Sengzhao

Sengzhao on the DRL

Classical Chinese Authors

僧肇

English Phonetics	Sengzhao
Sort Name	Sengzhao

Dates

Birth:	374
Death:	414

Tibetan calendar dates

Dates of birth

Day
Month
Gender
Element
Animal
Rab Jyung

Dates of passing

Day
Month
Gender
Element
Animal
Rab Jyung

About

Biographical Information

Sengzhao. (J. Sōjō; K. Sǔngjo 僧肇) (374-414). Influential early Chinese monk and exegete, whose writings helped to popularize the works of the Madhyamaka school in China. Sengzhao is said to have been born into an impoverished family but was able to support himself by working as a copyist. Thanks to his trade, he was able to read through much of traditional Chinese literature and philosophy, including such Daoist classics as the Zhuangzi and Laozi, and is said to have resolved to become a monk after reading the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa. He later became a disciple of Kumārajīva and served as the Chinese-language stylist for Kumārajīva’s translations. After Yao Xing (r. 394-416) of the Latter Qin dynasty (384-417) destroyed the state of Liang in 401, Sengzhao followed his teacher to Chang’an, where he and his colleague Sengrui (352-436) were appointed as two of the main assistants in Kumārajīva’s translation bureau there. Yao Xing ordered them to elucidate the scriptures Kumārajīva had translated, so Sengzhao subsequently wrote his Bore wuzhi lun to explicate the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikāprajñāpāramitāsūtra that Kumārajīva and his team had translated in 404. This and other influential treatises by Sengzhao were later compiled together as the Zhao lun. Sengzhao’s treatises and his commentary on the Vimalakīrtinirdeśa played a crucial role in the development of Mahāyāna thought in China. Sengzhao is treated retrospectively as a vaunt Courier in the San lun zong, the Chinese analogue of the Madhyamaka school, which was formally established some two centuries later by Jizang (549-623). The influential Baozang lun is also attributed to Sengzhao, although that treatise is probably a later work of the early Chan tradition. (Source: "Sengzhao." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 794. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)

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Along with Yogācāra, it is one of the two major philosophical schools of Mahāyāna Buddhism. Founded by Nāgārjuna around the second century CE, it is rooted in the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras, though its initial exposition was presented in Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.

The disciples of the Buddha who aspire to attain individual liberation or nirvāṇa. The final goal of the Hearers is to become an arhat, a state in which one has totally eliminated the inner problems of attachment, hatred and ignorance, the main causes for rebirth in this cycle of existence. There are four stages of a śrāvaka path including eight phases.

Mahāyāna, or the Great Vehicle, refers to the system of Buddhist thought and practice which developed around the beginning of Common Era, focusing on the pursuit of the state of full enlightenment of the Buddha through the realization of the wisdom of emptiness and the cultivation of compassion.