Sanlun Xuanyi — Translation Notes

These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of Jizang’s Sanlun Xuanyi (三論玄義, “The Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises,” Taishō T1852). They exist so that vocabulary stays consistent across all fourteen part pages, and matches this site’s existing Chinese Madhyamaka corpus — above all the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, the Twelve Gate Treatise, and the Hundred Treatise, all three of which this treatise defends and repeatedly cites by name.

What the text is, and why it matters

Jizang (吉藏, 549–623) founded the Sanlun (“Three Treatise”) school of Chinese Madhyamaka on the three works just named. This treatise is his own systematic apologia for that school — not a commentary on a root verse text, as the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Hundred Treatise pages on this site are, but Jizang writing in his own voice, composed by imperial command at the Sui court’s Huiri Monastery. It has two parts, announced in its own opening paragraph: refuting the false (破邪), which rebukes four sects in ascending order of sophistication — the outsiders of India and China, the Abhidharma, Harivarman’s Satyasiddhi school, and a mistaken grasp of the Mahāyāna itself — and revealing the true (顯正), which establishes Nāgārjuna’s own authority, assigns each of the three treatises (plus the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom) its own guiding doctrine, recounts the full history of the early Buddhist schisms, and closes with an exhaustive exegesis of the very name Zhonglun, “the Middle Treatise.”

Because Jizang is the recognized founder of this school and its acknowledged authority on what the three treatises mean, these pages do not manufacture a separate ancient commentator the way this site’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā pages do with Piṅgala’s commentary, or the Hundred Treatise pages do with Vasu’s. Jizang’s own prose is the primary text throughout. Reading notes on these pages are Ru-Yi Meditation Center’s own structural and cross-referential observations, stated honestly as such — never attributed to a premodern commentator who did not write them.

Source and translation practice

Root text: Taishō T45, no. 1852, 三論玄義, composed by Jizang.
This site translates directly from the classical Chinese. Existing English-language scholarship on Jizang and early Madhyamaka may be consulted privately to check difficult historical or doctrinal points, but the English wording, sentence structure, and section framing on this site are Ru-Yi’s own.
Jizang argues throughout in a rhetorical question-and-answer form (問曰 / 答曰) — a single author staging an objection to himself and answering it, not a transcript of two debaters. This is rendered plainly as Question: and Answer:, without the colored Outsider/Insider styling used on the Hundred Treatise pages, since that treatise’s source text explicitly uses the different labels 外曰/內曰 for a genuine two-party debate, while this text does not.
Verbatim scriptural citations embedded in Jizang’s prose (from the Lotus, Nirvāṇa, Vimalakīrti, Avataṃsaka, Larger Perfection of Wisdom, and other sūtras, and from the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom and other treatises) are translated in place, exactly as they appear inside his argument, rather than pulled out into block quotations.

Structure

The treatise’s own opening paragraph names two gates and four sects; this site splits the text into fourteen parts along the natural topic breaks Jizang himself marks with his recurring phrase 次明 (“next, making clear”), rather than at even character intervals. Parts range from roughly 1,000 to 2,500 Chinese characters depending on the density of the material at that point in the argument — see the part-count table below for the exact figures.

Parts	Content
1–2	摧外道 — Crushing the outsiders: India, then China
2–3	折毘曇 — Breaking the Abhidharma: six historical collections, then ten faults
3–5	排成實 — Pushing aside Satyasiddhi: Harivarman’s biography, then ten proofs
5–6	呵大執 — Rebuking the mistaken Mahāyāna: the five periods and the two truths
6–7	顯正・明人正 — Revealing the true person: Nāgārjuna’s prophesied authority
7	顯正・顯法正 (opening) — Is the teaching itself truly final?
8–9	The schism history: sūtra/treatise interdependence, then twenty schools in full
10–12	General/particular treatises, each treatise’s guiding doctrine, and why “three” treatises despite four works
13–14	別釋中論名題 — Dedicated exegesis of the title Zhonglun, closing the treatise

Core terminology

Renderings are matched to whatever is already dominant across this site’s Madhyamaka pages, even where an isolated source passage might suggest a different English word.

Chinese	English	Notes
三論玄義	Sanlun Xuanyi (“The Profound Meaning of the Three Treatises”)	Title kept in pinyin romanization on this site, following the precedent of Fahua Xuanyi and other Chinese-authored treatises whose titles are not translated into English as the page title.
破邪顯正	refuting the false, revealing the true	The treatise’s own two-part method, named in its first paragraph.
中論	Mūlamadhyamakakārikā	This treatise’s own recurring short title for Nāgārjuna’s root text; also called 正觀論, “the Treatise on Correct Contemplation” — both are rendered as “the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā” on this site, linking to the existing pages, since that is this site’s established title for the work.
十二門論	Twelve Gate Treatise	Matches the existing site pages.
百論	Hundred Treatise	Matches the existing site pages.
智度論 / 大智度論	Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom	Not yet translated in full on this site; kept as a full descriptive English title rather than a transliteration, matching how this treatise’s own citations are handled.
二諦	the two truths	Conventional (世諦) and ultimate (真諦/第一義諦); identified in Part 11 as the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā’s own guiding doctrine.
世諦	the conventional truth	Also “worldly truth” in some phrasings; kept as “conventional truth” for consistency.
真諦 / 第一義諦	the ultimate truth	Both Chinese terms are used interchangeably by Jizang for the same truth; both render as “the ultimate truth.”
中道	the middle way	Given a dedicated fourteen-part-closing exegesis in Parts 13–14: one way, or two, three, or four “middles,” depending on the distinction being tracked.
二智	the two kinds of knowledge	A buddha’s own knowing of the two truths — distinguished from 二慧, below.
二慧	the two kinds of wisdom	Real wisdom (實慧) and skillful wisdom (方便慧/漚和), a bodhisattva’s or commentator’s own attainment; identified as the Treatise on the Great Perfection of Wisdom’s guiding doctrine, and (in a different sense) the Hundred Treatise’s.
境智	object and wisdom	Identified as the Twelve Gate Treatise’s own guiding doctrine.
四宗	the four sects	Outsiders (外道), Abhidharma (毘曇), Satyasiddhi (成實), and the mistaken Mahāyāna (大執) — the treatise’s own ranked taxonomy, refuted in that order for reasons of relative depth of error.
通論 / 別論	general treatise / particular treatise	Whether a work addresses confusion across both Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna at once (通論) or only one side (別論); the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, Twelve Gate Treatise, and Hundred Treatise are all classified as Mahāyāna general treatises, differing only in scope and emphasis.
破而不取／取而不破／亦破亦取／不破不取	refuted and not gathered in / gathered in and not refuted / both refuted and gathered in / neither refuted nor gathered in	A recurring fourfold scheme, first stated in Part 1, reused to explain exactly how this treatise relates to every rival position it discusses.
假	the provisional	Provisional, conventionally real existence — never simply “false”; central to the “four kinds of the provisional” scheme in Part 12 and the “provisional-constituting middle” in Part 14.
二十部	the twenty schools	This treatise’s own final tally of the schismatic schools descending from the Sthavira and Mahāsāṃghika, reconciled in Part 9 against rival counts of five, seven, eight, and five hundred.

Figures and texts named across the treatise

A partial index of named persons and works this treatise cites or discusses, for readers tracing a particular figure across parts: Nāgārjuna and Āryadeva (the three treatises’ own authors); Kumārajīva, Sengzhao, Sengrui, and Tanying (the Chang’an translation circle, whose prefaces supply much of this treatise’s proof-text); Piṅgala and Vasu (commentators on the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Hundred Treatise, already translated on this site); Kātyāyana, Harivarman, and Kumāralāta (Abhidharma and Satyasiddhi figures); Huiguan (the five-period scheme refuted in Parts 5–6); and Huiyuan of Mount Lu and Sengzhao again (cited on rebirth and the nature of change in Part 1 and Part 14 respectively).

Final structure, confirmed

All fourteen parts are complete and cross-linked. A source-coverage verification script — reading the full base text, stripping markdown headers, splitting on 。？！ into sentence units, and checking each unit against the concatenated .source text of all fourteen part pages in order — found several genuine gaps in an early draft (a few transitional sentences at part boundaries, and one substantial passage on the Ash Mountain school’s own precept-verse and the origins of the Bahuśrutīya and Prajñaptivāda schools); all were investigated individually and restored to the appropriate part. The only remaining “gap” the script reports is a false positive from the source file’s own YAML frontmatter and CBETA numbering blockquote (neither of which is part of the treatise proper) becoming glued to the treatise’s real opening sentence before the first period — that sentence is fully translated in Part 1.