注大乘入楞伽經 1.11

1.11

Note: According to the commentary on this sūtra by Śramaṇa Zhiyan, a translator at Jing'ai Monastery of the Tang, upon the Liu Song translation of this sūtra, the opening preface states: 'The Sanskrit texts, in extensive and concise versions, generally comprise three editions: the extensive edition has one hundred thousand verses; the middle edition, thirty-six thousand verses; and the concise edition, four thousand verses. In this land, there have been four translations in all, earlier and later, all of which are the four-thousand-verse concise text. One edition has long been lost.' As for the three editions currently extant in the Great Canon: first, in the twelfth year of Yuanjia of the Liu Song, the Indian Tripiṭaka Guṇabhadra translated it into four fascicles at Caotang Monastery in Jinling, with only one chapter and an incomplete text brought over, entitled Laṅkāvatāra-ratna-sūtra (in the 'Shen' character case). Second, in the second year of Yanchang of the Later Wei, the Tripiṭaka Bodhiruci translated it at the residence of the Prince of Runan in Luoyang and at Jinhua Monastery in the capital of Ye, supplementing the missing text; spanning three chapters of the sūtra, it was translated into ten fascicles, divided into eighteen chapters, and entitled Entry into Laṅkā Sūtra (in the 'Fa' character case). Third, at the beginning of the Jiushi era of the Tang, Tripiṭaka Śikṣānanda of Khotan, Śramaṇa Fuli, and others, having completed the translation of the New Avataṃsaka Sūtra (the eighty-fascicle one), and seeing that the previous two translations of this sūtra were unpolished in their verbosity and brevity, wished to polish them again to expand their circulation, and continuously received an imperial edict to translate it once more. Thereupon, at Tianzhong Hermitage on Mount Song, they gathered the texts of the three editions (the two above along with one Sanskrit manuscript) and compiled them into seven fascicles with a total of ten chapters, entitled Mahāyāna Entry into Laṅkā Sūtra (in the 'Si' character case). Therefore, the Imperial Preface states: 'When the Yuanjia reign title was established, the translation by [Guṇa]bhadra was not widely propagated; when the Yanchang reign was recorded, the meanings in [Bodhi]ruci's [text] contained many discrepancies.' Now this commentary specifically explains the Tang edition, yet it takes the remaining eight chapter titles translated by Bodhiruci and inserts them sequentially into the commentary, so that within the sūtra there also become eighteen chapters, so that people may know that the text has a beginning and an end, and the principle has no discrepancy, making it easy for readers to understand.