Guǎngbǎi lùn shū juǎn dìyī 廣百論疏卷第一
Sub-commentary on the Extensive Hundred-Verse Treatise, Fascicle One (Dūnhuáng fragment) by 文軌 (Wénguǐ, 撰)
About the work
A single-fascicle Dūnhuáng-recovered fragment of the original ten-fascicle Tang-period sub-commentary by 文軌 Wénguǐ on Dharmapāla’s Dàshèng guǎngbǎi lùn shìlùn 大乘廣百論釋論 (KR6m0015 T1571). The work is preserved in Taishō volume 85 (the volume of Dūnhuáng-recovered apocrypha and exegetical fragments) at T2800. The opening preface explicitly states the original ten-fascicle structure (約文申義十卷勒成), of which only the first fascicle survives. Composition is conventionally dated to the second half of the seventh century, after Xuánzàng’s translation of T1571 in 650 and within Wénguǐ’s broader period of activity at Cháng’ān.
Structural Division
CANWWW lists this text as a Dūnhuáng-recovered fragment without a structural-division block. Related text per CANWWW: KR6m0015 Dàshèng guǎngbǎi lùn shìlùn 大乘廣百論釋論 (T30n1571).
Abstract
T2800 is one of the principal Dūnhuáng-recovered Tang Buddhist sub-commentarial fragments and the only known Chinese-Buddhist exegesis on the Catuḥśataka tradition outside the canonical translations themselves. The first-fascicle fragment covers the opening of the Pò cháng pǐn 破常品 (Refutation of permanence) — chapter 9 of the full Catuḥśataka, chapter 1 of the half-text preserved in Chinese — and supplies a Yogācāra-Madhyamaka exegesis that is doctrinally close to the contemporary KR6n0005 Chéng wéishì lùn 成唯識論 (T1585) tradition.
The literary preface preserved at the head of T2800 is one of the more elaborately ornate examples of mid-Tang Chinese-Buddhist commentarial preface-writing, employing the topos of the “meaning-cave” (義窟) and the “secret cliff” (嵩巖之穴) to characterise the difficulty of the Catuḥśataka. Wénguǐ identifies himself as one trained in the yīnmíng 因明 logical tradition, which is consistent with his other extant work, the Dūnhuáng-recovered Yīnmíng rù zhènglǐ lùn shū 因明入正理論疏 (KR6o0021).
The text was unknown to the medieval Sino-Japanese canon-tradition; it was identified and edited from Dūnhuáng manuscripts (Pelliot collection) in the early twentieth century and incorporated into the Taishō supplement-volume 85.
Translations and research
- Frauwallner, Erich. Texte der indischen Philosophie 4: Die Erkenntnislehre des klassischen Sānkhya-Systems. Wiesbaden, 1968. (Discussion of the Wén-guǐ logical fragments.)
- Mukai Akira 向井亮. “Bun-ki Inmyō nyū shōri ron sho no kenkyū” 文軌『因明入正理論疏』の研究. Bukkyō kenkyū, various years.
- Tucci, Giuseppe. “Buddhist Logic before Diṅnāga.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1929: 451–488. (Includes early notice of Wén-guǐ.)
- Lang, Karen C. Āryadeva on the Bodhisattva’s Cultivation of Merit and Knowledge. Indiske Studier 7. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1986. (Notes on T2800 in context of the Catuḥśataka tradition.)
Other points of interest
T2800 is one of the earliest Tang Mādhyamaka-tradition fragments preserved at Dūnhuáng — the conjunction of the Catuḥśataka tradition with the yīnmíng logical tradition in the same author makes it a particularly valuable witness to the late-Tang scholastic synthesis. The fact that nine of the ten original fascicles are lost is one of the more regrettable losses in the East-Asian Mādhyamaka commentarial corpus.