李通玄

李通玄之名不入本傳之列。《宋高僧傳》以他附見於他人傳後，起句曰「言是唐之帝胄，不知何王院之子孫」〔T50n2061 0853c04〕——出身既不可考，而其人「輕乎軒冕，尚彼林泉」〔T50n2061 0853c05〕，「戴樺皮冠，衣大布縫掖之制」〔T50n2061 0853c07〕，腰不束帶，足不躡履。傳稱他「該博古今，洞精儒釋，發于辭氣，若鏗巨鐘」〔T50n2061 0853c10〕，而「傾心華藏，未始輟懷」〔T50n2061 0853c11〕。他之所以動筆，傳文說得明白：「每覽諸家疏義繁衍，學者窮年無功進取」〔T50n2061 0853c12〕——不是要立一家之言，是嫌前人之疏太長，學者讀不完。

Li Tongxuan's name does not head a life of its own. The Song Biographies append him after another man's, opening: "said to be of the Tang imperial stock, though of which prince's house no one knew" 〔T50n2061 0853c04〕 — his origin past finding out, while the man himself "held carriage and cap light and prized forest and spring" 〔T50n2061 0853c05〕, "wore a birch-bark cap and a wide-cut robe of coarse cloth" 〔T50n2061 0853c07〕, his waist ungirded and his feet unshod. The life calls him "broadly learned in past and present, penetrating in both Confucian and Buddhist letters, and when he spoke it was like the striking of a great bell" 〔T50n2061 0853c10〕, whose "heart inclined to the Lotus-Treasury and never once let go of it" 〔T50n2061 0853c11〕. Why he took up the brush the text says plainly: "each time he looked over the commentaries of the several houses he found them prolix, so that students spent their years without advancing" 〔T50n2061 0853c12〕 — not to found a school, but because the earlier commentaries were too long to finish.

「開元七年春，齎《新華嚴經》」〔T50n2061 0853c13〕，曳笻自定襄而至盂縣西南大賢村高山奴家，止偏房中造論，「不出戶庭，幾于三載」〔T50n2061 0853c15〕。其居之簡，傳文記為「每日食棗十顆，柏葉餅一枚，餘無所須」〔T50n2061 0853c16〕。其後移南谷馬家古佛堂側，立小土屋。傳中所載遇虎馴伏、暴雨拔松而成長者泉、「每夜秉翰於口，兩角出白色光長尺餘」〔T50n2061 0853c25〕、二女子饋食五載——皆本傳之文，本編照錄其所記，不判其虛實。「凡經五載，至於紙墨供送無虧，及論成亡矣」〔T50n2061 0853c29〕：論成而饋食者不復見。

"In the spring of the seventh year of Kaiyuan, carrying the new Huayan Sūtra" 〔T50n2061 0853c13〕, he came with trailing staff from Dingxiang to the house of Gao Shannu in Daxian village southwest of Yu county, and in a side room composed his treatise, "not going out of gate or courtyard for nearly three years" 〔T50n2061 0853c15〕. Of the bareness of that life the text records: "each day he ate ten jujubes and one cypress-leaf cake and required nothing further" 〔T50n2061 0853c16〕. Afterwards he moved beside the Ma family's old buddha hall in the southern valley and put up a small earthen hut. The tiger that let itself be stroked, the storm that tore away a pine and left the Elder's Spring, the nights when "holding the brush in his mouth, white light more than a foot long issued from the two corners of it" 〔T50n2061 0853c25〕, the two women who brought food for five years — all of this is the biography's own wording, which this edition reproduces as recorded without ruling on it. "So it went for five years, the supply of paper and ink never failing — and when the treatise was done they were gone" 〔T50n2061 0853c29〕: the treatise finished, the bearers of food were seen no more.

所成者即本編所取之《新華嚴經論》：「所造論四十卷，總括八十卷經之文義」〔T50n2061 0854a01〕，繼之以《決疑論》四卷，「綰十會果因之玄要，列五十三位之法門」〔T50n2061 0854a02〕。本編以此二論與澄觀、法藏、智儼並列為華嚴之鏡，三家異讀誌錄不判——李論之異，往往正在其不依諸家。一日鄉人聚飲，他來謂之曰：「汝等好住，吾今去矣」〔T50n2061 0854a04〕；眾送至土龕，他說：「去住常也」〔T50n2061 0854a06〕。是夜子時坐亡龕中，「報齡九十六」〔T50n2061 0854a09〕，開元十八年暮春二十八日——生年由此逆推。其論之行世在其歿後四十四年：大曆九年僧廣超到蘭若收論二本，召書生就山繕寫，入汾川流行，「其論由茲而盛」〔T50n2061 0854a16〕。本傳通篇無師承、無出家受戒之記，本編如實記其無，不代為補。

What came of it is the Treatise on the New Huayan Sūtra that this edition draws on: "the treatise he composed ran to forty fascicles, gathering up the wording and sense of the eighty-fascicle sūtra" 〔T50n2061 0854a01〕, followed by the Treatise Resolving Doubts in four fascicles, which "knots together the profound essentials of cause and fruit in the ten assemblies and sets out the Dharma-gates of the fifty-three stations" 〔T50n2061 0854a02〕. This edition sets these two beside Chengguan, Fazang and Zhiyan as mirrors on the Huayan, recording where the houses diverge without adjudicating — and Li's divergence lies precisely in his not following the houses. One day, as the villagers were gathered drinking, he came and said: "Dwell well, all of you; I go now" 〔T50n2061 0854a04〕; they escorted him to the earthen cell, where he said, "Going and staying are the constant way" 〔T50n2061 0854a06〕. That midnight he died sitting upright in the cell, "his reported age ninety-six" 〔T50n2061 0854a09〕, on the twenty-eighth day of the last month of spring in the eighteenth year of Kaiyuan — his birth year is reckoned back from that. His treatise went abroad forty-four years after his death: in the ninth year of Dali the monk Guangchao came to the hermitage, collected two copies, summoned copyists to the mountain and carried them into Fenchuan, and "from this the treatise flourished" 〔T50n2061 0854a16〕. The life records no teacher and no ordination anywhere in its length; this edition records that absence as it stands and does not supply one.