Five Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra - One Line, Five Answers

A Sutra Buried Under Two Thousand Commentaries

The Diamond Sutra in Kumarajiva's early fifth century Chinese runs to about five thousand characters. Commentaries on it, counted across China, Korea, and Japan, are recorded at more than two thousand. A short sutra compresses its language, and compression leaves a great deal to unpack.

Once commentary piles up like that, the next generation's job is sorting. The usual solutions are to pick the soundest reading and elevate it, or to melt many readings down into one explanation. The Five Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra (金剛經五家解) does neither. It neither picks nor melts. It seats five commentators side by side under the same line of scripture.

The division of the sutra into thirty-two sections follows Prince Zhaoming of Liang. The compilation cuts those thirty-two sections into passages and attaches the five voices to each passage in turn. Who assembled it this way, and when, is not clear. Two of the five are from the Song, so the compilation is placed in the Song.

The Five

Fu Dashi's verses

Fu Dashi (497 to 569) lived in the Liang. His surname was Fu and his given name Xi, and he was a layman, never ordained. He built a hut under a pair of trees, kept himself by farming and hired labor, and taught at night. Among his students the word went around that he was an emanation of Maitreya.

His commentary is verse in lines of five characters. Each passage of the sutra is compressed into eight lines, and because the result is compression rather than explanation, it is easy to memorize. Seventy of his verses appear in the collection, though by one view only forty-nine are actually his.

Huineng's plain gloss

Huineng (638 to 713), the sixth patriarch, is said to have left home after hearing a line of the Diamond Sutra and to have awakened later at another line of the same text. His reading of it, the Jingang jing jieyi, is preserved in the collection as his oral gloss.

The prose is conspicuously easy. There is no ornament and almost no technical vocabulary. Dividing the form body from the dharma body, he says that the form body is flesh assembled from the four elements and born of parents, while the dharma body has no shape or segment, no blue or yellow or red or white, and cannot be seen by the eye. A listener gets it the first time.

Zongmi's essentials

Guifeng Zongmi (780 to 841) wrote the longest and most logical of the five, the Essentials of the Commentaries and Treatises on the Diamond Prajna Sutra. Zongmi stood in a Chan lineage while also inheriting Huayan scholasticism, and his commentary carries both characters.

He cuts the sutra into numbered divisions. This passage raises the cause of a doubt in order to ask about it; this passage seals the point that the Buddha's body is without marks. The whole text is built into a skeleton this way. He also refutes other commentators head on. On why Subhuti, who had already understood that the Buddha's body is not its marks, now answers that the Buddha can be seen by his marks, Zongmi flatly says that the two existing commentaries are both wrong.

Yefu's ripostes and songs

Yefu Daochuan lived in the Southern Song. His surname was Di and his given name San, and he held a post in the army before receiving the dharma name Daochuan from Daoqian. Inheriting the dharma of Jingyin Jicheng, he stands in the sixth generation of the Linji line.

His commentary comes in two parts: a single remark dropped under the passage, and a four line song. The remark is not explanation but a return blow. Under the line saying that whatever has marks is illusory, he asks where the Buddha is, given that mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers. Elsewhere he asks what marks this walking, standing, sitting, and lying down has, then adds: stop dozing.

Zongjing's outline

Yuzhang Zongjing was also a Song figure, but almost nothing of his life survives. His Outline of the Diamond Sutra takes the voice of a sermon. He states the main thread first, unfolds it at length through images, and closes with a verse.

His reading of the word sutra shows his character. Sutra means a path, he says, and had the Buddha not opened this path, where would later generations set their feet. Having asked that, he turns the first step back on the listener rather than taking it for them.

One Line, Five Answers

The closing line of the fifth section is among the most widely read passages in the sutra.

凡所有相 皆是虛妄 若見諸相非相 卽見如來

Whatever has marks is illusory. If you see all marks as not marks, you see the Thus Come One.

The collection seats all five under this one line.

Zongmi begins by naming the place this line occupies in the structure: the fourth position, where the Buddha's body is sealed as without marks. He then widens the scope, saying that not only the Buddha's body but every conditioned mark, of the ordinary and the holy alike, is illusory, and he cites the Awakening of Faith and Yogacara treatises for support. He even adds a warning that a reader who hears marks called illusory may go looking for a separate markless Buddha.

Huineng settles the same line in one sentence. The Thus Come One said all marks are illusory in order to reveal the dharma body, so to realize that all marks are illusory and unreal is itself to see the markless principle of the Thus Come One.

Fu Dashi answers in verse.

如來擧身相 爲順世間情 恐人生斷見 權且立虛名

The Thus Come One raised the marks of the body to go along with worldly feeling. Fearing that people would fall into the view of annihilation, he provisionally set up an empty name.

Yefu does not explain. He throws out his question about mountains and rivers, then blocks both exits with a song.

有相有求俱是妄 無形無見墮偏枯

To hold that there are marks and something to seek is delusion; to hold that there is no form and nothing to see is to fall into one-sided barrenness.

Zongjing paints. The Buddha's body towers like a lone peak above the sea and his marks shine like a full moon among stars, yet in the end it is not the real, and one moon appears in all waters while the moon in all waters is gathered into one. His verse closes it:

千江有水千江月 萬里無雲萬里天

A thousand rivers with water hold a thousand moons; ten thousand miles without cloud are ten thousand miles of sky.

Argument, plain statement, compression, riposte, and song stand on one page over the same line. Some lines draw all five and some only two, so noticing who spoke where already tells you something about the passage.

Not Sorting Is the Editing

Declining to reduce the commentaries to one has a cost. The reader has to do the dividing.

There is something gained in exchange. While reading Zongmi, a reader trains at grasping the meaning. Yefu, immediately below, makes the reader let go of what was grasped. Doctrinal force and the live word of Chan alternate on the same page, and that alternation takes the same shape as what the sutra teaches. Hold the raft, and once across the river, put down even the raft.

Reading one line from several angles was not new. Zhiyi of Tiantai read each line of the Lotus Sutra four times over in the Fahua Wenju. The Five Commentaries does that work not inside one head but across five voices. The difference is between dividing levels and seating people side by side.

The Sixth Voice

Hamheo Deuktong Gihwa (1376 to 1433), a monk of early Joseon, lectured on this book. He then attached his own reading to every difficult passage in the five, and that is the Seorui, the explication. The work dates to about 1417, and the collection and the explication were printed together as one book in 1457.

He did more than explicate. He corrected the circulating edition, removing wrong and dropped characters and duplications and restoring sentences that had been transposed. This is why the editions used in Joseon monastic schools differ in many places from the woodblock text.

His preface opens like this:

有一物於此 絕名相 貫古今 處一塵圍六合

There is one thing here. Cut off from name and mark, it runs through past and present; residing in a single mote of dust, it encircles the six directions.

The explication begins by asking what that one thing is. It is neither deluded nor awakened, so it cannot be called ordinary or holy; there is no self and no other in it, so it cannot be named as self or other. Hence it was called only one thing. Then, quoting Nanyue Huairang, he withdraws his own words: even to call it one thing misses.

Later in the preface he calls the five by name. Huineng and Guifeng Zongmi, Yefu Daochuan and Fu Dashi and Zongjing, all five honored by humans and gods, and of their commenting on the sutra he says:

豈是彫文喪德 可謂錦上添華

How could this be carving patterns and losing the virtue? It may be called adding flowers atop brocade.

Carve a pattern into a flawless jade and you lose the jade's own virtue. Commentary, Hamheo held, is the opposite. Five layers of it do not cover the sutra; they make its words more precise and its meaning brighter.

A King's Dying Instruction

In Joseon the book gained one more layer.

In 1448 King Sejong ordered Yefu's songs, Zongjing's outline, and Hamheo's explication rendered into Korean. The crown prince and Prince Suyang produced a draft, but Sejong died before the corrections were finished, and neither Munjong nor Sejo completed the work. Queen Dowager Jaseong, Sejo's consort, put the monk Hakjo in charge of the editing, and the result was printed in 1482, the thirteenth year of Seongjong, as the Three Commentaries on the Diamond Sutra. It is a five volume type-printed edition in Eulhae type, three hundred copies struck by the royal treasury office.

That three of the five were chosen is worth noting. Zongmi's Essentials, the longest and most logical, was dropped. What remained were Yefu and Zongjing, the two on the side of the live Chan word, and the Korean Hamheo. The voice that returns a single blow was put into Korean before the voice that argues.

The Three Commentaries is read today as a source for the history of the Korean language as well. It carries the character readings of the Dongguk Jeongun and sets Korean glosses in double lines alongside the text, so those studying early Hangul orthography go to this book. An editorial decision to keep commentaries side by side, begun inside classical Chinese, ended up adding one more row in Hangul.

For a Reader Today

Reading the Five Commentaries end to end is a specialist's task. One thing is portable: the way of reading.

Meet a line and resist the urge to collapse the answers into one. What happens if the line is built as an argument. What remains if it is put in plain words. What is thrown away if it is cut to eight lines of verse. What is exposed if it is answered with a single blow. What survives if it is sung. Lay five over each other and the line comes out thicker than any one reading makes it.

The way Yefu's remark cuts off explanation and asks back has the same grain as ganhwa seon, sitting with a single question. He inherited the Linji dharma, so this is no coincidence. There is a place where one remark carries off what argument has gathered, and the Five Commentaries is a book that built that place into its layout.