Dà Pílúzhēnà chéngdào jīng xīnmù 大毘盧遮那成道經心目
Eyes-of-the-Heart on the Sūtra of Mahāvairocana’s Attainment of the Way (authorship anonymous / disputed)
About the work
A short Heian-era Japanese-Esoteric doctrinal exposition on the Mahāvairocanasūtra (KR6j0001, T18n0848), printed in the Taishō under T58n2212B, immediately following Enchin’s Dà Pílúzhēnà jīng zhǐguī (T58n2212A, KR6j0003). The catalog meta records no attributed author, and the Taishō header simply gives the title without translator/composer attribution. The xīnmù 心目 (“eyes of the heart” / “mind-eye”) of the title is an Esoteric meditative metaphor for the contemplative perception by which the deeper meaning of the scripture is grasped — a distinctively Japanese-Esoteric homiletical genre.
Abstract
The Dà Pílúzhēnà chéngdào jīng xīnmù is one of several short Heian-era doctrinal expositions on the Mahāvairocanasūtra preserved in volume 58 of the Taishō (the Continued Sūtra-commentary 續經疏部) volume devoted to Japanese Esoteric exegesis. The title’s keyword chéngdào 成道 (“attaining the Way / awakening”) replaces the chéngfó 成佛 (“attaining Buddhahood”) of the canonical sūtra title — a substitution attested in some Heian Esoteric writings and reflecting the variant Japanese title Daibirushana-jōdō-kyō 大毘盧遮那成道經.
The composition’s authorship and dating are uncertain. The text is anonymous in the manuscript tradition; doctrinal content (a Taimitsu-style synthesis of the sūtra’s first chapter with Tendai yī xīn sān guān one-mind threefold contemplation) suggests a Tendai-Jimon provenance roughly contemporary with or slightly later than Enchin (814–891). The bracket 805–891 reflects the period from Kūkai’s importation of the Dàrìjīng corpus (805/806) through Enchin’s lifetime as the outer limit of plausible composition. The text is short — perhaps a single fascicle — and reads as a homiletical aide-mémoire rather than a full commentary.
The text is included in the Taishō on the basis of manuscripts at Tendai monastic libraries (Hieizan and/or Onjō-ji); no precise manuscript history has been published.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.