壇經

壇經

六祖壇經 · 行由品

行由品 — the verse contest (clean-slate rebuild)

Every line here is exactly two things: the verified CBETA source text (T2008, 宗寶本), and a verbatim quotation of one existing English translation (Hwa Deh Temple, 2016). Nothing on this page is paraphrased, synthesized, or compared across recensions. That is deliberate — this is a clean-slate rebuild of an earlier pass that had presented rewritten content under unclear attribution, which we withdrew rather than patched. Other editions and translations may be layered in later as separate, clearly-labeled passes.

What you're looking at

Each passage is broken into its natural lines of original Chinese. Beside every line is one English translation — Hwa Deh Temple's (2016), quoted verbatim and named on every line.

Tap a line’s number to copy that line — with its translation, when one is showing — and a link straight to it.

Two kinds of dotted underline appear under the Chinese, and they mean different things:

異文 · rival wording rare
The witnesses genuinely disagree on which character the text originally had — a real textual dispute. E.g., from 莊子: is the great fish 鯤 a “roe-fish,” or, as one editor argued, 鯨 a “whale”? Tap to see the competing texts.
釋文 · apparatus note
Everyone agrees on the character; the note just tells you one thing about it — 音 how it’s read · 訓 what it means · 異體 another way to write it · 句讀 where the clause breaks · 釋義 how the commentators interpret it. Every tap says which of these it is.

And when a character’s pronunciation itself is disputed (異讀), the mark rides on the pinyin instead of the character — the underlined syllable opens the rival readings (e.g. 鵬 as péng or fèng), grounded in the 經典釋文.

釋義 interpretation is the one that’s easy to mistake for a wording dispute: the character isn’t in doubt, only its sense — so it is not rival wording, and never gets the red mark.

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