Dàshèng fǎyuàn yìlín zhāng bǔquè 大乘法苑義林章補闕
Filling the Gaps in the Compendium of Doctrinal-Forest Essays by 慧沼 (Zīēnsì Huìzhǎo, 撰)
About the work
A three-fascicle Táng Cí’ēn-school sub-commentary by 慧沼 Huìzhǎo (650–714), Kuījī’s principal disciple and the second patriarch of the Cí’ēn-school, on his teacher’s KR6n0124 Dàshèng fǎyuàn yìlín zhāng 大乘法苑義林章. Preserved in the Manji Xuzangjing 卍續藏 at X55n0882 (= ZB6n0113). The function-marker bǔquè 補闕 (“filling the gaps”) indicates that the work supplies essays on topics where Kuījī’s parent compendium was either silent or compressed beyond clarity.
Structural Division
The text is structured as a series of additional doctrinal essays, the surviving fascicle 4 covering the Sānkē zhāng 三科章 (essay on the three categories — skandha, āyatana, dhātu), Défēidé zhāng 得非得章 (the essay on attainment and non-attainment), Kōngyì zhāng 空義章 (the essay on emptiness), and Shíèr zhī zhāng 十二支章 (the essay on the twelve links of dependent origination). Fascicles 7 and 8 of the source survival cover further specialised topics. The Manji recension preserves only fascicles 4, 7, and 8 — the bulk of the original three-fascicle structure.
Prefaces
Authorship line: “Dàyúnsì shāmén Huìzhǎo zhuàn 大雲寺沙門慧沼撰” — by the Dàyúnsì monk Huìzhǎo. The text opens directly with the additional essays; there is no separate authorial preface in the surviving recension.
Abstract
The Bǔquè is the single most important Cí’ēn-school sub-commentary on the Yìlín zhāng, supplementing Kuījī’s coverage with detailed expositions of doctrinal topics (the abhidharma-school traditional categories of sānkē, the analytic of dé / fēidé in abhidharma psychology, the Yogācāra reading of the twelve-link pratītyasamutpāda) where Kuījī’s text is either silent or compressed. The work is a key witness to the second-generation Cí’ēn-school’s effort to consolidate Kuījī’s compendium into a complete doctrinal reference.
慧沼 Huìzhǎo (650–714, zì Xuánshū 玄樞, sobriquet Zīēnsì 淄恩寺 / Sūshēngsì 蘇生寺) was Kuījī’s chief disciple and the second patriarch of the Cí’ēn-school, succeeding Kuījī at Cí’ēnsì and later moving to Dàyúnsì 大雲寺. His full corpus includes KR6n0127 Quànfā pútí xīn jí 勸發菩提心集 (T45n1862) and KR6n0128 Néng xiǎn zhōngbiān huìrì lùn 能顯中邊慧日論 (T45n1863). The dating window 682 (Kuījī’s death) to 714 (Huìzhǎo’s death) is the period within which Huìzhǎo could have composed the Bǔquè.
Translations and research
- Alan Sponberg, The Vijñaptimātratā Buddhism of the Chinese Monk K’uei-Chi. PhD diss., UBC, 1979 — discusses the second-generation Cí’ēn-school sub-commentarial corpus.
- Yoshimura Makoto 吉村誠, Chūgoku Yuishiki shisōshi kenkyū. Tokyo: Daizō shuppan, 2013.
- John Makeham (ed.), Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China. Oxford UP, 2014.