Bǎifǎ lùn xiǎnyōu chāo 百法論顯幽鈔
Notes Bringing-Out-the-Hidden on the Hundred-Dharmas Treatise by 從芳 (Cóngfāng, 述)
About the work
A substantial three-fascicle Cí’ēn-school 慈恩 / Fǎxiàng 法相 sub-commentary on Vasubandhu’s KR6n0096 Dàshèng bǎifǎ míngmén lùn 大乘百法明門論 (T31n1614), preserved only in the Manji Xuzangjing 卍續藏 (X48n0799). The author, 從芳 Cóngfāng, is otherwise unattested except as the named shù 述 (“expounder”) of this work; the catalog meta classifies him as Sòng, while the DILA Buddhist authority (following the Tendai bibliographic catalog Tōiki dentō mokuroku 東域傳燈目錄) tags him 唐. The doctrinal idiom of the text is fully post-Kuījī and fully post-Huìzhǎo, so a late-Táng to early-Sòng dating is most defensible.
Prefaces
The opening of the surviving juan does not preserve a free-standing preface; the source begins mid-text with the conventional fascicle header Bǎifǎ lùn xiǎnyōu chāo juǎn dìyī mò 百法論顯幽鈔卷第一末 (“end half of fascicle one”). The Manji editors note that the opening half of the first juan and several intermediate fascicles were lost; what survives is juǎn dìyī mò (later half of juan 1), juǎn èr mò (later half of juan 2), and juǎn dìqī mò (later half of juan 7).
Abstract
The Xiǎnyōu chāo is the most extensive surviving Chinese sub-commentary on the Bǎifǎ míngmén lùn outside the immediate Kuījī / Huìzhǎo / Zhìzhōu corpus. It systematically expounds the hundred-dharma classification through the standard Cí’ēn vocabulary of the èrzhàng 二障 (afflictive and cognitive obscurations), the shídì duànhuò 十地斷惑 (the ten bodhisattva-stages and the obscurations cut at each), and the relation between dìngài 定愛 / fǎài 法愛 (meditative attachment and dharma-attachment) and the four-truth-contemplation of the four-stage. The technical scaffolding of the surviving fascicles (which discusses the obscurations cut at the fourth, fifth, and sixth bodhisattva stages, and the analytic structure of tān 貪 attachment) presupposes a full Cí’ēn doctrinal training and is plainly the product of a developed mature scholastic tradition.
The text’s transmission is severely fragmentary — only juǎn 1 mò, juǎn 2 mò, and juǎn 7 mò survive, all reconstructed from a Japanese Hossō manuscript witness recovered for the Manji Xuzangjing. The substantial bulk of the original is lost. The work was unknown to the Korean and Chinese canons and is recorded only in Japanese Tendai-Hossō bibliographic catalogs. It is one of the principal lost-then-recovered Yogācāra commentaries of the medieval Chinese tradition.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.