Yǐyù jīng 蟻喻經
Sūtra of the Anthill Simile (the Vammīkasūtra; parallel to MN 23 Pāli Vammīka-sutta) by 施護 (Shīhù / Dānapāla, 譯)
About the work
The Yǐyù jīng is a single-fascicle Northern-Sòng translation of the Vammīkasūtra, the discourse on the riddle of the anthill: an anthill that smokes by night and burns by day, ploughed by a wise brahmin who finds successively a bolt, a frog, a fork-shaped object, a sieve, a tortoise, a butcher’s knife and a piece of meat, and finally a serpent — each of which the Buddha decodes as a phenomenon of the spiritual life (ignorance, anger, hesitation, the five hindrances, the body, sense-pleasures, the arhat’s ego). The Pāli parallel is MN 23 Vammīka-sutta. The Taishō head-note for T95 — ”[~M. 23, Vammīka sutta.]” — is one of the small number of Chinese-canonical sūtras for which the editors flagged a direct Pāli rather than Chinese parallel; remarkably, this is one of the few canonical sūtras for which there is no parallel in any of the Chinese Āgamas.
Prefaces
The text bears no preface or postface. The only paratext is the Sòng-court translator’s signature at the head: 「西天譯經三藏朝奉大夫試光祿卿傳法大師賜紫臣施護奉詔譯」.
Abstract
T95 is one of Shīhù’s series of Sòng-Institute renderings; the defensible bracket 982–1017 is recorded in the frontmatter. The Indic source is presumed lost. The text’s significance is enhanced by the absence of a parallel in any of the Chinese Āgamas — T95 is therefore the unique Chinese witness to a discourse otherwise preserved only in Pāli (MN 23) and (via Indic fragments) in some Sarvāstivāda materials. T95 thus provides the only Chinese-language access to one of the more memorable similes of the early Buddhist canon.
Translations and research
- Ñāṇamoli and Bodhi, tr. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995. — MN 23 Vammīka-sutta with notes.
- Anālayo, Bhikkhu. A Comparative Study of the Majjhima-nikāya, vol. 1. Taipei: Dharma Drum, 2011. — Discusses MN 23 and notes the absence of a Chinese-Āgama parallel.
Other points of interest
- T95 is one of the few cases in the Chinese canon where a discourse known from the Pāli has no Chinese-Āgama parallel, and is preserved in Chinese only through a late Sòng translation. The absence is itself doctrinally interesting — the discourse was apparently not part of the Madhyama-āgama lineage that descended to Saṃghadeva, but was preserved in some Indic line that reached the Sòng Institute through Shīhù’s manuscripts.
Links
- CBETA online text
- Shīhù DILA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (1000): CBETA, Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經, ed. Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭 (Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai / Daizō shuppan, 1924–1932) — dazangthings.nz