A New Revised and Enlarged Edition of Chengguan’s Commentary and Sub-Commentary on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra

Feature:

Compiles the 20 volumes of the New Revised and Enlarged Edition of Chengguan’s Commentary and Sub-Commentary on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra.

Introduction:

The Commentary and Sub-Commentary on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra was written by the fourth patriarch of the Huayan school, National Preceptor Chengguan, in the Zhenyuan era (785-805) of the Tang dynasty. It is based on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra in 80 fascicles and compiles both the commentary and the supplementary with commentary to sub-commentary. It explains the main doctrines of the sutra in terms of the four stages of practice; faith, understanding, practice, and attainment; and with the five circuits of cause and effect to connect the links of cause and effect of the stages of practice among 39 chapters, making the arrangement and contents of the “seven places and nine assemblies” of the sutra easier to understand.

In the early years of the Republic Era, the Compilation and Printing Association compiled the sutra, commentary and sub-commentary, and printed these three texts together as the Extended Commentary and Sub-Commentary on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra.. However, the sutras and commentaries of the texts and notes that cited are, for the most part, not mentioned the sources. The Huayen Lotus Association, in order to facilitate reading and research, as well as to preserve the precious legacy of wisdom of the patriarchs of the Huayan school, has republished this work anew, using modern language, on the occasion of the founding the Huayen Publication Association in August 1995. This version has been edited and annotated by consulting different editions of the canon as well as extra-canonical works, and is presented in modern punctuation and segmentation, with different parts typed in different fonts according to the analytical table of contents, rearranged into the New Revised and Enlarged Edition of Chengguan’s Commentary and Sub-Commentary on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra to enable readers to quickly explore the depths of the Huayan teachings, and in the expectation that this work will be of the greatest help to those students who wish to study the Huayan doctrines.

In order to allow the above material to be preserved and used continuously, modern digital technology has been used to compile the text, images and other data in a digital format, so that the data can be integrated into the digitalized New Revised and Enlarged Edition of Chengguan’s Commentary and Sub-Commentary on the Avataṃsaka-sūtra for the practicability and convenience of researchers.

Text markup:

Uses the international document standard TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) for content markup (XML Markup).

Content:

The features of the webpage interface are as follows:

1. Basic interface functions: Reading mode according to analytical table of contents, by volume, fascicle, page selection function, citation copying, dictionary lookup, punctuation mode, and other functions.
2. Advanced interface functions: analytical table of contents search, text search, report problem, offline download, etc.
3. Annotation functions: links to the Japanese SAT edition of the Taishō Canon and to CBETA.