Dàshèng jīng zuǎn yàoyì 大乘經纂要義
A Compiled Anthology of Essential Meanings from the Mahāyāna Sutras anonymous (Dunhuang manuscript)
About the work
A single-juan anonymous Dunhuang Buddhist anthology, preserved in the Taishō canon’s gǔyì bù 古逸部 (lost-and-recovered section, vol. 85) at T85 no. 2817. The text is structured as a topically-organized digest of essential teachings drawn from the major Mahāyāna sutras — opening with a verse-praise of the Three Jewels, the Buddha as “honored among gods and men”, and the rare-as-the-udumbara-flower’s-blossoming nature of the Buddha’s appearance in the world, then proceeding through doctrinal passages on the difficulty of obtaining a human birth, the necessity of refuge in the Dharma, etc.
Prefaces
The text has no preserved auto-preface or byline. It opens directly with a four-character verse-praise:
敬禮無上一切佛, 證於三身天人尊 教法甚深難思議, 無為解脫僧和合 是真歸依於三寶, 諸佛出世如憂曇 如悔盲龜遇浮木, 人身難得甚希有
(Reverently bowing to the unsurpassed all-Buddhas / who verify the Three Bodies, the Honored among gods and men / The teaching-Dharma profound, hard to think and discuss / The unconditioned Liberation, the harmonious Saṅgha / These are the true Three Refuges / The Buddhas appearing in the world like the udumbara flower / Like the blind tortoise encountering a floating log / The human body is hard to obtain, exceedingly rare.)
Abstract
Authorship and date are unrecoverable. The work is one of the anonymous Dunhuang Buddhist manuscripts preserved in the Mògāo Caves at Dūnhuáng (Cave 17, the “Library Cave”) and recovered in the early twentieth century by Stein, Pelliot, and others. Such Dunhuang manuscripts span the early Tang through the Northern Sòng (the Library Cave was sealed ca. 1006 CE); without internal dating clues, a defensible composition window for any individual unsigned manuscript is 600–1000 CE — the bracket adopted here. The gǔyì bù of the Taishō canon (vols. 84–85) is the standard collection of such recovered Dunhuang Buddhist manuscripts.
The work belongs to the genre of doctrinal digest (yàoyì jí 要義集 / zuǎn yàoyì 纂要義) — short topically-organized anthologies of canonical citations for monastic teaching and lay devotional use. Its function is parallel to but more abridged than the much larger Dàoshì Fǎyuàn zhūlín (KR6s0002) and Bǎochàng Jīnglǜ yìxiàng (KR6s0001) of the official canonical tradition. The Dunhuang preservation indicates that such anthology-digests were standard reading material in the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties / Sòng monastic establishment of the western frontier.
The text is structured as a sequence of brief doctrinal-narrative paragraphs, each typically opening with a sutra-citation (e.g. “The Buddha-store sūtra’s chapter on Buddha-recollection says…”) and continuing through the cited passage’s substance. Topics include the Three Jewels, refuge, karma, monastic precepts, devotional practice, and Pure Land aspirations.
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated Western-language secondary literature located. The text is treated within the larger Dunhuang-manuscript scholarly literature:
- Lionel Giles, Descriptive Catalogue of the Chinese Manuscripts from Tunhuang in the British Museum (London, 1957) — for the Stein-collection witnesses.
- Pelliot Chinese collection (Bibliothèque nationale de France) — see standard Pelliot catalogs.
- Fāng Guǎng-chāng 方廣錩 (ed.), Dūn-huáng-xué dà-cí-diǎn 敦煌學大辭典 (Shàng-hǎi Cí-shū, 1998) — entry on this and related Dunhuang Buddhist anthology-texts.
- Jaroslav Průšek, Stephen Owen, and successor scholars on Dunhuang popular-Buddhist literature.
Other points of interest
The Dunhuang anthology-digests collectively constitute one of the principal witnesses to lay-and-monastic Buddhist devotional reading at the western frontier in the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties / early-Sòng period. The choice of a verse-praise as opening — in five-character or seven-character lines, easily memorizable — reflects the work’s pastoral-pedagogical function.