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Re:
QUERY> A Puzzling Description of the Trikāya in a Qing-period Document
by Dan Lusthaus
Hi Matthew,Just got back from a conference in Xi’an — was offline without computer while in China, and just saw your posting to H-Buddhism about the unusual Qing description of the trikāya. In Chinese, context is everything, so without knowing more about where and why this passage appears, speculating about possible implications are at best tenuous. One can’t rule out a typo (mistakenly reversing nirmāṇa and sambhoga), or the author’s own confusion. Without knowing the context, again, it is hard to guess.
But, if we assume that the text is a correct presentation of the author’s thought, and the author is not simply confused about the more usual descriptions of the Buddha bodies, then there might be a way to interpret the passage that may make some sense. My initial impression is that it is treating the nirmāṇa-kāya not as a generic term for a type of buddha-body, but as a particularized reference to Śākyamuni, who, no longer with us, is currently invisible. Why is the sambhoga-kāya “visible”? There is a lot of Chinese material on “visualizing” the sambhoga kāya, which would include Amitābha, i.e., buddha-anusmṛti practices — they typically get reduced to chanting (Namu amito fo, etc) after the 7th c, but some visualization techniques were still touted, and perhaps this author was dipping into those sources, which are included in earlier texts that were incorporated into Pure Land foundations. Certainly the sambhoga buddhas are visible in their own buddha lands — one of the reasons often given for seeking rebirth there, i.e., to confirm one’s faith by seeing a buddha face-to-face.
Again, just speculation without context.
best,
Dan
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