Yùzhì fó fù 御製佛賦
Imperially Composed: A Buddha-Rhapsody by 太宗趙炅 (撰)
About the work
A two-juan imperially composed Buddhist fù 賦 (rhapsody / rhyme-prose) by Sòng Tài-zōng 太宗 (Zhào Jiǒng, 939–997, r. 976–997). The work uses the classical Chinese fù genre — long associated with literary virtuosity in the Wén-xuǎn 文選 tradition — to expound Buddhist doctrine, with elaborate parallel-prose construction and rhyme-organization. The subtitle indicates that the fù is organized by rhyme around the four characters cún yì kōng dǔ wú-lòu wéi lǐ (存意空覩無漏為理 — “preserving intent, contemplating emptiness, taking the unconditioned as principle”) used in sequential order. Preserved in the Zhōnghuá Tripiṭaka at C73 no. 1679. The fifth of Tài-zōng’s imperially-composed Buddhist works in the Kanripo (cf. KR6s0057–KR6s0060).
Prefaces
The text opens with an interlinear-glossed verse:
“Wonderful awakening, dark gate” 妙覺玄門 — (The pure dharma-body is named “wonderful”. Awakening to dharma-nature is called “awakening”. The two-emptiness true principle is named “dark gate”. This means: the real-nature, leaving marks, still-and-thus, reaching the dharma’s original truth, is named “wonderful awakening”. The Śūraṅgama-sūtra says: “In the tathāgata-garbha, nature-color is true emptiness; nature-emptiness is true color” — pure original-naturally pervading-the-dharma-realm. The Lotus Sūtra says: “Open the upāya gate, manifest the true-real mark.” Calling it “dark gate” is the able-explication-teaching. The sutra says: “Its wisdom-gate is hard to understand and hard to enter.” The Xuán-zàn shū says: “The gate has two meanings: first, the substance-wonderful possesses five hardnesses — namely, hard to see, hard to awaken, hard to know, hard to understand, hard to enter; second, hard to comprehend by the two vehicles, who do not know — therefore the sutra says: ‘all śrāvakas and pratyekabuddhas cannot know it’.“)
[The fù continues with elaborate verse-prose Buddhist doctrinal exposition, interlinearly glossed throughout.]
Abstract
Authorship and date: imperially composed by Sòng Tàizōng during his reign (980 – 997 plausibly). notBefore = 980, notAfter = 997. Catalog dynasty 宋.
The work is the fifth of Tài-zōng’s preserved imperially-composed Buddhist works (the others being KR6s0057–KR6s0060) and the only one preserved in the Zhōnghuá Tripiṭaka rather than the Korean canon. As a fù-genre composition, it is the most classically-literary of Tài-zōng’s Buddhist works — using the Wén-xuǎn parallel-rhyme-prose tradition to express Buddhist doctrine, in marked contrast to the more directly-pedagogical verse-encomium format of KR6s0057 and KR6s0058.
The choice of the fù genre — historically associated with court-literary virtuosity and the official examination tradition — for Buddhist doctrinal expression is itself a programmatic statement: it claims literary parity between Buddhist doctrine and the high-classical-literary tradition.
The four-character rhyme-organizing phrase cún yì kōng dǔ wú-lòu wéi lǐ — “preserving intent, contemplating emptiness, taking the unconditioned as principle” — is itself a doctrinal compression of the work’s core argument: that the cultivation of prajñā (preserving intent + contemplating emptiness) leads to the realization of nirvāṇa (taking the unconditioned as principle).
Translations and research
No substantial dedicated Western-language secondary literature located. See KR6s0057 for general Tài-zōng-Buddhism references.
Other points of interest
The fù genre’s adaptation to Buddhist doctrinal exposition has earlier precedents — most notably Wáng Bó’s 王勃 Shìjiā rúlái chéngdào jì 釋迦如來成道記 (early Tang) — but Tàizōng’s Yùzhì fó fù is the most ambitious Northern-Sòng imperial example of the genre and represents one of the principal pieces of evidence for the deep classical-literary integration of Tàizōng’s Buddhist patronage with the broader Sòng court literary culture.