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貞元華嚴經音義

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Text ID
KR6e0042
Date
1227–1250
Dynasty
日本鎌倉

Zhēnyuán Huáyán jīng yīnyì 貞元華嚴經音義

Sound-and-meaning Glossary on the Zhēnyuán-era [translation of the] Huāyán jīng by 喜海 Kikai (撰)

About the work

A one-juan phonetic-and-semantic glossary (yīnyì 音義) to the 40-juan Prajñā recension of the Dàfāngguǎng-fó-huāyán jīng 大方廣佛華嚴經 (KR6e0041, T293) — the Zhēnyuán Huáyán (named for the 貞元 era, 785–805), translated in 798 (貞元14) at Cháng’ān by the Kashmiri monk Prajñā 般若 (Bōrě), comprising a substantially expanded version of the Gaṇḍavyūha / 入法界品 chapter. As with the companion glossary KR6e0014 on the 80-juan Śikṣānanda recension, the compiler is the Japanese Kegon monk Kikai 喜海 (1178–1250) of Kōzan-ji 高山寺. The work is preserved as Taishō No. 2206B in T57 and is the shorter half of the conjoint glossary pair T2206 A/B.

Abstract

The text proceeds juan-by-juan (“卷第一”, “卷第二”, …) through the 40-juan Prajñā translation, supplying for each difficult graph or compound a fǎnqiè 反切 spelling and, where necessary, a brief gloss. The format is identical to the companion Xīnyì Huáyán jīng yīnyì and is patently the product of a single coordinated project. Representative entries: 階墀 古諧反 除飢反 (1卷), 羸痩 力爲反 所又反 (2卷), 環釧 下關反 充絹反 (1卷), 拊撃 芳武反 經歷反 (5卷). Unlike the longer companion volume, this text carries no dated colophon in the received Taishō witness — Kikai’s manuscript closes at the end of juan 40 with a page-break marker only.

The absence of a colophon means the date of compilation cannot be fixed precisely. The most defensible bracket is 1227 (the compilation date of the companion Xīnyì Huáyán jīng yīnyì) at the earliest and 1250 (Kikai’s death) at the latest, on the strong prior that the two glossaries are halves of a single intentional project to cover both received Chinese translations of the Huāyán jīng. Most Japanese reference works treat them as effectively contemporaneous, with the 40-juan glossary either preceding the 80-juan as a smaller prototype or following it as a sequel; the brevity of this text and the absence of the elaborate four-stage colophon found in KR6e0014 suggest it was the lighter or earlier of the pair, though the matter is not decidable from the text alone. Its provenance — Kikai’s Toganoo cell at Kōzan-ji in the master Myōe’s final years and the two decades thereafter — is, however, secure.

Catalog-vs-source note: as with the companion volume, the KR catalog meta for this entry omits dynasty, editions, and source-volume information; these have been supplied here from the Taishō header (T57 No. 2206B, p. 0377 ff.) and from the CANWWW record (T57N2206B, dated 日本).

Translations and research

No full Western-language translation. The work is normally treated in tandem with KR6e0014 in the Japanese-language issaikyō ongi 一切經音義 / Huāyán-yīnyì scholarship surveyed in Mizutani Shinjō 水谷真成 and Numoto Katsuaki 沼本克明 on Sino-Japanese phonological history, and in Ikeda Shōju 池田証寿’s papers on Kōzan-ji philological manuscripts. Discussions of Kikai’s intellectual context appear in the standard Myōe-Kōzan-ji literature: Kubota Jun 久保田淳, Okuda Isao 奥田勲, and in English George J. Tanabe, Myōe the Dreamkeeper (Harvard, 1992).

Other points of interest

The pairing of glossaries on both Chinese recensions of the Huāyán jīng — the long Śikṣānanda 80-juan version (the canonical recitation-text of the East-Asian Huayan school) and the shorter Prajñā 40-juan version (essentially an expanded Gaṇḍavyūha, given canonical status in its own right) — reflects a deliberate Japanese Kegon-school total-coverage programme: a single compiler at a single monastery providing the reading apparatus for the school’s two received scriptural witnesses. The Prajñā 40-juan translation was particularly esteemed in medieval Japan as the textual basis for the Fugen-gyōgan-bon 普賢行願品 (its closing juan, separately translated and immensely popular in Pure-Land–inflected Kegon devotion), and Kikai’s glossary equips the reader for that material on equal footing with the canonical Wǔshí huáyán.

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