Dà bōrě jīng gāngyào 大般若經綱要
Synoptic Outline of the Great Prajñā Sūtra arranged by 葛䵻 Gě Yì (提綱, sobriquet Qīkōng jūshì 七空居士)
About the work
A ten-fascicle late-Míng / early-Qīng jūshì-arranged synoptic outline of 玄奘 Xuánzàng’s 600-fascicle Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra (T220, KR6c0001), arranged by 葛䵻 Gě Yì of Kūnshān (sobriquet Qīkōng jūshì). Preserved in the Wàn xùzàng / Manji zoku-zō as X449. Ten fascicles.
The genre marker — gāngyào “synoptic outline” — signals an editorial work that distils the essential content of the very long Mahāprajñā into a manageable 10-fascicle compendium for lay study use, paralleling Dàyǐn’s earlier Sòng-period guānfǎ methodology (X448 = KR6c0227) but using a gāngyào (outline-essential) rather than guānfǎ (passage-key) approach.
Prefaces
The work opens with a substantial preface (No. 449-A) that argues for the necessity of the gāngyào methodology:
- “The sūtras spoken by the Western Sage are vast as the ocean. Without the Mahāyāna-superior-person possessing the dhāraṇī-ocean of comprehensive holding, one is insufficient to receive them. They are not ordinary worldly literature but the supreme-meaning-deva of the world-leaving. In the [Image-Dharma] period there appeared the great-being Nāgārjuna who, with the wisdom-eloquence-might-power, directly entered the Great Dragon Palace, exhausting the dharma-treasury of all that was collected, and saw three versions of the Avataṃsaka-sūtra: the upper version’s chapter-verses are all counted in particles-of-dust; the middle version is also a thousand-and-more chapters, summing to about 500,000 verses. These two are said to be unable to be held by Jambudvīpa human mind-strength, so [Nāgārjuna] rolled them up and embraced them, not transmitting them to the world. The 81-fascicle [Avataṃsaka] now circulating in Cīna is the small version, and even this is incomplete.”
- “Alas, the river-lord gazing at the ocean, the small dove holding to the ground — by these we know that the Buddha’s preaching-ocean and the Buddha’s word-ocean are not what the perceptions of the ordinary and small can sound. The Mahāprajñā in 600 fascicles is the crown of one great canon. But the text has fixed chapters and the phrases have fixed numbers; whoever has eyes and mouth may revere it and hold it…”
The preface continues with a substantive justification of the gāngyào methodology as a service to those who lack the dhāraṇī-capacity to hold the entire Mahāprajñā in mind.
Abstract
X449 is the principal late-Míng / early-Qīng jūshì-produced reference work on the Mahāprajñā and a primary witness to the late-imperial jūshì commitment to making canonical Buddhist scriptures accessible to lay readers. Doctrinally Gě Yì preserves the standard Tang Madhyamaka-Cí’ēn doctrinal framework but condenses the Mahāprajñā’s ocean of doctrinal-discursive material into manageable thematic synopses.
The 10-fascicle scale and the systematic gāngyào methodology make X449 the most ambitious jūshì-produced reference work on the Mahāprajñā in the late-imperial Chinese Buddhist canon. The work pairs structurally with Dàyǐn’s Sòng guānfǎ (KR6c0227) — the two together provide the principal late-imperial pedagogical apparatus for the 600-fascicle Mahāprajñā.
For the wider history, X449 is significant as: (i) the principal late-Míng / early-Qīng jūshì-produced Mahāprajñā reference work; (ii) a primary witness to Yangtze-delta lay Buddhist scholarship; and (iii) a major node in the long Chinese tradition of producing accessible reference apparatus for the very long Mahāprajñā.
Composition date: no internal dating. The bracket notBefore 1640 / notAfter 1700 reflects the late-Míng / early-Qīng window of Gě Yì’s floruit.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language translation located.
- For late-Míng / early-Qīng jūshì Buddhist scholarship, see Chün-fang Yü (1981); Timothy Brook (1993).
- For Mahāprajñā reception history, modern Chinese-language scholarship: 印順《大智度論之作者及其翻譯》 and related works.
Other points of interest
The opening preface’s reference to the Nāgārjuna-Dragon-Palace transmission of the three Avataṃsaka-sūtra recensions is one of the most colourful late-Míng / early-Qīng evocations of the canonical Mahāyāna mythological-doctrinal tradition. Gě Yì uses this reference to position his own gāngyào methodology within the Nāgārjuna-style transmission of the most-essential dharma-truths, while acknowledging the human cognitive limitations that necessitate condensation.