional truth’s false-existing); (ii) guān zhēndì zhēnshí yǒu (contemplating the true truth’s real-existing); (iii) guān dìyīyìdì fēi zhēnwàng yǒu (contemplating the supreme-truth’s neither-true-nor-false existing); (iv) guān fēiānlìdì fēifēi zhēnwàng yǒu (contemplating the unestablished truth’s not-not-true-or-false existing). This four-fold four-truths analytic is characteristic of mature Tang Yogācāra-Madhyamaka synthesis exegesis (the sìzhǒng èrdì 四種二諦 doctrine systematised by the Cheng wei-shi lun tradition).
The closing portion presents a verse: 「諸佛所師常住法 無有色空真俗性 我今得聞敬奉持 普願有情皆信解」 — “The constantly-abiding dharma that the Buddhas honour as teacher / Has no nature of form-emptiness, true-conventional / I now obtain it, hear it, and respectfully uphold it / Universally vowing all sentient beings to believe and understand.”
The closing colophon-like passage notes: “This sūtra was originally drawn out of the great Prajñā [corpus], like the Lotus Sūtra’s Universal-Gate chapter being separately circulated. The Tripiṭaka master 玄奘 Xuánzàng each time held this sūtra and had numinous responses; therefore he separately translated it for circulation. If a person purifies the mind, bathes, dons clean clothing, sits upright, and recites it five hundred times in a single session, he will be removed from ninety-five kinds of heretical paths, his good wishes will accord with the mind, and he will cross all sufferings.”
Abstract
T2746 is one of the small group of Tang-era Heart Sūtra commentaries preserved exclusively through Dūnhuáng manuscripts — paralleling 法成 Fǎchéng’s T255 (KR6c0132, which is a translation rather than a commentary), and a small number of other Dūnhuáng-only Heart Sūtra commentary fragments in the Stein and Pelliot collections.
Doctrinally the work belongs to the mature Tang Yogācāra-Madhyamaka synthesis tradition: the four-truths analytic, the careful zhēnsú èrdì (true-conventional two truths) treatment, the sìyùn děng wúfēi yǒu analysis. This places the work within the Cí’ēn-school (窺基 Kuíjī’s lineage) doctrinal mainstream of the late-7th and 8th centuries, although it is too brief to be assigned to any specific named author.
The closing colophon material — the 玄奘 Xuánzàng numinous-response legend, the five-hundred recitations purification ritual, the ninety-five heresies protection promise — places the work in the Tang Heart Sūtra cultic-devotional tradition that grew up around Xuánzàng’s translation and was elaborated through the Hsüan-tsang miracle stories recorded in the Dà Táng Cí’ēnsì sānzàng fǎshī zhuàn 大唐慈恩寺三藏法師傳 and elsewhere.
For the wider history of Heart Sūtra commentary, T2746 is a primary witness to the popular-devotional Tang Heart Sūtra reception that flourished alongside the elite scholastic commentaries (窺基 Kuíjī’s T1710, 圓測 Wǒnch’ǔk’s T1711, 法藏 Fǎzàng’s T1712).
Composition date: no internal dating; provenance is the Dūnhuáng caves, sealed c. early 11th century. The bracket notBefore 700 (giving the text time to develop after 玄奘 Xuánzàng’s death in 664) / notAfter 900 (well within the Dūnhuáng cave-deposit horizon) is conservative; the work most likely belongs to the 8th or early-9th century.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language translation located of T2746 specifically.
- For the Dūnhuáng Heart Sūtra commentary materials, see Ueyama Daishun 上山大峻, Tonkō Bukkyō no kenkyū 敦煌仏教の研究 (Kyōto: Hōzōkan, 1990) — fundamental.
- Jan Nattier, “The Heart Sūtra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?” JIABS 15.2 (1992): 153–223 — important methodological background.
- For Tang-period popular-devotional Heart Sūtra reception, see Antonino Forte, The Hostage An Shigao and His Offspring (Kyōto, 1995) — for the parallel sūtra-cult tradition.
- Stein and Pelliot manuscript catalogues for the broader Dūnhuáng Heart Sūtra commentary holdings.
Other points of interest
The closing five-hundred recitations purification ritual description is one of the more concrete pieces of Tang Heart Sūtra ritual practice attested in any commentary: bathing, clean clothing, upright sitting, five-hundred-recitation single-session. This is a substantial ritual programme requiring several hours of continuous recitation, and provides documentation of how the Heart Sūtra was used in Tang devotional practice.
The ninety-five heretical paths (九十五種邪道) reference is a standard Tang Buddhist polemical category drawn from the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra and other early Mahāyāna texts; the promise that Heart Sūtra recitation removes the practitioner from these heresies places the sūtra within the broader Tang anti-heretical literary tradition.
Links
- CBETA online
- IDP (International Dunhuang Project): for the underlying Dūnhuáng manuscript witness, search the Stein/Pelliot Heart Sūtra commentary catalogues.
- Kanseki DB