6th International Symposium Oriental Studies

The 6 th International Symposium on Oriental Ancient Documents Studies 72 Semyon Ryzhenkov The Preface to the Daboniepanjing yiyao 大般涅槃經義要 from Dunhuang and Some Remarks on Its Dating There are some digests of the Mahāparinirvā ṇ a-mahāsūtra (thereafter Nirvā ṇ a-sūtra) among manuscripts from Dunhuang Library Cave. These text are usually marked as Daboniepanjing chao 大般涅槃經鈔 or Daboniepanjing yiyao 大般涅槃經義要 . There are more than ten manuscripts that date approximately 7 th –8 th cc. AD. Making digests of sūtras was common practice in medieval China, while bibliographers tended to regard such texts negatively. For example, Sengyou 僧祐 (445–518) in his “Collected Records concerning the Tripitaka” said that such texts, through were not fake and promoted the teaching, might at some point in the future be mistaken as originals. As the result, digests were placed in the category of apocryphal texts and dubious sūtras. Such text have been survived by chance in written form. In the extant several Nirvā ṇ a-sūtra digests quoted fragments are not always the same, they were copied rather from the full text of sūtra than from each other. But they are not totally different and generally follow the same passages of the sūtra. Here I would like to focus on the manuscript from the National Library of China (shelf mark 北敦  6363). It is the most complete Nirvā ṇ a-sūtra digest we possess. It has characteristics common to written sūtra of the Tang period, the script is kaishu , there are 17 characters per line, the page dimensions are 45 cm in length and 25 cm in width (in average). It contains digests from 1–10  juan (out of 40  juan ) from the first section translated by Dharmak ṣ ema (385–433) (also called “the core part” of the Nirvā ṇ a-sūtra). Unlike the other known versions of Daboniepanjing chao the manuscript 北敦 6363 begins with a short “preface” (19 lines extant, beginningmutilated). The first 12 lines contain description of different types of nirvana. This part is similar to the fragment of Han Fa ben nei zhuan 漢法本內傳 (a lost apocrypha written in Southern and Northern dynasties). This fragment was recorded by Shi Zhisheng 释智昇 (8 th c.) in Xuji gujin fo dao lunheng [Continued