Treatise on the Sūtra of the Ten Grounds — Translation Notes

These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Daśabhūmikasūtra-śāstra (十地經論, Treatise on the Sūtra of the Ten Grounds), Taishō T1522, Vasubandhu’s commentary on the “Ten Grounds” chapter of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra, translated into Chinese by Bodhiruci and collaborators in the Northern Wei. They exist so that vocabulary — ten ground-names, a recurring fourfold-fruit structure, and a great deal of enumerated Yogācāra and Abhidharma terminology — stays consistent across all fifty-two parts, and so that this treatise’s own vocabulary is recorded for any later Huayan-line text on this site to inherit rather than re-coin.

The text

The Daśabhūmikasūtra-śāstra is Vasubandhu’s fascicle-by-fascicle commentary on the Daśabhūmika, the “Ten Grounds” chapter of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (華嚴經, the tenth of the sūtra’s own chapters in the sixty-fascicle recension, chapter twenty-two in the eighty-fascicle recension) — the sūtra passage that gave the Huayan school its later systematic account of the bodhisattva path’s ten grounds. Bodhiruci’s translation (T1522), completed with collaborators early in the sixth century under the Northern Wei, is the standard version and the only one this collection translates. The base text runs to twelve fascicles and roughly 109,094 Chinese characters, counting the treatise’s own front matter, section headings, and fascicle-break markers along with the continuous prose of sūtra and commentary; the depth-counted extraction of every page’s own source column that this collection’s per-page verification relies on accounts for 107,650 of those characters; the remaining span is front matter and fascicle-division headers, which this project treats as part of the base text but does not reproduce as separate translated content on any single page.

The sūtra portion embedded within the treatise — spoken in the voice of Vajragarbha Bodhisattva, empowered by the Buddha to teach — and Vasubandhu’s own commentary are translated together throughout, exactly as they appear interleaved in the base text, with the sūtra passages marked “Sūtra:” and the commentary marked “Commentary:” in every source and translation column.

Reading-note sourcing

Per this site’s commentator-vetting convention, reading notes are grounded in a named commentator rather than presented as unattributed analysis. This collection is the first on this site to draw on two successive named commentators rather than one throughout.

Parts 1 through 23 draw on Jingying Huiyuan’s (淨影慧遠, 523–592) 十地經論義記 (X0753). Huiyuan’s commentary survives only in part: his own manuscript physically ends partway through the Third Ground, Prabhākarī, breaking off just before the treatise’s closing King-and-samādhi passage for that ground — his own colophon records the interruption plainly, “end of fascicle four” (十地義記卷第四末終), with a closing methodological note (自後諸地皆同此判，宜須記知, “every ground hereafter follows this same division; this should be carefully noted and remembered”) that reads as knowingly written for a commentary its author expected not to finish. Part 23’s own reading notes mark this handoff directly.

Parts 24 through 52 draw on Fazang’s (法藏, 643–712, third patriarch of the Huayan school) 華嚴經探玄記 (T1733). Fazang’s commentary is not keyed to this treatise directly — it is his own systematic exegesis of the full Avataṃsaka Sūtra, organized by his own sevenfold analytical framework (ten gates of general interpretation applied to each chapter) rather than running paragraph-by-paragraph alongside Vasubandhu’s commentary the way Huiyuan’s does. Where Fazang’s exposition of the Daśabhūmika chapter addresses a passage this treatise also comments on, this collection’s reading notes draw on that exposition; where the two texts’ own organizing structures diverge, the notes say so rather than forcing an alignment neither author intended. The two commentators occasionally comment on the very same passage from genuinely different angles — Part 23’s reading notes show Fazang’s fourfold division of the Third Ground’s closing fruit matching Huiyuan’s own almost clause for clause, but assigning one of the ten qualities of patience a finer, more specific gloss than Huiyuan’s own bundled reading — a case kept in the notes deliberately, since the disagreement is itself instructive.

Structure

The treatise’s twelve fascicles divide, by the sūtra’s own account, into ten bodhisattva grounds (daśabhūmi), each named, each given its own closing etymology, and each — from the Second Ground onward — opened by a numbered set of “ten” qualities or minds that arouse entry into it. This collection’s fifty-two parts map onto the twelve fascicles as follows:

Per-part detail, with the Chinese-character length of each page’s own source column (root text and embedded commentary together, as extracted and verified via the depth-counted extract_top_level_blocks method in scripts/verify_dasabhumika_page.py):

Total across all fifty-two source columns: 107,650 characters — verified page by page via the depth-counted extraction method above, each page’s own coverage additionally checked against the base text with difflib.SequenceMatcher.

Core terminology

Renderings are matched first to this site’s existing Yogācāra pages (Cheng Weishi Lun, the Hundred Dharmas collection, Madhyāntavibhāga) wherever the same term already appears there; the ten ground-names themselves are left as Sanskrit loanwords throughout, matched by their English glosses established from the treatise’s own etymological passages (Parts 8, 19, 23, 25, 28, 32, 35, 39–40, 45, 48).

A note on this collection’s dual-commentary structure

This is the first collection on this site to draw its reading notes from two different named commentators across a single work, rather than one commentator throughout. The Huiyuan-to-Fazang handoff at Part 23 is a fact about what survives, not an editorial choice — Huiyuan’s own manuscript simply stops mid-treatise, in the middle of the Third Ground, and no later portion of his commentary on this text is known to survive. Readers moving from Part 23 into Part 24 will notice the shift in commentarial voice directly: Huiyuan comments paragraph by paragraph alongside Vasubandhu’s own text, tracking its structure closely; Fazang comments as part of a vastly larger, independently organized exposition of the whole Avataṃsaka Sūtra, and this collection’s reading notes draw on the portions of that larger work that speak to the passage at hand.