Huāyán yóu yì 華嚴遊意
Roving Reflections on the Huáyán [Sūtra] by 吉藏 Jízàng (撰)
About the work
The Huāyán yóu yì is a one-fascicle introductory essay by the Sānlùn 三論 master Jízàng 吉藏 (549–623), in which he sketches the principal doctrinal “gateways” (遊意, lit. “roving thoughts” — the genre-name Jízàng habitually used for his short overview tracts, cf. his Fǎ huá yóu yì, Nièpán yóu yì, Wéi mó yóu yì) of the [[KR6e0001|Dà fāngguǎng fó huáyán jīng]]. The text opens with the legendary account of how the Huáyán came down to Jambudvīpa: a story (which Jízàng reports as “transmitted but not in the catalogues”) of how Nāgārjuna, tempted by a sycophantic disciple to set himself up as a new Buddha, was carried off by the bodhisattva Mahānāga to the dragon palace, where he read sūtras “ten times more numerous than those of Jambudvīpa” and brought back the Huáyán on departing. Jízàng then surveys the southern lecturing tradition of the work, observing that the great pre-Liáng masters did not lecture on the Huáyán, that the practice arose only at Shèshān 攝山 — that is, at the Qīxiá / Jīxiá monastery (棲霞寺), the Sānlùn / Mādhyamaka stronghold of his own teacher Fǎlǎng 法朗 — and was perpetuated at Xìnghuángsì 興皇寺.
The body of the treatise treats the Huáyán under the Sān-lùn schema: a doctrinal frame opens with the “two-Buddha, two-teaching” gateway (二佛兩教門) — the dharma-kāya of Vairocana and the nirmāṇa-kāya of Śākyamuni, mapped onto the contrast between the Huáyán and the rest of the canon — and proceeds to the “Pure Land” topic in four heads (化主 the teaching agent; 化處 the teaching place; 教門 the teaching method; 徒眾 the audience), then to the bodhisattva path stages (the thirty thoughts 三十心 of the Shízhù, Shíxíng, and Shíhuíxiàng chapters; the Ten Stages 十地 of the Daśabhūmika chapter). The essay is short, self-described as preliminary, and presupposes acquaintance with the full sūtra; it is best understood as a propaedeutic to actual lecturing on the work.
Prefaces
The work has no formal preface. The text opens directly with Jízàng’s announcement that he will recount how the Huáyán “came to be in Jambudvīpa, [a story] which, although the catalogues do not record, has been transmitted [orally]” (且話閻浮得有此經錄雖不載相承云). The Taishō print derives from the Korean Tripiṭaka collated against the yuán 原 (original-block) and jiǎ 甲 (Japanese alternate) witnesses; the work’s textual transmission is unproblematic.
Abstract
Jízàng’s Huāyán yóu yì is significant chiefly for two reasons. First, it documents the absorption of Huáyán studies into the Sān-lùn (Mādhyamaka) curriculum at the very end of the sixth century — a generation before the rise of the Huáyán school proper under Dùshùn (557–640) and his disciple Zhìyǎn (602–668). Jízàng’s lineage was that of Fǎlǎng → Sēngquán → Sēngzhào, descending from Kumārajīva’s Cháng’ān circle; the fact that the Avataṃsaka was being lectured on at Shèshān and Xìng-huáng-sì in the late Chén / early Suí decades, when (according to Jízàng) the great southern Niè-pán, Chéngshí, and Pí-tán masters had ignored it, indicates that the long monopoly of tathāgatagarbha-related and abhidharma exegesis on the southern lecture-circuit was beginning to break down. Second, the work is a prime witness to the legendary reception-history of the Huáyán in China — the tale of Nāgārjuna’s retrieval of the sūtra from the nāga palace, which Jízàng treats as orally transmitted, becomes a standard topos of the Tang Huáyán school’s foundation-mythology and is reproduced (sometimes with elaborations) in Fǎzàng’s Huāyán jīng zhuàn jì 華嚴經傳記 (T2073) and many subsequent works.
The dating bracket here (595 – 623) is the period of Jízàng’s mature lecturing activity: he moved to the imperial Huìrìsì 慧日道場 (the colophon’s preferred setting for him) on Suí Yángdì’s establishment of the four imperial monasteries, c. 605 CE, and continued teaching until his death in 623. The text refers to the Huìrì dàochǎng 慧日道場 in its ascription, so the composition is most plausibly later than 605, though it could in principle be a re-edition of earlier lecture-notes. No firm internal date can be assigned.
Translations and research
- Liú Guìjié 劉貴傑. Jí-zàng zhī sīxiǎng 吉藏之思想. Taipei: Wén-jīn, 1985. — General study of Jí-zàng’s doctrinal corpus.
- Plassen, Jörg. Die Tathāgatagarbha-Lehre bei Jí-zàng. PhD dissertation, Universität Hamburg, 2002. — Includes attentive treatment of the Huáyán-related materials.
- Koseki, Aaron K. “Chi-tsang’s Ta-ch’eng-hsüan-lun: The Two Truths and the Buddha-nature.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1977. — Methodologically programmatic for reading the yóu yì tracts.
- Kanno Hiroshi 菅野博史. Kichizō Hokke gengi no kenkyū 吉藏『法華玄義』の研究. Tokyo: Sankibō Busshorin, 1992. — Definitive study of Jí-zàng’s parallel yóu yì-style work on the Lotus; informs the reading of all the yóu yì genre.
- Hirai Shun’ei 平井俊榮. Chūgoku hannya shisōshi kenkyū: Kichizō to Sanron gakuha 中国般若思想史研究: 吉藏と三論学派. Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1976.
- No substantial Western-language translation located.
Other points of interest
- The Nāgārjuna / nāga palace foundation-legend reproduced here is one of the earliest Chinese witnesses to the story; Jízàng’s careful framing (“transmitted [but] not in the catalogues”) preserves the awareness that the legend is hagiographic rather than bibliographic.
- The reference to the lecturing genealogy from Shèshān → Xìng-huáng-sì is one of the most concrete data-points for the late Liáng / Chén transmission of Avataṃsaka studies in the South before the Suí imperial centralization, and is much used by historians of the period (Lai 1979; Magnin 1981).