| In the process of Buddhist Sinicism, Buddhist Scriptures Translating is the beginning for Chinese to absorb Indian Buddhism, while Sutra Commentary is the witness of understanding, digesting, and expatiating on Buddhism. Vajracchedika-Sutra is one of the classical books of Mahayana Buddhism, which had gained much attention from masters of many dynasties. There was a large quantities of Commentary on Vajracchedika-Sutra kept in Dunhuang Manuscript. Although they could be dated back from pre-Qin Dynasty to Tang and Song Dynasties , they were not recorded by Buddhist Scriptures of any dynasties and most of the commentaries were made by translator himself or the director disciples of writer. Therefore the Commentaries on Vimalakirti-nrdesa Sutra are definitely valuable to the Subject of Buddhist Sinicism.Academic Circle studied the Vajracchedika-Sutra Commentaries once Dunhuang Manuscript were discovered, they wrote preface and postscript, made amendment and recorded the content, and also publicized the copy and handwritten copy. Chinese scholars LI Zhenggang and CHEN Yuan had made great contributions in the fields of indexing and naming before 1930, and Japanese scholars made outstanding outcomes on recording from 1930-1950, which was reflected in Dazheng Buddhist Scriptures, and after 1960, Japanese scholars made special studies on Vajracchedika-Sutra Commentaries and made remarkable achievements, while Chinese scholars WANG Chongmin and LIU Mingshu also gained great progress in indexing. However from then on, although the pictures of Dunhuang Manuscript were publicized continuously and the study conditioned were improved constantly, there are no more summarized articles in Vajracchedika-Sutra Commentaries , which caused the studies lagged behind, repeated and even some fault conclusions that had already been denied by Academic Circle long time ago were cited again and again.This article contains the indexes of more than one hundred copies of Dunhuang Vajracchedika-Sutra Commentaries, the studies on every manuscript. It will provide preface and make descriptive catalog for it.The descriptive catalog contains the following contents:1.Name the manuscript accurately.2.Introduce the beginning and ending of each manuscript, the quantity of lines. And mark its beginning and ending pages and lines quantity in their popular version.3.Cohere the manuscript with broken parts. The descriptive catalog writes according to the original catalog. The cohered manuscript information will write in the descriptive catalog and without other explanation.4.Study the transcript and writing time of the manuscript.5.Introduce the contents, research value and investigate the manuscript's spreading situation. 6.Give published information of this manuscript such as the published volume amount and range of pages in photocopies and transcript.7.List the related work which quoted or researched the manuscript.For making differentiation to the other scholar's index catalog, this article mains to compose the descriptive catalog from the angle of the scholarship history in a specific way. Exhausting all of the materials, this article hopes to introduce all of the published works and makes the researcher more convenience. There are following main features of this article:1.It's the most completed one with largest volume quantity.2.This article corrects the wrong volume names and some of the wrong research statements. At the same time this article corrects the wrong transcript time judged by former scholars.3.Put together and classify all the studies of each volume for the convenience of usage and study, to avoid delayed and repeated study.This article wants to collect all the manuscripts and studies volumes of the commentary on Vajracchedika-Sutra. It will give a complete introduction of the commentary on Vajracchedika-Sutra and demonstrate all kinds of the manuscripts values. It will greatly contribute to the further study of Dunhuang Buddhism scriptures and hope to helpful to the study of other Dunhuang subjects. |
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