Jīngāngjīng gǎnyìng zhuàn 金剛般若波羅蜜經感應傳
Biographical Accounts of Sympathetic Response to the Vajracchedikā
(anonymous compilation, late Tang or Sòng)
About the work
A 1-juan anonymous anthology of Diamond Sūtra miracle-tales, transmitted in the Xùzàngjīng (X1632) without attributed compiler or named compilation date. The work consists of a sequence of named-protagonist tales — 琰法師, 荀氏, 法藏, 陸彥通, 陳昭, 任五娘, 白仁哲, 司馬喬卿, 吳逵, etc. — drawn from the Six-Dynasties-through-Tang Diamond Sūtra miracle-anthological tradition. Several of the named protagonists overlap with both KR6r0174 Jíyàn jì and KR6r0175 Jiūyì, indicating that the present work draws on the same overall tale-repertoire. Transmitted in the Xùzàngjīng as X1632.
Prefaces
The work has no separate preface; it opens directly with the table of contents.
Abstract
The work catalogues approximately 30–40 Diamond Sūtra miracle-tales, in a compact and largely formulaic narrative style. The materials draw on the standard Tang and early-Sòng miracle-tale repertoire and are presented without the literary-bel-lettriste polish of Duàn Chéngshì’s KR6r0175 Jiūyì — suggesting a more practical, monastic-pastoral compilation purpose than literary production. The work is plausibly a late-Tang or early-Sòng compilation, produced for use in monastic preaching and lay-devotional instruction.
The work’s relationship to the other anonymous mid-imperial Diamond Sūtra anthology KR6r0176 Shòuchí gǎnyìng lù is unclear: the two works overlap in much of their content but differ in arrangement and tale-selection. It is plausible that both derive from a common Tang or Five-Dynasties source-archive that has not survived independently.
The dating bracket — 800 to 1100 — accommodates the work’s reliance on Tang miracle-tale materials (lower bound) and its transmission in the Sòng Buddhist publishing tradition (upper bound).
A representative tale: 司馬喬卿 of the Yǒnghuī era (650–656), the Dàlǐ Sīzhí of the Tang court — already noted in KR6r0168 as appearing in Táng Lín’s Míngbào jì — pricked his own heart for blood in mourning for his mother and wrote out one juan of the Diamond Sūtra; two stalks of zhī mushroom grew on his lean-to, attesting to the miraculous validity of his devotion. The tale’s reproduction across multiple Tang and Sòng anthologies shows the canonical-iconic function of certain key cases as paradigm exempla of the Diamond Sūtra tradition.
Translations and research
- 鄭阿財, 《敦煌佛教靈驗記研究》(Táiběi: Xīn-wén-fēng, 2010).
- Donald Gjertson, Miraculous Retribution (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1989).
- No dedicated monographic study of the present work has been located; it is generally treated alongside KR6r0176 in the secondary scholarship on the mid-imperial Diamond-Sūtra miracle-tale tradition.
Links
- CBETA: X87n1632