Qǐxìn lùn zhù 起信論註
Annotations on the Awakening of Faith (anonymous)
About the work
A short anonymous Tang-period commentary on the Awakening of Faith, in 1 juǎn, recovered from the Dūnhuáng cache and printed in Taishō Vol. 85. The catalog meta entry has no listed author; the text itself is signed only “述” (“expounded by ___”) without name.
Structural Division
CANWWW does not register entries in Taishō Vol. 85 in canonical form; the work cross-references with KR6o0079 (T32n1667), the Śikṣānanda recension of the parent text.
Abstract
The text opens directly into glossing of the Awakening of Faith prose: “The treatise says: ‘There is a Dharma which can give rise to the root of Mahāyāna faith — therefore one should explain it.’ Expounded: Below, second, [we] clarify the zhèngzōngfēn 正宗分 (the section of correct teaching). Within it there are two parts: first, raising the benefit, agreeing to expound it; later, properly explaining what is to be expounded.” The text proceeds in this question-and-answer scholastic format. A distinctive feature is the use of intercalary self-questioning notes within parenthesised brackets — possibly an oral lecture-format preserved in writing.
The work is anonymous and has no surviving title-page; without external evidence the dating cannot be tightened beyond the broad bracket of 700–900 (it must postdate the Tang Śikṣānanda translation of 700, and the Dūnhuáng manuscript witness must predate the cave-sealing in the early eleventh century). The author is plausibly a middle-tier scholastic of the Cháng’ān or Hé-xī Yogācāra-Huáyán environment to which Tán-kuàng KR6o0121, KR6o0122 also belonged.
The Taishō establishes the text from the Dūnhuáng manuscript witness alone.
Translations and research
- Ueyama Daishun 上山大峻. Tonkō bukkyō no kenkyū 敦煌佛教の研究. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1990. — Treats the Dūnhuáng Qǐ-xìn lùn commentary corpus.
- No further substantial secondary literature located on this anonymous text.
Other points of interest
The presence of multiple anonymous Tang Qǐxìn lùn commentaries in the Dūnhuáng cache — alongside the named works of 曇曠 — testifies to the centrality of the Awakening of Faith in Tang YogācāraHuáyán curriculum, far exceeding what the canonical transmission alone would suggest.