Yàoshī jīng shū 藥師經疏
Commentary on the Medicine Master Sūtra (anonymous Dunhuang manuscript commentary)
About the work
The Yàoshī jīng shū (T2767) is a second anonymous one-fascicle commentary on the Yakuṣī sūtra preserved in the Dunhuang corpus. Unlike T2766 (KR6i0054), which comments on the Huìjiǎn / Bá chú guòzuì recension (T1331/12), this commentary takes Dharmagupta’s translation (KR6i0047 = T449) as its base text — the Taishō header cross-references No. 449. It is doctrinally Yogācāra (Cí’ēn 慈恩-school), citing the Chéngyùshí lùn 成唯識論 (“如成唯識淨土差別有其四種”) and the Fódì lùn 佛地論. This places the commentary firmly in the post-Xuánzàng (post-660 CE) commentarial tradition.
Prefaces
The opening of the surviving text is fragmentary (the manuscript witnesses contain extensive lacunae marked 三主□□□). The preserved opening discusses Pure-Land theory through five gates: (1) explanation of the term jìngtǔ 淨土, (2) extraction of essence (出體), (3) division of types, (4) characteristics, (5) doctrinal proof. The Pure Land typology is the standard Yogācāra fourfold scheme: (i) fǎtǐ xìng tǔ 法體性土, (ii) zì shòuyòng tǔ 自受用土, (iii) tā shòuyòng tǔ 他受用土, (iv) biànhuà tǔ 變化土 — drawn directly from the Chéngyùshí lùn fascicle 10 and the Fódì lùn fascicle 7. The commentary moves from there into doctrinal exposition of the sūtra’s Pure Land of the East (Jìnglíulí 淨琉璃).
Abstract
This Dunhuang commentary represents the Cí’ēn-school exegetical reception of the Yàoshī sūtra in mid- to late-Tang provincial Buddhism. It is doctrinally more sophisticated than KR6i0054 (T2766) and reflects the consolidation of Yogācāra hegemony in scriptural exegesis after Xuánzàng. The Pure-Land theory presented here belongs to the Fódì jīng lùn 佛地經論 / Chéngyùshí lùn synthesis that defines Tang Yogācāra. The use of the 100-dharma scheme (百法) for analyzing the zì shòuyòng tǔ and the careful enumeration of “60 dharmas” (六十法) as the constituents of the self-enjoyment land mark the author as a trained Yogācāra scholastic.
The lack of named authorship and the fragmentary state of the text are typical of provincial Tang exegetical production. Together with KR6i0054, the manuscript provides important evidence of how Yakuṣī worship was systematized in Dunhuang Tang Buddhist circles. The commentary’s likely date (mid- to late-eighth century) places it in approximately the same era as Tàixián’s commentary (KR6i0053).
Translations and research
- Yoritomi Motohiro 頼富本宏. Yakushi shinkō 薬師信仰. Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1986.
- Birnbaum, Raoul. The Healing Buddha. Shambhala, 1979.
- Buswell, Robert E., Jr. Cultivating Original Enlightenment: Wŏnhyo’s Exposition of the Vajrasamādhi-Sūtra. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007 — Korean Yogācāra context.
Other points of interest
The Pure Land typology of T2767 is identical to that found in standard Tang Yogācāra commentaries, suggesting that even on the Hexi frontier the commentarial culture was fully integrated with the metropolitan Cí’ēn school. The careful citation apparatus (specific Chéngyùshí lùn and Fódì lùn fascicle numbers) marks the author as a trained scholastic with access to a comprehensive monastic library.