Is There a Hermeneutic Awareness in Chinese Buddhist Commentaries?

Alexander Meyer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

It is often taken for granted that commentarial traditions as rich as those of China must possess a hermeneutic. This certainly remains a truism as long as we do not try to define what exactly should be understood by this term. How do we define "hermeneutic" for the Chinese case? What are its criteria? Should the observation of historically transmitted exegetic rules and conventions be considered as a hermeneutic? Or, is the notion of hermeneutic itself culturally bound?

These questions I will address in the context of the tradition of Chinese Buddhist scripture (sutra) commentaries. As a sample I choose the Diamond Sutra (Jingang jing) commentaries. Among these I will highlight those which clearly stand at the epochal thresholds of the 6th, 11th, and 16th centuries. On the basis of the selected material I will show that the literature under study underwent significant transformations both with regard to the formal modes of commentary writing, as well as with regard to content, namely exegetic positions and "hermeneutic" orientations. It can be shown that the diverse trends of transformation are closely intertwined.

My argument is based on the distinction between two formally different modes of hermeneutical awareness: On the one hand we find the general acknowledgment of the "structural" priority of scripture, and that interpretation has to allow itself to be guided both by scripture and by the traditions of its interpretation, the latter including the observation of a set of (generally implicit) exegetic rules. Insofar as we want to define "hermeneutics" just as this mode of orientation, Chinese Buddhist Sutra commentaries can be understood to be fully hermeneutical in orientation. On the other hand hermeneutics could imply something "more", namely recognizing the culturality and historicity of one's interpretation, and to reflect and systematically elaborate on one's position both with regard to transmitted older interpretations and as interpretation already preset into culturally preestablished interpretative horizons. Only the fulfillment of the second criterion would qualify a respective commentarial tradition as fully "hermeneutical" in a modern sense.

I will argue that the evidence of the material I study supports the assumption that while we do in fact find a pervasiveness of the first aspect, the second, can be the fruit of only a long.