Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment.
Twelve bodhisattvas, twelve questions, one teaching. No Sanskrit or Tibetan version of the Yuanjue Jing has ever surfaced, and most modern scholarship treats it as very likely composed in China rather than translated from an Indic original — a judgment that has never once dimmed its influence: it became one of the most heavily studied scriptures in Chinese Buddhism, central to Chan, Huayan, and Tiantai alike, and the very text that converted Guifeng Zongmi, fifth patriarch of Huayan and heir of Heze Shenhui's Chan lineage, to a life of study and practice. This collection translates the whole sūtra across twelve pages, with reading notes drawn throughout from Zongmi's own shorter commentary, the Yuanjue Jing Lüeshu (圓覺經略疏, T1795).
How to read this collection
This is a mid-length sūtra — roughly 13,800 Chinese characters in the root text alone, an opening assembly followed by twelve chapters, each built around a single bodhisattva's question and the Buddha's answer, closing with a verse that restates the chapter's own content — read across twelve pages, one chapter to a page, because Zongmi's commentary running alongside it is dense enough that a single long page would bury the reading notes a reader actually needs. Zongmi wrote several commentaries on this sūtra at different lengths; this collection follows his shorter one, the version he himself wrote to be paired directly with the sūtra rather than studied as an independent treatise.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text, matched against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Zongmi's own line-by-line exegesis. His commentary treats nearly every clause of the root text directly, and where a passage's own doctrinal architecture ties into texts already translated elsewhere on this site — the Awakening of Faith most of all, but also the Huayan corpus behind the Ten Grounds treatise — the reading notes draw that connection out explicitly.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified against the base text for full coverage.
- Reading notes — "after Zongmi" throughout, since his commentary addresses this sūtra almost line by line.
- Cross-references to this site's Awakening of Faith and Huayan-related collections, where the sūtra's own doctrine directly overlaps with texts already translated here.
- The verse that closes each chapter, translated in full, restating that chapter's teaching at a different altitude.
The Sūtra's Own Structure
Zongmi divides the sūtra into an opening assembly, a main body of twelve chapters, and a closing transmission section — and within the main body, he further groups the middle nine chapters by the capacity of the practitioner they address: four for those of superior capacity, four for those of middling capacity, and one for those of lesser capacity, each group building on the one before it without either group making the others unnecessary.
Read by Part
All twelve parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Zongmi.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all twelve parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site's Yogācāra or tathāgatagarbha pages, we reuse it; where this sūtra's own vocabulary has no site precedent, we coin one here. See the full translation notes for the complete glossary, and also this site's note on translation method.