太上說轉輪五道宿命因緣經

Tàishàng shuō zhuǎnlún wǔdào sùmìng yīnyuán jīng 太上說轉輪五道宿命因緣經

Scripture of the Karmic Causes of the Previous Lives behind Rebirth through the Five Paths of the Turning Wheel, Spoken by the Most High

anonymous Táng-dynasty Daoist adaptation of a Buddhist karma-retribution sūtra, in one juàn of eight folios, preserved in the Zhèngtǒng Dàozàng (DZ 647 / CT 647, 洞神部本文類) and in the Dàozàng jíyào (JY066); seventh and last of the seven scriptures bundled together as “Qī jīng tóng juàn shāng bā” 七經同卷傷八. (The Kanripo catalog meta gives the title as Lúnzhuǎn wǔdào sùmìng yīnyuán jīng 輪轉五道宿命因緣經, transposing zhuǎnlún 轉輪 to lúnzhuǎn 輪轉; the title printed at head and foot of the source file, as of the DZJY listing, reads 轉輪, followed here.)

About the work

The text is one of the most openly Buddhicising compositions in the entire Daoist canon. It opens with an unmistakable pastiche of a Buddhist sūtra-opening: “At that time Tàishàng Lǎojūn 太上老君 was in the precincts of Jiāwéiluówèi guó 迦維羅衛國 [i.e. Kapilavastu, the Buddha’s ancestral city], together with the 1,250 heavenly and terrestrial immortals, xiāntóng 仙童 youths and yùnǚ 玉女 maidens. When the ninth-month long-fast had ended, he went forth from the spirit-hall and journeyed to the Jetavana grove of Anāthapiṇḍada (Shèwèi guó Qíshù-xià Jǐgūdú yuán 舍衛國祇樹下給孤獨園).” Between the two kingdoms grows an enormous shījù 尸俱 tree, 1,860 lǐ tall, whose fruit heals all diseases. Zuǒxuán zhēnrén 左玄眞人 then asks the assembled immortals to explain karmic causation; Tàishàng Lǎojūn responds with a long series of sùmìng yīnyuán 宿命因緣 — “karmic causes of previous lives” — paired antiphonally with their present-life fruits. Typical equations include:

• “one born in this life as a ruler, king, nobleman, or governor: in a previous life revered the Sānbǎo 三寶 [i.e. the Three Jewels — here Daoist, but the term is a direct Buddhist loan from triratna]”;
• wealthy in the present: from bùshī 布施 (alms-giving) previously;
• long-lived and free from illness: from chíjiè 持戒 (precept-keeping) previously;
• beautiful and fair: from rěnrǔ 忍辱 (forbearance) previously;
• wise and able to explain scripture: from zhìhuì 智慧 (wisdom) previously.

The list proceeds through roughly two hundred paired yīnguǒ 因果 (“cause-and-fruit”) items, structured on the Buddhist Pañca-gati scheme — the “five paths” (wǔdào 五道) of rebirth through gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell-beings — and reproducing without significant modification the Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng 善惡因果經 framework. Pattern fauna rebirths are catalogued in great ethnographic detail: the slanderer becomes a deaf dog; the thought-unhearer becomes a donkey; the stingy glutton becomes a hungry ghost; the food-withholder becomes a pig, piglet, or dung-beetle; the clothing-snatcher becomes a sheep whose skin is stripped; the fisher becomes a mayfly living from dawn to dusk; the adulterer enters hell to embrace a bronze pillar or lie on an iron bed, then returns as a chicken or duck; the drunkard is charged with “thirty-six losses” and sinks into the nílí 泥犁 (Skt. niraya / hell) before being reborn in imbecility. A closing parable of the shījù 尸俱 tree’s single root that gives limitless fruit frames the merit of recitation and transcription of the present scripture itself, with the gāthā formula: “Give once, receive ten-thousandfold” (施一得萬倍).

Prefaces

No preface. The text is cast in sūtra-form with a Buddhist-style Evaṃ mayā śrutam-adjacent opening (ěr shí Tàishàng Lǎojūn zài Jiāwéiluówèi guó 爾時太上老君在迦維羅衛國) and closes with the formula “At that time Zuǒxuán zhēnrén and the assembled heavenly and terrestrial immortals and the people of the world, hearing this scripture, all rejoiced greatly; each, as their karmic causes arose, circumambulated three times, bowed with forehead to the ground, and withdrew” — a direct calque of the standard Buddhist closing formula.

Abstract

John Lagerwey’s notice in Schipper & Verellen eds., The Taoist Canon (2004, 1:532, DZ 647, under “2.B.7.a.2 Medium-length Lingbao jīng of the SuíTáng period”) identifies the text as “quite clearly modelled on Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng” — the Buddhist apocryphal Fóshuō shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng 佛說善惡因果經 (T.2881, a Táng-era Chinese Buddhist composition preserved in the Dūnhuáng finds). Lagerwey documents the dependence at four levels: “the place from which the sermon is preached [Kapilavastu/Jetavana], its theme, the structure of its phrases, and even, on occasion, the language are identical.” He gives the specific parallel of the present text 2a.1–3 and 2b.6 with Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng (T.2881, 1380c.16-17), and notes that the administrative terminology zhōujùn lìngzhǎng 州郡令長 at 4b — often mobilised for dating — “cannot be used to date this text, as it derives from the Buddhist scripture” (T.2881, 1383a). Lagerwey further observes a significant Daoist editorial choice: “the prospect of punishment threatened by the Buddhist text to those who work in this life as shīgōng 師公 or shīmǔ 師母 [i.e. as [Buddhist] ritual masters] (1381c) is not found in this Taoist sūtra” — i.e. the Daoist redactor systematically expurgated the anti-ritualist stratum of the Buddhist source.

The catalog meta supplies no dynasty and no author. The frontmatter brackets notBefore 618 and notAfter 907 on three grounds: (i) the TC’s editorial placement in “SuíTáng Lingbao”; (ii) the source text — the Buddhist Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng — is itself a Táng Chinese composition; and (iii) the text’s assimilation of Daoist Sānbǎo rhetoric to Buddhist triratna vocabulary, and of Lǎojūn to the Buddha at Jetavana, fits the mature state of sānjiào 三教 doctrinal syncretism characteristic of the Táng rather than of earlier or later periods.

This is one of the principal Daoist witnesses to the institutional practice of “inter-canonical” adaptation: the deliberate production of Daoist jīng 經 on Buddhist models, in which not only doctrinal content but narrative frame, rhetorical form, and even proper-name geography (Kapilavastu, Jetavana, Anāthapiṇḍada) are transposed wholesale under the aegis of Lǎojūn’s revelation. As Kristofer Schipper has observed in the TC general introduction to 2.B.7 Lingbao (1:532), “Some jīng, such as 662 Tàishàng Lǎojūn shuō bào fùmǔ ēnzhòng jīng 太上老君說報父母恩重經 and 647 Tàishàng shuō zhuǎnlún wǔdào sùmìng yīnyuán jīng, are direct adaptations of Buddhist sūtras, whereas other scriptures, such as 630 Tàishàng Lǎojūn chángshēng yìsuàn miàojīng, have in turn been adapted as Buddhist texts” — the traffic ran in both directions.

Translations and research

• Schipper, Kristofer, and Franciscus Verellen, eds. The Taoist Canon: A Historical Companion to the Daozang. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, 1:532 (DZ 647, J. Lagerwey) and 1:515–18 (general introduction to 2.B.7 Lingbao, K. Schipper).
• Zürcher, Erik. “Buddhist Influence on Early Taoism: A Survey of Scriptural Evidence.” T’oung Pao 66 (1980): 84–147 — the foundational study; catalogues the two-way scriptural traffic to which the present text belongs.
• Bokenkamp, Stephen R. Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 — for the Daoist assimilation of Buddhist rebirth schemes through the liù dào / wǔ dào doctrine.
• Mollier, Christine. Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008 — the standard monograph on cross-canonical scriptural adaptation; discusses the Shàn’è yīnguǒ complex and its Daoist counterparts.
• Strickmann, Michel. Chinese Magical Medicine. Ed. Bernard Faure. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002 — for the ethnography of karmic-retribution rebirths catalogued in the present text.
• Fóshuō shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng 佛說善惡因果經 (T.2881) — the principal source text, available in the Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經.

Other points of interest

The text is the most transparent instance in the entire Dàozàng 洞神部本文類 (Dòngshénbù běnwén lèi) section of the Daoist scriptorium’s absorption of Buddhist material under an Lǎojūn signature. The list of karmic-rebirth equations (handsome ← respect; ugly ← anger; ignorant ← non-study; mute ← slander; deaf-blind ← non-reading of scripture; hare-lipped ← fish-hooking; etc., running to approximately eighty paired cases) is substantively coterminous with the Buddhist Shàn’è yīnguǒ tradition, itself a rich ethnographic witness to Táng popular ethics. The Daoist redactor’s single principal intervention — the removal of the Buddhist source’s threat against rival ritual specialists (shīgōng, shīmǔ) — is a clean sectarian tell, marking the site of Buddhist-Daoist competition rather than its content.

Links

• Kanseki Repository KR5c0028
• Schipper & Verellen, The Taoist Canon (2004), 1:532 — DZ 647 entry (J. Lagerwey).
• Fóshuō shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng 佛說善惡因果經 (T.2881), in CBETA: cbetaonline.dila.edu.tw/T2881.