Daoxuan (; 596–667) was an eminent Tang dynasty
Chinese Buddhist
Chinese Buddhism or Han Buddhism ( zh, s=汉传佛教, t=漢傳佛教, p=Hànchuán Fójiào) is a Chinese form of Mahayana, Mahayana Buddhism which has shaped Chinese culture in a wide variety of areas including Chinese art, art, politics, Ch ...
monk. He is perhaps best known as the patriarch of the Four-part
Vinaya
The Vinaya (Pali & Sanskrit: विनय) is the division of the Buddhist canon ('' Tripitaka'') containing the rules and procedures that govern the Buddhist Sangha (community of like-minded ''sramanas''). Three parallel Vinaya traditions remai ...
school (). Daoxuan wrote both the ''Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks'' (Xù gāosēng zhuàn 續高僧傳 ) and the ''
Standard Design for Buddhist Temple Construction
''Standard Design for Buddhist Temple Construction'' is a Chinese language text written by Daoxuan in the early Tang Dynasty. It described a design for Buddhist temples influenced by mainstream Chinese architecture, and based upon a traditional lay ...
''. Legends retold in his biographies also associate him to a relic of the Buddha which came to be called Daoxuan's tooth (''Daoxuan foya'' 道宣佛牙), one of the four tooth relics enshrined in the capital of Chang'an during the
Tang dynasty
The Tang dynasty (, ; zh, t= ), or Tang Empire, was an Dynasties in Chinese history, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 618 to 907 AD, with an Zhou dynasty (690–705), interregnum between 690 and 705. It was preceded by the Sui dyn ...
. He is said to have received the relic from Nezha (;
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
: Naṭa), a divinity associated with Indra.
Daoxuan wrote five commentaries on the Four-part Vinaya known as the Five Great Works of Mount Zhongnan. He was also part of the translation team that assisted
Xuanzang
Xuanzang (, ; 602–664), born Chen Hui / Chen Yi (), also known as Hiuen Tsang, was a 7th-century Chinese Buddhist monk, scholar, traveler, and translator. He is known for the epoch-making contributions to Chinese Buddhism, the travelogue of ...
in translating sutras from Sanskrit into Chinese.
Daoxuan was an influential cataloguer. His catalogue of Buddhist scriptures, the ''Catalogue of the Inner Canon of the Great Tang '' (''Datang neidian lu'' 大唐內典錄), aka ''Nèidiǎn Catalog'' (T2149) in 10 scrolls (''juan'' 卷), was commissioned by the Emperor
Gaozong Gaozong () is the temple name of several Chinese monarchs. It can refer to:
* Emperor Yuan of Han (reign: 49 BC–33 BC)
* Emperor Gaozong of Tang (reign: 649–683)
* Emperor Gaozong of Song (reign: 1127–1162)
* Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dyn ...
and completed in 664. The ''Nèidiǎn Catalog'' helped to define the shape of the Chinese Buddhist Canon in future years. Influenced by the apocalyptic Mo-fa or theory of the end of the Dharma, Daoxuan was particularly concerned to expose and denounce suspicious (''yiwei'' 疑偽) or fake (''wei'' 偽) sutras. He even witnessed the wholesale burning of texts suspected of being fake. The ''Nèidiǎn Catalog'' is also notable for being the first bibliographical work to attribute the ''
Heart Sutra'' to
Xuánzàng, who died in 664, the same year as the catalogue was completed.
Daoxuan is also noted for his admonishments to the Emperor Gaozong of the Tang for issuing an edict requiring that monastics bow before the emperor. His petition succeeded in the cancellation of that edict.
Early life
Daoxuan was born in 596, probably in the Sui capital of Daxing cheng 大興城, later renamed
Chang’an
Chang'an (; ) is the traditional name of Xi'an. The site had been settled since Neolithic times, during which the Yangshao culture was established in Banpo, in the city's suburbs. Furthermore, in the northern vicinity of modern Xi'an, Qin Shi ...
(present day
Xi’an
Xi'an ( , ; ; Chinese: ), frequently spelled as Xian and also known by other names, is the capital of Shaanxi Province. A sub-provincial city on the Guanzhong Plain, the city is the third most populous city in Western China, after Chongqing ...
). He was born to the Qian 錢 family and his mother was of the Yao 姚 family, two prominent clans hailing from the region of the lower Yangtze river basin (Jiangnan 江南). Daoxuan’s origins differ depending on the sources. The ''Song Biography of Eminent Monks'' states that he was from either Dantu 丹徒 in present day
Jiangsu
Jiangsu (; ; pinyin: Jiāngsū, Postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Kiangsu or Chiangsu) is an Eastern China, eastern coastal Provinces of the People's Republic of China, province of the China, People's Republic of China. It is o ...
, or Changcheng 長城 in present day
Changxing
() is a county of the prefecture-level city of Huzhou, in the northwest of Zhejiang province, China. Situated on the southwest shore of Lake Tai, it borders the provinces of Jiangsu to the north and Anhui to the west. It has a total area of an ...
district,
Zhejiang
Zhejiang ( or , ; , also romanized as Chekiang) is an eastern, coastal province of the People's Republic of China. Its capital and largest city is Hangzhou, and other notable cities include Ningbo and Wenzhou. Zhejiang is bordered by Jiang ...
. Scholarly consensus today seems to agree with the ''Kaiyuan shijiao lu'' 開元釋教錄, which states that his family hailed from Wuxing 吳興 in present day
Huzhou
Huzhou (, ; Huzhounese: ''ghou² cieu¹'') is a prefecture-level city in northern Zhejiang province (Hangzhou–Jiaxing–Huzhou Plain, China). Lying south of the Lake Tai, it borders Jiaxing to the east, Hangzhou to the south, and the provinc ...
city, Zhejiang. A good argument has been made for his birth place being Jingzhao 京兆, also known as Chang’an, where his father probably emigrated in the 580s. According to the ''Song Biography of Eminent Monks'', Daoxuan was of good stock: descendant of Qian Rang 錢讓 (89-151), Han dynasty Governor of Guangling 廣陵, and Qian Le 錢樂 (fl. 436), Grand Astrologer under
Emperor Wen (424-453) of the Liu-Song. He was the son of Qian Shen 錢申, a high official at the Chen court acting as Director at the Ministry of Personnel (shangshu libu 尚書吏部). When the Sui took power, Daoxuan’s family, alongside the families of many other Chen officials, were sent to the new capital in northwest China, a scene poignantly alluded to in the ''Ji shenzhou sanbao gantong lu'' 集神州三寶感通錄:
''When the Sui had overcome the Chen, the entire kingdom’s
hen ruling elite heads bared and hands bound, were moved west
o Daxing cheng (Chang’an)''
及隋滅陳,舉國露首,面縛西遷。
This move to the north most likely took place before he was born and he would have therefore grown up in Daxing cheng, not Wuxing. However, because his family came from the south, culturally Daoxuan remained a southerner. The difference between northerners and southerners would shape Daoxuan’s who, according to Chen Huaiyu, put much stock in the cultural superiority of the south as he himself tried to develop Buddhism in the northern capital.
In Daoxuan’s preface to his interview with the spirits, he wrote how from a young age he was interested in tales of the supernormal, recounting that:
''When I was young, I delighted in learning many
ifferent thingsfrom those texts that draw out
xamples ofrare and extraordinary
ccurrences The Soushen
iinvestigates the supernormal,
nd there are alsothe Mingxiang
i the Mingbao
i the Jingyi
ithe Shuyi
i tales of anomalies that record the unseen,
have read through them all''.
余少樂多聞希世拔俗之典籍。故《搜神》研神,《冥祥》、《冥報》、《旌異》、《述異》,志怪錄幽,曾經閱之。
Zanning wrote that Daoxuan was intellectually precocious, reading broadly and capable of composing verse by the age of nine. This mark of genius indicates, if anything, that he was brought up in a wealthy family that had the means to invest in his education. At the age of fifteen, as Daoxuan showed a fondness for Buddhist teaching and an aversion to worldly matters, he joined the monastic order.
Under the tutelage of Huiyun 慧頵 (564-637) at Riyan Monastery 日嚴寺, he began his practice and was, according to the ''Song Biography of Eminent Monks'' b
Zanning tonsured soon thereafter.
References
Sources
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Further reading
* Chen Jinhua (2002). An Alternative View of the Meditation Tradition in China: Meditation in the Life and Works of Daoxuan (596–667), T'oung Pao, Second Series, 88, (4/5), 332–395
* Kenney, E. (2002)
Dreams in Further Biographies of Eminent Monks (續高僧傳) Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies 51 (1), 18–21
* Zhou, Ang (2018)
The life of Daoxuan: according to others and his own words dissertation, Ghent University
{{DEFAULTSORT:Daoxuan
Mahayana Buddhism writers
596 births
667 deaths
7th-century Buddhist monks
Sui dynasty Buddhist monks
Tang dynasty Buddhist monks
Chinese bibliographers
Writers from Huzhou
Chinese spiritual writers
Tang dynasty writers
Founders of Buddhist sects