Dàshèng jìngtǔ zàn 大乘淨土讚
Mahāyāna Pure Land Encomium (anonymous; Dūnhuáng manuscript)
About the work
A short anonymous zàn 讚 (encomium) on Pure Land devotional themes, preserved in the Taishō Gǔyìbù 古逸部 (ancient-lost-texts division) of Vol. 85 as No. 2828. The text is a single-juǎn poetic devotional piece in the zàn genre; the closing rubric of the surviving witness reads Dàshèng jìngtǔ zàn yī běn 大乘淨土讚一本 (“Mahāyāna Pure Land Encomium, one [manuscript] copy”), implying a single-witness textual transmission.
Abstract
The text consists of a sustained poetic verse-cycle in five-character gāthā form, treating Pure Land doctrinal themes through the yīxīn / wéixīn 一心／唯心 frame:
fǎ jìng lín kōng zhào, xīn tōng wǔsè xiàn 法鏡臨空照，心通五色現 (“the dharma-mirror gazes upon the void; mind, penetrating, manifests as the five colours”)
yì zhū héng zì jìng, shēn guāng zhào shífāng 意珠恒自淨，身光照十方 (“the mind-jewel is constantly pure of itself; the body-light illumines the ten directions”)
guānxiǎng rú wúxiǎng, gāoshēng bù [□] shēng 觀想如無想，高聲不□聲 (“visualisation is as no-visualisation; high-voiced [niànfó] is not [a separate] voice”)
The text repeatedly invokes the huìjìng 惠鏡 (“wisdom-mirror”) as the operative metaphor for the practitioner’s purified mind, and articulates the Pure Land soteriology in the wéixīn jìngtǔ 唯心淨土 register characteristic of the Léngyán 楞嚴 / Yuánjué 圓覺 doctrinal frame.
The text is a Dūnhuáng manuscript recovery, anonymous, with no preserved authorial attribution or dating. The zàn genre, the doctrinal vocabulary, and the textual associations of the manuscript suggest a late-Táng or Five-Dynasties / early-Sòng provenance (c. 700–1000). The work belongs to the broader Dūnhuáng cluster of Pure Land devotional materials that includes 法照 Fǎzhào’s wǔhuì texts (T2827, KR6p0136) and the Dàoān fǎshī niànfó zàn materials (T2830AB, KR6p0139 / KR6p0140).
The manuscript witness shows multiple kōngquē 空缺 (gap-marker) lacunae (rendered here as □), reflecting the imperfect physical condition of the Dūnhuáng original.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The Dàshèng jìngtǔ zàn documents the rich Dūnhuáng devotional-poetry tradition of the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties period — a tradition that was substantially lost from the mainland Buddhist canonical mainstream and has been recovered to scholarship only through the early-twentieth-century Dūnhuáng cave-library finds. Together with the other Vol. 85 Pure Land texts, it provides important documentary evidence for the regional and popular variety of Pure Land devotional practice prior to the late-imperial Pure Land standardisation.