Dàshèng èrshí sòng lùn 大乘二十頌論
Twenty Verses on the Mahāyāna (Mahāyānaviṃśikā) by 龍樹菩薩 (Lóngshù púsà / Nāgārjuna, 造) and 施護 (Shīhù / Dānapāla, 譯)
About the work
A short Mādhyamaka treatise in twenty verses attributed to Nāgārjuna, translated by 施護 Dānapāla 施護 at the Northern-Song imperial yìjīngyuán 譯經院 c. 982–1000. The Sanskrit original — the Mahāyānaviṃśikā “Twenty Verses on the Great Vehicle” — is preserved (Vaidya 1923, Tucci 1956) and a Tibetan translation by Mūlaśrī (Tōh. 3833) supplies the parallel canonical witness. T1576 is one of the principal Northern-Song additions to the Indic Mādhyamaka short-treatise corpus in Chinese.
Structural Division
CANWWW gives this text without an internal subdivisions block. The text contains no related-text cross-references in CANWWW.
Abstract
The opening verse — “I take refuge in the inconceivable nature, in the unattached true wisdom of all Buddhas, in the imperishable and pure body of Dharma which has no marks and is yet the receptacle of all marks” 歸命不可思議性，諸佛無著真實智… — sets the doctrinal frame: the work expounds the dharmakāya of the Buddha as the locus where conventional and ultimate truths are unified. The twenty verses develop the doctrine of advaya (non-duality) of the conventional and the ultimate, situating the Mādhyamaka teaching of emptiness within a Mahāyāna devotional frame oriented toward the soteriological figure of the Buddha as dharmakāya.
The work is doctrinally close to the Bhavasaṃkrāntiśāstra tradition translated as KR6m0019 T1574 and the Yuktiṣaṣṭikā translated as KR6m0020 T1575 — all three by 施護 in the same Biànjīng 汴京 phase. The Sanskrit Mahāyānaviṃśikā shows a number of textual peculiarities (verses missing or out of order across the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan witnesses) that have been the subject of substantial modern philological work. The attribution to Nāgārjuna is generally accepted in modern scholarship, though Lindtner notes that the work’s stylistic and doctrinal profile suggests a slightly later Mādhyamaka author of the Nāgārjuna-school.
Translations and research
- Tucci, Giuseppe. “Mahāyānaviṃśaka.” In Minor Buddhist Texts part I. Serie Orientale Roma 9. Rome: ISMEO, 1956: 195–207. (Standard critical edition of the Sanskrit and English translation; principal modern study of T1576.)
- Vaidya, Paraśurāma Lakṣmaṇa, ed. Études sur Āryadeva et son Catuḥśataka. Paris: Geuthner, 1923. (Earlier Sanskrit edition.)
- Lindtner, Christian. Nāgārjuniana. Indiske Studier 4. Copenhagen: Akademisk Forlag, 1982. (Discussion of T1576’s place in the Nāgārjuna corpus.)
- Saigusa Mitsuyoshi 三枝充悳. Ryūju no kenkyū 龍樹の研究. Tōkyō: Daisanbunmeisha, 1985.
Other points of interest
The textual history of the Mahāyānaviṃśikā is one of the more complicated cases in the Nāgārjuna prakaraṇa corpus: the surviving Sanskrit manuscripts are short and contain only some of the verses preserved in the Tibetan and Chinese; T1576 contains verses absent from the Sanskrit and one verse absent from the Tibetan; reconstructions of the original twenty-verse work require composite witnesses.
Links
- CBETA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (1000): [ T ] T = CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924-1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. https://dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/1/