Jìngtǔ shēng wúshēng lùn huìjí 淨土生無生論會集
Conflated [Commentary] on the Treatise on Birth-as-Non-Birth in the Pure Land by 達默 (Hóngluó Dámò, 集)
About the work
A single-juǎn conflated commentary (huìjí 會集 — “gathered-together / harmonised compilation”) on 傳燈 Yōuxī Chuándēng’s Jìngtǔ shēng wúshēng lùn KR6p0056 (T1975), composed by the late-Qīng Pure Land monk 達默 Hóngluó Dámò 紅螺達默 of the Hóngluóshān 紅螺山 lineage in northern China. The work draws together earlier commentarial material on Chuándēng’s Lùn — most importantly the Qīnwén jì of Shòujiào KR6p0071 and the Zhù of Shíxián / Xǐng’ān — with Dámò’s own additions, producing a single unified commentary suitable for monastic-seminary instruction.
Abstract
Chuándēng’s Lùn generated an unusually rich commentarial tradition over the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries (Zhèngjì’s Zhù KR6p0070, Shòujiào’s Qīnwén jì KR6p0071, Shíxián’s Zhù, and now Dámò’s Huìjí). Dámò’s contribution belongs to the late-imperial huìjí genre — a style of textual scholarship in which earlier commentaries are collated and harmonised into a single readable composite — and is principally a pedagogical rather than original-doctrinal work. The annotations of the prior commentators are interleaved phrase by phrase with the underlying Lùn, with Dámò’s own glosses supplementing where the inherited commentaries leave gaps and adjudicating where they conflict.
The work belongs to the Hóngluóshān Pure Land lineage of the late Qīng — the institutional context that would, a generation later, produce the great Republican-era Pure Land master Yìnguāng 印光 (1861–1940). Dámò is also the author of the Ēmítuó jīng yàojiě biànméngchāo KR6p0025 — the standard Qīng pedagogical sub-commentary on Ǒuyì Zhìxù’s Ēmítuó jīng yàojiě. The two works together constitute his contribution to the Qīng Pure Land commentarial canon: biànméng on Ǒuyì’s Yàojiě (the smaller-sūtra commentary), huìjí on Chuándēng’s Lùn (the doctrinal treatise).
The text is preserved only in the Xùzàngjīng 卍續藏 (X1169). No preface fixes a precise composition date; the bracket adopted (1820–1870) covers the most plausible mid-nineteenth-century period of Dámò’s activity, drawn from the dated context of the related Biànméngchāo.
Translations and research
- Welch, Holmes. The Buddhist Revival in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1968 — for the late-Qīng Hóng-luó-shān lineage that produced Dámò and his successors.
- Goossaert, Vincent. “Late Qing Buddhist Lay Movements.” In Modern Chinese Religion II. Leiden: Brill, 2016.
- Bingenheimer, Marcus. Island of Guanyin: Mount Putuo and Its Gazetteers. New York: Oxford, 2016 — touches on the late-Qīng Pure Land institutional context.