Practice · NianVolume OnePart V · Recollection in the Great Mahāyāna SūtrasPaper 19 of 31

The Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra and One-Practice Samādhi

中文主題：《文殊般若》一行三昧

Author: Shi Huijing 釋慧鏡

Date: Spring 2026

Version: 1.0

ID: NIAN-P19

Abstract

This paper challenges a textbook narrative widely circulated in Western introductions to Chinese Buddhism: that the eka-vyūha-samādhi (yī-xíng sānmèi 一行三昧, one-practice samādhi) passage in the second fascicle of Mandrasena's Mañjuśrī-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō móhē bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說摩訶般若波羅蜜經; T0232) is the shared scriptural root of Chinese buddha-recollection practice, uniting the six most influential Chinese masters — Daoxin (Dàoxìn 道信), Zhiyi (Zhìyǐ 智顗), Huineng (Huìnéng 慧能), Shandao (Shàndǎo 善導), Daochuo (Dàochuò 道綽), and Yongming Yanshou (Yǒngmíng Yánshòu 永明延壽) — as co-heirs of one and the same passage. Close textual examination reveals this narrative as untenable. The six masters' commitment-weights toward T0232 are fundamentally asymmetric. Daoxin transplants the passage verbatim into his Entry into the Path of Pacifying-the-Mind (Rù-dào ānxīn yào fāngbiàn fǎmén 入道安心要方便法門; preserved at T2837) as one of two co-foundations of the East Mountain Teaching (Dōngshān fǎmén 東山法門) — foundation. Huineng's Platform Sūtra (Liùzǔ dàshī fǎbǎo tánjīng 六祖大師法寶壇經; T2008) preserves the compound "yī-xíng sānmèi" verbatim at two distinct sites but overturns its content and openly criticizes the literal reading as an "obstacle to the Way" — polemical inversion. Zhiyi's Mohe Zhiguan (Móhē zhǐguān 摩訶止觀; T1911), fascicle two, performs a philologically creative conflation of T0232 with T0233 to install the passage as the first of Tiantai's Four Kinds of Samādhi — systemic absorption. Shandao's canonical four-fascicle Guan-jing Commentary (Guānjīng Sìtiè Shū 觀經四帖疏; T1753) cites the passage zero times, while his smaller practice manual Guannian Famen (Guānniàn Ēmítuófó Xiānghǎi Sānmèi Gōngdé Fǎmén 觀念阿彌陀佛相海三昧功德法門; T1959) cites it once but re-keys it as adhipati-pratyaya (sustaining contributory condition) under other-power Pure Land logic — genre-sensitive selection. Daochuo's Anle Ji (Ānlè Jí 安樂集; T1958), fascicle two, lists it as the second of eight scriptural pillars for buddhānusmṛti-samādhi — parity pillar. Yongming's three-fascicle Wanshan Tonggui Ji (Wànshàn Tóngguī Jí 萬善同歸集; T2017) contains exactly one citation, placed as a rhetorical closure to a polemical exchange — peripheral endorsement. These six stances are non-reducible; together they constitute the scriptural starting point of Chinese Chan–Pure Land–Tiantai divergence. Divergence flows not from a common source but from differential stances on a single lodestone. Part V closes here; Part VI (P20–P24) paves forward.

I. Problem-Statement — Why Can a Single Passage Carry Six Different Stances?

Western readers entering the history of Chinese buddha-recollection typically encounter a structural puzzle. The Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra Spoken by Mañjuśrī (Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō móhē bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說摩訶般若波羅蜜經; Mañjuśrī-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, translated by Mandrasena, T0232; hereafter the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra), in the second of its two fascicles, contains a passage of no more than five or six hundred characters — the one-practice samādhi (eka-vyūha-samādhi) passage — that the six most influential masters in Chinese Buddhist history have, independently, all taken up. Daoxin, the fourth patriarch of the East Mountain Teaching, bases one of the two foundations of his Entry into the Path of Pacifying-the-Mind upon it; Zhiyi of Tiantai installs the passage as constant-sitting samādhi, the first of his Four Kinds of Samādhi; Huineng in the Platform Sūtra twice — at the Determination and Wisdom (Dìnghuì 定慧) chapter and again at the Final Instructions (Fùzhǔ 付囑) chapter at his deathbed — invokes the same compound to redefine what the Southern School means by "the single straight mind practiced at all places, walking, standing, sitting, lying down"; Shandao's teacher Daochuo in the Anle Ji lists the passage as the second of eight scriptural evidences for "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi as the cardinal teaching"; and Yongming Yanshou, forerunner of the Chan–Pure Land confluence, closes with the same passage a string of niàn-fó proof-texts answering a Chan practitioner's challenge to oral invocation.

One passage cited by six patriarchs — the standard textbook narrative reports this as the "common scriptural root" of Chinese buddha-recollection. The structure of the narrative is intuitively satisfying: if six houses all cite the same passage, it must be the shared ground underneath; differences arise only in later interpretation, while consensus remains at the level of scripture itself. Under this narrative, the history of Chinese buddha-recollection is written as a linear genealogy of "one source, six tributaries."

Yet a word-by-word re-examination of each of the six masters' texts shows that this "common scriptural root" narrative does not hold. The six masters' commitment-weights toward the same passage are fundamentally asymmetric.

Daoxin's Entry into the Path of Pacifying-the-Mind (preserved in Jìngjué's Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra, T2837, fascicle one) transcribes T0232's one-practice samādhi passage word for word and in full, and explicitly places it alongside T0670, the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, as the twin foundations of the East Mountain Teaching. This is the strongest stance of foundation.

Huineng's Platform Sūtra (T2008), in its Determination and Wisdom chapter's public exposition and again in its Final Instructions chapter at Huineng's deathbed, preserves the compound "yī-xíng sānmèi" verbatim at two distinct sites but redefines its content completely — from T0232's "binding the mind to a single buddha, solely invoking the name" (jì-xīn yī-fó, zhuān chēng míngzì 繫心一佛，專稱名字) to "at all places, walking-standing-sitting-lying-down, constantly practicing the single straight mind" (yú yīqiè chù, xíng-zhù-zuò-wò, cháng xíng yī-zhí-xīn) — and explicitly condemns those who read "constantly sitting motionless" as the meaning of one-practice samādhi as "equivalent to the insentient — this is in fact the very condition that obstructs the Way" (translation mine). More subversively still, the Final Instructions version immediately follows the new definition with the phrase "unmoving ritual-field is truly a Pure Land" (bù-dòng dàochǎng, zhēn chéng jìngtǔ) — absorbing Pure Land vocabulary into the language of self-verified manifestation. This is the strongest stance of polemical inversion.

Zhiyi's Mohe Zhiguan (T1911), fascicle two, performs a medieval Chinese exegetical move typical of its age — a héběn 合本 (text-collation) operation: "First, constant sitting: this comes from the Mañjuśrī's Discourse and Mañjuśrī's Question — the two Prajñā sūtras — and is named one-practice samādhi" (translation mine).¹ This simultaneously labels T0232 (Mañjuśrī's Discourse) and T0233 (Mañjuśrī's Question) as sources of "one-practice samādhi," despite the fact that T0233 nowhere contains the compound. This is the stance of systemic absorption.

Shandao's Guan-jing Sishu (T1753), across all four fascicles, contains zero citations of the one-practice samādhi passage; "Mañjuśrī Prajñā," "binding the mind to one buddha," and every other distinctive lexical marker of the passage likewise register zero hits. Shandao's smaller practice manual from the same authorial period, the Guannian Famen (T1959), contains one citation of the passage — but re-keys it as adhipati-pratyaya (zēngshàng yuán 增上緣), the sustaining contributory condition grounded in "the Buddhas' co-substantial great-compassion sustaining-power by which seeing is enabled" — translating the prajñā-signless samādhi thoroughly into Pure Land other-power causality. This is the stance of genre-sensitive selection.

Daochuo's Anle Ji (T1958), fascicle two, in its eightfold list of scriptural evidences for "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi as the cardinal teaching," places the one-practice samādhi as the second of eight (the first being the one-aspect samādhi of the Huashou Jing 《花首經》). The remaining six pillars include the Nirvāṇa, the Guan-jing, the Pratyutpanna, the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, the Avataṃsaka, and the Sāgara-nāgarāja-sūtra. Within this eightfold structure, one-practice samādhi is two-of-eight — not the main axis but a pillar in a parallel array. This is the stance of parity pillar.

Yongming Yanshou's three-fascicle Wanshan Tonggui Ji (T2017), across its entire corpus, contains exactly one citation of the one-practice samādhi (upper fascicle). This single citation sits at the conclusion of a long string of niàn-fó proof-texts assembled in answer to a Chan objector's challenge — "if this very mind is the Buddha, why seek outside?" — functioning as the closing authoritative seal of a polemical exchange, not as the architectural spine of Chan–Pure Land confluence. Yongming's actual architectural spine for Chan–Pure Land confluence lies elsewhere, along three other axes: the parity-doctrine of self-power and other-power, the Avataṃsaka's "mind-only buddha-recollection through the gate of self-abiding mind," and the systematic apotropaic buddhānusmṛti-samādhi frame drawn from Huaigan's (Huáigǎn 懷感) Shì jìngtǔ qúnyí lùn (Treatise Dispelling Doubts About the Pure Land 釋淨土群疑論) and Feixi's (Fēixī 飛錫) Sānmèi bǎo-wáng lùn (Treatise of the Treasure-King of Samādhis 三昧寶王論). This is the stance of peripheral endorsement (marginal acknowledgment).

Six commitment-weights — foundation / polemical inversion / systemic absorption / genre-sensitive selection / parity pillar / peripheral endorsement. That a single passage can give rise to six such different postures is a philological fact far more interesting than the "common scriptural root" narrative, and far closer to the actual texture of the history of Chinese buddha-recollection.

The thesis of this paper is accordingly: the one-practice samādhi passage of T0232, fascicle two, is not the common ground-floor of the six Chinese masters, but the lodestone toward which each of them had to take a stance. Divergence does not flow from a common source; each master's tradition is founded by a distinct stance toward the same lodestone. The six modes of stance themselves constitute the scriptural starting point of the Part VI divergences.

This thesis carries a direct significance for Western readers. Over the last two decades, Anglophone Chan studies has worked with two standard narratives of Chinese Chan–Pure Land relations: the "Chan–Pure Land opposition" narrative (inherited from the Suzuki line) and the "Chan–Pure Land confluence" narrative (inherited from the Zongmi-and-after later historiography of Chinese Buddhism). Both rest on the presupposition that there is a common scriptural root from which tributaries either diverge or toward which they later reconverge. This paper argues that the presupposition itself does not hold. One-practice samādhi was never a common source; it is a lodestone. Each of the six masters left marks on that lodestone of differing weight, and the differences among those marks are themselves the genealogy. This observation shares structural kinship with the critique of the "McMindfulness" phenomenon in Western secularized Buddhism — namely, its reduction of all contemplative traditions to a "common mindfulness core" — in that both simplifications flatten genuine historical richness by positing a "common origin."

P19 proceeds on four levels. §II establishes the locus classicus restoration of the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage, the philological instability of T0233's parallel passage, and the structural low-threshold architecture of the T0232 passage as the textual reason why this passage can bear six different stances. §III unfolds the core argument — each of the six modes of stance in its own section, closing with an account of the lodestone as the structural starting point of the Part VI divergences. §IV places McRae as primary interlocutor, Sharf as philological guardrail, and Stevenson as background citation for the Tiantai handling, documenting the Anglophone scholarly gap around cross-sectarian reception history. §V delivers Middle-Way corrections on four typical misreadings: eka-vyūha-samādhi = one-pointed concentration (concentration-training reductio), oral invocation = mantric conditioning (mantric-conditioning reductio), Huineng's single-straight-mind = daily-life mindfulness (secularized-mindfulness projection), Daoxin's one-practice samādhi = proto-Pure-Land (anachronistic retrojection). §VI gathers the genealogical weight of the Part V octology (from P12's Śūraṃgama's "gathering the six faculties" to P19's Mañjuśrī Prajñā's "one-practice samādhi as lodestone") and hands off to Part VI's two-line interwoven trajectory.

P17 on the Laṅkāvatāra completed the seventh verb-axis layer (seeing-the-mind) through the interiorization of the object of buddha-recollection into the hearts-of-all-buddhas (hṛdaya) already present as one's own. P18 on the Ghanavyūha completed the eighth layer (āśraya-parāvṛtti, transmutation of the base) through the constructive-bridge architecture linking ontology and soteriology. After the twin axes of P17 and P18, P19's work lies in a further dimension: the methodological-genealogy axis — one-practice samādhi as the methodological lodestone, and the question of how each of the six masters, taking up the same lodestone in turn, left differently weighted marks on it. This is the scriptural-historical starting point of the transition from canonical grounding to sectarian divergence in the history of Chinese buddha-recollection. This paper does not adjudicate which of the six stances is most faithful to the T0232 original — that is neither the task of this paper nor the task proper to a Part V closing piece. This paper only displays the existence of the six stances and the philological legitimacy of their difference. Part VI (P20–P24) will, along the four tracks these stances open (Daochuo–Shandao's Pure Land line; Daoxin–Huineng's Chan line; Zhiyi's Tiantai bridge; Yongming's confluence forerunner), take each track into its own historical-and-doctrinal unfolding.

⚠️ Philological note. T0232 and T0233 are two Chinese translations of a single Sanskrit textual system (Mandrasena translated during the Tianjian era of Liang, c. 503 CE; Saṃghavarman translated during the Tianjian–Putong years of Liang, c. 506–520 CE). In terms of fascicle division, T0232 is in two fascicles and T0233 in one, by the reckoning of the current CBETA editions. The textual shape of the two translations at the one-practice samādhi passage differs enormously — most critically, the compound "yī-xíng sānmèi" never once appears in T0233; full details in §2.2. This paper does not undertake word-by-word collation with the Sanskrit witness; the analytic layer is the comparison of the two Chinese translations. Readers interested in further Sanskrit-layer investigation should consult Conze 1973 and Lamotte 1944–1980.²

II. Canonical Grounding — the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra's Locus Classicus, the Saṃghavarman Recension's Philological Instability, and the Structural Low Threshold

This chapter establishes the canonical grounding of P19 on three levels. §2.1 restores the locus classicus of T0232's one-practice samādhi passage and flags the six-layer structure of its practice-instruction. §2.2 handles the philological instability of T0233 at the parallel passage — the compound "one-practice samādhi" as a stable term hangs on the T0232 textual line only. §2.3 argues that the T0232 passage's structural low threshold — low preliminary bar, variable direction, abstract one-buddha — is the textual reason the passage can bear six different stances among the six masters.

2.1 The Locus Classicus of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra's One-Practice Samādhi Passage (Fascicle Two)

In fascicle two of T0232, Mañjuśrī addresses the Buddha: "World-Honored One! What practice, performed in what manner, leads quickly to anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi?" The Buddha first answers "Practice as taught in the prajñāpāramitā," then continues: "And there is further a one-practice samādhi... which likewise leads quickly to anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi" (translation mine). Mañjuśrī immediately presses the question further:

"World-Honored One! What is meant by 'one-practice samādhi'?" The Buddha answered: "The dharmadhātu of one mark (dharmadhātu-ekalakṣaṇa) — binding one's conditioning to the dharmadhātu — this is called one-practice samādhi" (translation mine).³

This sentence performs the definitional naming. The objective field here is the dharmadhātu itself — not another-direction buddha-realm, not a specific buddha-body. The "one" of "one-practice" is not the "one" of "a single object of attention" but the "one" of "the dharmadhātu's single mark" (dharmadhātu-ekalakṣaṇa). This definition determines the ontological floor of the entire passage: the ultimate objective field of one-practice samādhi is the prajñā-level marklessness of the dharmadhātu, not any particular buddha-body at the level of sensory object.

After the naming, the Buddha sets out the preliminary threshold for entering the samādhi:

"If a good son or good daughter wishes to enter one-practice samādhi, they ought first to hear the prajñāpāramitā and to practice as it teaches; only then can they enter one-practice samādhi. Like the conditioning of the dharmadhātu itself — non-retrogressive, non-deteriorating, inconceivable, unobstructed, signless" (translation mine).⁴

Three preliminaries: hearing prajñā; practicing as taught; non-retrogressive non-deteriorating dharmadhātu-conditioning. The scripture adds two further discriminations: "Those who do not faithfully receive the true Dharma, and those unable to clear severe karmic obstructions, cannot enter."⁵ T0232's original preliminary requirements come to just these five — all at the cognitive/doctrinal level, touching neither the three-minds-aspiration, nor the precept-system, nor the confession-preliminaries characteristic of later Pure Land systems. This point will bear structural significance in §2.3.

After setting out the threshold, the Buddha sets out the method:

"A good son or good daughter wishing to enter one-practice samādhi should go to a place of quietude, discard all distracting intentions, not grasp at marks, bind the mind to a single buddha, solely invoke the name. Following the direction of that buddha, body upright and facing straight, able to keep, with regard to a single buddha, moment-to-moment recollection unbroken — then within such recollection the buddhas of past, future, and present are seen" (translation mine).⁶

This passage is the practice-instruction core of the whole sūtra and the locus classicus verbatim-cited by many hands across Chinese buddha-recollection history. Its structure decomposes into six layers: setting (a place of quietude); mental condition (discarding distractions, not grasping marks); objective field (binding the mind to a single buddha); verbal act (solely invoking the name); bodily discipline (facing the buddha's direction, body upright facing straight); temporal continuity (moment-to-moment unbroken). The six operate together: "moment-to-moment recollection unbroken of a single buddha" is the operational form of this samādhi. The fruit of the practice is "within such recollection, the buddhas of past, future, and present are seen" — recollecting a single buddha is already seeing the buddhas of the three periods. The penetration-mechanism of this "one-is-many" is given in the subsequent line:

"The merit of recollecting a single buddha is measureless, limitless, equal and non-different from the merit of measureless buddhas; the inconceivable Buddha-dharmas are without distinction. All ride on a single suchness (jiē chéng yī-rú 皆乘一如), attaining the supreme correct awakening and possessing limitless merit and limitless eloquence" (translation mine).⁷

The phrase "all ride on a single suchness" locks in the ontological ground of this penetration-mechanism: the merits of all buddhas are intrinsically without distinction, the same suchness throughout; hence recollecting a single buddha already gathers the buddhas of the three periods. This is not a mystical-responsive phenomenon but a natural expression of ontological sameness. This also answers back to the foundational line in the first fascicle: "Thus-come-one and wisdom are of no two marks; emptiness is the Thus-come-one, there is only the name."⁸ The Mañjuśrī Prajñā has already, in its first fascicle, set the buddha-body as a nominal designation (prajñapti) of emptiness. The "binding the mind to a single buddha" of the second fascicle is not, in this context, the worship of an external buddha-body but the positing of an objective field upon the ground-floor of emptiness.

The practice fruit extends, beyond "seeing the buddhas of the three periods," into unobstructed eloquence — "one who enters one-practice samādhi thoroughly knows the buddhas and dharmadhātu of the sands of the Ganges, without differential marks."⁹ The Buddha contrasts this with Ānanda: Ānanda's bahu-śruta (wide learning) and memory-retention, foremost among śrāvakas, is still "within quantities and numbers, and within the obstructions of bounds"; one-practice samādhi transcends this, for "with regard to all the sūtra-gates, one distinguishes each and all without exception, determinately and without obstruction."¹⁰ The passage closes with two similes — the jeweller's polishing of a maṇi-jewel, whose merit increases through the polishing; and the sun's encompassing illumination. The two similes operate in tandem: the former emphasizes process (merit increasing through practice-time), the latter emphasizes completion (at samādhi-attainment all merits are present as encompassing illumination).¹¹

The T0232 one-practice samādhi passage is complete here. The doctrinal skeleton of the whole passage is: ontological naming through the single mark of the dharmadhātu → preliminary of hearing prajñā → six-layer method of binding-to-one-buddha, solely invoking the name, following the direction → fruit of seeing the three-periods buddhas through recollection of one → ontological ground in single suchness → closure through two similes. The whole passage runs under six hundred characters. Its structure is tight, its operational instructions concrete, its ontological position sharp. This is the locus classicus that the six Chinese masters each go on to cite.

2.2 The Philological Instability of the Saṃghavarman Recension — "One-Practice Samādhi" as a Stable Compound Hangs on the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra Alone

The Mañjuśrī-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra (translated by Saṃghavarman, T0233; one fascicle in the current CBETA edition) is an independent Chinese translation of the same Sanskrit textual system as T0232.¹² The textual shape of the two translations at the one-practice samādhi passage differs enormously. The critical fact: the compound "one-practice samādhi" never once appears in T0233.

T0232's definitional sentence — "the dharmadhātu of one mark, binding one's conditioning to the dharmadhātu, is called one-practice samādhi" — is replaced, at the corresponding textual locus in T0233, by an entirely different samādhi-name and an entirely different structure:

The Buddha asked: "Have you entered the not-thinkable samādhi?" Mañjuśrī replied: "No, World-Honored One! I myself am the not-thinkable. I do not see that there is any mind capable of being thought; how can one say one enters the not-thinkable samādhi?" (translation mine).¹³

T0233 replaces the samādhi-name with "not-thinkable samādhi" (bù sīyì sānmèi 不思議三昧), and the structure shifts from attention-pointing (binding-conditioning-to-dharmadhātu) to cognitive-negation (no-mind-to-be-thought). "One-practice samādhi" as a fixed compound simply disappears from the entire T0233 text.

Concurrently, T0232's concrete practice-instructions — "binding the mind to a single buddha, solely invoking the name, following the direction of that buddha" — are also entirely absent from T0233. In their place is an archery simile for long-practiced skill:

It is like a person learning archery: through long practice they become skilled. Later, though without any effort, because of the long practice, whatever they shoot hits the mark. I am likewise. When I first began to practice the not-thinkable samādhi, I bound the mind to a single object. Once long practice had accomplished it, no more mental activity: constantly and naturally unified with samādhi (translation mine).¹⁴

"Binding the mind to a single object" (jì-xīn yī-yuán 繫心一緣), set against T0232's triple "binding the mind to a single buddha, solely invoking the name, following the direction," loses the buddha, loses the name-invocation, loses the direction-parameter. T0233 completely empties out T0232's concrete practice-instructions, retaining only an abstract "binding-the-mind-to-one-object." A full T0233 search confirms this: the words "solely invoking the name," "invoking the Buddha," "niàn-fó," and "direction of the buddha" all register zero hits; the only "single-object" occurrence is at the archery simile, "binding the mind to a single object."

This difference cannot be read as "T0233 does not handle niàn-fó." T0233 has other philosophically rich theses of its own — "all sentient beings have in truth accomplished the not-thinkable samādhi" (an original awakening thesis)¹⁵; the equational chain "prajñāpāramitā is the not-thinkable, the not-thinkable is the dharmadhātu, the dharmadhātu is the signless"¹⁶; the gold-ingot-hammering simile for non-retrogressive wisdom.¹⁷ These contents simply do not go by the "binding-the-mind-to-one-buddha, solely invoking the name" pathway. Nor can T0233 be read as "an abbreviated edition of T0232" — T0233 contains passages (archery simile, gold-ingot simile, original-awakening thesis) that T0232 lacks, and T0232 contains passages (maṇi-polishing simile, sun-illumination simile, karmic-obstruction discrimination) that T0233 lacks. The two translations are independently recensional witnesses within a single Sanskrit textual family, each going its own philological way.

The implication for P19: "One-practice samādhi" as a stable compound (stable compound) is philologically present in the T0232 textual line only. When later Tiantai, Chan, Pure Land, and confluence masters cite "one-practice samādhi," they are citing a specific compound and a specific textual context that belongs to Mandrasena's T0232 translation, not a trans-translation shared concept. This observation will resurface in §3.4 when treating Zhiyi — the Mohe Zhiguan's fascicle-two labeling of T0232 and T0233 simultaneously as the sources of "one-practice samādhi" is a creative philological operation, not a factual reportage of the textual evidence.

2.3 The Structural Low Threshold of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra's One-Practice Samādhi Passage — Why Six Stances Are Possible

§§2.1 and 2.2 have established the locus classicus of the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage and its philological stability. This section argues the textual reason why the passage can bear six different stances from six masters: on three distinct levels, the T0232 original leaves structural room such that any of the later houses can insert its own interpretation without philological illegitimacy.

Level one: low preliminary threshold. §2.1 has already noted that T0232's preliminaries come to just three (hearing prajñā; practicing as taught; non-retrogressive dharmadhātu-conditioning) plus two discriminations (not defaming the true Dharma; clearing severe karmic obstructions). The three-minds-aspiration, precept-system, and confession-preliminary — the regulatory preliminaries of later Pure Land systems (e.g., Shandao's nine-grade preliminary structure in the Guan-jing Commentary) or the East Mountain systems (e.g., Daoxin's ritual of sitting-meditation-and-mind-contemplation) — are all absent from the T0232 original. T0232's threshold for entry leans cognitive-doctrinal (hearing prajñā, not-defaming-the-Dharma), not behavioral-ritual (precept-keeping, confession, vow-making). This low threshold means that T0232's practitioner-bar is wider than any of the later houses; each house can supplement T0232's wide threshold with its own preliminary system without having to negate the T0232 original. The highly elaborate preliminary structure of later Pure Land soteriology — which makes niàn-fó's preliminary conditions far more elaborate — represents supplementation from the mature Three-Sūtra (Wúliàngshòu jīng 無量壽經, Guān jīng 觀經, Ēmítuó jīng 阿彌陀經) system, not content that comes from T0232.

Level two: variable direction. In the phrase "following the direction of that buddha, body upright facing straight," "direction" is a variable — whichever buddha is chosen, the direction is that buddha's. T0232 specifies neither a particular buddha-name nor a particular direction (West, East, the Ten Directions). Later Pure Land's presupposition of Amitābha and presupposition of the Western direction are retrojective readings from the mature Three-Sūtra Pure Land system, not content from the T0232 original. Zhiyi's constant-sitting samādhi is not restricted to Amitābha; Daoxin's East Mountain Teaching does not adopt a Western orientation — all these are philologically legitimate because of T0232's variable-direction parameter. This variability permits a Pure Land reader to read "West," a Chan reader to read "one's own mind," a Tiantai reader to read "the dharmadhātu" — all within the scope of T0232's original tolerance.

Level three: abstract one-buddha. The "one buddha" of "binding the mind to a single buddha" is an abstract designation: it does not equate with any specific buddha-name, and it does not exclude any specific buddha-name. In actual practice a practitioner must choose one particular buddha-name as the objective field for invocation, but T0232 does not lock this choice down. This abstractness yields a productive tension between "in practice it must be concrete" and "in scripture it is unspecified" — each master fills in his own choice within this tension. Daoxin and Zhiyi do not specify (preserving abstractness); Shandao and Daochuo fill in Amitābha as the practice-object (filling in concreteness); Huineng fills in "the straight mind of one's own mind" as the object (a fundamental overturning of the object's ontological status).

Three levels of structural room — low threshold, variable direction, abstract one-buddha — jointly constitute the conditions that allow the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage to function as lodestone. If the passage's threshold were high, its direction fixed, its buddha-name locked, the six masters could not each have filled it with their own positions; there would be no lodestone to begin with. Precisely because T0232 provides this structural room, six stances are possible in principle. The room is not a defect of the scripture but an ontological structure of prajñā-family scripture — scripture gives pointing, not fixing; the filling-in is later practitioners' own labor, and the differences in the filling-in are the genealogy itself. §III will handle the six concrete forms of this filling-in.

III. Core Argument — The Lodestone and the Six Stances

3.1 From Locus Classicus to Lodestone — A Structural Typology of Six Stances

§II has established the textual stability and the structural room of the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage. This section moves into the core argument: each of the six masters' stances toward this passage can be arrayed, along two axes — commitment-weight and interpretive gesture — into six structural types.

The axis of commitment-weight divides into three levels. Heavy weight (foundation / polemical inversion) — the passage is read as foundational, or read as a foundation requiring overturning; in both cases the passage is the central object of the interpretive gesture. Medium weight (systemic absorption / genre-sensitive selection) — the passage is absorbed into a larger system, or its citation is decided by genre; its commitment-weight hinges on the needs of the system. Light weight (parity pillar / peripheral endorsement) — the passage is one pillar among parallel others, or a marginal endorsement; it does not form the center of the interpretive gesture.

The axis of interpretive gesture divides into two classes. Preservation (bǎoliú 保留) — accepting the compound and its textual context from T0232's original and placing it within one's own system. Inversion (fānzhuǎn 翻轉) — preserving the compound but overturning its content, or preserving the surface and substituting its gloss. Among the six modes, Daoxin / Zhiyi / Daochuo / Yongming take the preservation path (with differing commitment-weights, all are accepting). Huineng takes the inversion path (highest commitment-weight, most radical gesture). Shandao operates in dual mode: in the major work, genre-led omission (no citation); in the smaller work, genre-led re-glossing (absorbed as other-power).

This typology is not a retrospective projection but a structural pattern that emerges from the philological actuality of each master's text. Every stance is identifiable, citable, and countable in the primary text (citation counts, character-level proportion, positional weight). The analysis here rests on these.

The six sections below proceed in the order foundation → polemical inversion → systemic absorption → genre-sensitive selection → parity pillar → peripheral endorsement. This order is not historical chronology (Daoxin ca. 580–651, Zhiyi 538–597, Daochuo 562–645, Shandao 613–681, Huineng 638–713, Yongming 904–975 — the historically earliest is Zhiyi), but typological logic: from the most direct acceptance (foundation) to the most radical overturning (inversion), then structural absorption (absorption, selection, parity), and finally marginal endorsement. This logical sequence makes the structural difference among the six stances easier to see.

3.2 Daoxin: The Dual-Foundation Positioning

Daoxin (580–651) is the founder of the East Mountain Teaching. His Entry into the Path of Pacifying-the-Mind does not circulate as a standalone text; the surviving fragment is preserved in Jìngjué's (c. 683–750) Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra (T2837), fascicle one, under the Daoxin section. The historical authority of this witness is high: Jìngjué was a disciple of Shenxiu's line, and the Record was compiled in the early Kaiyuan era (713–714 CE) as the official self-historiography of the East Mountain Teaching. Its Daoxin section is the earliest recoverable layer of this text.

Daoxin's section opens with an explicit declaration of the twin foundations of the East Mountain Teaching:

For those whose conditions have ripened, I expound this teaching of mine. It relies upon the Laṅkā's "hearts of all buddhas first" — and further upon the Mañjuśrī's Discourse Prajñā Sūtra's "one-practice samādhi." Thus the mind that recollects the Buddha is the Buddha. Deluded thought is the ordinary person (translation mine).¹⁸

The structural significance of this declaration was analyzed in P17: the Laṅkāvatāra supplies the ontology of the object (the hearts of all buddhas, hṛdaya); the Mañjuśrī Prajñā supplies the operational method (the "binding-the-mind-to-one-buddha, solely invoking the name" of one-practice samādhi). The two sūtras stand in parity, not in main-and-subordinate. This is the structural focus of the present paper. For Daoxin, both the Laṅkāvatāra and the Mañjuśrī Prajñā occupy foundational status, rather than one being skeleton and the other corroborating support.

Daoxin then transcribes T0232's definitional sentence and practice-instructions word for word, in full:

The Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra says: "Mañjuśrī asked: 'World-Honored One! What is called one-practice samādhi?' The Buddha said: 'The dharmadhātu of one mark, binding one's conditioning to the dharmadhātu — this is called one-practice samādhi. If a good son or good daughter wishes to enter one-practice samādhi, they ought first to hear the prajñāpāramitā and to practice as it teaches; then they can enter one-practice samādhi. Like the conditioning of the dharmadhātu, non-retrogressive, non-deteriorating, inconceivable, unobstructed, signless. A good son or good daughter wishing to enter one-practice samādhi should go to a place of quietude, discard all distracting intentions, not grasp at marks, bind the mind to a single buddha, solely invoke the name. Following the buddha's expedient direction, body upright facing straight, able to keep, with regard to a single buddha, moment-to-moment recollection unbroken'" (translation mine).¹⁹

T0232 is integrally transplanted, as a continuous block, into Daoxin's text. Philologically this gesture is the strongest form of the foundation stance — not rewriting, not selective citation, not reconstruction, but complete transplantation. Daoxin then follows this with his famous chain-formula, "Thus the mind that recollects the Buddha is the Buddha... apart from mind there is no separate buddha; apart from the buddha there is no separate mind. Recollecting the Buddha is recollecting the mind; seeking the mind is seeking the Buddha" (jí niàn-fó shì niàn-xīn, qiú xīn jí shì qiú fó).²⁰ This absorbs T0232's "binding the mind to a single buddha" into "recollecting the hearts of all buddhas present as one's own mind" — the landing of the "seeing-the-mind" gesture argued in P17. But this landing does not alter the foundational status of the T0232 passage itself. Daoxin's interpretive gesture is preservation: he takes the T0232 passage as the regulatory scripture of the East Mountain Teaching and receives it in full.

Shenxiu (606–706), in his dialogue with Empress Wu Zetian's court, confirms this foundational status once more: "Empress-Emperor asked Chan Master Shenxiu: 'The teaching you transmit — which house is its tradition?' He answered: 'Received from the East Mountain Teaching of Qizhou.' 'On what scriptural authority?' 'On the Mañjuśrī's Discourse Prajñā Sūtra's one-practice samādhi.' The Empress said: 'As for speaking of practicing the Way — nothing surpasses the East Mountain Teaching.'"²¹ The early-eighth-century royal confirmation indicates that by this point, the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage was already the official canonical foundation of the East Mountain Teaching system.

3.3 Huineng: The Subversive Re-Glossing as Polemical Inversion

Huineng (638–713)'s re-glossing of one-practice samādhi in the Platform Sūtra (T2008) is the most radical of the six stances — he preserves the compound while completely overturning its content. The overturning is not a covert substitution but an explicit declarative overturning.

In the Platform Sūtra, at the public exposition of the Determination and Wisdom chapter:

Good friends! As for one-practice samādhi: at all places, walking, standing, sitting, lying down, constantly practicing the single straight mind — that is it. The Vimalakīrti-sūtra says: "The straight mind is the ritual-field; the straight mind is the Pure Land" (translation mine).²²

The compound "one-practice samādhi" (T0232's stable compound) is preserved, but its content is replaced — from T0232's "binding the mind to a single buddha, solely invoking the name, following the direction" (sitting-meditation; single object; body facing a fixed direction) to "at all places, walking, standing, sitting, lying down; constantly practicing the single straight mind" (unrestricted by posture; unspecified object; straight mind as the locus of reliance). More critically, Huineng immediately follows with an explicit critique of those who take T0232 literally as one-practice samādhi:

Deluded people, attached to dharma-marks, take hold of "one-practice samādhi" and straightforwardly claim: "Constantly sitting motionless, with no deluded thought arising in the mind — that is one-practice samādhi." Those who take this view are equivalent to the insentient — this is in fact the very condition that obstructs the Way. ... The Way must flow through. Why should it be obstructed? If the mind does not abide in any dharma, the Way flows through; if the mind abides in dharmas, that is called self-binding. If it were the case that "constantly sitting motionless" is it — recall how Śāriputra, sitting in meditation in the forest, was rebuked by Vimalakīrti (translation mine).²³

Huineng condemns the "constantly-sitting-motionless" reading of one-practice samādhi as "the very condition that obstructs the Way." Who is the precise target of this critique? — the very constant-sitting meditation method founded by Daoxin, Hongren, and Shenxiu in the East Mountain Teaching. Huineng further invokes the Vimalakīrti rebuke of Śāriputra's forest-sitting as authority, placing T0232's foundation reading in the position of the overturned. This is intra-canonical critique of a Mahāyāna scripture by a Mahāyāna scripture — not a non-Buddhist rejection of Mahāyāna, but the Vimalakīrti brought against the literal reading of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā.

Huineng's overturning reappears, verbatim at a second site, in the Final Instructions chapter at his deathbed, this time with an additional key phrase:

If you wish to accomplish the omniscient-wisdom, you must penetrate the one-aspect samādhi and the one-practice samādhi... If at all places, walking, standing, sitting, lying down, purely the single straight mind, unmoving ritual-field — that is truly Pure Land; this is called one-practice samādhi (translation mine).²⁴

"Unmoving ritual-field is truly a Pure Land." This phrase directly incorporates Pure Land vocabulary into the new definition of one-practice samādhi. Philologically, this is a subversive observation: the conventional narrative reads Huineng as "opposed to Pure Land" or as "exclusively mind-only Chan," yet at his deathbed instructions Huineng himself uses the term "Pure Land." This is not a late-life "turn toward Pure Land" by Huineng — the architecture of the single straight mind remains unchanged — but a folding of Pure Land vocabulary into the language of the self-verified manifestation-field. Huineng's Pure Land is not a directional other-world of rebirth; it is the self-verified manifestation-field displayed by the straight mind.

This Final Instructions passage is transcribed, without a character altered, into the Huineng chapter of the Jingde Record of the Transmission of the Lamp (T2076) fascicle five.²⁵ Song-dynasty Chan editorial historiography fixed this overturned version as Huineng's orthodox definition of one-practice samādhi. Though subsequent Southern-School developments (Shenhui, Zongmi) have their own refinements, "at all places, walking-standing-sitting-lying-down, constantly practicing the single straight mind" had replaced the East Mountain Teaching's foundation reading as the Southern-School definition of one-practice samādhi at the latest by Shenhui's mid-eighth-century northern campaign, becoming the mainstream Chan position.

The philological legitimacy of Huineng's overturning comes from the structural room of T0232 argued in §2.3 — the "one" of the original is "one mark of the dharmadhātu," not "one bodily posture," so his reading does not exclude "at all places." The "one buddha" of "binding the mind to a single buddha," if buddha is mind and mind is buddha, does not exclude the reading "one's own mind is the buddha." Philological legitimacy, however, does not equate with philological fidelity — Huineng does not claim to be faithful to the T0232 original; his declaration is "I hereby redefine this," with explicit critique of prior readings. The polemical force lies in this openness — not a stealth substitution but an open re-glossing accompanied by a critique of the prior reading.

Huineng's interpretive gesture is exemplary of the inversion path: preserve the surface (the four characters "one-practice samādhi"), overturn the content (from "binding the mind to a single buddha" to "constantly practicing the single straight mind"), and declare the legitimacy of the overturning publicly. The philological weight of this gesture is the heaviest — it does not set up a fresh scriptural authority outside the T0232 passage but rewrites the content of the T0232 passage at its own site. This is why Huineng's stance can serve as the strongest watershed in the subsequent history of Chinese Chan.

3.4 Zhiyi: Héběn Exegesis as Systemic Absorption

Zhiyi (538–597), in the Mohe Zhiguan (T1911), fascicle two, sets out the Four Kinds of Samādhi: constant-sitting, constant-walking, half-walking-half-sitting, neither-walking-nor-sitting. Constant-sitting is listed first, with an explicit declaration of scriptural source:

First, constant sitting: this comes from the Mañjuśrī's Discourse and Mañjuśrī's Question — the two Prajñā sūtras — and is named one-practice samādhi (translation mine).¹

The philological operation of this sentence is what §2.2 flagged as systemic absorption — labeling T0232 (Mañjuśrī's Discourse Prajñā) and T0233 (Mañjuśrī's Question Prajñā) simultaneously as sources of "one-practice samādhi." But as §2.2 established, the compound "one-practice samādhi" is absent from the entire T0233. Zhiyi's citation here is a creative philological operation — he is not recording a fact but performing, in response to systematizing demands, héběn (text-collation) exegesis.

This héběn exegetical operation was not uncommon in medieval Chinese scholastic practice; it was standard within the jīng-shū 經疏 (commentary) tradition. Zhiyi's systematic need is: to install the "Mañjuśrī-Prajñā-family" as an integral whole within the Tiantai Four-Kinds-of-Samādhi system, giving constant-sitting samādhi a systematized canonical foundation. T0232 and T0233 were considered, in medieval China, two translations of a single sūtra (this view itself has philological warrant, the two being Chinese translations of a single Sanskrit textual system), so Zhiyi treats the two together as the "Mañjuśrī Prajñā" canonical class and treats "one-practice samādhi" as the representative samādhi-name for this class — even though T0233 actually has only "not-thinkable samādhi."

The effect of this héběn operation is that Zhiyi's constant-sitting samādhi both inherits T0232's "binding the mind to a single buddha, solely invoking the name, following the direction" six-layer method (Zhiyi unfolds the six layers sequentially in the subsequent passage of Mohe Zhiguan fascicle two²⁶) and draws on T0233's original-awakening-style thesis — "all sentient beings have in truth accomplished the not-thinkable samādhi" — as ontological backing. This dual backing lets constant-sitting samādhi serve simultaneously as methodological concrete practice (from T0232's operational instructions) and as ontological dharmadhātu-contemplation (leveraging T0233's not-thinkable principle).

Zhiyi's interpretive gesture is preservation — he accepts the T0232 practice-instructions and canonical status, but incorporates that status into the Tiantai Four-Samādhi system, so that T0232 no longer stands as an independent canonical anchor but occupies the first gate of the Tiantai zhǐguān (cessation-and-contemplation) system. This systemic position determines the character of Zhiyi's reading of T0232: he neither makes T0232 the whole of a teaching, as Daoxin does, nor performs a polemical inversion on T0232, as Huineng does — his task is to integrate T0232 into a larger system, making it a position within that system.

This is why Zhiyi's commitment-weight falls at medium rather than highest. T0232 occupies the first samādhi-position within the Mohe Zhiguan system, but not a unique position — constant-walking samādhi (from the Pratyutpanna), half-walking-half-sitting samādhi (from the Lotus and the Mahāvaipulya-dhāraṇī), neither-walking-nor-sitting samādhi each occupy their own positions. T0232 is one element in a system, not the whole system. Zhiyi's systemic absorption gains for T0232 Tiantai authorial recognition while simultaneously surrendering T0232's independent canonical status to the system.

3.5 Shandao: Genre-Sensitive Selection

Shandao (613–681) is the master synthesizer of Pure Land. His Guan-jing Sishu (T1753), four fascicles, is Pure Land's canonical commentary, establishing the bifurcation of the essential gate (yàomén 要門) and the great vow gate (hóngyuàn 弘願), and the doctrine of "ten voicings of the Buddha's name fully accomplish the ten vows and ten practices." The total character-count of these four fascicles is vast; its textual density high. Yet a full scan returns:

In the full text of T1753, fascicles 1–4, the four terms "one-practice samādhi," "Mañjuśrī Prajñā," "binding the mind to one buddha," and "solely invoking the name" register zero hits (fascicle 1 = 0; fascicle 2 = 0; fascicle 3 = 0; fascicle 4 = 0). The sole occurrence of "Mañjuśrī" across the four fascicles is in fascicle 2, in the passage "separately highlighting Mañjuśrī's lofty virtue," a semantic reference within the nine-grade section of the Guan-jing, not a citation of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā.²⁷

In his largest and most authoritative Guan-jing commentary, Shandao does not cite the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage at all. This is an observation of absolute absence.

This absence is not carelessness or oversight. Shandao's Guan-jing Sishu cites many scriptures and treatises across its length (the Wúliàngshòu jīng, the Ēmítuó jīng, the Pratyutpanna-samādhi-sūtra, the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra, the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra, and more); its scriptural-evidential network is highly dense. His non-citation of T0232 in the Guan-jing Sishu reflects the fact that his invocational theology does not require T0232's endorsement. Shandao's invocational theology is built on a different anchor-group — Vow 18 of the Wúliàngshòu jīng; the lowest-of-the-low grade of the Guan-jing; the "holding the name" of the Ēmítuó jīng. These three sūtras are self-sufficient. T0232's prajñā-signless register lies outside this anchor-group; no absorption is needed.

However, in a smaller work of different generic character — the Guannian Famen (T1959; one fascicle; practice-oriented instructional manual) — Shandao does cite the one-practice samādhi passage once:

Moreover, the Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra says: Mañjuśrī addressed the Buddha: "What is called one-practice samādhi?" The Buddha said: "If a man or woman at a place of quietude discards all distracting intentions, follows the buddha's direction, body upright facing straight, does not grasp at marks, solely invokes the buddha's name, recollecting without rest — then within such recollection the buddhas of past, present, and future are seen." Moreover, by this scriptural evidence, this is [understood as] the sustaining-power of the Buddhas' co-substantial great-compassion recollection enabling seeing. This is indeed the contributory condition (adhipati-pratyaya) for an ordinary being's buddha-seeing samādhi (translation mine).²⁸

The structural significance of this passage is crucial. Shandao quotes T0232 verbatim and then immediately re-glosses it as "the Buddhas' co-substantial great-compassion sustaining-power enabling seeing" — as other-power contributory condition (adhipati-pratyaya). T0232's original prajñā-signless ontology — "all riding on a single suchness," "dharmadhātu of all buddhas, without differential marks" — is, at Shandao's hands, completely re-glossed as "the buddhas from other directions, through the power of their recollection, sustain the practitioner's seeing of the Buddha." This is not a simple borrowing but a philologically refined re-glossing: the letters of T0232 are untouched, yet its operational frame is switched — from "generic Mahāyāna prajñā ontology" to "specific Pure Land other-power causality."

Shandao's interpretive gesture is therefore dual-modal: the genre of the Guan-jing Commentary demands a tight doctrinal system, so T0232 need not be cited (the prajñā family is not requisite to a Guan-jing commentary); the genre of the Guannian Famen is practice-instruction for buddha-recollection samādhi and needs a broader scriptural-evidential array, so T0232 may be cited but must be re-glossed as other-power contributory condition (else it would conflict with Pure Land's vow-power system). This genre-sensitive selection shows that Shandao is a systematist, but a systematist whose spine runs on vow-power, not prajñā. T0232 at Shandao is not requisite but optional; when cited, it is re-glossed; non-citation is just as acceptable.

This observation carries corrective significance for some conventional readings of Shandao. Occasional philosophical-expansion readings in Western sinology — "Shandao's invocational theology contains a prajñā-signless undertone" — have no philological warrant in T1753. Shandao's invocational theology is relational-ethical (the practitioner's other-power relation with Amitābha) and vow-power grounded (Vow 18), not prajñā-emptiness grounded. To philosophize Shandao into a prajñā-practitioner is a later researcher's interpretive preference, not Shandao's own self-accounting.

3.6 Daochuo: Parity Pillar in the Eightfold Array

Daochuo (562–645)'s Anle Ji (T1958), fascicle two, contains a passage enumerating scriptural evidences for "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi as the cardinal teaching," enumerated in eight parts:

The first two clarify the one-aspect samādhi. The subsequent six, based on conditioned marks, clarify buddhānusmṛti-samādhi (translation mine).²⁹

The eight are: (1) the Huashou Jing's one-aspect samādhi; (2) the Mañjuśrī Prajñā's one-practice samādhi; (3) the Nirvāṇa's "constantly cultivating buddhānusmṛti-samādhi"; (4) the Guan-jing; (5) the Pratyutpanna; (6) three evidences from the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra; (7) the Avataṃsaka; (8) the Sāgara-nāgarāja-sūtra.

In the second position Daochuo cites T0232 verbatim:

Second, relying on the Mañjuśrī Prajñā to clarify one-practice samādhi: "At that time Mañjuśrī addressed the Buddha: 'World-Honored One! What is called one-practice samādhi?' The Buddha said: 'As for one-practice samādhi — a good son or good daughter ought at a place of quietude to discard all distracting intentions, follow the buddha's direction, body upright facing straight, not grasp at marks, bind the mind to a single buddha, solely invoke the name, recollecting without rest — and within such recollection the buddhas of past, present, and future are seen. Why so? Because the merit of recollecting a single buddha is measureless and limitless, equal and non-different from the merit of measureless buddhas. This is the one-practice samādhi of the bodhisattva'" (translation mine).³⁰

This citation is nearly verbatim from T0232; it is philologically the most faithful of the six citations. Daochuo's interpretive gesture is preservation — he accepts T0232's original text but incorporates that original into the second-of-eight position in the scriptural-array, as a pillar of "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi as the cardinal teaching" rather than a sole authority.

The philological meaning of the eightfold structure is this: Daochuo considers that "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi" requires multiple scriptural evidences to stand. T0232 alone is insufficient; the Pratyutpanna alone is insufficient; the Nirvāṇa alone is insufficient. Only an eightfold mutual support can establish the position of "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi as the cardinal teaching." In this structure, the one-practice samādhi of T0232 is two-of-eight — it holds canonical status, but not main-axis status. This contrasts with Shandao's "three-sūtra self-sufficiency": Shandao takes the three sūtras as sufficient basis for invocational theology; Daochuo requires an eightfold cross-corroboration to establish buddhānusmṛti-samādhi. Both are Pure Land masters, but their commitment-weights toward T0232 differ — Shandao's lower (omissible), Daochuo's higher (must cite, and must list as scriptural evidence); but neither elevates T0232 to main-axis status.

Daochuo's two-part subdivision — "clarifying one-aspect samādhi" followed by "clarifying buddhānusmṛti-samādhi" — has a further layer of meaning: one-aspect samādhi and one-practice samādhi stand in parallel as the "signless opening pair," set against the subsequent six pillars' "conditioned-sign niàn-fó" — a signless/signed bifurcation. T0232 in this bifurcation belongs to the signless class — Daochuo grants T0232 its prajñā undertone (in contrast with Shandao's other-power re-glossing) — yet, even with that recognition, places it in a parallel position and does not grant it exclusive foundational status on account of its signless depth. This is the early Pure Land handling of T0232 (Daochuo being roughly one generation earlier than Shandao): integrate into the system, but do not elevate to main-axis.

3.7 Yongming Yanshou: Peripheral Endorsement

Yongming Yanshou (904–975) is typically described in Western sinological narratives as the primary founder of "Chan–Pure Land confluence." His Wanshan Tonggui Ji (T2017, three fascicles) is one of the most influential Chan–Pure Land confluence texts of the Five-Dynasties–Northern-Song transition. By the conventional narrative, Yongming would be the figure who takes one-practice samādhi as the scriptural axis of the Chan–Pure Land confluence. Yet the philological actuality shows:

Across the three fascicles (upper / middle / lower) of T2017, "one-practice samādhi" as a compound registers one hit (upper fascicle, 962b25). This single citation sits at the concluding point of a long string of niàn-fó proof-texts, functioning as the closing line of Yongming's reply to a Chan practitioner's challenge against "invoking another-buddha's name."³¹

One. In a three-fascicle text of tens of thousands of characters, "one-practice samādhi" as a compound appears exactly once. And this one appearance is not at an opening foundation, not at a main-axis unfolding, but at a polemical closure: Yongming, answering the Chan challenge "this very mind is the Buddha — why seek outside? If one recognizes other dust, one's own dharma is obscured," lists a string of niàn-fó scriptural evidences (the Ratnakūṭa on loud-voiced niàn-fó; the Mañjuśrī Prajñā on name-invocation with continuity; the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra on distracted-mind niàn-fó; Feixi's Sānmèi bǎo-wáng lùn on "clarifying-pearl settling the muddy water"; Huaigan's Qúnyí lùn on "lion-sinew as lute-string"), closing with the verbatim T0232 one-practice samādhi passage:

The Prajñā Sūtra says: Mañjuśrī asked the Buddha: "How does one quickly attain anuttara-bodhi?" The Buddha answered: "There is a one-practice samādhi. One who wishes to enter one-practice samādhi ought at a place of quietude to discard all distracting intentions, not grasp at marks, bind the recollection to a single buddha, solely invoke the name. Following the buddha's direction, body upright facing straight. Able, with regard to a single buddha, to keep moment-to-moment recollection unbroken — within such recollection the buddhas of past, future, and present are seen. Day and night eloquent wisdom is spoken unceasingly" (translation mine).³²

The citation immediately closes: "Thus is known that the Buddha's power is inconceivable; mysterious penetration rarely fathomed, as stone drawing iron, as water thrown into the river."³³ The function of the entire citation is that of an authoritative evidence — a closing scriptural seal that makes the defense appear scripturally complete. This is a rhetorical closure, not an architectural position.

Where, then, is the actual architectural spine of Yongming's Chan–Pure Land confluence? A re-examination finds that it runs along three other axes:

First axis: the parity doctrine of self-power and other-power. In the opening section of his answer to "this very mind is the Buddha — why seek outside?" Yongming establishes: "The dharma-gates of all buddhas are not of one direction; all have self-power, other-power, own-mark, and shared-mark... If self-power is complete, one does not borrow conditions; if self-power is not yet adequate, one must rely on the other's momentum."³⁴ This self-power / other-power parity doctrine is the foundational architecture of Yongming's Chan–Pure Land confluence — not one-practice samādhi unifying Chan and Pure Land, but the parity theory of the two powers unifying them. T0232 lies outside this architecture.

Second axis: the Avataṃsaka's mind-only niàn-fó gate. Yongming cites the Avataṃsaka-sūtra: "Abiding in the gate of buddha-recollection through the self-abiding mind, knowing that as the own-mind desires and delights, all buddhas manifest their forms accordingly."³⁵ The Avataṃsaka's "as the own-mind desires and delights, the buddha-forms manifest" mind-only niàn-fó is used as the reasoning by which "no buddha outside mind" and "invoking another's name" are harmonized. This is an Avataṃsaka-pathway confluence, not a T0232-one-practice-samādhi pathway.

Third axis: buddhānusmṛti-samādhi as the comprehensive counteracting gate. Yongming cites Huaigan's Shì jìngtǔ qúnyí lùn: "If one, within the mind of bodhicitta, practices buddhānusmṛti-samādhi, all afflictions and all obstructions are cut off and cease."³⁶ And Feixi's Sānmèi bǎo-wáng lùn: "As a clarifying-pearl cast into muddy water, niàn-fó is cast into the distracted mind." Buddhānusmṛti-samādhi (not one-practice samādhi) serves as the operational counteracting gate for Chan–Pure Land confluence. Yongming has another passage in the middle fascicle on "practicing buddhānusmṛti-samādhi in reliance upon the teaching of a good friend"³⁷ and, also in the middle fascicle, "attaining buddhānusmṛti-samādhi, one is prophesied by the Buddha, and in each of the ten directions attains buddhahood."³⁸ The center of gravity of Yongming's working vocabulary sits on "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi," not "one-practice samādhi." Across T2017, "buddhānusmṛti-samādhi" occurs far more frequently than "one-practice samādhi," indicating that Yongming's terminological selection has migrated from T0232's eka-vyūha-samādhi to the Pratyutpanna-and-Pure-Land buddhānusmṛti-samādhi.

This observation directly corrects the conventional narrative. Yongming does not take one-practice samādhi as the scriptural axis of Chan–Pure Land confluence — his confluence architecture runs on three axes elsewhere, and T0232 is but one among many endorsing niàn-fó evidences. Yongming's commitment-weight toward T0232 is peripheral: cited, legitimate, usable — but not spine.

This peripheral weight does not equate with rejection. Yongming does treat T0232 as legitimate authority — this is the endorsement; but the endorsement is peripheral — this authority is not at the center of the architecture. This positioning leaves room for P24 (late-Ming confluence: Lianchi's Ēmítuó jīng shū chāo 《阿彌陀經疏鈔》, Ouyi's Mítuó yào jiě 《彌陀要解》, etc.) — late-Ming masters would promote T0232's one-practice samādhi from Yongming's peripheral position to a foundational position, linking one-practice samādhi with Hanshan, Zhongfeng, Yunqi, and Ouyi's "holding-the-name niàn-fó" as a complete scriptural genealogy of the Chan–Pure Land confluence. Yongming is the forerunner of this promotion, not its completion — his peripheral endorsement leaves the possibility of later promotion open, but he himself does not complete it. P24 will handle the history and doctrine of that promotion.

3.8 The Structural Significance of the Lodestone as the Starting Point of Part VI Divergences

§§3.2–3.7 have unfolded the philological actuality of the six stances. This section gathers the chapter — the structural significance of the lodestone concept as closure to Part V and opening to Part VI.

First, the differences among the six stances are not retrospective sectarian projections. Each master's stance leaves clear philological traces in their own text — citation counts, verbatim quotation, re-glossing pattern, positional weight. These traces are present in the text at the moment the text was written, not a typological construct of later historians. The lodestone concept only extracts from these traces the common structure — "same passage, different commitment-weights" — and points out that this structure is the empirical starting point of the Part VI divergences.

Second, the differences among the six stances are non-reducible to one another. Foundation is not an intensified version of parity pillar (Daoxin's and Daochuo's commitments toward T0232 differ in nature, not in degree); polemical inversion is not the opposite of foundation (Huineng's action toward T0232 is inversion, not negation — Huineng still retains the compound "one-practice samādhi" as the name of his own teaching); genre-sensitive selection is not the analogue of peripheral endorsement (Shandao's dual-mode and Yongming's single-mode are essentially different: Shandao is "no citation in one genre, re-glossed in another genre," while Yongming is "peripheral in the overall system"). Each of the six stances has its own structural independence.

Third, the differences among the six stances constitute the scriptural-historical starting point of the Part VI divergences. Part VI will treat the interweaving of the Chan line and the Pure Land line in Chinese Buddhism. The conventional narrative begins sectarian divergence with the Tang-dynasty formation of the schools (divergence occurs at the historical layer); this paper argues that the scriptural-historical starting point of divergence lies in the six masters' differing stances toward T0232 — divergence begins at the scriptural-stance layer, and the historical layer is only the unfolding of the stance-layer in time. Daoxin and Huineng represent the two poles of the Chan line (foundation and polemical inversion); Shandao and Daochuo represent the two modes of the Pure Land line (genre-sensitive selection and parity pillar); Zhiyi represents the Tiantai bridge (systemic absorption); Yongming represents the confluence forerunner (peripheral endorsement). These six stances' differences are fully unfolded within the individual texts between the seventh and tenth centuries. Part VI's P20–P24 will go, along these four tracks (Pure Land, Chan, Tiantai, confluence), into the historical-and-doctrinal unfolding of each line.

Finally, this lodestone framework carries a methodological implication for Western readers: the history of Chinese Buddhism is to be read not as a tree-shaped "one source, linear divergence" structure but as a radial "one lodestone, six stances, each establishing its own house" structure. Chinese Buddhist schools are not branches growing from a shared ground but different marks left on the same lodestone. This observation supplies the structural premise for Part VI's narrative — display the divergence without adjudicating it. Part V's work closes here; Part VI will depart from this starting point.

IV. Interdisciplinary Convergence — McRae as Primary, Sharf as Guardrail, Stevenson as Background

This chapter takes Anglophone scholarship on one-practice samādhi and the East Mountain Teaching as dialogue resources, through a three-tier configuration: McRae as primary interlocutor (scope limited to the Chan reception of the passage); Sharf as philological guardrail (academic counterpart for the §V treatment of the McMindfulness misreading); Stevenson as background citation for the Tiantai segment. The choice of this three-tier configuration rests on a philological judgment: Anglophone scholarly resources on one-practice samādhi exist in segmented coverage — McRae on Chan reception; Stevenson on Tiantai absorption; Sharf on modernist misreading — with no single scholar having completed the cross-sectarian genealogical work this paper attempts. §4.4 will frame this coverage gap positively as the locus of P19's modest novelty — not for self-aggrandizement, but to orient Western readers.

4.1 McRae as Primary Interlocutor — The Genealogy of the East Mountain Teaching and the Southern-School Pivot

John R. McRae, in The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism (1986) and Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (2003), has provided the philologically most rigorous Western scholarly treatment of the early Chan genealogy from Daoxin / Hongren / Shenxiu to Huineng. McRae's core observations — which this paper accepts — are: Daoxin's East Mountain Teaching is founded explicitly on the one-practice samādhi passage of T0232, evidence of which is preserved through the verbatim quotation in the Daoxin section of T2837 (Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra); Shenxiu's self-accounting at Wu Zetian's court — "relying on the Mañjuśrī's Discourse Prajñā Sūtra's one-practice samādhi" — further confirms this foundational status as the Northern School's official self-positioning into the early eighth century; Huineng's redefinition of one-practice samādhi in the Platform Sūtra is a polemical move, not a faithful interpretation of the T0232 original.

McRae's philological groundwork for §3.2 (Daoxin) and §3.3 (Huineng) is especially solid. This paper's argument in those two sections owes much to McRae's foundations. McRae's scope, however, has self-imposed limits — his field is Chan; his handling of Tiantai (Zhiyi), Pure Land (Shandao, Daochuo), and confluence (Yongming) is marginal rather than systematic. To extend McRae directly into the cross-sectarian scope of the present paper would produce field-misplacement (lǐngyù cuòzhì 領域錯置) — to read Chan internal philological variation is McRae's expertise, but applying his method to T0232's selection or omission in Shandao's Guan-jing Commentary or Daochuo's Anle Ji enters a field McRae did not systematically treat.

Accordingly, this paper's use of McRae has a clear boundary: §§3.2 and 3.3 take McRae as primary interlocutor; §§3.4–3.7 do not rely on McRae but take each master's original text as direct philological evidence. This self-discipline is not a slight to McRae but an extension of McRae's own work-scope discipline — he never claims to be a cross-sectarian authority; his work is the refinement of Chan history. The present paper's cross-sectarian work is a separate project. McRae grounds the Chan portion of it, but does not underwrite the whole.

McRae's other observation — captured in his famous "McRae's Rules," of which the first reads "It's not all true; it's not all untrue"³⁹ — provides an important methodological reminder for this paper. McRae takes a neither-entirely-credulous-nor-entirely-dismissive stance toward Chan self-narrations (Bodhidharma transmitting the mind to Huike, to Sengcan, to Daoxin, to Hongren, to Huineng); this paper adopts a similar stance toward the "one-practice samādhi as common scriptural root" narrative of Chinese buddha-recollection — it is not wholly wrong (the six masters do all cite one-practice samādhi), but it is not wholly right either (their commitment-weights are fundamentally asymmetric). The lodestone concept seeks to provide a philologically solid middle-way frame between the two extremes.

4.2 Sharf as Philological Guardrail — Against the Modernist Projection of "Meditative Experience"

Robert H. Sharf, in "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience" (Numen 42/3, 1995) and "Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan" (Philosophy East and West 64/4, 2014), has offered a sustained critique of the Western modernist interpretive frame for "meditative experience." Sharf's core thesis: Western Buddhist modernism (Buddhist modernism) reads East Asian traditions of samādhi as an "inner phenomenological state" (phenomenological inner state), a post-Enlightenment projection rather than the native sense of traditional Buddhist terminology.⁴⁰

Sharf's work bears directly on the McMindfulness misreading segment of §V. When Western readers read eka-vyūha-samādhi as "concentration training" (one-pointedness / mindfulness training), they are not directly misreading the Chinese of T0232 — they are reading the Chinese of T0232 through a modernist interpretive framework that did not exist in medieval China. Sharf points out: "samādhi," as a technical term in early Chinese Buddhism, does not refer to some subjective state phenomenologically locatable but to a ritualized doctrinal posture — a practice-posture structured under a doctrinal framework. This observation provides the academic counterpart for the §V misreading corrections.

This paper positions Sharf precisely: not as primary interlocutor but as philological guardrail. Placing Sharf as primary would carry a risk — his deflationary tendency (tending to dissolve the reality of "meditative experience" into rhetoric) could make P19 read as meta-critique (critique of the Western misreading of one-practice samādhi) rather than as positive genealogy (presentation of the Chinese tradition's plural stances toward one-practice samādhi). The task of this paper is the latter — to present the genealogy, not to dissolve experience. Sharf's rigor is therefore adopted as a guardrail against modernist interpretation, but his deflationary tone is not inherited. This distinction matters: guardrails prevent vehicles from veering off the road but do not determine where the vehicles go. The Sharf guardrail prevents the §V misreading corrections from sliding into blanket modernist embrace, but does not determine the direction of this paper's positive thesis.

4.3 Stevenson as Tiantai Background Citation — Constant-Sitting Samādhi in Anglophone Scholarship

Daniel B. Stevenson, in "The Four Kinds of Samādhi in Early T'ien-t'ai Buddhism" (in Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Peter N. Gregory, 1986), has provided the most detailed Anglophone scholarly treatment of Zhiyi's Four-Kinds-of-Samādhi system — particularly the constant-sitting samādhi. Stevenson gives citation-level reconstruction of the 90-day practice structure of constant-sitting samādhi, its correspondence with the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage, and Zhiyi's héběn operation on T0232 and T0233.⁴¹

For the §3.4 Zhiyi segment, Stevenson's work functions as background citation only — not as interlocutor, for two reasons: (a) Stevenson's scope is confined to Tiantai; he does not address the cross-sectarian Chan / Pure Land / confluence reception. (b) This paper's thesis (lodestone plus six stances) does not surface in Stevenson's work (he does not undertake cross-sectarian comparison), so taking Stevenson as interlocutor would produce defocusing — he treats an adjacent but different question. The Stevenson citation serves the single function of supplying Western readers with a traceable Anglophone scholarly referent for the thesis that "Zhiyi, in Mohe Zhiguan fascicle two, performs a héběn operation on T0232 and T0233."

4.4 The Anglophone Scholarly Gap — Cross-Sectarian Reception History and P19's Modest Novelty

Taking McRae, Sharf, and Stevenson together, a pattern in Anglophone scholarly coverage emerges:

Scholar	Primary coverage	Relation to one-practice samādhi
Stevenson	Tiantai Four Samādhi	Constant-sitting = Zhiyi's absorption of one-practice samādhi
McRae	Chan East Mountain Teaching → Southern School pivot	Daoxin's reception + Huineng's overturning
Sharf	Modernist critique	Refusing the reading of samādhi as inner state
Faure	Chan rhetoric critique	Chan ideological reconstruction of the East Mountain Teaching
Bielefeldt	East Asian sitting-meditation ritual	Institutionalization of sitting-meditation manuals (extending to Dōgen)

Taking the five together, not one of them addresses cross-sectarian reception history of one-practice samādhi. Shandao, Daochuo, and Yongming — three Pure Land / confluence masters — receive no chapter-level treatment in the primary works of any of these five. The coverage of Anglophone scholarly resources displays segmented coverage: Stevenson on the Tiantai-absorption end; McRae on the Chan end; Sharf on the modernism-critique end. But the work of juxtaposing the six masters as six stances toward a single passage, with the lodestone structure unifying their differences under a single frame, has not been undertaken in Anglophone scholarship.

P19's modest novelty lies in this coverage gap: not the discovery of new materials (all six masters' texts are publicly available canonical sources, long read closely in Chinese and Japanese scholarship); nor methodological innovation (textual re-examination and quantitative verification are standard scholarly moves); but a structural juxtaposition — presenting the six masters' different stances toward a single passage within a unified frame for Anglophone readers. This is genealogical tidying work, not theoretical innovation. If this presentation can provide a starting frame for later scholars working on cross-sectarian Chinese buddha-recollection history, P19's dual function — Part V closing piece and Part VI paving piece — is fulfilled.

V. Middle-Way Corrections — Four Typical Misreadings

This chapter handles four of the most common misreadings. Each item is structured in three sentences: the misreading proposition; its source; the correction (grounded in the T0232 original or in the original texts of the relevant master). The four items proceed in order: concentration-training reductio; mantric-mechanization; mindfulness-commodification projection; Pure Land anachronistic retrojection.

❌ First: Eka-vyūha-samādhi = One-Pointed Concentration (Concentration-Training Reductio)

This misreading reads the T0232 one-practice samādhi as mere attention-training or concentration-technique, demoting the prajñā-signless ontological floor to a branch of concentration-practice. Its source lies in a standing tendency in contemporary Western studies of samādhi — to reduce all samādhi terminology uniformly to "psychological training focused on a single object," so that "binding the mind to a single buddha" is straightforwardly read as a concentration-anchor, "moment-to-moment unbroken" straightforwardly read as sustained attention. Correction: the T0232 fascicle-two definition sentence explicitly reads "the dharmadhātu of one mark, binding the conditioning to the dharmadhātu, is called one-practice samādhi" — the ultimate objective field is the single mark of the dharmadhātu, not a particular sensory-level object. The operation "binding the mind to a single buddha" must run on the prajñā-ontological floor of "all riding on a single suchness." Lose the signless floor, and one-practice samādhi no longer stands as one-practice samādhi but is reduced to a concentration-technique.

❌ Second: Invoking the Name = Mantric Repetition / Mantric Conditioning

This misreading reads T0232's "solely invoking the name" as mantric-recitation-style mechanical training, with the implicit comparative frame drawn from Hindu japa (verbal mantra-recitation) or recent neuroplasticity-conditioning models. Its source: to isolate "invoking the name" from its architecture — examining only its verbal-act layer without examining the preceding object-positing layer. Correction: the T0232 six-layer structure places "binding the mind to a single buddha" prior to "solely invoking the name" — object-positing is the precondition of verbal repetition, not its result; the naming is the linguistic address of an already-posited object, not a mantric-energetic mechanism. To empty this structure into mantric conditioning is to mistake the operational layer for the ontological layer. The foundational preparation of the first fascicle ("emptiness is the Thus-come-one, there is only the name") is also thereby erased.

❌ Third: Huineng's "Constantly Practicing the Single Straight Mind" = Daily Mindfulness (Secularized-Mindfulness Projection)

This misreading reads Huineng's redefinition of one-practice samādhi — "at all places, walking-standing-sitting-lying-down, constantly practicing the single straight mind" — as "maintaining mindfulness in daily life," a lifestyle-practice recommendation. Its source: the post-popularization reverse projection of contemporary Western mindfulness (current general rendering as "正念," but the sense is already commodified into a relaxation technique or an efficiency-management tool). Correction: Huineng's new definition is immediately followed by an explicit critique of those who hold to the dharma-marks reading — "constantly sitting motionless, with no deluded thought arising in the mind, is one-practice samādhi" — condemning them as "the very condition that obstructs the Way," and invoking the Vimalakīrti rebuke of Śāriputra's meditation-sitting as authority. This is a doctrinal paradigm shift (paradigm shift), not a softening of everyday ritual. To dilute it into a lifestyle recommendation loses the critical move internal to the scripture itself.

❌ Fourth: Daoxin's One-Practice Samādhi = Proto-Pure Land Practice (Anachronistic Retrojection)

This misreading reads Daoxin's use of T0232 as "an incipient form of Pure Land niàn-fó, not yet fully formed" — a backwards reading from the mature Three-Sūtra Pure Land system. Its source: pushing Lianchi's and Ouyi's temporal position back onto the seventh-century East Mountain Teaching, projecting a later vow-power structure onto pre-Pure-Land literature. Correction: Daoxin explicitly, in Record of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkāvatāra fascicle one, declares the twin foundations of the East Mountain Teaching as the Laṅkāvatāra (hearts-of-all-buddhas-first) and the Mañjuśrī Prajñā (one-practice samādhi) standing in parity. His "binding the mind to a single buddha" gesture is the landing of the "seeing-the-mind" argument developed in P17 — the recollection of the hearts-of-all-buddhas present as one's own mind, not a preparatory exercise for rebirth in another buddha-realm. The dual-foundation structure differs ontologically from the Pure Land vow-power system. To fit Daoxin's use of T0232 into a Pure-Land preparatory framework is to format a seventh-century text by a post-tenth-century system.

VI. Conclusion — Lodestone, Genealogy, Part V Closure

(a) Essentials

The core thesis of this paper gathers into three sentences. First, the T0232 Mañjuśrī Prajñā Sūtra's fascicle-two one-practice samādhi passage is not the shared scriptural-ground-floor of the six Chinese masters but the lodestone toward which each of them had to take a stance. Divergence does not flow from a common source; each master's tradition is founded by a distinct stance toward the same passage. Second, the six modes of stance — foundation (Daoxin), polemical inversion (Huineng), systemic absorption (Zhiyi), genre-sensitive selection (Shandao), parity pillar (Daochuo), peripheral endorsement (Yongming) — each has its own independent textual footprint; the differences are non-reducible. Third, the differences among the six stances constitute the scriptural-historical starting point of the Chinese Chan–Pure Land–Tiantai divergence. The historical-layer formation of schools is only the unfolding of the scriptural-stance layer in time.

(b) Practice Guidance

For contemporary buddha-recollection practitioners and researchers, this framework carries a concrete implication: the task is not to choose one line to rely on but to see that each of the six stances has its philologically legitimate grounds. The pluralism of Chinese buddha-recollection is not a matter of lineage confusion or doctrinal non-uniformity; it is the natural unfolding of the lodestone structure — a passage simultaneously wide enough to admit six stances and tight enough to require each of them to be distinguishable from the other five. This tension constitutes T0232's one-practice samādhi as lodestone. When a practitioner recites and recollects, seeing which of the lines their own niàn-fó tradition belongs to (or how it moves across the lines) is a form of textual self-awareness about one's practice — not a demand to choose one house among six, but a clarification of the structural position of the scriptural basis within whichever stance one inhabits. This self-awareness is, in itself, the direct contribution of Part V's eight-paper scriptural-historical work to contemporary practice.

(c) Open Questions / Part VI Paving

Part VI (P20–P24) will enter each of four tracks in its own depth: P20, Tanluan–Daochuo's other-power foundation; P21, Chan's turning-inward from Daoxin to Huineng; P22, Shandao's institutionalization of invocational theology and the three-sūtra self-sufficiency structure; P23, the complete system of Tiantai's Four Kinds of Samādhi and Zhiyi's héběn exegetical work; P24, the late-Ming confluence (Lianchi, Ouyi, Hanshan, Zhongfeng) and the completion of the scriptural genealogy. This paper does not pre-adjudicate any track's rightness or wrongness — the six stances each have their legitimacy; the historical weight of each track's unfolding Part VI will present one track at a time. One open question is left for Part VI's final chapter: how does the late-Ming confluence promote Yongming's position of peripheral endorsement into a complete scriptural genealogy, lifting one-practice samādhi from a marginal citation to the core endorsement of holding-the-name buddha-recollection — is this promotion a natural extension of the genealogy, or a fresh polemical move in its own right? The answer will be given in P24.

Part V Finale

Part V, across its eight papers — P12 (the Śūraṃgama on "gathering the six faculties"); P13 (the Lotus on Universal-Gate name-invocation); P14 (the Yuanjue Jing 圓覺經 on the twenty-five pure samādhi-wheels); P15 (the Brahmajāla on precepts and sustained niàn-fó); P16 (the Suvarṇaprabhāsa on confession and niàn-fó); P17 (the Laṅkāvatāra on "hearts of all buddhas first"); P18 (the Ghanavyūha on niàn-fó as āśraya-parāvṛtti); P19 (the Mañjuśrī Prajñā on one-practice samādhi as lodestone) — draws together eight Mahāyāna sūtras each supplying a scriptural facet of buddha-recollection, jointly completing the genealogical weight of Part V. Part V closes here.

References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

T0232 Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō móhē bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說摩訶般若波羅蜜經 (Mañjuśrī-prajñāpāramitā-sūtra), translated by Mandrasena (Liang Tianjian era, c. 503 CE), two fascicles, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō vol. 8.
T0233 Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說般若波羅蜜經, translated by Saṃghavarman (Liang Tianjian–Putong years, c. 506–520 CE), one fascicle, Taishō vol. 8.
T0670 Léngqié ábátuōluó bǎo jīng 楞伽阿跋多羅寶經 (Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra), translated by Guṇabhadra, four fascicles, Taishō vol. 16.

II. Patriarchal Commentaries

T1753 Guān Wúliàngshòu fó jīng shū 觀無量壽佛經疏 (Guānjīng Sìtiè Shū 觀經四帖疏), compiled by Shandao, four fascicles, Taishō vol. 37. Shandao's Guan-jing commentary — key interlocutor in §3.5.
T1911 Móhē zhǐguān 摩訶止觀, spoken by Zhiyi and recorded by Guanding, twenty fascicles, Taishō vol. 46. Zhiyi's Zhiguan — key interlocutor in §3.4.
T1958 Ānlè Jí 安樂集, compiled by Daochuo, two fascicles, Taishō vol. 47. Daochuo's Anle Ji — key interlocutor in §3.6.
T1959 Guānniàn Ēmítuófó Xiānghǎi Sānmèi Gōngdé Fǎmén 觀念阿彌陀佛相海三昧功德法門, compiled by Shandao, one fascicle, Taishō vol. 47. Shandao's Guannian Famen — key interlocutor in §3.5.
T2008 Liùzǔ dàshī fǎbǎo tánjīng 六祖大師法寶壇經, edited by Zongbao, one fascicle, Taishō vol. 48. Huineng's Platform Sūtra — key interlocutor in §3.3.
T2017 Wànshàn Tóngguī Jí 萬善同歸集, compiled by Yongming Yanshou, three fascicles, Taishō vol. 48. Yongming's Wanshan Ji — key interlocutor in §3.7.
T2076 Jǐngdé chuándēng lù 景德傳燈錄, compiled by Daoyuan, thirty fascicles, Taishō vol. 51. Daoyuan's Transmission of the Lamp — background for Chan genealogy.
T2837 Léngqié shīzī jì 楞伽師資記, compiled by Jìngjué, one fascicle, Taishō vol. 85. Jingjue's Shizi Ji — background for East Mountain lineage.

III. Modern Scholarship

Bielefeldt, Carl. Dōgen's Manuals of Zen Meditation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Conze, Edward. The Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines and Its Verse Summary. Bolinas: Four Seasons Foundation, 1973.
Faure, Bernard. The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Faure, Bernard. Chan Insights and Oversights: An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Gregory, Peter N., ed. Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1986.
Gregory, Peter N. Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
Lamotte, Étienne. Le Traité de la Grande Vertu de Sagesse de Nāgārjuna. 5 vols. Louvain: Institut Orientaliste, 1944–1980.
McRae, John R. The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1986.
McRae, John R. Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
Sharf, Robert H. "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience." Numen 42/3 (1995): 228–283.
Sharf, Robert H. "Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan." Philosophy East and West 64/4 (2014): 933–964.
Stevenson, Daniel B. "The Four Kinds of Samādhi in Early T'ien-t'ai Buddhism." In Gregory 1986, 45–97.

IV. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Abbreviation	Full Title	Taishō No.	Author / Translator
Mañjuśrī Prajñā	Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō móhē bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說摩訶般若波羅蜜經	T0232	trans. Mandrasena
Mañjuśrī's Question Prajñā	Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說般若波羅蜜經	T0233	trans. Saṃghavarman
Laṅkā	Léngqié ábátuōluó bǎo jīng 楞伽阿跋多羅寶經	T0670	trans. Guṇabhadra
Guan-jing Commentary	Guān Wúliàngshòu fó jīng shū 觀無量壽佛經疏 (Guānjīng Sìtiè Shū)	T1753	comp. Shandao
Zhiguan	Móhē zhǐguān 摩訶止觀	T1911	spoken by Zhiyi, recorded by Guanding
Anle Ji	Ānlè Jí 安樂集	T1958	comp. Daochuo
Guannian Famen	Guānniàn Ēmítuófó Xiānghǎi Sānmèi Gōngdé Fǎmén 觀念阿彌陀佛相海三昧功德法門	T1959	comp. Shandao
Platform Sūtra	Liùzǔ dàshī fǎbǎo tánjīng 六祖大師法寶壇經	T2008	ed. Zongbao
Wanshan Ji	Wànshàn Tóngguī Jí 萬善同歸集	T2017	comp. Yongming Yanshou
Transmission of the Lamp	Jǐngdé chuándēng lù 景德傳燈錄	T2076	comp. Daoyuan
Shizi Ji	Léngqié shīzī jì 楞伽師資記	T2837	comp. Jìngjué

V. Cross-Reference to Series Papers

Backward cross-references (within Part V and earlier):

P06 Pratyutpanna-samādhi-sūtra: the generic-Mahāyāna paradigm of buddha-seeing samādhi; main-axis contrast in §3.7's Yongming citation array.
P12 Śūraṃgama's Mahāsthāmaprāpta chapter on perfect penetration through buddha-recollection: the "gathering the six faculties" paradigm; structural comparison with §3.2's Daoxin on the gesture of seeing-the-mind.
P14 Yuanjue Jing's twenty-five pure samādhi-wheels: the concentration-and-prajñā-layer configuration of buddha-recollection; parallel handling to §3.4's Zhiyi Four-Kinds-of-Samādhi system.
P15 Brahmajāla's bodhisattva precepts and sustained buddha-recollection: preliminary-precept structure; contrasts with §2.3's T0232 low preliminary threshold.
P17 Laṅkāvatāra "hearts of all buddhas first": ontological positioning of the seeing-the-mind gesture; paired companion piece to §3.2's East Mountain Teaching twin foundations.
P18 Ghanavyūha buddha-recollection as ālaya-parāvṛtti: ontological construction of the buddha-recollection mechanism; transmutation-version of §3.2's Daoxin chain-formula "recollecting the Buddha is recollecting the mind."

Forward cross-references (into Part VI):

P20: Tanluan–Daochuo's other-power foundation (inheriting §3.6's Daochuo parity-pillar stance).
P21: The Chan inward-turning from Daoxin to Huineng (inheriting §§3.2–3.3's two poles of the Chan line).
P22: The institutionalization of Shandao's invocational theology (inheriting §3.5's Shandao genre-sensitive selection).
P23: The complete system of Tiantai's Four Kinds of Samādhi (inheriting §3.4's Zhiyi systemic absorption).
P24: Late-Ming confluence (Lianchi, Ouyi, Hanshan, Zhongfeng) and the completion of the scriptural genealogy (inheriting §3.7's Yongming peripheral endorsement and promoting it to foundational status).

Footnotes

T1911 Móhē zhǐguān 摩訶止觀, spoken by Zhiyi and recorded by Guanding (Guàndǐng 灌頂), fascicle two, CBETA vol. 46, No. 1911, 11a. "First, constant sitting: this comes from the Mañjuśrī's Discourse and Mañjuśrī's Question — the two Prajñā sūtras — and is named one-practice samādhi." ↩ ↩²
T0232 Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō móhē bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說摩訶般若波羅蜜經 (translated by Mandrasena, two fascicles) and T0233 Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說般若波羅蜜經 (translated by Saṃghavarman, one fascicle) belong to the same Prajñā-family textual system, both edited into volume 8 of the current CBETA edition. For study of the Sanskrit stratum behind the two translations, see Conze, The Perfection of Wisdom Literature (1973); Lamotte, Le Traité de la Grande Vertu de Sagesse (1944–80). ↩
T0232, fascicle two, CBETA vol. 8, No. 232, 731a. Scripture: "The dharmadhātu of one mark, binding one's conditioning to the dharmadhātu, is called one-practice samādhi." ↩
Ibid., 731a. Scripture: "If a good son or good daughter wishes to enter one-practice samādhi, they ought first to hear the prajñāpāramitā and to practice as it teaches; only then can they enter one-practice samādhi." ↩
Ibid., 731a–b. Discrimination-language: those who cannot generate faith in and who slander the Buddha's true Dharma cannot enter; also excluded are those with severe karmic obstructions. ↩
Ibid., 731a–b. Practice-instruction core of the one-practice samādhi passage; the verbatim citations by all six Chinese masters derive from this passage. ↩
Ibid., 731b. Scripture: "The merit of recollecting a single buddha is measureless, limitless... all ride on a single suchness, attaining the supreme correct awakening." ↩
T0232, fascicle one, 727b. Scripture: "Thus-come-one and wisdom are of no two marks; emptiness is the Thus-come-one, there is only the name." Ontological preparation. ↩
T0232, fascicle two, 731b. One who enters one-practice samādhi thoroughly knows the buddhas and dharmadhātu without differential marks. ↩
Ibid., 731b–c. The Ānanda comparison passage. ↩
Ibid., 731c. The maṇi-polishing simile and sun-illumination simile. ↩
T0233 Wénshū shīlì suǒ shuō bōrěbōluómì jīng 文殊師利所說般若波羅蜜經, CBETA vol. 8, No. 233; individual-passage line-numbers cited below. ↩
T0233, 732b. Scripture: "Have you entered the not-thinkable samādhi? ... I myself am the not-thinkable. I do not see that there is any mind capable of being thought." ↩
T0233, 732c. The archery-simile passage: "It is like a person learning archery; through long practice they become skilled... When I first began to practice the not-thinkable samādhi, I bound the mind to a single object." ↩
T0233, 733b. Original-awakening thesis: "All sentient beings have in truth accomplished the not-thinkable samādhi." ↩
T0233, 732c–733a. Equational chain: "Prajñāpāramitā is the not-thinkable, the not-thinkable is the dharmadhātu, the dharmadhātu is the signless." ↩
T0233, 733a. Gold-ingot-hammering simile for non-retrogressive wisdom. ↩
T2837 Léngqié shīzī jì 楞伽師資記, compiled by Jìngjué, fascicle one, Daoxin section, CBETA vol. 85, No. 2837, 1286c–1287a. Declaration of the East Mountain Teaching's twin foundations. ↩
Ibid., 1287a. Daoxin's verbatim, full-text quotation of the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage. ↩
Ibid., 1287b. Daoxin's chain-formula: "Recollecting the Buddha is recollecting the mind; seeking the mind is seeking the Buddha." ↩
Ibid., 1290a. Shenxiu-Wu Zetian court dialogue passage: "Relying on the Mañjuśrī's Discourse Prajñā Sūtra's one-practice samādhi." ↩
T2008 Liùzǔ dàshī fǎbǎo tánjīng 六祖大師法寶壇經, Determination and Wisdom chapter, CBETA vol. 48, No. 2008, 352c. ↩
Ibid., 352c–353a. Huineng criticizes those who take "constantly sitting motionless" as "the condition that obstructs the Way," and invokes the Vimalakīrti rebuke of Śāriputra's meditation-sitting. ↩
Ibid., Final Instructions chapter, 362a. "If at all places, walking, standing, sitting, lying down, purely the single straight mind, unmoving ritual-field, truly a Pure Land — this is called one-practice samādhi." ↩
T2076 Jǐngdé chuándēng lù 景德傳燈錄, fascicle five, Huineng chapter, CBETA vol. 51, No. 2076, 236a. Song-dynasty historiographical transcription of the Final Instructions version. ↩
Ibid., 11a–14a. Tiantai unfolding of the six-layer method of constant-sitting samādhi. ↩
T1753 Guānjīng Sìtiè Shū 觀經四帖疏 (Guan-jing Commentary in Four Fascicles, compiled by Shandao, four fascicles), CBETA vol. 37, No. 1753. A full-text scan across the four fascicles registers no corresponding citation for any of the four terms "one-practice samādhi," "Mañjuśrī Prajñā," "binding the mind to one buddha," or "solely invoking the name." The sole occurrence of "Mañjuśrī" is in fascicle 2, within the section "separately highlighting Mañjuśrī's lofty virtue," a semantic reference within the nine-grade section of the Guan-jing, not a citation of the Mañjuśrī Prajñā. ↩
T1959 Guānniàn Ēmítuófó Xiānghǎi Sānmèi Gōngdé Fǎmén 觀念阿彌陀佛相海三昧功德法門 (compiled by Shandao), CBETA vol. 47, No. 1959, 24a. Shandao cites T0232 and re-glosses: "This is the Buddhas' co-substantial great-compassion sustaining-power, enabling seeing. This is indeed the contributory condition (adhipati-pratyaya) for an ordinary being's buddha-seeing samādhi." ↩
T1958 Ānlè Jí 安樂集 (compiled by Daochuo), fascicle two, CBETA vol. 47, No. 1958, 15a. "The first two clarify the one-aspect samādhi. The subsequent six, based on conditioned marks, clarify buddhānusmṛti-samādhi." ↩
Ibid., 15a–b. Daochuo's verbatim quotation of the T0232 one-practice samādhi passage as the second pillar. ↩
T2017 Wànshàn Tóngguī Jí 萬善同歸集 (compiled by Yongming Yanshou, three fascicles), CBETA vol. 48, No. 2017. The compound "one-practice samādhi" occurs only once in the whole work, at 962b25, in the upper fascicle. ↩
Ibid., upper fascicle, 962b. Yongming's verbatim quotation of T0232 as polemical closure. ↩
Ibid., 962b. Closing line: "Thus is known that the Buddha's power is inconceivable; mysterious penetration rarely fathomed, as stone drawing iron, as water thrown into the river." ↩
Ibid., upper fascicle, 960a–b. Yongming's self-power / other-power parity doctrine: "The dharma-gates of all buddhas are not of one direction; all have self-power, other-power, own-mark, and shared-mark." ↩
Ibid., upper fascicle, 961a. Citation of the Avataṃsaka's gate of buddha-recollection through the self-abiding mind. ↩
Ibid., upper fascicle, 961b. Citation of Huaigan's Shì jìngtǔ qúnyí lùn 《釋淨土群疑論》on the counteracting-gate of buddhānusmṛti-samādhi. ↩
Ibid., middle fascicle, 969c. ↩
Ibid., middle fascicle, 970a. ↩
McRae, John R., Seeing through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), xix. The first of McRae's Rules: "It's not all true; it's not all untrue." ↩
Sharf, Robert H., "Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience," Numen 42/3 (1995): 228–283; same author, "Mindfulness and Mindlessness in Early Chan," Philosophy East and West 64/4 (2014): 933–964. ↩
Stevenson, Daniel B., "The Four Kinds of Samādhi in Early T'ien-t'ai Buddhism," in Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1986), 45–97. ↩

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