The Huayan shuchao

The history of Buddhism saw the development of a number of schools which were in certain ways markedly influenced by local cultures. Some of them concentrated on practice, some distinguished themselves in terms of philosophy. In China, the Tiantai and Huayan schools are examples of the latter type though their roots were still grounded in the real life application of the teaching -all of their patriarchs counted as meditation masters.

Both of these schools spread to Korea and Japan and underwent further changes there while in China proper their influence declined and the respective lineages were hardly carried on. This is especially the case with the Huayan school which established an enormously complex philosophical structure and map of the way to Buddhahood on the basis of one of the major Mahayana scriptures, the Huayan jing or Avatamsaka sutra as it is known in Sanskrit.

The Chinese Huayan school flourished during the Tang dynasty (618-907 CE). Its patriarchs wrote a number of commentaries on their main text among which the one by Chengguan (737-838 CE) can lay claim on being the most voluminous. Actually, the massive Huayan shuchao we now have combines both commentary and sub-commentary by its prolific and long-lived author.

An important document of intellectual history, it is becoming more and more inaccessible to the modern reader due to the constant process of change and development language and culture are subjected to. Thus Venerable Cheng-yi, former abbot of the Huayan Lotus Society in Taipei, initiated the project of producing a new edition of the Huayan shuchao -a textcritical edition offering the reader the advantages of not only modern punctuation but also of footnotes which identify sources and reflect the readings of the various earlier editions.

Everyone who has ever worked with commentaries in classical Chinese will readily understand how great the benefit of such an edition can be. Thus it is to be welcomed that after many months of strenuous labour with the all the unavoidable hitches and depressions on a bumpy road, the first forty fascicles of the new edition are finally scheduled for publication later this summer. What is even more exciting is to see how the group of nuns preparing the draft has, all the way along, grown as a team with each member deepening her understanding and gaining precious expertise.

This page was last updated on February 6th, 2000.

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