Yuánjué jīng shūchāo suíwén yàojiě 圓覺經疏鈔隨文要解
Essential Explanations Following the Text of the Commentary and Subcommentary on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment by 清遠 (Qīngyuǎn, 述)
About the work
A 12-fascicle running explication of 宗密 Guīfēng Zōngmì’s KR6i0553 Yuánjué jīng lüèshū and its KR6i0559 lüèshū chāo, by the southern-Sòng Huáyán scholar-monk Qīngyuǎn 清遠. The work proceeds line-by-line down the Zōngmì shūchāo unit, supplying the yàojiě 要解 — “essential explication” — needed to make the dense scholastic apparatus accessible to a southern-Sòng student readership a century-and-a-half after Zōngmì’s death. As such it is a third-tier exegetical text (commentary on subcommentary on commentary on sūtra), of a kind characteristic of the late-southern-Sòng / early-Yuán Huáyán pedagogical tradition.
Abstract
The author’s own preface, preserved at the head of the work (X10 no. 250), is dated 皇宋嘉定六年龍集癸酉杓建鶉火望日 — i.e., 1213 CE, the full-moon day of the sixth month of Jiādìng 6, southern-Sòng Níngzōng’s reign. The preface is signed by Qīngyuǎn himself in self-deprecatory mode: 圭峰定慧禪師疏鈔斯經弘傳今古凊遠猥因宿植 (“Guīfēng Dìnghuìchánshī’s shūchāo on this scripture has been propagated past and present; I, Qīngyuǎn, on account of karmic seeds planted in the past, …”). The preface and the work itself are accordingly Sòng-era productions of 1213 or shortly before. The catalog meta-record assigns the dynasty as 元 (Yuán), but the internal colophon evidence is decisive for a southern-Sòng dating; the catalog’s 元 is followed here only formally (by recording it in the abstract) and corrected to 宋 in the dynasty field. The authorial Qīngyuǎn is otherwise undocumented in standard Buddhological reference works; he is to be distinguished from the much earlier Línjì-Chán figure Lóngxīng Fóhǎi 佛眼清遠 Qīngyuǎn (1067–1120), with whom he shares only the name.
The work is one of the longer single-author Yuánjué exegetical productions in the canon and is comparable in scale to the parallel commentary tradition by 周琪 Zhōuqí (KR6i0564) of roughly the same period. Together they document the active southern-Sòng Huáyán reading of Zōngmì.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The preface contains an extensive doxographical excursus on the relation between xìngzōng 性宗 and xiàngzōng 相宗 (the “nature-school”, i.e. tathāgatagarbha-tradition Huáyán/Yuánjué exegesis, against the “characteristics-school”, i.e. Wéishí / Yogācāra), arguing for the prior validity of xìngzōng — a stance that reflects the long-standing Huáyán polemical position and Zōngmì’s own classification.