Yuánjué jīng xùzhù 圓覺經序注
Annotations on the Preface to the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment by 如山 (Rúshān, 註序)
About the work
A short single-fascicle annotated commentary on the famous preface to the Yuánjué jīng (KR6i0551) — the preface composed by 裴休 Péi Xiū 裴休 (787–860) for the 宗密 Zōngmì commentary tradition — by the Sòng-era monk 如山 Rúshān 如山 of the chuánfǎ shāmén 傳法沙門 rank at the Zhāngjiāng Chán Yuàn 章江禪院 in Lóngshā 龍沙 (Jiāngxī). Péi Xiū’s preface, opening 夫血氣之屬必有知，凡有知者必同體 (“All blood-and-breath beings have awareness; all that have awareness share a single substance”), became one of the most-cited prose statements of late-Táng Buddhist universalism and was the standard preface attached to the Yuánjué jīng commentary apparatus through the Sòng. The present xùzhù is a line-by-line philological-cum-doctrinal annotation of Péi’s preface, supplying biographical and doctrinal background, identifying allusions, and connecting Péi’s formulations to passages from the Yuánjué jīng itself and to Zōngmì’s KR6i0555 Dàshū. Its companion piece by the same author, KR6i0567 Yuánjué jīng lüèshū xùzhù, treats Péi’s preface to the Lüèshū.
Abstract
The work opens with a detailed annotation of Péi Xiū’s biography, drawing on the popular Buddhist zhuàn tradition that identified Péi as a re-incarnation of the Eastern-Jìn lay Buddhist 許玄度 Xǔ Xuándù — a late-Táng narrative of “three lives” preserved in Tánzhuāng’s Liúshǐ tàibēi 留世太碑 and elaborated in Sòng gāosēng zhuàn. Each subsequent line of Péi’s preface is then annotated in turn, with cross-references to Zōngmì’s Dàshū and Lüèshū. Rúshān’s lifedates are not preserved; the catalog assigns him to the Sòng without further specification, and the work is bracketed here in the long Sòng range 1100–1279 on the basis of its evident dependence on a fully formed Zōngmì exegetical apparatus and its absence from any Yuán-or-later cross-references that would tighten the date. The Lóngshā (= Nánchāng 南昌, Jiāngxī) Chán Yuàn was a Línjì-Yangqi institution under the southern Sòng; Rúshān’s affiliation as chuánfǎ shāmén indicates a senior monastic role.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The Yuánjué jīng xùzhù is one of relatively few medieval Chinese commentaries devoted exclusively to a preface rather than to a primary text — a sub-genre that nevertheless flourishes in the Sòng-and-after Buddhist literature, where the great prefaces (especially Péi Xiū’s Yuánjué and Chányuán zhūquán prefaces, 宗密 Zōngmì’s Dàshèng qǐxìnlùn preface, and others) had attained classical status and were studied as discrete literary-doctrinal objects.