Huìlín yīnyì yǔ Tángdài dàzàngjīng 《慧琳音義》與唐代大藏經
The Yīn-yì of Huìlín and the Buddhist Canon of the Táng by 方廣錩 (Fāng Guǎngchāng)
About the work
A scholarly article by Fāng Guǎngchāng, item No. 071 in Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn vol. 8. The paper uses Huìlín 慧琳’s (737–820) monumental Buddhist yīnyì 音義 (“phonology and glosses”) work — Yīqièjīng yīnyì 一切經音義 (T54n2128, 100 fascicles, completed in 810 under Xiántōng 4) — as a window onto the actual contents of the Táng-period canon. Since Huìlín glosses every text in the standard Táng dàzàngjīng in the order he found them, his yīnyì is effectively a zhèngmù 正目 (“authoritative table-of-contents”) of the early-9th-c. canon.
Abstract
Fāng’s article opens with a meditation on why the Chinese Buddhist canon (Hànchuán dàzàngjīng) is itself an innovation alien to Indian Buddhism: in India, where political fragmentation was the rule and where partisan disagreement was treated as a normal feature of doctrinal life, no comparable unified Buddhist canon was ever compiled. The cliché “the eighteen broken pieces of a single golden staff are each true gold” — invoked by Indian bùpài 部派 (school) Buddhists to justify partisan plurality — captures this. China’s centralizing political and cultural impulses produced the opposite outcome: a unified dàzàngjīng developed gestation through Hàn–Wèi–LiǎngJìn, formed in the Northern-and-Southern dynasties, and structurally stabilised in Suí–Táng. Huìlín’s Yīqièjīng yīnyì is the principal data-point on the late-Táng form. The paper analyses its scope and structure, comparing it with the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù 開元錄 (730) ideal canon, and identifies discrepancies that show the actual circulating canon was already diverging from the Kāiyuán ideal by the early 9th century.
The paper challenges the conventional view (which Fāng calls into question elsewhere too) that the Kāiyuánlù’s ideal canon-list was rapidly translated into a stable physical canon. Huìlín’s yīnyì shows that even within Cháng’ān’s most prestigious monasteries, the working canon was a hybrid of Kāiyuán-listed translations and additional locally-circulating texts. This finding has methodological implications for medieval Chinese Buddhist textual history more broadly.
Translations and research
- Fāng Guǎngchāng 方廣錩, Bā—shí shìjì fójiào dà-zàng-jīng shǐ (Beijing: Zhōngguó shèhuì kēxué, 1991) — monograph context.
- Buswell, Robert E. and Lopez, Donald S., Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014) — reference entry on Yī-qiè-jīng yīn-yì.
- Yáo Yǒngmíng 姚永銘, Huìlín Yī-qiè-jīng yīn-yì yán-jiū 慧琳一切經音義研究 (Nanjing: Jiāngsū gǔjí, 2003) — comprehensive philological study.
- Ledderose, Lothar, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) — context on the modular-canon concept.
Other points of interest
The article is the third in Fāng Guǎngchāng’s Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn triplet on canonical history (with KR6v0062 Tiāntái jiàodiǎn rùzàng kǎo and KR6v0090 Dūnhuáng sìyuàn suǒcáng dàzàngjīng gàimào). Together these constitute a programmatic statement on how to re-read the Chinese Buddhist canon’s history through the lens of regional, sectarian, and bibliographic divergence rather than through the single dominant lens of imperial-canon-history.