Dàshèng běi zōng lùn 大乘北宗論
Treatise of the Mahāyāna Northern School
An anonymous short didactic-verse text from the Dūnhuáng manuscript cache, preserving a characteristic early-8th-century Northern-School Chán formulation organised as a series of negation-couplets on the six pāramitā and related Buddhist virtues
About the work
A one-juan short verse-and-prose text, Taishō T85 n2836, preserved only through Dūnhuáng manuscript witnesses. Non-commentary; commentedTextid omitted.
The text opens with a characteristic set of negation-couplets on the six pāramitās: “Wǒ shàng bù qǐ bù shī xīn, hé kuàng qiāntān xīn; wǒ shàng bù qǐ chí jiè xīn, hé kuàng chù fàn xīn 我尚不起布施心，何況慳貪心；我尚不起持戒心，何況觸犯心” (“I do not even raise the mind of almsgiving — how much less the mind of meanness and greed; I do not even raise the mind of precept-observance — how much less the mind of precept-violation”). The pattern runs through all six pāramitās and their opposites, and through further dualities: heaven/hell, compassion/harm, purity/defilement, joy/anger, etc.
Tiyao
Not a WYG text; no 四庫 tíyào exists. No preface; the text is anonymous.
Abstract
The Dàshèng běi zōng lùn is programmatically titled — it self-identifies as a “Northern School” doctrinal text — and preserves in condensed form the wúxīn 無心 / wúniàn 無念 doctrinal position that the Northern School shared with the earlier Bodhidharma-attributed corpus. The negation-couplet form — “I do not even raise the mind of X — how much less that of not-X” — is an idiosyncratic rhetorical device not widely paralleled elsewhere in the Chán canon, and suggests a specific pedagogical or liturgical use (perhaps as a recitation-verse for use in meditation-practice).
The text’s self-identification as běi zōng 北宗 is significant: most Northern-School literature post-dating the mid-8th-century Shénhuì polemical campaign avoided the label or presented material under Bodhidharma or anonymous attribution; a text carrying the běi zōng label openly is either early (pre-Shénhuì) or is deliberately recuperative. Either reading places the text in the Kāiyuán (713–741) or early Tiānbǎo (742–755) period.
Dating bracket: notBefore 710, notAfter 850 (Dūnhuáng paleographic terminus ante quem). Probably early-to-mid 8th century.
Translations and research
- McRae, John R. 1986. The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism. Hawai’i.
- Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山 1967. 《初期禪宗史書の研究》. Hōzōkan.
- Faure, Bernard. 1997. The Will to Orthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Northern Chan Buddhism. Stanford.
Other points of interest
The Dàshèng běi zōng lùn’s open self-labelling as “Northern School” literature is almost unique in the surviving Chán doctrinal corpus, making the text an important witness to the self-understanding of the Northern School prior to the Shénhuì polemical assault. Most Northern-School material was subsequently re-packaged as anonymous or Bodhidharma-attributed in the effort to survive the Southern-School hegemonic project.