貞元新定釋教目錄 26.4

26.4

As for 'branch-extraction sūtras': this refers to those excerpted from major works to circulate separately, such as the Second Assembly of the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-sūtra. Indeed, the Dharma-gates are vast and extensive, their shores and shallows seldom charted; the canonical scriptures are teeming and manifold, their boundaries never exhausted. Therefore, to teach and guide in accordance with circumstance, responding to living beings by providing conditions, brief selections were drawn from large works to be used as the occasion required. Those who opened and explored them did not know their source, while those who studied and practiced them found that their doctrinal coherence was left incomplete. Now I bring together their multiple offshoots and return them each to their proper work; moreover, I prune the old catalogues, adjusting additions and omissions according to whether texts exist or not, fully recording their titles and meticulously explaining discrepancies. I hope to enable future scholars to inspect the branches and thereby know the source, yet fearing this may still fall short of perfection, I entrust it to the wisdom of future sages.