Guānwúliángshòu jīng shū Miàozōngchāo kē 觀無量壽經疏妙宗鈔科
Topical Outline of the Miàozōngchāo Sub-commentary on the Guānjīng Commentary by 知禮 (Sìmíng Zhīlǐ, 排定) and 真覺 (Zhēnjué, 重排, Míng)
About the work
A single-juǎn topical outline (kē 科) of the Guānwúliángshòu fó jīng shū miàozōng chāo 觀無量壽佛經疏妙宗鈔 KR6p0007 — Sìmíng Zhīlǐ’s 四明知禮 (960–1028) authoritative Tiāntái sub-commentary on the Guānjīng. The original kē was prepared by Zhīlǐ himself in 大中祥符 6 (1013) along with the Miàozōngchāo; the Xùzàngjīng prints a Míng-period rearrangement (重排) by Zhēnjué 真覺 (also called Bāisōng 百松 / Bǎisōng 百嵩, fl. early 17th c., a Tiāntái Pure Land lineage holder) that flattens the original nested structure into a single tabular outline more accessible for Miàozōngchāo study. The text has no continuous prose, only nested headings keyed to the corresponding sections of the Miàozōngchāo itself.
Abstract
A kē (科, “topical outline”) is a standard pedagogical adjunct in Tiāntái and other Sino-Buddhist scholastic traditions: a hierarchical tree of section-headings extracted from a parent commentary, designed to guide the reader through the argumentative structure of the work. The Miàozōngchāo is one of the most ramified and difficult of the Sòng Tiāntái commentarial corpus, and the kē — first as Zhīlǐ’s own outline, then as Zhēnjué’s Míng-period revision — has historically served as the principal navigation aid for students. Zhēnjué’s revision dates to the late Wànlì 萬曆 / early Tiānqǐ 天啟 period (c. 1620s–1640s); the Xùzàngjīng recension prints his revised version, with the original Zhīlǐ outline preserved within. The dating bracket adopted here covers from the original kē (c. 1021, contemporary with the parent commentary) to Zhēnjué’s revision (terminus c. 1640).
The text is doctrinally significant only as a window onto the structure of the parent Miàozōngchāo: it makes visible how Zhīlǐ organised his sub-commentary around the Tiāntái doctrine of the “three contemplations in one mind” (yī xīn sān guān 一心三觀) and the corresponding three truths (sān dì 三諦), with the sixteen contemplations of the sūtra subordinated to this systematic frame.
Translations and research
- Stevenson, Daniel. “The T’ien-t’ai Four Forms of Samādhi and Late North-South Dynasties, Sui, and Early T’ang Buddhist Devotionalism.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987.
- Getz, Daniel A. “Siming Zhili and Tiantai Pure Land in the Song Dynasty.” In Buddhism in the Sung, ed. Peter Gregory and Daniel Getz. University of Hawai’i Press, 1999. — Standard treatment of Zhīlǐ’s Pure Land project.
The kē itself has not been the object of an independent monograph.