百論 序

Sengzhao’s preface begins not with doctrine but with people and events: Deva composed, the adept Vasu commented, Kumārajīva translated, and Yao Song gathered an assembly to recollate. The Hundred Treatise now in hand is what remains after these four acts.

The condition for composing the treatise was that “erroneous arguments approached the semblance of truth and nearly confused the right path.” The hardest claims to handle are not obvious nonsense but words so nearly true that they can be mistaken for it. Deva “looked upward and lamented the decline of the sacred teaching; bending downward, he grieved over the many deluded people abandoning themselves to deception.” Compassion and vision were present together, and so this treatise came to be. Its function is “to protect the correct and guard against error”—one hand protects, one discloses.

Sengzhao defines the treatise’s character in four clauses: “It speaks without landing, refutes without clinging; freely without any ground, events do not lose their truth; quietly without lodging, principle naturally meets the profound.” Ordinary refutation destroys another’s ground and then occupies it; this treatise refutes and does not remain standing. Without ground, events do not lose their truth; without lodging, principle meets of itself. The mind, not principle, needs to grasp something for reassurance. Thus he dares say: “The path of returning to the root is manifest here.”

The text has two layers: “The treatise contains one hundred verses and therefore takes Hundred as its name,” yet “its ultimate destination is subtle and spare, and few find its gate.” Therefore, the adept Vasu “accorded from afar with its profound traces and composed an instructional commentary,” causing “meanings once sunk and hidden to appear in elegant writing.” Nor does the preface conceal the translation history: Kumārajīva “had translated it personally before, but the language of this land had not yet been integrated,” so “those seeking its meaning hesitated before erroneous phrases.” In the sixth year of Hongshi, Yao Song “gathered śramaṇas versed in principle and, with Kumārajīva, collated the correct text,” “refining and reviewing it while striving to preserve the treatise’s intent,” producing a text “plain without being crude, concise yet certain to arrive.”

Scale and loss are recorded together: “The treatise originally had twenty chapters, each with five verses,” while “the people responsible considered the latter ten of no benefit to this land, so they were omitted and not transmitted.” Nothing is concealed and nothing supplied. The preface entrusts only one sentence: “May discerning gentlemen examine and gather it in detail.”

Sengzhao composed the “Preface to the Hundred Treatise,” placed at the head of the Hundred Treatise translated by Tripiṭaka Master Kumārajīva of the Later Qin, Taishō T30n1569. Paragraph-initial〔T30 …〕marks a Taishō page-column-line anchor.

1. The Opening Sentence: This Is a Path

〔T30 0167c14〕Broadly speaking, the Hundred Treatise is a ford and road leading to the mind of a sage, and an essential treatise that opens and discloses the true meaning.

2. The Person Deva

More than eight hundred years after the Buddha entered nirvāṇa, there was a great renunciant named Deva. His mind accorded with the hidden and profound, awakening independently, and his talent was lofty and bright. The Way he practiced illuminated his age, and his spirit transcended the worldly marks. He could therefore open the layered barriers of the Tripiṭaka and level the profound and difficult roads of the twelvefold teaching. He walked unmatched in the region of Kāśī and became a moat protecting the city of Dharma.

3. The Conditions for Composing the Treatise

At that time, outsiders arose in profusion and heterodox positions competed for prominence. Cunning and erroneous arguments approached the semblance of truth and nearly threw the right path into confusion. Deva looked upward and lamented the daily decline of the sacred teaching; bending downward, he grieved over the many deluded people who abandoned themselves to deception. Intending to rescue those long sunk and lost, he composed this treatise. Its function is to protect the correct Dharma, guard against and check erroneous teachings, and magnificently disclose the ultimate point of the tenet.

Through it the correct teaching flourished, and through it erroneous paths declined. If he had not been one capable of comprehending all subtle meanings, who could have accomplished this?

4. Named for One Hundred Verses

The treatise contains one hundred verses and therefore takes “Hundred” as its name. Its principles and purport are deep and profound, gathering the essential meanings of many scriptures. Its language and intent are subtle and concise, exhausting the excellence of treatise-making. Yet its ultimate destination is subtle and spare, and few have found its gate.

5. The Adept Vasu Composes the Commentary

There was an adept named Vasu, lucid in wisdom and inwardly integrated, whose marvelous thought rose beyond common ways. From afar he accorded with Deva’s profound traces and composed an instructional commentary on the treatise. Meanings once sunk and hidden were disclosed through his elegant writing; the treatise’s flavor circulated and spread, covering later generations. Its literary brilliance shone, and the path of its tenet became easy to understand.

6. How This Treatise Works

As a treatise, it speaks without landing upon any fixed object and refutes without clinging to what it establishes. Though freely without any ground, events do not lose their truth; though quietly without any lodging, principle naturally meets the profound. The path of returning to the root is manifest here.

7. Kumārajīva’s Study and the First Translation That Had Not Yet Been Integrated

There was an Indian śramaṇa named Kumārajīva, profound and vast in capacity, with inspired thought outstanding and far-reaching. He studied and revered the treatise for many years, finding it ever more unfathomable the longer he read; he constantly recited and savored it as the heart-essence. Although he had translated it personally before, the language of this land had not yet been fully integrated. Consequently, those who sought its meaning hesitated before erroneous phrases, and those who marked out its doctrinal position could even contradict the treatise’s destination.

8. The Person Yao Song

Yao Song, Colonel Director of Retainers and Marquis of Ancheng in the Great Qin, possessed a lucid and relaxed bearing and a tranquil mind that excelled in concision. He studied widely in both inner and outer canons and penetrated principle and thought alike. In youth he delighted in the Great Way and grew firmer with age. Though his body was bound by affairs of government, his discourse on Dharma never ceased. Whenever he handled and read this text, his reflections were many.

9. The Recollation in the Sixth Year of Hongshi

In the sixth year of Hongshi, the year of Shouxing, Yao Song gathered śramaṇas deeply versed in principle and, together with Kumārajīva, collated and established the correct text. They repeatedly refined, tempered, reviewed, and clarified it, striving to preserve the treatise’s intent. The revised language was plain without being crude, concise yet certain to arrive at the meaning. Its tenet and purport were exhausted here, leaving nothing further to fault.

10. Twenty Chapters, and the Ten Transmitted

The treatise originally had twenty chapters, each with five verses. The people responsible for transmission considered the latter ten of no benefit to this land, so they were omitted and not transmitted. Sengzhao closes by hoping that discerning and knowledgeable gentlemen will unfold and examine in detail the portion now transmitted.

Readers often turn past a preface placed at the head of a treatise and think nothing of it. This preface cannot be passed over. Its author is Sengzhao, not a later narrator but a participant in the translation atelier. The Deva, adept Vasu, Kumārajīva, and Yao Song he records are the four acts through which the treatise took its present form. One sentence in the preface exhausts the character of the Hundred Treatise: “It speaks without landing and refutes without clinging.” Everything the preface says turns around this sentence.

One matter must first be distinguished. The speaker in this preface is Sengzhao. The Deva he describes is Deva as he understood him; the purport of the treatise he reports is his judgment after reading. The preface belongs to the treatise but is not its root text. Every passage cited below from the preface speaks in Sengzhao’s voice and cannot be presented as Deva’s verse or Vasu’s commentary.

1. The Opening First Gives a Road

Sengzhao does not begin with a biography but with a position. The Hundred Treatise is a “ford and road leading to the sage’s mind” and “an essential treatise opening the true meaning.” A ford crosses water; a road leads somewhere. He uses an image of travel. A treatise known for refutation opens as a ford and road. The arrangement itself speaks: refutation does not tear up the water; it enables a crossing.

Only then does he return to the person and the time. “More than eight hundred years after the Buddha entered nirvāṇa,” a great renunciant named Deva appeared, whose “profound mind awakened alone and whose outstanding spirit was lofty and bright,” able to “open the layered barriers of the Tripiṭaka and level the profound roads of the twelvefold teaching.” Opening barriers and leveling roads continue the same image. The barrier blocks and the road is difficult; Deva opens and levels rather than constructing another edifice.

2. Why This Treatise Had to Be Written

Sengzhao writes the conditions directly: “At that time outsiders arose in profusion, heterodox positions competed, and erroneous arguments approached the semblance of truth, nearly confusing the right path.” The crucial four words are “error approached truth.” This does not mean it was true, but that it looked true. The hardest things to handle are never obvious falsehoods, but statements that sound so plausible and reasonable that they lead people elsewhere. The right path was “nearly confused” not because it had been overthrown, but because likeness crowded it until it could no longer be recognized.

Deva’s response has two levels: he “looked upward and lamented the decline of the sacred teaching; bending downward, he grieved over the many deluded people abandoning themselves to deception.” One level looks upward at the teaching’s decline; the other downward at people under deception. Compassion and vision present together led him to “compose this treatise to rescue those long sunk and lost.” The treatise was not composed to win an argument but to rescue. Nor should the word “long” be passed lightly: he intended to save more than those in one debate before him.

Sengzhao gathers the treatise’s function into two clauses: “protect the correct and guard against error,” and “magnificently illuminate the ultimate of the tenet.” Protecting holds safe; guarding checks and blocks. One hand guards, the other discloses. The result is that “through it the correct transformation flourished, and through it erroneous paths declined.” We should see clearly how the erroneous path declines: it is illuminated, not suppressed. Sengzhao immediately praises: “Who but one who comprehends all subtleties could do this?” The one who does so relies upon insight gathering all subtle meanings, not upon aggressive eloquence.

3. “Refuting without Clinging”: One Defining Judgment

When the preface describes the treatise’s character, it uses four clauses: “It speaks without landing and refutes without clinging; freely without any ground, events do not lose their truth; quietly without lodging, principle naturally meets the profound.”

In “speaks without landing,” landing means settling or striking against a fixed place. To speak without settling anywhere means that each statement in the treatise arises in response; it is not used to establish a new foothold. “Refutes without clinging” closes the matter: the refuting side leaves behind nothing of its own to grasp. This is the most important distinction between the Hundred Treatise and ordinary disputation. Ordinary refutation destroys another’s position and then stands upon it; this treatise refutes and does not stand.

The next two clauses answer an inevitable doubt: if nothing is relied upon, do events not dissolve? Sengzhao answers decisively: “Freely without any ground, events do not lose their truth.” Precisely without a foothold, events do not lose their truth. “Quietly without lodging, principle naturally meets the profound.” Without anything in which to lodge, principle subtly comes into accord by itself. The need to grasp something for reassurance is a habit of mind, not a condition of events or principle. Once the grasp is withdrawn, each rests in its original place.

He therefore dares conclude: “The path of returning to the root is manifest here.” Where is the path manifest? In this “without clinging.” Only refutation that leaves not even itself is a return to the root. To establish a new root after refutation is still to go outward, not to return.

This sentence is the key to reading the ten chapters. The first chapter, “Relinquishing Demerit and Merit,” relinquishes appropriation; the final chapter, “Refuting Emptiness,” leaves neither emptiness nor refutation behind. The way the ten chapters move is already stated as a rule in Sengzhao’s preface.

4. One Hundred Verses, and One Person Who Speaks for Them

The origin of the name is plain: “The treatise contains one hundred verses and therefore takes Hundred as its name.” Two clauses then judge its principles and language: “Its principles and purport are deep and profound, gathering the essentials of many scriptures; its wording and intent are subtle and concise, exhausting the excellence of composition.” Verse is already compact; compressed to the utmost, it becomes difficult to enter. “Yet its ultimate destination is subtle and spare, and few find its gate.” This is honest: without someone to unfold one hundred verses, most readers cannot even find the door.

Thus came the adept Vasu. Sengzhao describes him as “lucid in wisdom and inwardly integrated, marvelous in thought and outstanding,” whose work was to “accord from afar with the profound traces and compose an instructional commentary.” He first accords with Deva’s way, then writes the explanation; he does not impose his own scheme. The effect has three parts. “Meanings sunk and hidden appear in elegant writing”: what lay below rises into words. “Its flavor circulates and spreads to later generations”: the treatise’s flavor reaches posterity. “The literary brilliance shines and the road of the tenet is easy to understand”: the path becomes recognizable.

The reader-facing edition therefore distinguishes Deva’s root statement from Vasu’s commentary. The basis is here. The preface itself clearly records two levels: one is the bone; the other the flesh that unfolds it. Blend them, and the reader no longer knows which sentence is established and which clarifies it.

5. The Reality of the Translation Atelier: An Unintegrated First Translation, Recollated in Hongshi Six

The most precious passage in the preface is that it does not conceal the translation’s blemish.

Kumārajīva possessed “profound and expansive capacity, inspired thought outstanding and far-reaching,” and “studied and revered it for many years, finding it increasingly unfathomable; he constantly savored and recited this treatise as the heart-essence.” Notice “increasingly unfathomable”: the longer he read, the less he thought he could reach its bottom. This is how one should read a treatise and a warning against quick judgments.

Yet Sengzhao immediately writes: “Although he had translated it personally before, the language of this land had not yet been integrated.” Kumārajīva himself translated it, yet its Chinese had not come into full accord. Sengzhao records the consequence too: “Those seeking its meaning hesitated before erroneous wording, and those marking its position contradicted its destination.” Those who sought deeply stalled at flawed phrases; those trying to establish its doctrinal position could move against its purport. However high a treatise’s meaning, readers can go astray when it falls into unintegrated language.

The work of repair belonged to Yao Song. Sengzhao describes him as “lucid and relaxed in bearing, tranquil in mind and excelling in concision,” “widely read in inner and outer canons, penetrating principle and thought,” and one who “though bodily bound by affairs of the age never ceased discourse on Dharma.” He remained in government yet did not stop speaking Dharma; this grounded his capacity for the task. “Whenever he handled this text, his reflections were many.” To handle means to return to it repeatedly; reflection means he read the problems.

Thus, “in the sixth year of Hongshi, year of Shouxing, he gathered śramaṇas versed in principle and together with Kumārajīva collated the correct text.” All three elements are definite: the time, people deeply versed in principle, and the task of establishing a correct text together with Kumārajīva. The method was “refining, tempering, reviewing, and clarifying, striving to preserve the treatise’s intent.” The words could change; the intent could not.

The standard for the result is also given: “plain without being crude, concise yet certain to arrive.” Plain but not coarse; brief but always reaching the meaning. These eight words still express the measure of Chinese translation of treatises: speech may be reduced, meaning may not. The final sentence—“its tenet and purport are exhausted here, with nothing to fault”—is Sengzhao’s account of the established text.

The Hundred Treatise now in readers’ hands is this recollated text, not the earlier translation whose “language had not yet been integrated.”

6. Twenty Chapters, Ten Transmitted: The Gap Stated by the Preface Itself

The preface’s end records the scale: “The treatise originally had twenty chapters, each with five verses.” Then comes the undisguised sentence: “The people responsible considered the latter ten of no benefit to this land, so they were omitted and not transmitted.”

Sengzhao does not round the matter into completeness. He neither conceals that the original contained twenty chapters nor defends the omission. He records only the transmitters’ reason—“of no benefit to this land”—and the result: omitted and not transmitted. This is the honesty proper to a translation-atelier record. The boundary is therefore clear to the reader: the ten extant chapters can be read; the ten lost chapters are not in hand and should not be supplied from imagination.

The preface’s final sentence is an entrustment: “May discerning and knowledgeable gentlemen examine and gather it in detail.” May expresses hope; detail means careful examination; gather means to take it up. He hands the book over to those willing to look closely.

Carried Forward

This preface is not an appendix but part of the transmitted Hundred Treatise. It settles three matters for the ten chapters that follow: the treatise refutes without clinging; its text has the two layers of root and commentary; and its Chinese version is the ten-chapter text after the recollation of Hongshi Six.

The preface’s sentence “The path of returning to the root is manifest here” must be fulfilled in every following chapter. The first begins with stopping evil and practicing good but closes through “relinquishing.” The middle chapters examine self, one and different, faculties and objects, cause and fruit, permanence, and emptiness. The final chapter permits neither refutation nor emptiness to remain. If a reader finds in any chapter a conclusion on which to stand, comparing it with this sentence in the preface shows that the reading is not finished.

Another intra-lineage mirror can be read beside it. In his “Preface to the Treatise on the Middle,” Sengrui assigns functions to four treatises and says: “The Hundred Treatise treats the external to guard against error.” One treats the external, another removes the internal. The two prefaces emerged from the same translation atelier and agree in their understanding of this treatise. Jizang later composed a separate preface commentary explaining Sengzhao’s preface sentence by sentence. That is a mirror from the Tang period held up for Chinese readers. However bright the mirror, the transmission and translation events recorded by the preface itself remain the standard.