Dàshèng qǐxìn lùn lièwǎng shū 大乘起信論裂網疏
Net-Rending Commentary on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith by 智旭 (Ǒuyì Zhìxù, 述)
About the work
A six-juǎn commentary on the Dà-shèng qǐ-xìn lùn — specifically, on the Tang 實叉難陀 Śikṣānanda translation KR6o0079 (T32n1667), not the more familiar Liáng-Paramārtha translation. By 智旭 Ǒu-yì Zhì-xù 蕅益智旭 (1599–1655), one of the Wǎn-Míng sì dà gāosēng 晚明四大高僧 (the four great masters of late Ming Buddhism). The image in the title — liè-wǎng 裂網, “rending the net [of false views]” — frames the commentary as a polemical clearing of mistaken interpretations rather than a sequential gloss.
Structural Division
CANWWW (T44N1850) lists no internal sub-divisions; the related-text pointer is to KR6o0079 (T32n1667), the Śikṣānanda recension of the parent text.
Abstract
The text opens with the author’s identification: 靈峰蕅益沙門智旭述 (“composed by the monk Zhìxù of Língfēng [Mountain], [styled] Ǒuyì”). The opening doctrinal preface is a classic statement of Zhìxù’s integrative position: “The path of the Buddhas and patriarchs is the transmission of mind through mind. The bodhisattvas’ composition of treatises and exposition of sūtras is also for this one great matter alone. Thus it says: ‘Searching the ten directions one finds no other vehicle.’ Even when the teachings are bent down to the various capacities and gradually lead the disciples — using the provisional in service of the real, expounding the various paths — they are like the three kinds of grass and two kinds of trees that receive the same rain unequally; yet the rain that moistens them is of one taste.”
Zhì-xù’s distinctive contribution to the Qǐ-xìn lùn tradition is twofold. First, he is virtually alone among major commentators in working from Śikṣānanda’s translation rather than Paramārtha’s, on the conviction that the Śikṣānanda is closer to the (assumed) Sanskrit original. Second, he reads the Qǐ-xìn lùn not through a Huáyán xìng-qǐ lens (as 法藏 had done) nor through a Yogācāra-only lens (as 太賢), but through his characteristic Tiāntái 天台-Yogācāra-Pure Land synthesis. Composition is bracketed by Zhì-xù’s late-career commentarial period at Língfēng-sì, c. 1646–1655.
Translations and research
- Shih, Heng-ching. “Yung-ming Yen-shou: The Synthesis of Pure Land and Ch’an in the Sung Dynasty.” Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1984. — Background on the synthetic tradition Zhì-xù inherits.
- Shèngyán 聖嚴. Míng-mò fó-jiào yán-jiū 明末佛教研究. Taibei: Dōngchū, 1987. — The standard study of late-Ming Buddhism, covering Zhì-xù in detail.
- McGuire, Beverley Foulks. Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014.
- Mochizuki Shinkō 望月信亨. Daijō kishin-ron no kenkyū 大乘起信論之研究. Tōkyō, 1922.
Other points of interest
The Liè-wǎng shū is the only major Ming commentary on the Śikṣānanda recension of the Qǐ-xìn lùn. Most readers of the text in late-imperial China continued to use Paramārtha’s version, because 法藏’s Yì-jì and 子璿’s Bǐ-xuē jì both glossed it. Zhì-xù’s choice of the Śikṣānanda is part of his philological program of returning to the texts the late-Ming saw as more reliable.
Links
- CBETA
- DILA Authority (Zhìxù): A001257