Chapter 4 · The Eastward Transmission — Xuanzang's Journey and the Cien School

Part One · Sources and Formation

Why does the Chinese tradition read Xuanzang's version? Why did he have no choice but to go to India?

This chapter is the book's self-introduction: this edition takes what Xuanzang translated as its source texts, and the reason is not preference but a piece of history. Once that history is told through to the end, 『why read Xuanzang's translations』 will no longer need any defense.

1 · The Two Earlier Streams — The Bewilderment of Divergent Translations

This school's transmission eastward preceded Xuanzang. The 「two earlier streams」 named in this section's title are first delimited by the two main trunks verifiable in the canon: one is the Daśabhūmika-śāstra, whose opening clearly records that it was composed by the Bodhisattva Vasubandhu and translated by Bodhiruci and others of the Later Wei; the other is the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, whose opening clearly records that it was composed by the Bodhisattva Asaṅga and translated by Paramārtha of the Chen. The former, as a treatise-exegesis of the bodhisattva path of the ten grounds, circulated in the Northern dynasties; the latter, once Paramārtha had translated it, made the study of the Saṃgraha flourish in the Southern dynasties. Here we establish only the two earlier sets of translated scriptures and the treatise-topics they rest upon; we do not compress the later offshoots and confluences of the various masters into a single synonymous phrase.

Two streams running in parallel also meant that the translations, the treatises relied upon, and the lines of interpretation did not agree. The young Xuanzang traveled everywhere to study; the Biography of Cien records what he saw at Chang'an:

「Companions with book-satchels on their backs followed him like clouds; though he encompassed and synthesized the many scriptures, he lectured especially on the Mahāyānasaṃgraha.」 〔《大慈恩寺三藏法師傳》·T50n2053 0222b26–27·待譯〕

The flourishing of this scholarly climate is plain to see — and the problem lay within that very flourishing. Xuanzang studied through the teachings of every house, yet what he came away with was bewilderment:

「The Master, having visited all the masters in turn and fully partaken of their teachings, examined their reasoning in detail; each was master of his own doctrinal path, yet when these were tested against the sacred canon, there too were divergences, hidden and manifest, so that one knew not which to follow」 〔同前·0222c02–04·待譯〕

「Each was master of his own doctrinal path」 — every house had its own system; 「when these were tested against the sacred canon, there too were divergences, hidden and manifest」 — take the masters' teachings and check them against the sacred canon, and in the hidden and the manifest alike discrepancies appear; 「one knew not which to follow」. This was not Xuanzang's predicament alone; it was the whole age's: one and the same treatise — differing translations, differing lineages, differing expositions — while the original lay ten thousand li away. (This edition's section-by-section collation of Paramārtha's translation of the Mahāyānasaṃgraha (T1595) is precisely the continuation, in our own day, of this history of divergence — see the philological layer of the Saṃgraha edition.)

2 · Doubt, Then the Journey — Ten Thousand Li for One Treatise

Bewilderment forced out that famous decision. The Biography of Cien's account is worth reading in full, because it makes clear something often overlooked — among the aims of Xuanzang's westward journey there was one specific book:

「So he vowed to journey to the West to inquire into what perplexed him, and to bring back the Treatise on the Seventeen Grounds to resolve his many doubts — that is, today's Yogācārabhūmi.」 〔同前·0222c04–06·待譯〕

「To inquire into what perplexed him」 — to go and ask; 「and to bring back the Treatise on the Seventeen Grounds」 — to go and fetch a treatise and bring it home. The Treatise on the Seventeen Grounds is that root treatise, the Yogācārabhūmi, which appeared again and again in the previous two chapters. In other words: Xuanzang's journey was no vague pilgrimage in search of the Dharma; he went with a reading list in hand, aimed straight at this school's root scriptures. He submitted a memorial requesting leave to cross the border, but the court did not permit it:

「An imperial edict denied it. All the others withdrew; only the Master would not yield.」 〔同前·0222c09–10·待譯·◑「詔」從宋元明宮甲諸本，大正作「瞾」〕

His companions retreated to a man; Xuanzang went alone. During the Zhenguan era he passed out through the Jade Gate, waded the flowing sands, and crossed the snow ranges; the hardships and perils of that passage are recorded in full by the Biography of Cien and by Xuanzang's own Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang, and this book will not belabor them — only keep in mind the motive: a question that had not been answered, and a treatise that had not been translated in full.

3 · Nālandā and Śīlabhadra — Receiving the Lineage in Person

The destination was Nālandā Monastery, at that time the highest seat of Buddhist learning in India. Xuanzang himself set down the origin of the monastery's name in the Records of the Western Regions:

「Coming to the Saṃghārāma of Nālandā: I heard from the elders that in the āmra grove to the south of this monastery there is a pool, and the nāga of that pool is named Nālandā; the monastery was built beside it and took its name from it.」……「In their time men praised his virtue and styled him 'Insatiable in Giving,' and from this the monastery took its name accordingly.」 〔《大唐西域記》·T51n2087 0923b13–19·待譯〕

The monastery's principal lecturer was the treatise-master Śīlabhadra, a disciple of the Bodhisattva Dharmapāla. The Records of the Western Regions records his line of learning:

「Coming to the Saṃghārāma of Nālandā in this country, he met the Bodhisattva Dharmapāla, heard the Dharma, and awakened in faith. He asked to take the dyed robe, consulted him on the ultimate purport, and inquired of the path of liberation; having exhausted the deepest principle and fathomed its subtle words, his fame was foremost in his time and his renown rang high in foreign lands.」 〔同前·0914c04–09·待譯〕

Dharmapāla — the one among the ten commentators of the Cheng Weishi Lun whom Xuanzang took as authoritative — transmitted directly to Śīlabhadra; Śīlabhadra, 「outstanding in virtue and venerable in years, a master to the whole assembly」 (T2053 0237b28–29), was honored in the monastery as the 「Treasury of the True Dharma」. The scene of Xuanzang entering the monastery to pay his respects is recorded in the Biography of Cien thus:

「They were about to present the Master to the Treasury of the True Dharma — that is, the Dharma Master Śīlabhadra, whom the assembly all revered and, not calling him by name, styled the Treasury of the True Dharma.」 The Master was asked whence he had come. He replied: 「I have come from the land of Cīna, wishing to study the Yogācārabhūmi under the master.」 Hearing this, [Śīlabhadra] wept. 〔《慈恩傳》·T50n2053 0236c13–20·待譯〕

「Wishing to study the Yogācārabhūmi under the master」 — the purpose that had come ten thousand li, told in a single sentence; the old treatise-master, hearing these words, wept. The biography records Śīlabhadra's own account of how, three years earlier, in the agony of illness and about to relinquish his body, he received an omen in a dream and so remained; the omen's closing words were:

「There is a monk from the land of Cīna who delights in mastering the Great Dharma and wishes to come to you to study; you should wait and teach him.」 〔同前·0237a12–13·待譯·夢兆全段見原傳，此依裁節引〕

After this, 「he returned to Nālandā Monastery and there requested the Dharma Master Śīlabhadra to expound the Yogācārabhūmi, with several thousand fellow-listeners」; Xuanzang took him as his preceptor and received instruction, 「the Master, while in the monastery, heard the Yogācārabhūmi three times through」, and also studied logic, grammar, and the various Madhyamaka treatises. As for the scholarly bearing he left behind, one passage best shows the man. At the time there was a great worthy who exclusively propagated the Middle Treatise and the Hundred Treatise while refuting the meaning of the Yogācārabhūmi; Xuanzang's attitude was this:

「He held that the sages, in establishing their teachings, each followed a single intent, and that these do not conflict or obstruct one another; the bewildered, unable to reconcile them, take them to be contradictory. But this is a failing in those who transmit — what has it to do with the Dharma itself?」 〔同前·0244b29–c03·待譯〕

The sages, in establishing their teachings, each had what was fitting to them, and none obstructs another; those who see contradiction have lost, in the transmitting, the power to reconcile — it is not that the Dharma is at odds with itself. The return of the emptiness-and-existence pendulum to true, which Chapter Three traced, became in Xuanzang the very temperament of his scholarship. This book's cross-school format inherits precisely this one saying.

4 · The Translation Bureau and the Cien School — Where This Site's Source Texts Come From

In the nineteenth year of Zhenguan, Xuanzang returned from the West bearing scriptures and images, and Emperor Taizong decreed that a translation bureau be set up at Chang'an. Translating scriptures here was not one man bent over his desk; it was a whole procedure of collective verification and collation. The new-translation preface to the Yogācārabhūmi, composed by imperial command by Xu Jingzong and placed at the head of the work, records its scale:

「He summoned twenty-one eminent monks, versed in both the inner and outer learning, to translate together the Sanskrit Tripiṭaka texts he had brought back」「The translating began with the Yogācārabhūmi. The treatise's Sanskrit original comprises forty thousand ślokas, each śloka of thirty-two syllables; it has in all five divisions, and sets forth in the main the meaning of the seventeen grounds. The Tripiṭaka Master Xuanzang, reverently holding the Sanskrit, rendered it into the language of the Tang」 〔許敬宗《瑜伽師地論新譯序》·T30n1579 卷首·本編本源檔已抽〕

The twenty-one eminent monks, learned in the inner and the outer, took charge severally of the offices of verifying the meaning, polishing the prose, and the rest — before a translated line could stand, it first passed under many eyes. This discipline of 『translation as collective verification』 is what gives Xuanzang's translations the assurance to be relied on as source texts (this edition's working method — word-by-word collation, verifiable at every layer — regards itself as the present-day continuation of that same discipline). The total volume of the translation enterprise is recorded in a single line of the postface at the end of the Cheng Weishi Lun:

「Beginning in the nineteenth year of Zhenguan and ending at the close of the Xianqing era, the works came to nearly sixty and the fascicles produced reached a thousand.」 〔《成唯識論》後序·本編本源檔 :623〕

From the opening of translation in the nineteenth year of Zhenguan to the close of the Xianqing era — 「the works came to nearly sixty and the fascicles produced reached a thousand」 — the Yogācārabhūmi in a hundred fascicles, the Saṃdhinirmocana, the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, the Madhyāntavibhāga, the Viṃśatikā and Triṃśikā, and the Cheng Weishi Lun in ten fascicles woven from the commentaries of ten masters: the core body of Xuanzang-translated texts on which this book rests all issued from this one translation enterprise. The full series also includes texts not translated by Xuanzang — Guṇabhadra's translation of the Laṅkāvatāra, Prabhākaramitra's translation of the Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra, and others — so one must not assign the entire ten-text corpus to Xuanzang's translation bureau. And the one who took up the translation enterprise, established the commentaries, and founded the school was Xuanzang's foremost disciple, Kuiji. The same postface records:

「Ji, disciple of the Tripiṭaka Master, of an eminent clan and lofty house」……「personally received the four eloquences, his words nurtured by the three insights」……「he synthesized its essentials and discerned its sections and order, and also composed doctrinal commentaries to hand down to later students.」 〔同前·:623〕

Kuiji synthesized and ordered the essentials and composed commentaries such as the Cheng Weishi Lun Shuji; later ages called him the Great Master Cien, and this school's Chinese line came accordingly to be called the Cien school (the Faxiang, or Dharma-characteristics, school). The line this book carries forward is told down to Cien, and there it stops.

Finally, let this site's position be stated plainly once more, as the close of the whole of Part One: 指月／waken takes the translations of the Xuanzang lineage as its core source texts, while faithfully incorporating the relevant ancient translations as well — the Xuanzang-translation core issues from a ten-thousand-li quest for verification undertaken to resolve divergence, from a lineage received in person — Dharmapāla to Śīlabhadra to Xuanzang — and from a translation-bureau discipline of collective checking; the several treatises Xuanzang translated come from a single hand, their terminology consistent from first to last, and they can be cross-verified against ancient translations such as the Laṅkāvatāra and the Sūtrālaṃkāra (see this site's methodology and conventions page for details). Chapter One asked 「did the Buddha ever speak of mind?」 — the answer lies in the scriptures; this chapter asked 『on what basis do we read in this way?』 — the answer lies in history. The sources and their formation are now accounted for — Part Two: into the doctrine of the school.

Author · Shi Huijing CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · 二〇二六 · 夏