Yīnmíng rù zhèng lǐ lùn shū 因明入正理論疏
Commentary on the Treatise on Entering Correct Reasoning of Hetuvidyā (Wénguǐ’s commentary, the “Old Commentary”) by 文軌 (Wénguǐ, 述)
About the work
A one-juǎn commentary on the Yīnmíng rù zhèng lǐ lùn KR6o0003 by Wénguǐ 文軌 of Dàzhuāngyánsì 大莊嚴寺, a contemporary of 窺基 (Kuījī) but slightly his senior. Universally known in the East Asian yīnmíng tradition as the “Old Commentary” (古疏 Gǔshū) — to distinguish it from Kuījī’s “Great Commentary” (大疏) KR6o0008. Wénguǐ was actually one of the very first Chinese exegetes of the Rù lùn, working on his commentary almost immediately after Xuánzàng’s translation in 647; what survives in the Xuzangjing is only a fragment of the upper juǎn (shàngshū 上疏 / 序疏卷第一), the rest having been displaced from the Chinese tradition by Kuījī’s Dàshū. Some material from the lost portions is preserved in citations by Huìzhǎo KR6o0018 and the Japanese Hossō tradition.
Structural Division
The Xuzangjing recension of this text is not in CANWWW. The work comments on the Rù lùn KR6o0003.
Abstract
The opening colophon “大莊嚴寺沙門文軌撰” identifies the author. The preface offers a wide-ranging introduction to the function of yīnmíng among the five sciences (pañcavidyā 五明), distinguishing the “outer” sciences (聲明 phonology, 醫方 medicine, 工巧 crafts) from the “inner” sciences (內明 Buddhist doctrine and 因明 logic), and arguing that the yīnmíng science is not a non-Buddhist import (some early Chinese readers having taken it for an “external-path” 外道 doctrine because of its Sanskrit forms) but a properly Buddhist science deployed for the refutation of slanderers. The body of the surviving fragment glosses the opening verses of the Rù lùn in detail. Composition is normally placed shortly after the 647 translation of the Rù lùn and before Wénguǐ’s death, conventionally given as c. 670; the work was clearly already in circulation by the time Kuījī’s Dà-shū KR6o0008 was composed, and Kuījī engages directly with Wénguǐ’s positions in many places — generally to refute them. Modern scholarship (Frankenhauser 1996, Takemura 1986) has used the surviving Wénguǐ text together with Huìzhǎo’s Yìduàn KR6o0018 and the Japanese citation-tradition to reconstruct as much as possible of Wénguǐ’s full position. The Xuzangjing transmits the text from a Japanese manuscript witness; the work fell out of canonical Chinese circulation by the late Táng.
Translations and research
- Frankenhauser, Uwe. Die Einführung der buddhistischen Logik in China. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996. — German monograph; treats Wénguǐ extensively.
- Shen Jianying 沈剣英. Dūnhuáng yīnmíng wénxiàn yánjiū 敦煌因明文獻研究. Shanghai, 2008. — Includes Dūnhuáng yīnmíng fragments that overlap with Wénguǐ’s lost commentary.
- Tang Yiqie 湯一介 and Sun Bojie 孫博傑. “Wénguǐ Yīnmíng rù zhèng lǐ lùn shū zhī yánjiū” 文軌《因明入正理論疏》之研究. Zhōngguó xuéshù 中國學術 (2003).
Other points of interest
Wénguǐ’s Old Commentary is one of the principal lost works of early-Táng Buddhist scholarship; what survives constitutes a primary witness to the very first Chinese reception of Indian Buddhist logic, before the Cí’ēn / Fǎxiàng synthesis of Kuījī fixed the canonical reading. The retrieval of further Wénguǐ fragments from the Dūnhuáng manuscripts has been one of the major contributions of twentieth-century yīnmíng scholarship.