Fǎhuá jīng dàkuǎn 法華經大窾
The Great Cavity of the Lotus Sūtra by 通潤 (Tōngrùn / Yīyǔ Tōngrùn / Èrlèng zhǔrén, 箋)
About the work
A seven-juan late-Míng annotated commentary on the Lotus Sūtra by Yīyǔ 通潤 Tōngrùn 一雨通潤 (1565–1624) of Dòngtíng Xīshān 洞庭西山 (Lake Tài, Sūzhōu region). The genre — jiān 箋 (“annotated”) — places the work in the Sòng–Míng jiānzhù commentarial tradition. The title’s metaphor dàkuǎn 大窾 (“great cavity,” i.e., the open space at the heart of a thing) draws on the Zhuāngzǐ’s account of Pao Ding the Cook’s perfect butchery, indicating the commentary’s claim to penetrate the Lotus Sūtra at its decisive structural and doctrinal junctures.
Prefaces
The text in the X31n0614 recension carries Tōngrùn’s own framing of the jiān genre and the dàkuǎn metaphor. The work is signed in body attribution.
Abstract
Tōngrùn’s Dàkuǎn applies a distinctive late-Wànlì critical-philological method to the Lotus Sūtra, drawing both on the Tiāntái scholastic tradition and on the broader late-Míng critical-evaluative apparatus parallel to that of 焦竑 Jiāo Hóng’s Pínglín (KR6d0078) and 德清 Hānshān Déqīng’s Tōngyì (KR6d0077). Tōngrùn’s own self-style Èrlèng zhǔrén 二楞主人 (“Master of the Two-Lèngyán [Sūtras]”) indicates his particular interest in the Lèngyán and Lèngqié sūtras, alongside the Lotus; his Lotus commentary likely integrates this Lèngyán–Lèngqié doctrinal interest into the broader exposition.
The composition is bracketed within Tōngrùn’s productive period c. 1590–1624. His native location at Dòngtíng Xīshān places him within the Sūzhōu literati-Buddhist intellectual network, which was a major productive centre of late-Wànlì Buddhist commentary alongside the Jīnlíng (Nánjīng) and Hángzhōu networks.
Translations and research
- Eichman, Jennifer. A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship. Leiden: Brill, 2016. (For the Sūzhōu literati-Buddhist intellectual context.)
- Wu, Jiang. Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
- Brook, Timothy. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1993.
Other points of interest
The Zhuāngzǐ-derived metaphor dàkuǎn — Pao Ding the Cook moving his blade through the great cavities of the ox without resistance — is one of the more philosophically sophisticated late-Míng commentarial titles, drawing the Buddhist exegetical tradition into close engagement with the classical Daoist intellectual heritage. The same Pao Ding metaphor was employed by Tōngrùn’s contemporary Jiāo Hóng in his Confucian-Buddhist syncretic productions, demonstrating the broader late-Wànlì cultural circulation of Zhuāngzǐ-derived hermeneutic vocabulary across school boundaries.