藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha (The Medicine Buddha Sutra)

A sūtra of one fascicle, which this edition divides into nine units and five layers. The nine units are the sūtra’s own sequence; the five layers are five ways of reading one and the same unit. (Unit is this edition’s place for reading the fascicle by divisions; section means a division made by the sūtra itself or by a commentator — as the line-by-line mirror divides the benefits of hearing the name into five sections. The two words do not stand in for each other.) A reader need not begin with the thickest layer, but should first know what each layer can answer and what it cannot replace.

I. What Each of the Five Layers Does

The Plain Reading and the Exposition are never merged: the Plain Reading only follows the text, while the Exposition opens the meaning. The Apparatus is the layer of evidence; the Heart-Essence is an entrance, not a text authorized to digest the rest. The last four layers each exist in Chinese and in English.

II. The Sequence of the Nine Units

1. The Introductory Section — the time, the place, the assembly; Mañjuśrī’s asking after three things; the eastern Pure Beryl and the general statement of the twelve vows.
2. The Twelve Great Vows, One through Four — written of the buddha’s body, with every closing clause given over to sentient beings.
3. The Twelve Great Vows, Five through Eight — precepts broken, faculties wanting, no physician, weariness of a woman’s body; a name-hearing clause comes four times running, three of them worded “having heard my name.”
4. The Twelve Great Vows, Nine through Twelve — the net of Māra and evil views, those taken by the law of the king, hunger and thirst, poverty without clothing; the adornment of the buddha-land and the exhortation to vow birth there.
5. The Benefits of Hearing the Name — five kinds of person, five destinations, and the hearing of the name so light that it is only “once briefly heard.”
6. Offering and Protection; Hearing the Name and Receiving It in Faith — the three levels of offering, and what is sought, what is loathed, what is feared; Ānanda states his own doubt, and the Buddha himself judges it hard to believe.
7. Bodhisattva Rescue-and-Deliverance and the Method of Prolonging Life — the passage where the signs of death appear, the sense taken from lamps and banners, the nine untimely deaths, calamity in the realm and the “pardoning of those held in bonds.”
8. The Twelve Spirit Generals — the yakṣa generals’ requital of kindness; the tying of the name in a five-colored cord and the loosing of the knot thereafter.
9. Circulation — the three names of the teaching, “thus should it be upheld,” and the copyist’s colophon at the end of the fascicle.

III. The Nine Topics of the Apparatus

The Apparatus of every unit is arranged upon the same frame:

1. Doctrinal-outline placement — the three parts, the five accomplishments, the six paired gates, and the further division of each gate;
2. Cross-recension collation — agreements and divergences in the actual text of the four translations, collated only within passages each actually contains;
3. Scriptural and treatise basis — the scriptures and treatises the commentators cite, and what they are cited to establish;
4. Exegesis of the passage — the line-by-line mirror’s phrase-by-phrase glossing of this passage;
5. Divergent glosses of the commentators — the three commentaries set side by side in columns, each marked with the recension it glosses;
6. Terms — names and terms at their first occurrence, with the Chinese graphs, what the ancient masters transmitted, what is attested, and the sense;
7. Simile and rhetoric — the similes and the sentence-patterns proper to this passage;
8. Citation and carrying forward — cross-reading within the sūtra, and how later ages carried it forward;
9. Text-critical placement — collation notes on variant readings, corruptions and lacunae in the manuscripts, and the position of the four translations and of the commentaries.

An empty topic honestly records ‘nothing in this passage’ rather than being silently dropped.

IV. A Few Routes Through

• A quarter of an hour only — read the Opening Heart-Essence, then the Heart-Essence of unit five. The hinge of the whole sūtra is there.
• To know what that buddha promised — read units two, three, and four together, and in every vow read on to the closing clause before stopping. When the three units are done, twelve very concrete things will be left in your hands.
• To know what one should do — read units six and seven together. Offering has its order, and the method of prolonging life has its definite numbers, yet the sūtra has itself said “as their strength allows.”
• To know why one ought to believe — units five and six. The threshold as low as “briefly heard,” and the judgment that “none of the śrāvakas, the pratyekabuddhas, or the bodhisattvas who have not yet ascended the grounds is able to believe and understand it as it truly is,” stand in one and the same place.
• To walk the whole way through from the beginning — start at unit one and read in order. The sequence of the nine units is the sequence of the sūtra.

A suggested order: Plain Reading → Heart-Essence → Exposition → Apparatus. To go quickly, stop at the Heart-Essence; to go deep, carry on into the Apparatus. The Source-Text can be returned to at any moment.

V. Places Where the Source-Text and the Apparatus Should Be Read Together

The number of the life-prolonging banners and lamps and the list of the nine untimely deaths; the names of the twelve great yakṣa generals; whether the passage on offerings carries a dhāraṇī; the ordering of the vows in the Consecration recension; the long variant readings of the Dunhuang witness — in these places the four translations and the three commentaries yield different things. The Source-Text and the Apparatus should be read together there, so that no single Heart-Essence and no single commentator’s account stands in for the whole face of the evidence.

I. Base Text and Collation Witnesses

• Base text: The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata, translated by Xuanzang, Tripiṭaka master of the Great Tang — T14n0450, one fascicle. The Source-Text layer runs from the title at the head of the fascicle to the title at its close.
• Three collation witnesses (one sūtra, four translations):
  • Dharmagupta’s Sui recension, The Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Tathāgata, T14n0449, one fascicle.
  • Yijing’s Tang recension, The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Seven Buddhas of Beryl Radiance, T14n0451, two fascicles — a Seven-Buddha expanded recension in which the Medicine Buddha stands seventh and his vows fall at the end of the first fascicle. Where this recension is cited, the citation is always taken from the Medicine Buddha’s own vow-section, never from the vows of the six preceding buddhas.
  • Śrīmitra’s Eastern Jin recension, The Consecration Sūtra fascicle 12, T21n1331 — the earliest layer.
• The four recensions are collated only within passages each actually contains. Differences in the ordering of vows, in fullness or brevity, and in renderings of names are set side by side as they stand. No other recension is silently supplied into the base text, and no wording of the base text is imposed upon another recension.
• Self-attestation of the translation sequence: the preface to the Sui recension records an earlier translation by the monk Huijian of Luye Monastery in the Song Xiaowu era; the line-by-line commentary likewise matches three translations to the sūtra’s three names. Both attest that a Song-era translation existed; neither states when it was incorporated into the twelve-fascicle Consecration Sūtra — that matter is recorded without adjudication.

II. The Three Commentarial Lenses and the Recension Each Glosses

The commentaries on this sūtra do not gloss the same recension. Whenever an outline or a gloss is cited, the recension it glosses is named first; a commentary on another recension is never presented as an explanation of the base text.

• Which recension each lens glosses is established mechanically, not by report: Taehyŏn is fixed by the fact that every locution peculiar to Xuanzang’s recension is present in his text; T85n2766 by 「使我來世」 and like phrases, found only in the Consecration recension; T85n2767 by 「破於正見」 and 「慧命阿難」, found only in the Sui recension.
• Both Dunhuang commentaries are anonymous and undated; their period is not adjudicated. Only the works they cite are recorded.
• Both are manuscripts, in which corrupt and missing graphs occur. Citations reproduce the manuscript as it stands: nothing is emended and nothing is supplied.
• A fourth class of citation — Master Mai (the first three being scripture, treatise, and commentary). At three places — glossing the reckoning of days for the eight-precept fast, answering the objection 「淨土因華，何名化生」—“if birth in the Pure Land is from a flower, why is it called birth by transformation?”, and glossing the form of the seven-wheeled lamps — the line-by-line mirror cites 「邁師云」—“Master Mai says” 〔T38n1770 0260a14〕 (the other two at 0260a27 and 0262a13). His own commentary does not survive; he is visible only because Taehyŏn quotes him. Wherever his words occur, this edition names him as Master Mai and never lets them pass as Taehyŏn’s own.

III. Policy on Sanskrit

• No modern critical edition of a Sanskrit text is treated as an authority over the wording of this edition.
• Roman script serves only as a pronunciation aid, and must rest on what the ancient masters transmitted. Such transmission occurs in three places: a commentator’s gloss (「梵云」／「唐云」), a transliteration in another canonical translation, and a transliteration in the sūtra itself. Where none of the three yields a form, none is supplied.
• On this ground the edition writes Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha: Yijing’s recension transliterates the name graph by graph within the great dhāraṇī spoken by the Medicine Buddha himself 〔T14n0451 0414b29〕. This is transmitted, not reconstructed. On the same ground 琉璃 is rendered beryl (薜琉璃 = vaiḍūrya), never lapis lazuli.
• The names of the twelve yakṣa generals are given no Sanskrit form by any of the three lenses; their Chinese sound is therefore kept and no reconstruction is attempted.
• Where the ancient masters transmitted nothing, nothing is invented — not for dhāraṇīs, not for proper names, not for technical terms.

IV. Citation and Counting

• 「」 marks a verbatim citation: punctuation follows the base text, an inner quotation is kept as it stands, and an interlinear note is enclosed in 〔…〕. 『』 marks the translator’s own modern-language phrasing and is never used for citation.
• Every citation carries a page anchor, and the anchor is the nearest preceding <lb> before the first graph of the cited phrase.
• Wherever a statement counts occurrences, the count is of graphs, not of the lines containing them; and wherever a statement says “all,” “every,” or “throughout,” the items were enumerated before the statement was written. This edition erred on both points more than once, and so records them here as standing rules.

V. Recorded Without Adjudication

Divergences among recensions, doubts recorded in the catalogues, and differing readings among commentators are set down side by side: not forced into agreement, not ranked, and never used to alter a single graph of the base text. Four such matters are prominent:

1. Whether this passage carries a dhāraṇī — the base text has none; the reduced-print canon inserts a full dhāraṇī section into the passage on offerings, whose content is equivalent to the dhāraṇī section in Yijing’s recension; and the line-by-line lens nowhere glosses it. The three facts stand together.
2. The ordering of vows in the Consecration recension — its third, fourth, and eighth vows pledge matters differing from the other three recensions: the fourth is nowhere found in it, the sense of the third appears at another position, and its eighth vow reads 「講宣妙法」—“to expound the wondrous Dharma” and 「入智慧門」—“to enter the gate of wisdom” rather than the turning from woman to man.
3. The standing of T21n1331 fascicle 12 — whether it is the Song-era translation by Huijian; neither the Sui preface nor the commentary says.
4. The long variant readings of the Dunhuang witness — for instance the names of the eight bodhisattvas, where the base text gives only their number, and the abbreviated title at the close of the fascicle.

VI. The Measure for Bringing Other Recensions into the Exposition

Cross-recension collation belongs to the Apparatus. It enters the Exposition only where the comparison lights up something the base text itself contains — a layer it adds, a layer it lacks, a matter it places elsewhere. Purely lexical differences remain in the Apparatus. A comparison is a lamp turned on the base text, not a scale weighing two recensions: one may say that the base text carries one layer more here; one may not say that a given recension is the better.

VII. The Layers and What Each Does

Source-Text (classical Chinese, never re-translated) · Plain Reading · Exposition · Apparatus · Heart-Essence; the last four each in Chinese and English.

• Plain Reading: a continuous modern restatement covering every graph; speech reported in the sūtra is set in 『』. The vows are words of pledging, and the Plain Reading keeps them in the voice of a vow rather than lowering them into narration.
• Apparatus: all nine topics are present; where a topic has nothing for a passage, it says so rather than being silently dropped.
• Exposition: material for teaching the Dharma. The sūtra is the subject of its sentences; a commentator’s name belongs to the opening placement paragraph and to the closing “Transmission” section.
• Heart-Essence: a reader-facing text standing on its own, naming no commentator and setting its own headings — it is not a digest of the Exposition.

The Translator of the Base Chinese Text — Xuanzang

The attribution at the head of the fascicle, graph for graph: 「大唐、三藏法師玄奘奉　詔譯」—“Translated by imperial command by Xuanzang, Tripiṭaka Master of the Great Tang” 〔T14n0450 0404c14〕. This page establishes the translator’s identity from the attribution of the base text and from what the ancient masters recorded, and takes no biographical figure lacking an attached source as evidence for collation.

Xuanzang’s translation work appears elsewhere in this series in such root texts of the Dharma-characteristics line as the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, the Yogācārabhūmi, and the Madhyāntavibhāga. Among his translations this sūtra is one of the shortest, and it has circulated the most widely. A Tang commentary records its translation thus: 「今大唐貞觀年中玄奘三藏所譯之本，具取初名題一部也」—“The version translated by Tripiṭaka Master Xuanzang in the Zhenguan years of the present Great Tang takes the first title in full as the title of the whole work.” 〔T38n1770 0257a13〕 This is a commentator’s word; this edition sets it down as it stands and does not undertake to establish the year on his behalf.

The fascicle being one, the Source-Text layer keeps this Chinese translation graph for graph; the Plain Reading, the Exposition, the Heart-Essence, and the English mirror all take the sense of its sentences, the order of its passages, and its proper names as their point of departure.

The Translators of the Three Collation Witnesses

• Śrīmitra — the Eastern Jin translation of The Consecration Sūtra, whose fascicle 12, The Sūtra on the Uprooting of Past Sins and Deliverance from Birth and Death, is the earliest surviving stratum of this sūtra. Its opening and combining of the vows and its renderings of names differ in many places from the other three.
• Dharmagupta — the Sui translation of The Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Tathāgata, one fascicle. The translator’s preface at the head of the fascicle records that an older translation had already existed in the Song era, and records the settling of its own recension: 「此本最定，諸讀誦者願莫更疑，得罪不輕」—“This version is the most settled; may those who read and recite it doubt no further, for the fault incurred is not light” 〔T14n0449 0401a28〕.
• Yijing — the Tang translation of The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Seven Buddhas of Beryl Radiance, in two fascicles, the Seven-Buddha expanded recension, in which the Medicine Buddha stands seventh. Wherever this recension is drawn on for comparison, the Medicine Buddha’s own vow-section is taken, never by mistake the vows of the six preceding buddhas.

The four translations sit at one collation table, and each keeps its own wording. The differences are themselves matter for the Apparatus: this edition does not silently alter a word of one translation into that of another, nor smooth away a divergence for the sake of fluency.

The Authors of the Three Mirrors of Carrying Forward

Taehyŏn — the head of the fascicle bears 「青丘沙門太賢」—“Taehyŏn, śramaṇa of Ch’ŏnggu” 〔T38n1770 0257a05〕. He composed Ancient Traces on the Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Buddha in two fascicles, glossing Xuanzang’s recension phrase by phrase, and is the only author surviving today who glosses the base text word by word upon the base text itself. He also has the Study Notes on the Cheng Weishi Lun; the Treatise on the Buddha-Ground and the Yogācārabhūmi, which he cites, are texts the Dharma-characteristics house commonly relies upon.

The authors of the two Dunhuang commentaries are unknown — T85n2766 glosses the Consecration recension and T85n2767 Dharmagupta’s Sui recension; neither bears a date of composition, their period is not adjudicated, and they serve only as collateral light locus by locus. Both are manuscripts in which corrupt and missing graphs occur; every citation reproduces the graph as the manuscript has it, with nothing emended and nothing supplied.

The Translator and Annotator of This Edition — Shi Huijing

The Plain Reading, the Exposition, the Apparatus, the Heart-Essence, and the English mirror of this edition are translated and annotated by Shi Huijing (釋慧鏡).

The order of compilation is this: first keep to Xuanzang’s source text; then collate the four translations passage by passage; take Ancient Traces on the Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Buddha as the line-by-line mirror, with the two Dunhuang commentaries as collateral light. Every choice of terminology, every English construction, every layering of doctrine, and every statement of textual history is the responsibility of the translator and annotator; the words of the ancient masters are always marked as theirs, together with the recension each glosses, and the authority of the ancient masters is never used to screen editorial responsibility.

This bibliography lists the base text on which this edition actually rests, the three alternate translations, and the three mirrors of carrying forward; and it keeps apart, as fact requires, the two classes 「已對校之書」—“works this edition has itself collated” and 「注家所引而本版未取其本對校之書」—“works the commentators cite, whose own texts this edition has not taken up for collation.” For scriptures and treatises cited here and there within a single unit, the canon numbers and page anchors listed under Topics III and VIII of that unit’s Apparatus remain authoritative. This edition holds scripture and the ancient masters to be the bounds of authority, and lists no modern research as a ground of doctrine.

I. The Base Text and the Alternate Translations (one sūtra, four translations)

The four translations are collated only within the passages each actually contains. Differences in the ordering and grouping of the vows, in fullness and brevity, and in the rendering of names are set side by side as they stand: nothing from another translation is silently supplied into the base text, and no wording of the base text is laid over an alternate translation.

Self-attestation of the sequence of the translations (twofold · both drawn from this sūtra and its commentary, not from modern textual criticism): the preface to the Sui recension records of itself that an older Song-era translation preceded it — 「昔宋孝武之世，鹿野寺沙門慧簡已曾譯出在世流行，但以梵宋不融、文辭雜糅，致令轉讀之輩多生疑惑」—“Of old, in the time of Emperor Xiaowu of the Song, the śramaṇa Huijian of Luye Monastery had already brought out a translation which circulated in the world; but because the Sanskrit and the Chinese were not fused and the diction was mixed and confused, those who recited it were led into much doubt” 〔T14n0449 0401a11〕 — and it sets down its own version as settled: 「此本最定，諸讀誦者願莫更疑，得罪不輕」—“This version is the most settled; may those who read and recite it doubt no further, for the fault incurred is not light” 〔T14n0449 0401a28〕. The line-by-line mirror, for its part, matches the three titles to the three translations: 「此中宋孝武世大明元年譯出之本，取第三名拔除過罪生死得度」—“Among these, the version brought out in the first year of the Daming era in the time of Emperor Xiaowu of the Song takes the third title, the uprooting of past sins and deliverance from birth and death.” 〔T38n1770 0257a10〕, 「隋大業十一年東都洛水南上林薗翻經館譯，略取初名藥師如來本願經」—“The translation made in the eleventh year of the Daye era of the Sui, at the Sūtra-Translation Hall of the Shanglin Park south of the Luo waters in the Eastern Capital, takes the first title in brief, the Sūtra of the Original Vows of the Medicine Tathāgata.” 〔T38n1770 0257a12〕, 「今大唐貞觀年中玄奘三藏所譯之本，具取初名題一部也」—“The version translated by Tripiṭaka Master Xuanzang in the Zhenguan years of the present Great Tang takes the first title in full as the title of the whole work.” 〔T38n1770 0257a13〕; and it judges their fullness and brevity thus: 「文義廣略，後二相似」—“In the breadth and brevity of letter and sense, the latter two are alike.” 〔T38n1770 0257a15〕. Both witnesses point to a Song-era translation, and neither says when it was incorporated into the twelve fascicles of the Consecration Sūtra — that matter is recorded without adjudication.

II. The Three Mirrors of Carrying Forward

The three do not gloss the same translation. Whenever an outline or a gloss of theirs is cited, the recension it glosses is named first; a commentary on another translation is never made to serve directly as an explanation of the base text. Which recension each glosses is settled by mechanical collation, not by report.

• At the head of its fascicle Ancient Traces gives its own attribution, 「青丘沙門太賢撰」—“composed by Taehyŏn, śramaṇa of Ch’ŏnggu” 〔T38n1770 0257a05〕. The books it cites run throughout along the Dharma-characteristics line.
• Both Dunhuang commentaries are anonymous and neither records a date of composition; their period is not adjudicated, and only the recension each glosses and the books each cites are recorded as found. T85n2766 cites the Vibhāṣā, the Four-Part Abhidharma, the Saṃyukta-abhidharma-hṛdaya, the Tattvasiddhi, the Bodhisattvabhūmi, and the Daśabhūmika treatise; T85n2767 cites the Cheng weishi lun and the Treatise on the Buddha-Bhūmi.
• Both are manuscripts, in which corrupt and missing graphs occur. Every citation reproduces the manuscript graph as it stands: nothing is emended and nothing is supplied.
• In three places Ancient Traces cites the words of one 「邁師」—“Master Mai” by way of gloss: 「邁師云」—“Master Mai says” 〔T38n1770 0260a14〕 (glossing the months and the year of the eight-precept fast), 〔T38n1770 0260a27〕 (glossing birth by transformation), and 〔T38n1770 0262a13〕 (glossing the form of the seven lamps). Of his name and where he lived Ancient Traces says nothing, and this edition records without adjudicating, setting him down only as an authority whose words the line-by-line mirror cites.

III. Works Cited in the Canon’s Collation Notes

IV. Scriptures and Treatises Cited in the Commentaries

Two classes, kept apart.

A · Works whose own texts this edition has collated

B · Cited but not collated (this edition has not separately taken up their texts as a textual ground)

All the works below are cited by the line-by-line mirror. This edition records its citations and its anchors as they stand, inferring nothing as to whether the works survive, and taking up no other text on their behalf to supply corroboration.

V. The Scope of Sanskrit and of Modern Materials

This edition treats no modern Sanskrit critical edition and no modern scholar as an authority over the wording of the sūtra. Roman script serves only as a pronunciation aid, and must rest upon what the ancient masters transmitted — such transmission occurs in three places: a commentator’s interlinear 「梵云／唐云」, a transliteration in an alternate translation, and a transliteration in the sūtra itself. Where none of the three yields a form, none is supplied.

On this ground the Sanskrit of that buddha is written Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha: Yijing’s recension transliterates the name graph by graph within the great dhāraṇī spoken by the Medicine Buddha himself 〔T14n0451 0414b29〕, and this is not a modern reconstruction; and since 「薜琉璃」 = vaiḍūrya, the 「琉璃」 series is rendered beryl. For the names of the twelve yakṣa generals none of the three commentaries yields a Sanskrit form, and so the Chinese sound is kept and no reconstruction is attempted. Where the ancient masters transmitted nothing, nothing is supplied: no reconstructed form is invented for a dhāraṇī, a proper name, or a technical term.

Tibetan translations and modern manuscript materials do not enter into the textual adjudications of this edition; where they are used merely to explain what survives and what is lost of a recension, their limited role is stated expressly.

This index is compiled according to the textual order of Xuanzang’s single fascicle and the boundaries of the nine units of this edition. It serves for navigation only and sets up no outline of its own. Click a unit name to enter that unit’s five-layer reader. The page anchors listed here are all fastened to the base text T14n0450; the anchors of the alternate translations and of the commentaries each keep their own canon number.

I. The Nine Units

II. The Twelve Great Vows

The twelve vows begin from the equality with the Buddha of 「令一切有情，如我無異」—“I shall cause all sentient beings to be just as I am, with no difference” 〔T14n0450 0405a10〕 and end in the granting of what people seek of 「隨心所翫，皆令滿足」—“whatever their heart delights in, all of it will be made complete” 〔T14n0450 0405b26〕; and not one of the twelve closes upon the buddha’s attainment in his own body. The summing-up stands at 「是為彼世尊藥師琉璃光如來、應、正等覺，行菩薩道時，所發十二微妙上願」—“these are the twelve sublime and supreme vows that the World-Honored Bhaiṣajyaguru Vaiḍūryaprabha Tathāgata, Worthy One, Perfectly Awakened One, made when he practiced the bodhisattva path” 〔T14n0450 0405b27〕.

III. The Six Paired Gates

The six pairs are set out in sum at 「廣說門中有六對門」—“Within the gate of extensive exposition there are six paired gates.” 〔T38n1770 0258b19〕. Two vows make one pair; three units of this edition hold two pairs each, and the unit boundaries fall together with the pair boundaries, cutting no pair in two. The Dunhuang T85n2766 likewise reads the twelve vows as six, but the recension it glosses is another and the vows it assigns are wholly different; the two outlines are recorded together with no mediation set up between them (see Topic V of unit 02’s Apparatus).

IV. The Nine Untimely Deaths

The question that opens the nine stands at 「汝豈不聞如來說有九橫死耶」—“have you not heard the Tathāgata say that there are nine untimely deaths” 〔T14n0450 0407c29〕, and their close at 「是為如來略說橫死，有此九種」—“these are the untimely deaths the Tathāgata has set out in brief, nine in kind” 〔T14n0450 0408a16〕. The first alone is given at length, filling half the passage on the nine, while the remaining eight run to a single sentence each. The imprecation and charms of the eighth and the imprecation and bewitchment of the fourth section of unit 05 are one and the same set of matters: in the one place the obstruction to be cured, in the other the mishap to be guarded against.

V. The Twelve Yakṣa Generals

The names of the twelve generals are transliterations, and the four translations differ from one another in the graphs used; this belongs to the usage of translation, and one recension is not collated against another upon it. None of the three commentaries yields a Sanskrit form or glosses the names, and so this edition keeps the Chinese sound and attempts no reconstruction. The number of their attendants stands at 「此十二藥叉大將，一一各有七千藥叉以為眷屬」—“each one of these twelve yakṣa generals has seven thousand yakṣas as his attendants” 〔T14n0450 0408b02〕; the method of knotting the names, at 「以五色縷，結我名字，得如願已，然後解結」—“with a five-colored cord, knot our names; and when the wish has been obtained, then untie the knot” 〔T14n0450 0408b12〕.

VI. Quick Reference to the Four Translations

A · The recensions

B · Correspondence of the twelve vows (ordered by the vow-numbering of the base text)

Wholly equivalent, six (1 · 2 · 6 · 9 · 10 · 12); half equivalent, three (5 · 7 · 11); not found, two (4 · 8); displaced, one (3). All three of the half-equivalent places are places where the base text carries one layer more — vow five adds purity regained after transgression, vow seven adds goods of livelihood in abundance, vow eleven adds the savor of Dharma afterwards. Agreement and difference are recorded together; no ranking of better and worse is imposed, and not one character of the base text is altered on their account. The word-by-word collation of each vow stands under Topic II of the Apparatus in units 02 through 04.

VII. The Fixed Files in Every Unit

Each directory is named NN_slug, where NN is the unit number in this edition. Each directory holds nine files, always the same:

• NN_slug_source.md — Source-Text;
• NN_slug_baihua_zh.md／_en.md — Plain Reading;
• NN_slug_yishu_zh.md／_en.md — Exposition;
• NN_slug_apparatus_zh.md／_en.md — Apparatus;
• NN_slug_xinyao_zh.md／_en.md — Heart-Essence.

VIII. Front-Matter Navigation

• Opening Essentials
• Introduction
• Reading Guide
• Conventions
• The Translator
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Colophon and Citation

IX. Quick Reference to the Sources

I. Colophon

The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata: A Translation with Annotation

• Base text — 藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經, translated by Xuanzang, Tripiṭaka master of the Great Tang; T14n0450, one fascicle.
• Translation and annotation — Shi Huijing 釋慧鏡.
• Series — Zhiyue 指月 · Han-canon Translations with Annotation.
• Compiled — Summer 2026.
• Form — Divided by textual order into nine units, each unit a five-layer reader: Source-Text, Plain Reading, Exposition, Apparatus, Heart-Essence. The Source-Text remains in classical Chinese; the other four layers each have a Chinese and an English text.
• Status — A working edition: the nine units in five layers and the Chinese and English front matter are built out and the mechanical checks all run green; the final reading of the whole fascicle and the approval for publication are not yet complete.
• License — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution · NonCommercial · ShareAlike).

II. Citation

A full citation should give the unit number, the unit name, the layer, and the base-text page locus:

Shi Huijing, Yaoshi liuliguang rulai benyuan gongde jing yizhu (The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata: A Translation with Annotation), unit 7, “Bodhisattva Rescue-and-Deliverance and the Method of Prolonging Life” · Exposition · Zhiyue · Summer 2026 〔T14n0450 0407b21〕.

Short form:

Shi Huijing, Yaoshi liuliguang rulai benyuan gongde jing yizhu, unit 〔number〕, “{unit name}” · {layer} · Zhiyue · Summer 2026 〔T14n0450 PPPPCLL〕.

• Layer — Source-Text / Plain Reading / Exposition / Apparatus / Heart-Essence.
• Base text — T14n0450 is the canon number for the book as a whole; when an actual sentence is quoted, add its actual page, column, and line.
• Unit number — the nine units are this edition’s own division, not a chapter-numbering the sūtra itself carries: Xuanzang’s single fascicle has no chapters. Whenever a unit is cited, it must be made plain that the division is this edition’s.
• Alternate translations and commentaries — when a text of T14n0449, T14n0451, T21n1331, or of T38n1770, T85n2766, T85n2767 is cited from the Apparatus layer, that item’s own canon number and page locus are to be kept, and not recast as T14n0450.

III. Note on the Edition

This edition takes Xuanzang’s T14n0450 as its sole base text; Dharmagupta’s Sui recension T14n0449, Yijing’s Tang Seven-Buddha expanded recension T14n0451, and fascicle 12 of the Eastern Jin 《灌頂經》 T21n1331 as its three collation witnesses; Taehyŏn’s 《本願藥師經古迹》, the Ancient Traces, T38n1770, as its line-by-line mirror; and the two anonymous Dunhuang 《藥師經疏》, T85n2766 and T85n2767, cited per locus. The three commentaries do not gloss the same translation, and so whenever an outline or a gloss of theirs is cited, the recension it glosses is named first. The Apparatus takes only scripture and the ancient masters as authoritative sources. Roman script serves only as a pronunciation aid, and no modern Sanskrit critical edition is used to reconstruct the sūtra text or a dhāraṇī.

Divergences among the recensions, doubts recorded in the catalogues, and differing explanations among the commentators are all set down side by side: not forced into agreement, not ranked as better and worse, and never used to alter a single graph of the base text. Four such matters are the chief ones — whether this passage carries a dhāraṇī; the ordering of the vows in the Consecration recension; the standing of T21n1331 fascicle 12; and the long variant readings of the Dunhuang witness. Each of the four is fastened to the Apparatus layer of its own unit, and the reader may follow the anchors back and check for himself.

Though this edition now has its nine units and its bilingual front matter complete, and the mechanical checks all run green, files being in place and checks being passed still cannot stand in for the translator’s reading of the whole fascicle or for his adjudication of doctrine. This colophon therefore names the present state, as fact requires, a working edition, and does not let 「建竣」—“built out” stand in for v1.0.

This edition is not a retranslation set up to replace Xuanzang, nor does it let one commentary stand in place of the sūtra. What it does is to hold fast to the source text, to return the evidence of the four translations and the three commentaries each to its own place, and to build for readers of today a reader that may be entered layer by layer and whose sources may be traced back.

Shi Huijing · 指月 · The Sūtra of the Original Vows and Merits of the Medicine Buddha, Beryl Radiance Tathāgata · Colophon · Summer 2026