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雜阿含經

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Text ID
KR6a0099
Date
435–443
Dynasty
劉宋

Zá Āhán jīng 雜阿含經

The Connected Discourses (Saṃyukta-āgama) by 求那跋陀羅 (Guṇabhadra, 譯)

About the work

The Zá Āhán jīng, in 50 fascicles, is the Chinese version of the Saṃyukta-āgama — the third of the four Indic-language āgama collections that, on the northern side of the transmission, correspond to the Pāli Saṃyutta-nikāya. It contains some 1,362 sūtras (compared to about 2,889 in the Pāli) organised into “connected sets” (saṃyukta) by topic, by character, or by frame: the great Saṃyukta on the five aggregates, on the six sense-bases, on dependent origination, on the path-factors, on individual disciples (Sāriputta, Mahāmoggallāna, Mahākāśyapa, etc.), on encounters with Māra, on encounters with the various gods, and so on. Modern scholarship (Yìnshùn 印順, Bingenheimer, Anālayo, Choong) is unanimous that the underlying Indic recension belongs to the (Mūla-)Sarvāstivāda 說一切有部 school — the same school whose Vinaya tradition predominates in the Sanskrit Buddhist manuscripts of Central Asia.

The translation was produced by the Indian master Guṇabhadra 求那跋陀羅 (394–468) at the Liú-Sòng capital Jiànkāng, with the imperial monk Bǎoyún 寶雲 as his Chinese-language collaborator and Fǎyǒng 法勇 as scribe. Although the precise date of completion is not fixed in the early sources — the Gāosēng zhuàn records only that the translation was begun “shortly after Guṇabhadra’s arrival” in 435 — modern scholarship places its completion in the early 440s, with a defensible bracket of 435–443 CE recorded in the frontmatter.

The fascicle ordering of T99 as transmitted is famously disordered: the original work was in 50 fascicles, but they have been re-arranged in the medieval canonical tradition such that fascicles 23 and 25 are duplicate copies of two non-Saṃyukta texts (the Aśokarāja-sūtra and the Aśokarāja-avadāna) inserted into the wrong place, and other fascicles have been displaced. The reconstruction of the original ordering is the principal task of modern Zá Āhán philology, on which Yìnshùn and Bingenheimer have done foundational work.

Prefaces

T99 has no surviving original preface, although Sēngyòu’s Chū sānzàng jì jí (T2145, 13a–b) preserves a brief catalogue-style note on Guṇabhadra’s translation activity at Jiànkāng. The opening verses of fascicle 1 — the Nidāna (因緣) of the Saṃyukta — function as an internal preface, summarising the fivefold organisation of the canonical material.

Abstract

The Saṃyukta-āgama is, in Buddhist scholarship, the most important of the four āgamas for the systematic doctrinal exposition of early Buddhism: where the Cháng āhán (T1) is foundational for narrative-frame discourses, and the Zhōng āhán (T26) for character-and-context discourses, the Saṃyukta is foundational for the systematic doctrinal teaching — the Khandha-saṃyutta, Saḷāyatana-saṃyutta, Nidāna-saṃyutta, Sacca-saṃyutta, and the Mahāvagga on the path. The four foundations of mindfulness, the seven bodhyaṅgas, the eightfold path — all the foundational doctrinal categories of pre-Mahāyāna Buddhism find their fullest discursive elaboration in the Saṃyukta.

T99’s distinctive feature is its preservation of the (Mūla-)Sarvāstivāda recension of the Saṃyukta; the Pāli Saṃyutta-nikāya is Theravāda, and the partial Sanskrit Saṃyukta (the so-called Turfan Saṃyukta-fragments) edited by Tripāṭhī, Hosoda, and Enomoto belongs to the same Sarvāstivāda lineage as T99, providing direct comparative material for those sūtras where the Sanskrit fragments survive. The remarkable result is that, for many doctrinal-foundational sūtras of early Buddhism, T99 is the only complete Sarvāstivāda witness, with the Pāli being the only complete Theravāda witness — making T99 / Saṃyutta-nikāya together the principal foundation of all comparative Saṃyukta-āgama studies.

There exists also a separate “variant” Saṃyukta-āgama in 16 fascicles (T100), of unknown school affiliation but probably Mahīśāsaka-related, and a still shorter T101 Zá āhán jīng in 1 fascicle (anonymous, very early). The three together — T99 (50 fasc., Sarvāstivāda), T100 (16 fasc., Mahīśāsaka?), T101 (1 fasc., anonymous) — provide the three Chinese windows on the Indic Saṃyukta tradition.

The translation idiom of T99 is the polished Liú-Sòng register characteristic of Guṇabhadra’s circle. The proper-name transcriptions are post-Saṃghadeva and pre-Xuánzàng; the doctrinal vocabulary is fully standardised, and many technical terms in T99 would become canonical for subsequent Chinese-Buddhist usage.

Translations and research

  • Yìnshùn 印順. Zá-āhán jīng lùnhuì biān 雜阿含經論會編 [The Saṃyukta-āgama with the Yogācārabhūmi-commentary, edited together]. 3 vols. Taipei: Zhèng-wén, 1983. — Foundational Chinese reconstruction of the original fascicle-order, integrating T99 with the Saṃyukta-āgama-bhāṣya portion of the Yogācārabhūmi. Standard reference work.
  • Bingenheimer, Marcus. Studies in Āgama Literature: With Special Reference to the Shorter Chinese Saṃyuktāgama. Taipei: Shin Wen Feng Print Co., 2011.
  • Bingenheimer, Marcus, Bhikkhu Anālayo, and Roderick S. Bucknell, eds., tr. The Saṃyukta-āgama Translation Project (in progress, BDK America). — The first English translation of T99.
  • 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.
  • Anālayo, Bhikkhu. Saṃyukta-āgama Studies. Taipei: Dharma Drum, 2015.
  • Hosoda, Noriaki 細田典明. Sanskrit Manuscripts of the Saṃyuktāgama from the Gilgit-Bāmiyān Region. Various articles.
  • Tripāṭhī, Chandra-bhāl. Fünfundzwanzig Sūtras des Nidānasaṃyukta. Sanskrittexte aus den Turfanfunden 8. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1962. — Critical edition of Sanskrit Nidāna-saṃyukta fragments with comparative reference to T99.
  • Enomoto, Fumio 榎本文雄. Sanskrit Fragments from the Saṃyuktāgama. Various editions.
  • Bhikkhu Bodhi, tr. The Connected Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Saṃyutta-nikāya. 2 vols. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2000. — The Pāli parallel.

Other points of interest

  • The disorder of T99’s fascicles (with fascicles 23 and 25 being mislocated Aśokarāja material from a separate translation) is one of the most-discussed textual problems in the Chinese canon. Yìnshùn’s reconstruction of the original ordering, broadly accepted, has been used by all subsequent translators.
  • T99 is the principal Chinese source for the doctrine of the five aggregates, the six sense-bases, dependent origination, and the foundations of mindfulness — the doctrinal cornerstones of Buddhist analysis.

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