Jīnglǜ yìxiàng 經律異相
Differing Phenomena Drawn from the Sūtras and the Vinaya by 寶唱 (等集), with 僧旻 (originator)
About the work
A fifty-juan imperially commissioned Buddhist anthology of marvels and notable events extracted from the sūtra (經) and vinaya (律) corpora, compiled at the southern court of Liáng Wǔdì 梁武帝 between Tiānjiān 天監 7 (508) and Tiānjiān 15 (516). The anthology is structured topically — heavens, earth, buddhas, bodhisattvas, śrāvakas, kings, ministers, women, lay disciples, non-humans, hells, and so on — with each entry condensing one striking yì-xiàng 異相 (“differing / distinguishing manifestation”) from a named scriptural source. It is the earliest substantial extant Chinese Buddhist lèi-shū 類書 and the direct prototype for the great Táng florilegia, above all Dào-shì’s Fǎ-yuàn zhū-lín 法苑珠林 (KR6s0002).
Prefaces
The received text opens with a single anonymous preface (likely by Bǎochàng himself or a court hand writing on his behalf) which sets out the genesis of the project in detail. In paraphrase:
Since the Tathāgata’s response to causes and instruction tailored to capacity, his teaching has reached even nāgas and ghosts, not the gods and humans alone — the textual deposit accumulated to a billion lines. Liú Xiàng 劉向 collated books and the xuán-yán 玄言 lay long obscured; with Hàn Míngdì’s dream-vision the spiritual evidence flourished, and translation thereafter was continuous. The three baskets are by now broadly available in their essentials, but the nine aṅga miscellaneous sayings remain ungathered.
The August Emperor [Wǔdì], whose attainment matches the equal-awakening (děngjué 等覺) and whose virtue accords with the All-Knowing One, has greatly propagated the scriptural teaching to the benefit of monastics and lay alike, broadly seeking the ancient and gathering scattered remnants.
The imperial intent observed that the xiàng and zhèng (semblance and right) Dharma-ages are now drawing to a close and that faith and joy are weakening; that the textual extent is vast and few can master it. Accordingly in Tiānjiān 7 (508) an edict commanded Sēng Mín 釋僧旻 and others to make a full epitome of the canon, evidencing deep doctrine and bringing it to bear on the divine principle, with the wording brief and the meaning clear, already a more-than-half profit for the seeker. But the rare and distinguishing manifestations remained scattered through the various scrolls, and the secret discourses had not been brought to view. So at the close of Tiānjiān 15 (516) a further edict commanded Bǎochàng 寶唱 to excerpt the essentials of jīng and lǜ, all to be arranged thematically, that the reader might easily understand. Further the new-edict abbots of Xīn’ānsì 新安寺 — Sēnghao 釋僧豪 — and of Xīnghuángsì 興皇寺 — Fǎshēng 釋法生 — were ordered to assist in the cross-checking and the reading. Thus, broadly comprising the canonical books and selecting their secret essentials, consulting the spiritual deliberations above and adopting the established models, the work was made into fifty juan, plus a mùlù 目錄 (“table of contents”) in five juan, divided into five zhì 秩 (“bundles”). It was named Jīnglǜ yìxiàng 經律異相. Future students will become broad without effort.
The five-juan separate mùlù mentioned here was already lost by the Táng; the present text carries only an internal table of contents.
Abstract
The compilation history given by the preface is corroborated by Dàoxuān’s Xù gāo-sēng zhuàn 續高僧傳 (T2060), j. 1 Bǎochàng zhuàn, which records that Bǎochàng (DILA A001926; native of Wúxiàn 吳縣 in Wú-jùn, lay surname Cén 岑) had earlier been an assistant in the court translation bureaus of Saṅghabhara 僧伽婆羅 and brush-receiver for the Aśoka-rāja-sūtra 阿育王經 and ten other works, before being entrusted by Wǔdì with this florilegium. The catalog meta and the canon byline name only Bǎochàng as compiler (“等集”), reflecting the imperial assignment of 516, but the preface itself credits the original 508 commission to Sēng Mín 僧旻 (467 – 527 CE; DILA A001595; one of the “three great Liáng dharma-masters” alongside Fǎ-yún 法雲 and Zhì-zàng 智藏) — Bǎochàng was the redactor who completed and reorganized the work. The two helper-monks Sēnghao of Xīn’ān-sì and Fǎ-shēng of Xīnghuáng-sì are named in the preface but are otherwise obscure.
Dating: notBefore = 508 (Tiānjiān 7, the original Sēng Mín commission, which the preface presents as a single continuous project); notAfter = 516 (Tiānjiān 15, the Bǎochàng completion-edict). The catalog dynasty 梁 reflects this Liáng court provenance.
The work’s structure is the earliest fully-developed Chinese Buddhist topical encyclopedia. Headings move down a hierarchy of cosmic and social rank: tiān-bù 天部 (heavens, in two juan, broken further into the six kāmadhātu heavens, the twenty-three rūpadhātu heavens, and the four ārūpyadhātu heavens), then earth and its phenomena (mountains, oceans, rivers, mineral and animal kingdoms), then fó-bù 佛部 (buddhas, past and present, with biographical synopses extracted from the Lalitavistara, Buddhacarita, Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra and so on), pútí-sà-bù 菩薩部 (bodhisattvas), shēng-wén-bù 聲聞部 (śrāvakas), guó-wáng-bù 國王部 (kings), zhū-chén-bù 諸臣部 (ministers), jū-shì-bù 居士部 (lay disciples), zhū-rén-bù 諸人部 (ordinary persons), fú-rén-bù 婦人部 (women), bā-bù 八部 (the eight non-human classes), yāo-guài-bù 妖怪部 (demons), dì-yù-bù 地獄部 (hells). Every entry is signed at its end with the name of its scriptural source — making the work also a partial canon-witness for early sixth-century southern recensions of texts now in many cases lost or only fragmentarily preserved.
The prevailing canonical text is the Taishō recension T53 no. 2121, which collates the Sòng, Yuán, Míng, Gōng (宮), Korean (麗), and South-Hidden (南藏) witnesses against a Min’an-temple base.
Translations and research
- André Bareau, “Une nouvelle source d’information pour l’étude des conciles bouddhiques anciens : le ‘Jing lü yi xiang’”, in Etudes d’Orient et Etudes asiatiques (1972) — early Western use of the work as a vinaya witness.
- Funayama Tōru 船山徹, Butten wa dou kanyaku sareta no ka — sūtora ga keiten ni naru toki 仏典はどう漢訳されたのか――スートラが経典になるとき (Iwanami Shoten, 2013) — discusses the Jīng-lǜ yì-xiàng in the context of imperially-sponsored Liáng compilation projects.
- Iwasaki Hideo 岩崎日出男, “Kyōritsu ihō no zentō to Hokku kyō” 經律異相の前途と法句經, Indogaku Bukkyōgaku Kenkyū 30.2 (1982).
- Chen Jinhua, Philosopher, Practitioner, Politician: The Many Lives of Fazang (Brill, 2007) — discusses the Liáng florilegium tradition into which Jīng-lǜ yì-xiàng fits.
- The standard Chinese reference is the punctuated edition Dǒng Zhìqiào 董志翹 (ed.), Jīng-lǜ yì-xiàng zhěnglǐ yǔ yánjiū 經律異相整理與研究 (Bā-Shǔ Shū-shè 巴蜀書社, 2011), a four-volume critical text plus monograph.
Other points of interest
The Jīng-lǜ yì-xiàng preserves verbatim quotations from a number of early translations now lost or available only in Dūnhuáng witnesses (e.g. portions of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra and the Saṃyukta-piṭaka otherwise unattested), making it a primary canonical-philological source for the state of southern Chinese Buddhist scriptural transmission ca. 510. Its topical organization is the direct ancestor of the Fǎ-yuàn zhū-lín (KR6s0002, completed 668 by Dào-shì 道世), which expands the same structure to one hundred juan and adds an apparatus of gǎn-yìng 感應 (“stimulus-response”) miracle reports.
Links
- DILA authority: A001926 (寶唱), A001595 (僧旻)
- CBETA: T53n2121
- Successor florilegium: KR6s0002 Fǎyuàn zhūlín 法苑珠林
- Dazangthings date evidence (510, 517): [ T ] T = CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924-1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. https://dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/1/