Dàbù miàoxuán géyán 大部妙玄格言
Aphoristic Notes on the Great-Treatise [Tiāntái] Profound Meaning by 善月 Shànyuè (Bóting Shànyuè, 述)
About the work
A two-juan (上 / 下) aphoristic commentary on 智顗 Zhìyǐ’s Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng xuányì (KR6d0006, T1716) by the Southern-Sòng Tiāntái master Bóting Shànyuè 柏庭善月 of Sìmíng. It is the xuányì counterpart to Shànyuè’s Fǎhuá jīng wénjù géyán (KR6d0021, X29n0598) on Zhìyǐ’s Wénjù; together the two géyán productions complete Shànyuè’s distinctive aphoristic Lotus apparatus on the Tiāntái triple-treatise corpus. The body attribution: Sìmíng shāmén Bóting Shànyuè shù 四明沙門栢庭 善月 述.
Prefaces
The text in the X28n0587 recension carries no separate translator’s preface. The work opens with the standard Tiāntái scholastic framing: “Xuán 1, opening: Our Buddha expounded the one great canon of teaching due to Qìngxǐ (阿難 Ānanda) ─ … upholding through Zhìzhě (智顗 Zhìyǐ) who expounded the three-section literary monuments. Without Zhāngān (灌頂 Guàndǐng) how could they have been compiled? If they had not been compiled, the words would not have reached the present day. Without dependence on transmission-and-upholding, how could our Buddha’s teaching be shown to later ages? Supreme indeed is the Way of our Buddha and patriarchs.”
Abstract
The Dàbù miàoxuán géyán applies Shànyuè’s distinctive géyán 格言 (aphoristic) genre to Zhìyǐ’s Xuányì: rather than providing continuous glossarial annotation, Shànyuè extracts the principal doctrinal points of each significant section of the Xuányì and reformulates them as crystallised aphorisms suitable for memorisation and recitation. The same method applied to Zhìyǐ’s Wénjù in KR6d0021.
The work is consequently of substantial value as a Southern-Sòng Tiāntái pedagogical instrument and as a witness to the shānjiā tradition’s late-Sòng pedagogical synthesis. Its compactness (two juan) and aphoristic clarity made it widely useful for monastic lecturers preparing public expositions of the Xuányì and for students preparing to engage with the larger commentarial apparatus.
The composition is dated, with KR6d0021, to Shànyuè’s mature productive period at the Yánqìngsì 延慶寺 in Sìmíng, c. 1180–1240. The work was incorporated into the Southern-Sòng Tiāntái scholastic curriculum.
Translations and research
See KR6d0021 for the bibliography on Bóting Shànyuè.
- Getz, Daniel A. “T’ien-t’ai Pure Land Societies and the Creation of the Pure Land Patriarchate.” In Buddhism in the Sung, eds. Peter N. Gregory and Daniel A. Getz, 477–523. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999.
Other points of interest
The pair of Shànyuè géyán productions (KR6d0021 on the Wénjù and this work on the Xuányì) together constitute the most distinctive Southern-Sòng pedagogical reformulation of the Tiāntái Lotus exegetical tradition into the aphoristic literary register that characterised Sòng-period scholastic productive culture more broadly. The aphoristic genre’s continued use through the late-Sòng and Yuán periods demonstrates the broader institutional assimilation of Tiāntái Lotus pedagogy to the literary forms of mainstream Sòng-period Confucian-monastic scholarship.