注大乘入楞伽經 1.12

1.12

Some may say that students believe what Bodhidharma pointed to was solely the four-fascicle text, which, compared to the bulk of the seven fascicles, is easier to manage. Little do they know that when the sūtra was first translated, the language was concise and archaic, lacking portions at the beginning and the end. Even great scholars and eminent masters were troubled by the difficulty of reading and punctuating it. The prefaces, citations, titles, and colophons have clear documentation of this (during the Yuanfeng era, Su Dongpo transcribed this four-fascicle edition of the sūtra for Duke Zhang Wending and wrote a colophon himself, saying: 'The purport of the Laṅkā is profound and obscure, its language concise and archaic, so that readers at times cannot even parse its sentences.' Jiang Yingshu, in his preface, also said: 'Zhiqi has often suffered from the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra being difficult to read; one may imagine how it is for others.'). This sūtra compares and harmonizes the three editions, obtaining its pure completeness, with sentences and meanings clearly evident. If you try to open and read it, you will know that the essentials are more than half understood!