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人本欲生經

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Text ID
KR6a0014
Date
148–170
Dynasty
後漢

Rénběn yùshēng jīng 人本欲生經

Sūtra on the Origins and the Wish-to-Be-Reborn of Humans (the Mahānidānasūtra; parallel to Cháng Āhán sūtra 13, the Dàyuán fāngbiàn jīng 大緣方便經, to Madhyama-āgama sūtra 97, and to T52) by 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, 譯)

About the work

The Rénběn yùshēng jīng is a single-fascicle Eastern Hàn 後漢 translation of the Mahānidānasūtra, the great discourse on dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda) addressed by the Buddha to Ānanda. The Taishō head-note marks T14 as a parallel to T1[13] (the Dàyuán fāngbiàn jīng 大緣方便經 of the Cháng Āhán; some sources, more accurately, place this as sūtra 14 in the Cháng Āhán) and, more loosely, to Madhyama-āgama sūtra 97 (the Dà yīn jīng 大因經) and to T52 (the late-Sòng Dà shēngyì jīng 大生義經 by Shīhù, on essentially the same subject). The Pāli parallel is DN 15 Mahānidāna-sutta. T14 is the earliest of the four Chinese versions and the only one made before Kumārajīva.

The text opens at Kammāsadhamma 拘類國 in the Kuru country (here rendered “the place where the Kurus’ law-court is administered” 行拘類國法治處). Ānanda, in solitary retreat at night, reflects on a saying of the Buddha that paṭicca-samuppāda is “profound and appears profound, yet seems easy to grasp” (是意微妙本，生死亦微妙中微妙，但為分明易現), and, in the night’s first hours, approaches the Buddha to ask why something so subtle should appear so clear. The body of the text is the Buddha’s reply: the famous Mahānidāna exposition of dependent origination, traversed forwards and backwards through its links — birth, becoming, grasping, craving, feeling, contact, the six sense-bases, name-and-form, consciousness, the three feelings, the seven stations of consciousness, the eight liberations, and so on.

Prefaces

The text bears no preface or postface. The only paratext is the canonical translator’s signature at the head: 「後漢安息三藏安世高譯」 — “translated by Ān Shìgāo, Tripiṭaka master of the country of Anxi (Parthia), under the Later Hàn.” The byline pattern is identical to that of T13.

Abstract

T14, like T13, was produced during Ān Shìgāo’s Luòyáng period (148–170 CE), and that bracket is recorded in the frontmatter. It is one of the earliest Chinese translations of an Āgama discourse to survive in identifiable form. The Indic source is presumed lost; comparative work suggests a (proto-)Sarvāstivāda affiliation typical of the Parthian–Central Asian milieu of An Shigao’s Buddhism.

The text’s principal philological interest lies in its rendering of the doctrine of dependent origination. T14’s vocabulary is markedly archaic — pratītyasamutpāda is not yet rendered by the later standard 緣起 / 因緣, but is paraphrased (“人本欲生” — “the original wish-to-be-reborn of humans” — itself an interpretive gloss); vijñāna is 識, nāma-rūpa is 名色, saṃskāra is rendered variously and not yet standardised. Together with T13 and other Ān-Shìgāo translations, T14 is one of the cornerstone texts for the reconstruction of the early-Hàn Buddhist Chinese register.

T14 was the subject of one of the earliest Chinese Buddhist commentaries: the now-lost Rénběn yùshēng jīng zhù 人本欲生經注 by 道安 Dào’ān (312–385), one of the most important pre-Kumārajīva exegetes; fragments of Dào’ān’s commentary survive embedded in his Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 prefaces (T2145, KR6s0084). This makes T14 not merely an early translation but also one of the texts on which the early Chinese exegetical tradition was built.

The Taishō head-note flag “[No. 1(13)]” appears to give the Cháng āhán number; in the Buddhayaśas / Zhú Fóniàn version of the Cháng āhán the Mahānidāna parallel is in fact the 13th sūtra under one common reckoning, the 14th under another (depending on whether the Sānjù jīng 三聚經 is counted separately from the Dàyuán fāngbiàn jīng). The ambiguity is reflected variably in the modern reference works.

Translations and research

  • Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han 東漢 and Three Kingdoms 三國 Periods. Tokyo: IRIAB, 2008. — Standard modern survey of An Shigao’s translation corpus, with treatment of T14.
  • Zürcher, Erik. “A New Look at the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Texts.” In From Benares to Beijing, edited by Koichi Shinohara and Gregory Schopen, 277–304. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1991.
  • Bodhi, Bhikkhu. The Great Discourse on Causation: The Mahānidāna Sutta and Its Commentaries. Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1984. — English translation and study of the Pāli parallel.
  • Anālayo, Bhikkhu. “The Treatment of Saṅkhāra in Paṭicca-samuppāda Formulations and the Question of Saṅkhāra-anāgāmin.” Indo-Iranian Journal 56 (2013): 217–269. — Comparative discussion that includes T14 alongside DN 15 and T1.
  • For Dào’ān’s lost commentary on T14, see Zürcher’s Buddhist Conquest of China (1959 / 2007), and the prefaces collected in 僧祐 Sēngyòu, Chū sānzàng jì jí (KR6s0084, T2145).

Other points of interest

  • The title 人本欲生 (“the original wish-to-be-reborn of humans”) is one of the most distinctive of An Shigao’s interpretive renderings, and is unique to T14 in the Chinese canon. Later renderings of the same Indic title would prefer 緣 (e.g. T1[13] Dàyuán fāngbiàn jīng; T26[97] Dà yīn jīng; T52 Dà shēng-yì jīng). T14’s title therefore has independent value as evidence for the early-Hàn semantic understanding of paṭicca-samuppāda.

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