聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

長阿含經

9 min read

Text ID
KR6a0001
Date
413–413
Dynasty
後秦

Cháng Āhán jīng 長阿含經

The Long Discourses (Dīrgha-āgama) by 佛陀耶舍 (Buddhayaśas, 譯) and 竺佛念 (Zhú Fóniàn, 譯)

About the work

The Cháng Āhán jīng is the Chinese version of the Dīrgha-āgama, one of the four Indic-language āgama collections that correspond, on the northern side of the transmission, to the Pāli Dīgha-nikāya. In 22 fascicles it gathers thirty long discourses (sūtra) of the Buddha, organized into four “divisions” (分): the first concerns Buddha-biography and the past Buddhas (centred on the Dà běn jīng 大本經 / Mahāvadāna and the Yóuxíng jīng 遊行經 / Mahāparinirvāṇa); the second treats the monastic and lay community; the third gathers debates and dialogues with brahmins and wanderers; the fourth, the Shìjì jīng 世記經 (“Sūtra on the Record of the World”), is a long Buddhist cosmology with no direct Pāli counterpart. The translation was produced in Cháng’ān in Hóngshǐ 弘始 15 (413 CE) by the Kashmirian monk Buddhayaśas, with Zhú Fóniàn as Chinese-language assistant; the Daoshì 道士 (here in the early-medieval Buddhist sense of “religious professional,” i.e. a monk) 道含 Dàohán of the Qín state served as scribe (筆受). Modern scholarship is broadly agreed that the underlying Indic recension belongs to the Dharmaguptaka (法藏部) school — the same school whose Vinaya (the Sìfēn lǜ 四分律 KR6k0009) Buddhayaśas had translated immediately before — though the question is not entirely settled.

Prefaces

The work is prefaced by 僧肇 Shì Sēngzhào 釋僧肇 (384–414) of Cháng’ān, the closest disciple of 鳩摩羅什 Kumārajīva. The preface is the principal contemporary witness to the circumstances of the translation and is summarized here.

Sēngzhào opens with the doctrinal frame that the ineffable ultimate is conveyed only through the Buddha’s three-fold teaching — Vinaya (禁律) restrains body and speech, Sūtra (契經) clarifies good and evil, Abhidharma (法相) expounds the subtle. The Three Baskets (Tripiṭaka) thus arise from three responses to need but converge on a single goal. Within the Sūtra-piṭaka stand the four Āgama collections: the Zēngyī Āhán 增一阿含 (KR6a0126), the Zhōng Āhán 中阿含 (KR6a0026), the Zá Āhán 雜阿含 (KR6a0099), and “this Cháng Āhán, in four divisions and four recitations, comprising thirty discourses as a single work.” Āgama, Sēngzhào glosses, “in the language of Qín means Fǎguī 法歸 — that to which the Dharma resorts”: a deep store of every good and a grove of total retention (dhāraṇī). The collection is called Long (Cháng 長) because it opens out a “long course” (修途) and records what is far and distant.

The preface then sets the historical scene. The “Heavenly King of the Great Qín” — 姚興 Yáo Xìng (r. 394–416) — concerned that the subtle Word be obscured among foreign customs, charged the Right General, Imperial Envoy, Inspector of the Capital Region, Duke of Jìn, 姚爽 Yáo Shuǎng, with the patronage of the translation enterprise. In Hóngshǐ 12 (year gēngxū 庚戌 = 410 CE; the preface uses the archaizing cycle-name shàngzhāng yānmào 上章閹茂) the Kashmirian Tripiṭaka master Buddhayaśas was invited to bring forth one division of the Vinaya — the Sìfēn lǜ in 45 fascicles — completed in Hóngshǐ 14 (412); and in Hóngshǐ 15 (year guǐchǒu 癸丑 = 413, archaizing zhāoyáng chìfènchǒu 昭陽赤奮若) the Cháng Āhán itself was completed. The preface specifies that “the śramaṇa Fówàng 佛忘 of Liángzhōu translated, and the Daoshì Dàohán 道含 of the Qín state took dictation” (涼州沙門佛忘為譯，秦國道士道含筆受). The reading 佛忘 is a transmitted scribal slip for 佛念 (Zhú Fóniàn 竺佛念, the catalog’s named co-translator); the slip is preserved here as it stands in the source. Eminent monks were assembled at Yáo Shuǎng’s residence to collate the rendering, “paring away ornament and exalting plainness, striving to preserve the saintly intent.” Sēngzhào closes with a self-deprecating note — that he was admitted to the audience by good fortune and writes only to leave a record for later worthies.

Abstract

The Cháng Āhán jīng belongs to the second wave of āgama translations into Chinese under the Yáo-Qín 姚秦 court. Its translation is precisely datable to 413 CE on the testimony of Sēngzhào’s preface (above) and is corroborated by the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145, KR6s0084) and the Gāosēng zhuàn 高僧傳 (T2059, KR6r0052) biographies of Buddhayaśas (T50.333c–334b) and Zhú Fóniàn (T50.329a–b), which describe the collaboration: Buddhayaśas, having committed the Indic text to memory, recited it from memory, while Zhú Fóniàn, a native of Liángzhōu fluent in both Indic languages and Chinese, rendered it orally; the resulting Chinese was then taken down and edited by Dàohán and a circle of scholar-monks. The collaboration thus follows the standard Yáo-Qín “translation bureau” (譯場) protocol pioneered by Kumārajīva.

The school affiliation of the underlying Indic original has been a long-standing question. The dominant view, advanced in the modern period by Erich Frauwallner, André Bareau and others and reinforced more recently by Ernst Waldschmidt, Jens-Uwe Hartmann and Jin-il Chung, is that the Cháng Āhán’s Vorlage was a Dharmaguptaka recension: this fits the fact that Buddhayaśas had brought, and translated, the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya (《四分律》); it is also consistent with parallels found among the Bāmiyān / Schøyen Sanskrit Dīrgha-āgama fragments, which on independent grounds are assigned to a (Mūla-)Sarvāstivādin recension and which contrast with the Chinese collection both in selection and in arrangement. A minority view (Étienne Lamotte, then more cautiously Tilmann Vetter and others) proposed Mahīśāsaka or unknown affiliation; the Dharmaguptaka identification, however, is now the working consensus.

The structure of the received text differs from the Pāli Dīgha-nikāya both in the number of sutta (30 vs. 34) and in arrangement. Notable inclusions in the Chinese collection without close Pāli counterpart are the long cosmological Shìjì jīng 世記經 (the work’s fourth “division,” divided into twelve “chapters” 品 covering Jambudvīpa, Uttarakuru, the wheel-turning king, the hells, dragons and birds, the asuras, the Four Heavenly Kings, the Trāyastriṃśa heaven, the three calamities, the cosmic battles, the three intermediate kalpas, and the genealogy of the world); this Lokaprajñapti-type material is one of the most important Chinese sources for early Indian Buddhist cosmology. Conversely, several long Pāli suttas (e.g. the Mahāparinibbāna-sutta, the Sāmaññaphala, the Brahmajāla, the Aggañña, the Sigālovāda) have direct or close parallels in the Chinese collection (the Yóuxíng jīng 遊行經, Shāmén guǒ jīng 沙門果經, Fàndòng jīng 梵動經, Xiǎoyuán jīng 小緣經, Shànshēng jīng 善生經 respectively), so that the Cháng Āhán is among the most important non-Pāli sources for early Buddhist discourse traditions.

The text was incorporated into all major editions of the printed Buddhist canon; the Taishō Tripiṭaka prints it as T1 (vol. 1) on the basis of the Korean Tripiṭaka Koreana (高麗藏 / 麗) collated against the Sòng (宋), Yuán (元), Míng (明), Shèng (聖) and Old Sòng (磧砂) witnesses. No autograph or pre-Táng manuscript of the Chinese version survives.

Translations and research

  • Ichimura, Shōhei, tr. The Canonical Book of the Buddha’s Lengthy Discourses. 3 vols. Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai English Tripiṭaka Series. Berkeley: Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research, 2015–2018. — The first complete English translation of T1.
  • Hartmann, Jens-Uwe. “Further Remarks on the New Manuscript of the Dīrghāgama.” Journal of the International College for Advanced Buddhist Studies 5 (2002): 133–150. (And subsequent articles by Hartmann and by Klaus Wille on the Sanskrit Dīrghāgama manuscript from the Bāmiyān / Schøyen find, which is closely relevant to the Chinese collection’s text-historical context.)
  • Karashima, Seishi 辛嶋静志. A Glossary of Kumārajīva’s Translation of the Lotus Sutra and a series of related glossary studies (Tokyo: Soka University IRIAB, 1998– ). His comparative philological work on Yáo-Qín translation idiom directly informs the reading of the Cháng Āhán.
  • Anālayo, Bhikkhu. Comparative Studies in the Majjhima-nikāya, 2 vols., Dharma Drum Publishing, 2011, and numerous articles in the Fuyan Buddhist Studies and Journal of the Centre for Buddhist Studies, Sri Lanka — these range over āgama-nikāya parallels and frequently treat the Cháng Āhán.
  • Choong, Mun-keat. The Fundamental Teachings of Early Buddhism: A Comparative Study Based on the Sūtrāṅga Portion of the Pāli Saṃyutta-nikāya and the Chinese Saṃyuktāgama. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000. — Chiefly on the Saṃyuktāgama but methodologically programmatic for the Chinese-Pāli comparative study of all four Āgamas.
  • Weller, Friedrich. “Buddhas Letzte Wanderung.” Monumenta Serica 4 (1939–40): 40–84; 5 (1940): 141–207. — Classic study and partial translation of the Yóuxíng jīng / Mahāparinirvāṇa.
  • Bareau, André. Recherches sur la biographie du Buddha dans les Sūtrapiṭaka et les Vinayapiṭaka anciens. 3 vols. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1963–1995. — Repeatedly cites and analyses the Cháng Āhán’s Buddha-biographical material.
  • Pāsādika, Bhikkhu. “The Dīrgha-āgama Translation Project at Munich.” Journal of the Pali Text Society 35 (2018): 117–140 (and earlier reports). — Survey of the international project to edit and translate the Sanskrit Dīrghāgama manuscript, with constant reference to T1.
  • Frauwallner, Erich. The Earliest Vinaya and the Beginnings of Buddhist Literature. Serie Orientale Roma 8. Rome: IsMEO, 1956. — The classic argument situating the Cháng Āhán within Dharmaguptaka literature.

Other points of interest

  • The third division of the work, the Shìjì jīng 世記經, is in length and conception more like an independent cosmological treatise (lokaprajñapti) than a discourse-collection, and was excerpted and recompiled in later Chinese cosmological encyclopaedias such as the Fǎyuàn zhūlín 法苑珠林 (KR6s0002).
  • The transmitted preface preserves the slip 佛忘 for 佛念 (i.e. Zhú Fóniàn) — a well-known textual oddity already noted by 僧祐 Sēngyòu in the Chū sānzàng jì jí and treated by editors of the modern canon as an obvious scribal error rather than evidence for a different translator.
  • Sēngzhào’s preface uses the archaizing Ěryǎ 爾雅-style sexagenary cycle names (上章閹茂 for 庚戌, 昭陽赤奮若 for 癸丑) — a stylistic mannerism shared with other YáoQín prefaces and useful for dating purposes since the cycle names are unambiguous.

Graph View

Backlinks