Léngqié jīng zōngtōng 楞伽經宗通
Penetrating-the-School Commentary on the Sūtra of Laṅkā composed by 曾鳳儀 (Zēng Fèngyí, 通)
About the work
X330 in eight fascicles is 曾鳳儀’s late-Wàn-lì lay-Buddhist commentary on [[KR6i0327|Léngqiéābáduōluó bǎo jīng 楞伽阿跋多羅寶經]] (T670). The genre-name zōngtōng 宗通 (“penetrating the school’s teaching”) is distinctive to 曾鳳儀’s coordinated late-life Buddhist project: he produced four such commentaries (on the Śūraṅgama, the Lotus, the Laṅkāvatāra, and the Yuánjué), all in the same generic register — programmatic doctrinal commentary delivered through a layman’s voice.
Prefaces
The Taishō / Xuzangjing preserves at the head 曾鳳儀’s Yuánqǐ 緣起 (origin-narrative) of the project. The narrative is unusually personal: in the jiǎshēn 甲申 year (1584), returning from Chángzhōu 長洲 to Jiāhé 嘉禾 (Jiāxīng), he met “Dáguān and Mìzàng, two patched-robe ones” — Zǐbǎi Dáguān 紫柏達觀 (1543–1603) and Mìzàng Dàokāi 密藏道開 — and came to feel a deep affinity. After dreaming of the bodhisattva Maitreya saying “Discrimination is consciousness; non-discrimination is wisdom” (分別是識，無分別是智), he asked the two monks the source — they said it sounded like the Laṅkāvatāra. He searched the parent sūtra at length without finding it; in the dīngyǒu year (1597) the village monk Dùmén 度門 brought the line to him in T670, and the zōngtōng project began. The narrative dates the project’s inception precisely to 1597 and locates 曾鳳儀 within the late-Wàn-lì lay-Buddhist circle of Zǐbǎi 紫柏 and his disciples.
Abstract
Note on naming: the catalog meta gives the author as “曾鳳儀宗” — a misreading. 宗通 is the title-genre, not part of the personal name. The author is 曾鳳儀 alone (DILA Authority A001305).
Date bracket follows the documented zōngtōng-project origin in 1597 and a probable completion in the 1610s, within 曾鳳儀’s post-retirement productive period (after his Wànlì 11 / 1583 jǐnshì and resignation in protest over the heir-apparent dispute). The work is one of the principal late-Míng lay-Buddhist commentaries on the Laṅkāvatāra, and stands alongside the monastic productions of 德清 (KR6i0343), 智旭 (KR6i0345, KR6i0346), and 通潤 (KR6i0348) as part of the late-Míng commentarial canon.
Related canonical texts: parent sūtra KR6i0327 (楞伽阿跋多羅寶經 / T670); 曾鳳儀’s parallel Léngyán zōngtōng (X318) on the Śūraṅgama; Diamond-sūtra commentaries KR6c0059 / KR6c0060.
Translations and research
- Eichman, Jennifer. A Late Sixteenth-Century Chinese Buddhist Fellowship. Leiden: Brill, 2016. The standard study of the late-Wàn-lì lay-and-monastic Buddhist circle to which 曾鳳儀 belonged.
- Wu Jiang. Enlightenment in Dispute. Oxford, 2008.
- Tokiwa Gishin. Ryōgakyō no kenkyū. Tokyo: Daitō, 1976.
No book-length English translation located.