Fóshuō Léngqiéjīng chánmén xītán zhāng 佛說楞伽經禪門悉談章
Buddha’s Discourse: Chapter on the Siddham of the Chán Gate of the Sūtra of Laṅkā anonymous
About the work
T2779 in one fascicle is a short anonymous Tang-period verse-cum-prose composition organising key terms of the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra under the rubric of the xītánzhāng 悉談章 — that is, the siddham primer (the Indic syllabic chart that opens the curriculum of medieval Chinese Buddhist phonological study). The work is preserved among the early Chán-tradition manuscripts in Dūnhuáng (the Stein and Pelliot collections) and was incorporated into T85 as part of the gǔyìbù 古逸部 (ancient missing texts) on the basis of those manuscripts.
Abstract
The work is anonymous — no author is named in the source — and the attribution is therefore left blank in the catalog meta. Internal evidence places its composition in the Tang. The opening preface identifies it as a teaching produced “after Bodhidharma in the first year of [Liú-]Sòng (元年)” — the conventional Chán-school dating for Bodhidharma’s arrival in China — and links it to a Léngqié recension of “five fascicles” (which would correspond neither to T670’s four nor to T671’s ten, but matches the Northern-Wèi-period 5-fascicle Suvarṇaprabhāsa-related variants — likely a confused recollection by the compiler). The preface specifies that “the xītánzhāng (siddham primer) was translated by Dìnghuì 定慧, the Mt. Sōngshān Huìshàn monk”, whose verses *do not adhere to the written word but are qínyīn 秦音 (literary Northern Chinese), in tonal agreement with Kumārajīva’s lǔliú (魯留) phonology” — a striking reference to the xītánzhāng tradition’s use of phonological-cum-mnemonic verse for transmitting Buddhist doctrine.
T2779 is therefore best understood as an early-Chán pedagogical text combining (i) the siddham / phonological framework of medieval Chinese Buddhist linguistic study with (ii) doctrinal content drawn from the 求那跋陀羅 Laṅkāvatāra tradition — the Laṅkāvatāra-school (楞伽宗) line that the early Chán tradition claimed as its own. As such, the text is a valuable witness to the eighth-century Chán community’s pedagogical and devotional practice, even though it is not a “commentary” in the technical sense. Date bracket conservatively follows the eighth century (700–800), which is the period of the Léngqié-school phase of early Chán identified by McRae 1986.
Related canonical texts: parent sūtra KR6i0327 (楞伽阿跋多羅寶經 / T670).
Translations and research
- McRae, John R. The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986. The standard study of the Léngqié-school Chan, in which T2779 is contextualised.
- Adamek, Wendi. The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan History and Its Contexts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
- Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山. Shoki Zen-shū shisho no kenkyū 初期禅宗史書の研究. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1967. Foundational study of early Chán texts including the xītánzhāng genre.
No book-length English translation located.
Other points of interest
T2779 is one of the earliest Chinese Buddhist texts to use the xītánzhāng genre — the siddham alphabet primer — for doctrinal exposition. The combination of phonological pedagogy with doctrinal content was characteristic of Tang-period medieval Chinese Buddhism’s deep absorption of the Indic linguistic tradition, and looks back to the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra’s arapacana alphabet meditation.