Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna.
One mind, two gates. The Dasheng Qixin Lun is the single treatise that did the most to fuse tathāgatagarbha thought with Yogācāra psychology, giving Chinese Buddhism the architecture — original enlightenment, actualized enlightenment, non-enlightenment, the ālayavijñāna as "neither one nor different" from suchness — that Chan, Tiantai, and Huayan would spend the next thousand years responding to. This site's Yogācāra corpus has long been complete; the tathāgatagarbha line was, until now, its largest gap. This collection translates the whole of Paramārtha's sixth-century version (T1666) across ten pages, with reading notes drawn throughout from Fazang's own commentary, the Dasheng Qixin Lun Yiji (T1846).
How to read this collection
This is a single, short treatise — about 10,600 Chinese characters in its own text, not counting the later commentator's colophon and the sūtra source's front matter — read across ten pages rather than one, because its argument is dense enough that a single long page would bury the reading notes a reader actually needs. Two Chinese translations of this treatise survive: Paramārtha's from 553 (T1666) and Śikṣānanda's from the early eighth century (T1667). This collection translates only Paramārtha's version, the one Fazang's commentary is keyed to and the one later tradition treats as standard whenever "the Awakening of Faith" is invoked without further qualification.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text, matched paragraph by paragraph against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Fazang's own line-by-line exegesis wherever his commentary addresses the passage directly — which, across three fascicles of commentary running roughly six times the length of the root text itself, is nearly everywhere.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified against the base text for full coverage.
- Reading notes — "after Fazang" wherever his commentary directly addresses the passage, which is nearly always.
- Cross-references tying the treatise's several overlapping classification schemes back together as they accumulate across pages.
- Terminology matched to the site's existing Yogācāra pages where the same term already has an established rendering.
The Treatise's Own Structure
Five parts, named by the treatise itself in its opening lines. The middle part — "explanation" — is by far the largest, and is itself divided into three: revealing the true meaning, countering wrong attachments, and distinguishing the marks of the path.
Read by Part
All ten parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Fazang.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all ten parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site's Yogācāra pages, we reuse it; where this treatise's own tathāgatagarbha vocabulary has no site precedent, we coin one here for future tathāgatagarbha-line texts to inherit. See the full translation notes for the complete glossary, and also this site's note on translation method.