Dàzàng yīlǎn 大藏一覽
The Whole Canon at a Glance by 陳實 (編), revised and re-edited by 姚舜漁 (重輯)
About the work
A late-Míng ten-juan condensed digest of the entire Buddhist canon, compiled by the lay disciple Chén Shí 陳實 (style Chén Shíyuán 陳實原) of Níngdé 寧德 in Fújiàn, and re-edited a generation later for the 1614 recutting by Yáo Shùnyú 姚舜漁 (lay style Xiùshuǐ jūshì 秀水居士) of Jiāxīng. The text is structured into 8 mén (“gates”), 60 pǐn (“chapters”), and 1,181 yīnyuán (“causal-narrative entries”) drawn from the jīng / lǜ / lùn of the canon, totaling ten juan of selected stories and doctrinal kernels for the lay reader. The work is preserved in the Jiāxīng canon as J21 no. B109.
Prefaces
The preserved preface is the Chóngkè dàzàng yīlǎn xù 重刻大藏一覽序 (“Preface to the Recutting of the Dàzàng yīlǎn”) by Chén Yìdiǎn 陳懿典 of Xiùshuǐ (Jiāxīng), then serving as Hànlínyuàn shìdú xuéshì 翰林院侍讀學士. It is dated Wànlì jiǎyín mèngdōng 萬曆甲寅孟冬 = first month of winter, Wànlì 42 (10th lunar month) = November 1614, written at his “Xuépǔ Studio” 學圃軒. In paraphrase:
Buddhism entered the Central Lands from the Hàn — at first only the Forty-Two Sections. By the Wèi, Jìn, and Táng, western envoys came back and back, and the eastern translations were beyond counting. From Sòng to Yuán, expositions of the lineage-school and the literati’s cross-readings grew daily. The August Míng, in opening its founding fortunes, gathered them as a Great Canon — jīng, lǜ, lùn — over five thousand juan of vast extent. To exhaust the years on it without finishing, even the elders of inspection cannot complete the round; how then for one of the first ground? Even in famous cloisters with their honored stores it is not easy — what to say of out-of-the-way places?
So the yīlǎn compilation of Chén jūshì Shí 陳居士實 cost his heart-mind hard work indeed. He raised the essentials and hooked the recondite — that the superior-faculty could go through it and glimpse the great whole, the prevailing fruit and wonderful causes; that the middle-faculty could hear of it and see faith arise. The whole comes to ten juan divided into eight mén and sixty pǐn, fastened together with eleven hundred and eighty-one yīnyuán — the eight gates following one another in succession, and “good and evil” treated unusually amply, none of it being other than karmic-recompense reminders to the dull and muddy living beings. The chapters open with “Former Kings” 先王 and close with “Spreading-and-Communicating” 流通 — and again with that they propagate and spread, that men together obtain to see and hear and uphold, in the first sense of “Repaying-Grace” bàoēn.
[On Buddhist cosmology and karma:] If there are worlds there must be living beings; the having of living beings is the completing of the world; and yet the having of living beings is also the cause of the world’s destruction. Why? Because the nature of all living beings is the Buddha-nature; if their nature does not become dim, they can see the Buddha. Hence one knows that the mountains and rivers and the great earth are all made by the mind; that the heaven-and-people drift in turning and finally come to āsrava; and they must seek a place to settle the body and establish the destiny. If the nature of living beings becomes dim they do not see the Buddha; the superior-wisdom takes the whole life as full cultivation and the imperishable as the after-world; … those of the unworthy and unable then take wantonness as suiting their nature, take “calamity-on-licentiousness” as not necessary so, give license to desire as fortune in their feeling; if they merely escape today’s blame they hold cruelty as cleverness, and they no longer worry that this age’s mockery and the ten-thousand-year curses will continue. Holding to this confused view, when one man uses himself, ten thousand men receive its bitter poison.
Were there no Buddhist law to recompense it with calamity-and-fortune over a thousand kalpas and ten thousand kalpas, what could ever wake the drunken from their dream? This volume’s thousand-plus yīnyuán are particularly displayed and lifted up — the intent is here! the intent is here! Of those of high illumination there are few and of those of low darkness there are many; of the compassionate-and-mild there is no lack of persons but of the cruel-and-violent there are especially many. To draw them toward the destiny one must first draw them toward direction; to draw them toward goodness and away from evil, one must first draw them toward fearing calamity and seeking fortune. Cause and effect are not awry over an exhausted kalpa; the present can be known. Repentance can be dissolved from before-beginning — at this very moment what could be hard? This volume in its world-circulation will let the tube-peeking lower-scholar, the scant-village remote-place, the violent-stubborn knot of habit — all obtain to grasp its outline, water its clear-coolness, make a great-rejoicing, open a great expedient.
The Guǎngbiàn Yáo jūshì 廣辯姚居士 [Yáo Shùnyú] is a senior of the Chén external clan — in his youth he carried a scholar’s name and in his late years he indulged in chányuè (Chán-joy). He liked to put his virtue in things of which he had no knowledge — particularly placing his attention on alms-giving and on palm-leaf [scriptures]. Together with his sons of the màocái (cultivated-talent rank) [Yáo] Jūnfù 君復 and others, he co-revered the Three Jewels at the Three-Pagoda Bodhisattva Hall 三塔大士殿 [in Jiāxīng], called the assembly together to gather the workers, and recut the Lèngqié and Lèngyán sutras and the others. As for this volume — mindful that the old cuttings had become rubbed and dim — he specially contributed to the carving, personally collated and corrected, drew out his own subtle understanding to make a colophon, and asked I, the unworthy, to make this preface for it.
I am ashamed to have neither Lètiān 樂天 [Bái Jūyì] nor Zǐzhān 子瞻 [Sū Shì]‘s ground of vision; I have set down a sketch of the yīlǎn’s threading-and-articulation as it stands. May the great good-and-knowledgeable open my stubbornness.
Wànlì jiǎyín mèngdōng — Hànlínyuàn shìdú xuéshì, Xiùshuǐ Chén Yìdiǎn, written at the Xuépǔ Studio.
Abstract
The work as transmitted in the Jiāxīng canon is therefore the 1614 recutting under Yáo Shùnyú’s editorial supervision. Chén Shí’s original compilation, mentioned in the preface as a previously-cut text whose blocks had become worn, must significantly precede 1614. Chén is recorded only as a Wàn-lì-era lay disciple 優婆塞 from Níngdé 寧德 (a coastal prefecture in northeast Fújiàn) — no further dates survive — making a defensible composition window the Wànlì era as a whole, 1573–1614.
Yáo Shùn-yú (DILA A037257) was a Jiā-xīng gentleman, kinsman by marriage to the Hàn-lín scholar Chén Yì-diǎn, with at least two sons (the mào-cái Jūn-fù 君復 and others) active in the same lay-Buddhist patronage circles. His participation in the Three-Pagoda Bodhisattva Hall 三塔大士殿 recutting project at Jiā-xīng — alongside the recutting of the Laṅkāvatāra and Śūraṅgama sutras — places this work within the late-Míng Jiāxīng-canon lay-printing movement that culminated in Mì-cáng Dào-kāi’s 密藏道開 great Jiāxīng (Léng-yán-sì) canon project (begun 1589). The Dà-zàng yī-lǎn enters the canon at J21 B109 as part of that printing tradition.
The 60 pǐn run topically: j. 1 opens with the eight (or nine) chapters on the Buddha’s career — xiānwáng 先王, yīndì 因地, shìshēng 示生, chūjiā 出家, chéngdào 成道, dùshēng 度生, rùmiè 入滅, chángzhù 常住, then yuándào 原道, jiàoxìng 教興, yōulè 優劣, jiūjìng 究竟, shìyí 釋疑, zhèngyàn 證驗, tuōtāi 託胎, wǔyùn 五蘊, fánnǎo 煩惱; the remaining juan continue through karma, vinaya, bhūmi, eschatological themes, and lay practice, closing with liútōng 流通 (canonical circulation). The structural emphasis on karma-vipāka narratives — explicitly singled out by Chén Yìdiǎn as the work’s special contribution — makes the Dàzàng yīlǎn a primary witness to late-Míng popular Buddhist moralizing and to the Jiāxīng-canon project’s pastoral aim of bringing the canon within reach of “lower scholars and remote villages”.
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated Western-language secondary literature located. The work is occasionally cited in:
- Gregory P. Schopen and successor scholars on Buddhist popular pedagogy — peripheral citation as a preservation site for late-pre-modern yīn-guǒ literature.
- Bù Yǒng-jiān 卜永堅 and other Sinophone studies of the Jiāxīng canon — the work is one of the standard B-section (續藏) lay-compilations of the canon.
- Liào Zhào-héng 廖肇亨 in studies on late-Míng literati Buddhist patronage.
Other points of interest
The Three-Pagoda Bodhisattva Hall 三塔大士殿 in Jiā-xīng — site of Yáo Shùn-yú’s recutting — was one of the key Jiā-xīng-canon production centers in the early decades of the Wǎn-Míng-Qīng-chū canon-printing project. The 1614 recutting joins a contemporaneous wave of late-Wàn-lì lay-sponsored printings of standard sutras (Laṅkāvatāra, Śūraṅgama) and of new lay-compilations like the present text. The work’s structuring around yīn-yuán (causal narratives) makes it the closest Míng analogue to the late-Táng Tài-píng guǎng-jì in Buddhist register.