The Vajrasamadhisutra (Chin-kang san-mei ching; Taisho no. 273) is a prominent East Asian Buddhist apocryphal sutra, which has heretofore been treated as an indigenous Chinese composition. I seek to prove instead that it was written in Korea, ca. 680 A.D., by an early adept of the Korean Son (Ch. Ch'an) school.
Chapter One, "Prolegomenon to the Study of Buddhist Apocryphal Literature," surveys the importance of apocryphal scriptures in studying East Asian Buddhism and social history.
Chapter Two discusses evaluations of Vajrasamadhi in traditional Buddhist bibliographical catalogues and the dating these suggest for the text. Ancillary coverage is given to the editorial techniques used in preparing the Buddhist xylographic canons.
Chapter Three covers the biographies of the Korean scholiast, Wonhyo (617-686), who is indirectly implicated in the "recovery" of Vajrasamadhi. His biographies suggest that the scripture is of Korean provenance. Wonhyo's religious career and the characteristics of Chinese and Korean Buddhist hagiography are also treated.
Chapter Four discusses the philosophy of Vajrasamadhi and its implications for determining the authorship of the text. The scripture is interpreted as attempting to synthesize various tendencies in early Chinese Ch'an thought with a disparate variety of Mahayana (especially Tathagatagarbha) doctrinal elements. This melange was intended to transmit surreptitiously the message of the Tao-hsin school of Ch'an in a guise that would appeal to the sensibilities of Silla scholastic exegetes like Wonhyo. Authorship of Vajrasamadhi is attributed to Pomnang (d.u.), a Korean who reputedly studied in China under Tao-hsin and returned to Korea ca. 650. Pomnang is portrayed as a frustrated Ch'an missionary, who finally resorted to textual forgery to communicate his radical teachings. Vajrasamadhi thus emerges as the earliest document of the incipient Korean Son tradition, predating as well most Chinese Ch'an works.
The second half of the dissertation presents a complete translation of Vajrasamadhisutra, with annotation drawn from Wonhyo's 7th-century commentary, Kumgang sammaegyong-ron (Taisho no. 1730). An appendix summarizes all the text-critical annotation appearing in Sugi's 30-fascicle Collation Notes to the Koryo Tripitaka (Koryo no. 1402), which will be of value to scholars working in Buddhist textual transmission.
