Dàshèng sìfǎ jīng shì chāo 大乘四法經釋抄
Subcommentary on the Explication of the Sūtra of the Four Mahāyāna Dharmas anonymous Táng-period author
About the work
A short single-fascicle subcommentary (T85 no. 2784, Dūnhuáng manuscript-derived) attached to a shì 釋-format commentary on the Dàshèng sìfǎ jīng 大乘四法經 (KR6i0469 T17 n0772 / KR6i0471 T17 n0774). Taishō no. 2784 belongs to the Dūnhuángbù 敦煌部 (volume 85) of the Taishō, which preserves Buddhist manuscript material recovered from the Dunhuang Cave 17 cache; T85 n2784 is the modern editorial number assigned by the Taishō editors to a specific Dūnhuáng manuscript or related cluster of manuscripts containing this commentary.
Abstract
The text employs the standard Chinese sūtra-title-classification framework: that titles are constructed yuē 約 (“with reference to”) four classes — rén 人 (person, e.g. the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa named after Vimalakīrti), chù 處 (place, e.g. the Lèngqié jīng named after the mountain), fǎ 法 (doctrine, e.g. the Dàbōrě-jīng on the prajñāpāramitā), and yù 喻 (simile, e.g. the Bǎoyún-jīng 寶雲經 on the assembled bodhisattvas compared to clouds). The Dàshèng sìfǎ jīng is classified as yuēfǎ 約法 (“with reference to doctrine”); the four dharmas are then enumerated as the foundational bodhisattva commitments. The work proceeds as a commentary on the parent commentary (KR6i0594 Dàshèng sìfǎ jīng shì).
The work has no authorial attribution and no surviving date; its presence in the Dūnhuáng manuscript corpus places it in the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties period (circa 700–900), the textual frame within which the Dūnhuáng Cave 17 corpus accumulated. The cross-reference cf. No. 1535 in the Taishō editorial apparatus links it directly to the KR6i0594 Shì. The two texts together represent a Tang-period scholastic commentary tradition on the Dàshèng sìfǎ jīng that has otherwise left almost no trace in the standard transmitted canon — preserving the Dunhuang-cache manuscript discovery’s value for the recovery of Tang-period regional Buddhist scholarship.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The fourfold classification of Buddhist sūtra-titles (rén, chù, fǎ, yù) presented in the opening of the work is the standard medieval Chinese pedagogical framework for sūtra-title analysis, deriving ultimately from Zhìyǐ’s Miào fǎ liánhuá jīng xuányì 妙法蓮華經玄義 (T33 no. 1716) and standardised through the Tang-period Tiāntái-and-Huáyán scholastic tradition. The application of the framework to a comparatively obscure sūtra like the Dàshèng sìfǎ jīng is a useful witness to the diffusion of this pedagogical apparatus into the broader Tang Buddhist commentary culture.