Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna (Qixinlun); kepan; textual organization; explicit kepan; implicit kepan
摘要
This article examines the self-imposed textual organization (or kepan) of the sixth century Buddhist treatise entitled the Awakening of Faith in Mahāyāna (or Qixinlun in its popular Chinese abbreviation). While the treatise is generally acknowledged as a well-organized text, its practice of kepan (i.e. the practice, rather than the content, of kepan) has not been examined in a comprehensive and systematic manner: how, or in what forms, does the treatise organize itself? In what scope are such kepans applied? And to what extent are such forms of kepan effective in charting out the structural relationship of the treatise? Responding to these questions, this article proposes to address this neglected issue of the kepan practice in the Qixinlun. More specifically, it seeks to identify and outline some of the major forms of the Qixinlun kepan and, where necessary, to discuss a few possible problems in such kepan systems.
目次
1. Introduction 4 2. Some Major Forms 6 2.1. The Explicit Kepan: “Fen” 分 and “Zhong” 種 7 2.2. The Implicit Kepan: The General and the Sectional 10 2.2.1. The General Kepans in the Three Introductory Sections 10 2.2.2. The Sectional Kepans in the Introductory Sentences 14 3. A Few Possible Problems 20 3.1. The General Insufficiency of the Qixinlun Kepan 20 3.2. The Ambiguous Reading of the “Yi” 義 in the “Fa-yi” 法義 and the Kepan Problems it Entails 22 3.3. Nianfo 念佛, the Unaccounted-for Method in the Cultivation of Faith 27 3.4. Liao-jian 料簡 and the Disproportionate In-Text Annotations 30 4. Conclusion 34
