Jīngāngdǐng jīng dàyúqié bìmì xīndì fǎmén yìjué 金剛頂經大瑜伽祕密心地法門義訣
Hermeneutic Synopsis of the Mind-Ground Dharma-Gate of the Great Yoga of the Vajra-Crown Sūtra by 不空 (撰)
About the work
A one-fascicle (1卷) Tang Esoteric (mìjiào 密教) hermeneutic synopsis (yìjué 義訣) of the Vajra-śekharasūtra (Jīngāngdǐng jīng 金剛頂經, T18 no. 865 / no. 866 / no. 867 — the Sarvatathāgata-tattva-saṃgraha cycle), attributed in the catalog meta to Bùkōng 不空 不空 (Amoghavajra, 705–774). Whereas the surviving Vajra-śekhara texts proper supply the ritual-doctrinal content of the maṇḍala-and-abhiṣeka cycle, the present yìjué serves as a structural-doctrinal synopsis of the Vajraśekhara cycle: it analyses the architecture of the sūtra’s introductory verses, identifies the five Tathāgatas of the Vajradhātu maṇḍala by their respective epithets, and charts the logical-doctrinal sequence by which the buddhas of the four directions and their attendant bodhisattvas (Vajragarbha, Ākāśagarbha, Avalokiteśvara, Viśvakarman) emerge from the central Vairocana family. The work is thus less a verse-by-verse commentary than a prolegomenon designed to make the cryptic Yogatantra liturgy intelligible to Chinese readers.
Prefaces
The Mandoku transcription preserves a printer’s colophon at the end of the fascicle: “To repay the kindness of the Buddha and the virtue of the patriarchs, I respectfully open the printing-blocks and transmit (the work) to coming generations” (為報佛恩祖德謹開印板傳之來葉矣) — dated Shōō 4, the cyclical year xīnmǎo = 1291 (正應四年(辛卯)七月十八日), by the monk Keiga 慶賀, at the Ōjō-in 往生院 sub-cloister of Mt. Kōya 高野山, Hōzō-in 寶藏院 carving the blocks. This is a Kamakura-period Japanese Shingon woodblock printing of the text, again testifying to the work’s preservation through the Japanese transmission rather than through Sòng-period Chinese editions.
Abstract
The work opens directly with structural analysis: “This Yogasūtra is broadly divided into two: first, verses of summary praise; next, prose on practice for self and others. Within the verses there are again two: first, the four-line stanza of refuge in the Three Jewels; second, the differentiated refuges of the holy assembly …” (此瑜伽經大分為二。初偈頌總相歸讚。次長行等自他利行 …). Each refuge is then identified with a specific Tathāgata or Bodhisattva of the Vajradhātu pentad. The exposition is technical and assumes the reader’s familiarity with the maṇḍala configuration; it functions as a scholastic key to the Yogatantra liturgy rather than as a beginner’s introduction.
The attribution to Bùkōng 不空 is plausible on stylistic grounds and is supported by the standard catalogues from the Zhēnyuán xīndìng shìjiào mùlù 貞元新定釋教目錄 onward, but has been doubted in modern scholarship: the work’s terminology (e.g., the use of yúqié 瑜伽 as a fixed technical term, the citation of the bǎiqiān sòng Jīngāngdǐng 百千頌金剛頂 — the long extended Vajraśekhara recension known to East Asia primarily from Bùkōng’s translation excerpts) and its synthetic doctrinal framework are consistent with Bùkōng’s known authorship corpus and with his Cháng’ān period (return from Sri Lanka 746 — death 774). The dating bracket is set to 746–774 on this basis, with the work most plausibly composed during Bùkōng’s middle Cháng’ān years (760s).
The work was carried to Japan with the rest of the Esoteric textual corpus by Kūkai 空海 in 806 and became a standard reference in Heian Shingon scholastic instruction on the Vajradhātu side of the dual-mandala curriculum.
Translations and research
- Lü Jianfu 呂建福, Zhōngguó mìjiào shǐ 中國密教史 (Beijing, 1995) — places T1798 in Bùkōng’s authorial corpus.
- Charles D. Orzech, Politics and Transcendent Wisdom: The Scripture for Humane Kings in the Creation of Chinese Buddhism (Penn State Press, 1998); also Orzech, “After Amoghavajra: Esoteric Buddhism in the Late Tang,” in Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia (Brill, 2011), pp. 315–336.
- Rolf W. Giebel (trans.), Two Esoteric Sutras: The Adamantine Pinnacle Sutra; The Susiddhikara Sutra (Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2001) — translates the related Jīngāngdǐng texts (not the yìjué itself but its sourcesūtra).
- No complete translation of T1798 in any Western language located.
Other points of interest
The Kōya-san Shōō 4 (1291) woodblock colophon is one of the relatively rare instances where the Mandoku-transcribed text preserves a precisely datable Japanese printer’s colophon, useful for the bibliographic history of Esoteric texts in medieval Japan.