Yuèjīng shí’èrzhǒng 閱經十二種
Twelve Sūtra-Reading [Essays] by 淨挺 (Liángtíng Jìngtǐng, 著)
About the work
A 14-fascicle collection of twelve discrete sūtra-reading essays by the early-Qīng Cáodòng-school Chán master 淨挺 Liángtíng Jìngtǐng 俍亭淨挺 (1615–1684) — also known by his lay name 徐繼恩 Xú Jì’ēn, hào Yúnxī 雲溪. The work assembles Jìngtǐng’s substantive personal commentaries (yuèjīng 閱經, “sūtra-reading [exercises]”) on twelve major Mahāyāna scriptures and treatises. The framing-preface (Liáng-tíng héshàng yuè-jīng shí’èr-zhǒng xù 俍亭和尚閱經十二種序) is by an unnamed disciple-or-friend who places Jìngtǐng’s work in the line of the great Chán master-commentators and notes — characteristically — the paradox of the yuèjīng genre: that Bodhidharma “did not establish words” yet a Chán master is here producing fourteen fascicles of textual commentary, pressed by the necessity of guiding latter-day students. The constituent twelve sūtras include both shorter Mahāyāna scriptures and prajñāpāramitā literature.
Abstract
Jìngtǐng was one of the most prolific early-Qīng Chán-master authors. Trained as a Confucian scholar in his youth, he took refuge in Buddhism after the MíngQīng collapse of 1644 and was tonsured at age 46 (1642). He served in three abbacies — the Cíyún sì 慈雲寺 in Hangzhou (his principal seat), the Fànshòu sì 梵受寺, and the Xiǎnshèng sì 顯聖寺 — and produced an enormous corpus of doctrinal essays, encyclopedic reference works, and Chán yǔlù materials. The bibliophilic orientation of his work was famous: his disciple 嚴沆 Yán Hàng describes him as yú xué wú bù kuī, zhù shū mǎn jiā 于學無不窺，著書滿家 (“his learning omits no field, his books fill the house”).
The composition window of the Yuèjīng shí’èrzhǒng is bracketed at circa 1660–1684 — i.e., the late mature period of Jìngtǐng’s writing, after his initial Cíyún abbacy was established and before his death. The work is one of the principal early-Qīng products of the Hángzhōu monastic-publishing community and a substantial example of the yuèjīng genre — the personal-and-systematic sūtra-reading-and-commentary tradition that flourished in late-Míng / early-Qīng monasticism.
Translations and research
- Xī hé wén jí 西河文集 j. 9 (the Liángtíng Tǐng chánshī tomb-inscription, the principal biographical source).
- Brook, Timothy. Praying for Power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1993. — On the early-Qīng monastic-publishing context.
- Jiang Wu 吳疆. Enlightenment in Dispute. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. — Treats the early-Qīng Chán publishing tradition.
Other points of interest
The Yuèjīng (“sūtra-reading”) genre — exemplified here by Jìngtǐng — is one of the most distinctively late-Míng / early-Qīng innovations in Chinese Buddhist exegetical practice. Where the medieval shū 疏 (“commentary”) and chāo 鈔 (“subcommentary”) had been highly formalised scholastic productions, the yuèjīng essay is a more personal, more rhetorically free, and more ecumenically curated reading of a scripture by a senior Chán master, intended for the intermediate practitioner-reader rather than for the monastic doctrinal-curriculum classroom.