Xiāoshì Jīngāngjīng kēyí 銷釋金剛經科儀
Ritual Manual Annotating the Vajracchedikā by 釋宗鏡 (述); critical edition by 侯沖 (整理)
About the work
A Chinese Buddhist kē-yí 科儀 (“ritual manual”) in one fascicle, also known by the short title Jīn-gāng kē-yí 金剛科儀, structured around a popular printed edition of the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T08n0235, Jīngāng bōrě bōluómì jīng 金剛般若波羅蜜經, in the standard Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什 translation). The ritual must be performed in conjunction with a popular printed Jīngāng-jīng edition that begins with the fèngqǐng bā Jīngāng, sì-púsà 奉請八金剛、四菩薩 invocation. Compiled by Zōng-jìng 宗鏡 chán-shī of Bǎi-fú-yuàn 百福院 in Lóng-xìng-fǔ 隆興府 (modern Nán-chāng, Jiāngxī).
Abstract
The text is unrecorded in any pre-modern Chinese Buddhist catalog and absent from the historical Chinese canons. It does appear in the Japanese Xùzàngjīng 續藏經 (X-J) in two forms: (1) X74n1494 Xiāoshì Jīngāngkē huìyào zhùjiě 銷釋金剛科儀會要註解 (the Míng Jiājìng 嘉靖 30 = 1551 huìjí annotated edition by Juélián 覺連) and (2) a Qīng Dàoguāng 道光-period manuscript edition of the unannotated text — neither collated against earlier witnesses. Despite being canonically marginal, the text has had a remarkable downstream history: it has been habitually conflated with the popular-religious-vernacular bǎojuàn 寶卷 corpus by 20th-century scholarship; Hóu Chōng’s editorial preface argues against this conflation, identifying the work as a properly Buddhist kēyí with continuous use in the Yúnnán Āzhālì 阿吒力 ritual lineage from the Míng to the present. The composition window is bracketed by the Southern Sòng (1127–1279) — the surviving witnesses converge on a 12th–13th c. date for the original compilation, though the precise year is irrecoverable.
The Zàngwài edition uses an old hand-copy from the Yúnnán Jiànchuān 劍川 Āzhālì monk Zhāng Zōngyì 張宗義 as the base copy; collation copies are X74n1494 (jiǎ 甲); the Xùzàng unannotated edition (yǐ 乙); and a Guāngxù 12 (1886) hand-copy from the Jiànchuān Āzhālì monk Zhào Pèilín 趙沛霖 (bǐng 丙). A Míng print held by the Tianjin Library and additional Jiànchuān manuscripts were not collated due to access constraints.
Translations and research
- Hou Chong 侯沖, “Xiāo-shì Jīngāng-jīng kē-yí lì-shǐ kǎo,” in Yúnnán Āzhālì jiào-pài jí qí jīngdiǎn yán-jiū (Beijing: Zhōngguó shū-jí, 2008).
- Sawada Mizuho 澤田瑞穗, Hōkan no kenkyū 寶卷の研究 (Tokyo: Kokusho kankō-kai, 1975) — the standard study on bǎo-juàn, with discussion of the Jīngāng kē-yí genre.
- Overmyer, Daniel, Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999) — context for the popular reception of the text.
Other points of interest
The Xiāoshì Jīngāng kēyí is a key case-study for the boundary between Buddhist kēyí (institutional ritual manual) and bǎojuàn (sectarian popular religion text): Hóu Chōng’s argument that it belongs to the former rather than the latter has methodological implications for how late-imperial Chinese popular Buddhist literature is classified.