Dà fāngguǎng rù rúlái zhì dé bù sī yì jīng 大方廣入如來智德不思議經
The Great, Vast Sūtra on Entering the Inconceivable Wisdom and Virtue of the Tathāgata by 實叉難陀 (Śikṣānanda, 譯)
About the work
This one-fascicle text by 實叉難陀 Śikṣānanda is the third Chinese rendering of the Avataṃsaka-family material on the Tathāgata’s wisdom and virtue, after T0302 (anonymous Qín-period) and T0303 (闍那崛多 Jñānagupta, Suí). The Taishō apparatus’s parallel-listing confirms the three-way correspondence.
Prefaces
No formal preface; the standard Tang-court attribution.
Abstract
The translation belongs to 實叉難陀 Śikṣānanda’s mature Cháng’ān 長安 period, c. 695 – 710 CE; the bracket adopted here reflects this window. As with T0301 and several other smaller Avataṃsaka-tradition translations Śikṣānanda undertook alongside the great [[KR6e0010|80-fascicle Huáyán 華嚴]], this version provides the canonical Tang rendering of material that had been translated multiple times before, and would become the authoritative version in subsequent East Asian Buddhist study.
The triple-translation history of this material — anonymous Qín → Jñānagupta Suí → Śikṣānanda Tang — provides one of the clearest cases for the comparative-philological study of the development of Chinese Buddhist translation conventions across the late-fourth to early-eighth centuries.
The Taishō text (T0304) is established on the standard apparatus.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language translation located.
- Hamar, Imre, ed. Reflecting Mirrors (2007).
Other points of interest
- The triple translation history (T0302 → T0303 → T0304) is one of the most striking cases of the Chinese Buddhist tradition’s commitment to producing successive translations of doctrinally important Indic texts, with each new version benefiting from the philological conventions of its own era.