Kǔyìn yīnshì jīng 苦陰因事經
Sūtra on the Causes of the Mass of Suffering (the Cūḷa-dukkhakkhandha-sūtra; parallel to Madhyama-āgama sūtra 100, the Kǔyìn jīng 苦陰經, and to Shì Mónán běnsìzǐ jīng 釋摩男本四子經 (KR6a0054)) by 法炬 (Fǎjù, 譯)
About the work
The Kǔyìn yīnshì jīng is a single-fascicle Western Jìn 西晉 translation of the Cūḷa-dukkhakkhandha-sūtra, a doublet of T54 (Zhī Qiān). Both texts render essentially the same Indic Vorlage, but T55 is in Fǎjù’s late-Western-Jìn idiom (use of 婆迦婆 — a slight orthographic variant of 婆伽婆 Pójiāpó — for Bhagavat; standardised proper-name transcriptions). The Pāli parallel is MN 14 Cūḷa-dukkhakkhandha-sutta; the Chinese parallels are T26[100] and T54.
The text opens “in the Śākyan country” (釋䩭底 = Sakyesu with the gloss 剎帝隸種也 “kṣatriya-class”, supplied by the translator) at Kapilavastu, with Mahānāman approaching the Buddha as in T54. The body of the discourse is the same three-fold analysis of kāma.
Prefaces
The text bears no preface or postface. The only paratext is the Western-Jìn translator’s signature at the head: 「西晉沙門法炬譯」.
Abstract
T55 was produced during Fǎjù’s Western Jìn translation period (290–311 CE), recorded in the frontmatter. The Indic source is presumed lost. The principal scholarly interest of T55 lies in the comparison with T54 — the two together provide a rare example of an early-Chinese translation-doublet for which we have witnesses both from the Three-Kingdoms Wú (T54, c. 222–253) and from the late Western Jìn (T55, c. 290–311), allowing the diachronic study of how the same Indic source was rendered into Chinese over a span of fifty to ninety years by translators working in distinct idioms.
Translations and research
- See KR6a0054 for the comparative Cūḷa-dukkhakkhandha literature.
Links
- CBETA online text
- Fǎjù DILA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (299, 390): Féi Chángfáng 費長房, Lìdài sānbǎo jì (LDSBJ) 歷代三寶紀 T2034 (KR6r0011), XLIX 67c18 — dazangthings.nz