Dàfāngguǎng fóhuáyán jīng gǎnyìng zhuàn 大方廣佛華嚴經感應傳
Records of Efficacious Responses to the Mahāvaipulya-buddha-avataṃsaka Sūtra
original 2-juan compilation by 惠英 (Huìyīng, fl. early 8th c., 撰), disciple of 法藏; redacted into 1 juan by the layman 胡幽貞 (Hú Yōuzhēn / Wúshēng jūshì, 纂) in 783
About the work
A 1-juan compendium of Avataṃsaka-sūtra miracle-narratives, with a complex two-stage editorial history. The original 2-juan compilation was composed by Huì-yīng 惠英, a disciple of the Huá-yán patriarch 法藏, probably in the late 7th or early 8th century, drawing on the Huá-yán-jīng zhuàn-jì tradition that culminates in KR6r0084. In Jiàn-zhōng 建中 4 (783) the layman Hú Yōuzhēn 胡幽貞 (hào Wú-shēng jūshì 無生居士), a resident of Sì-míng-shān 四明山, redacted Huì-yīng’s 2-juan compendium into a single juan, omitting what he judged to be “extraneous flowery language outside the topic” (qí shì-wài fú-cí 其事外浮詞) and tightening the prose around the central thematic of gǎn-yìng — efficacious response.
Abstract
The work contains roughly 30 miracle-narratives of the Avataṃsaka cult, arranged thematically. The opening narrative — the locus classicus of the redactional preface — is the standard story of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu: Vasubandhu, having composed 500 abhidharma treatises in his “small-vehicle” period, is brought to the Mahāyāna by his elder brother Asaṅga’s contrived illness, and subsequently composes 500 Mahāyāna treatises — i.e., the canonical narrative of the conversion of Vasubandhu to the Yogācāra tradition that the Avataṃsaka embodies. The remaining narratives cluster around: (i) miraculous experiences of Chinese Avataṃsaka expositors — Bùddhabhadra, Sēng-zhào, Dù Shùn 杜順 (Huá-yán “first patriarch”), Zhì-yǎn 智儼, 法藏 himself; (ii) recitation-miracles of lay devotees, particularly Tang court ladies and jìn-shì officials; (iii) miraculous healings, recoveries from peril, and rebirths in pure realms attributed to Avataṃsaka recitation.
Hú Yōuzhēn’s redactional preface is itself a small but unusual document: a layperson’s editorial intervention in a clerical compilation, with explicit critique of the original’s prose style. The redaction is the form preserved in the canon (T2074), and Huìyīng’s original 2-juan version does not survive separately. The bracket of dating reflects this: the canonical text dates to 783, with Huìyīng’s underlying composition some decades earlier.
The text was incorporated into the standard Sòng-Yuán-Míng-Korean recensions and into the Taishō (T2074). The transmission is clean.
Translations and research
- Imre Hamar (ed.), Reflecting Mirrors: Perspectives on Huayan Buddhism (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007) — touches on the Avataṃsaka miracle-narrative tradition.
- 鎌田茂雄, Chūgoku Kegon shisōshi no kenkyū (Tokyo, 1965).
- Chen Jinhua, Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician (Leiden: Brill, 2007) — discusses Huì-yīng as one of 法藏’s circle.
- No substantial English-language secondary monograph on this specific text.
Other points of interest
The Asaṅga-Vasubandhu opening-narrative is one of the principal Chinese-canonical witnesses to the conversion-of-Vasubandhu story, parallel to but independent of Paramārtha’s Vasubandhu zhuàn (T2049). The other principal source for the same narrative is the Pó-sǒu pán-dòu fǎ-shī zhuàn 婆藪槃豆法師傳 (T2049, Paramārtha’s biography of Vasubandhu, mid-6th c.). The Avataṃsaka canonical-context here gives the conversion-narrative a distinctive doctrinal-cult emphasis absent from the Paramārtha version.
Links
- CBETA: T51n2074