花嚴經文義綱目 1.8

1.8

First, regarding the manner of the transmission of the teaching: according to the tradition of the Western Regions, after this sūtra was compiled, it was placed in the dragon palace. Six hundred years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, Bodhisattva Nāgārjuna went to the dragon palace and saw this great, inconceivable sūtra. The upper version had verses numbering as many as the dust motes in thirteen great chiliocosms, and chapters numbering as many as the dust motes in the four continents; the middle version had 498,800 verses and 1,200 chapters; and the lower version had 100,000 verses and thirty-eight chapters. Nāgārjuna then brought this lower version out to India and composed the Treatise on the Inconceivable, also in 100,000 verses, to explain this sūtra. The Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā translated by the Tripiṭaka Master Yaśas today is one chapter of that treatise. Then there was the Eastern Jin śramaṇa named Zhi Faling, who obtained only these 36,000 verses from Khotan, and also invited a Dhyāna master who was a bodhisattva of the third fruit of the Mahāyāna, named Buddhabhadra—translated here as Juexian—whose lay surname was Śākya, being a descendant of King Amṛtodana, to come to the Jin dynasty. On the tenth day of the third month in the fourteenth year of Emperor An's Yixi reign era, cyclical year chunhuo, in the Xie Sikong Monastery of Yangzhou, a specially built, pure-protected Huayan Dharma Hall was established, and this sūtra was translated therein. At that time, in front of the hall was a lotus pond; every day two blue-clad youths would emerge from the pond to sweep, sprinkle water, and grind ink, returning to the pond at dusk, and they stopped once the sūtra was completed. The traditional explanation says: because this sūtra had long remained in the dragon palace, [the dragon king] celebrated its transmission and circulation, and thus sent [servants] to attend to it. Later, because of this, the monastery's name was changed to Xingyan Monastery. There were the Jin śramaṇas Shi Faye, Huiyan, Huiguan, and others who directly took down the translation in writing. Faye subsequently produced a commentary on its meaning titled The Purport of the Avataṃsaka in two fascicles. The Governor of Wu Commandery Meng Yi and General of the Right Guard Chu Shudu were the dānapatis. The translation was completed on the tenth day of the sixth month in the second year of Yuanxi. On the twentieth day of the twelfth month in the second year of Dazong's Yongchu reign era, its collation against the Sanskrit text was completed, resulting at the time in fifty fascicles. Later persons also combined it into sixty fascicles, in which eight or nine sheets of text were originally missing from the Gaṇḍavyūha chapter. Recently, in the third month of the first year of the Yonglong reign era of the Great Tang, the Tripiṭaka Master Divākara of Central India—translated into Chinese as Rizhao—under imperial decree together with ten venerables including the śramaṇa Daocheng, translated and supplied the missing text at the Taiyuan Monastery in the Western Capital, with the śramaṇa Fuli taking it down in writing. The spiritual responses to the sūtra and the miraculous deeds of Buddhabhadra are all distinguished as in the Newly Compiled Biographies of the Avataṃsaka.