Fó shuō héngshuǐ liúshù jīng 佛說恒水流樹經
Sūtra of the Tree Floating in the Ganges (parallel to Saṃyukta-āgama sūtra 1248) by 求那跋陀羅 (Guṇabhadra, 譯)
About the work
The Fó shuō héng-shuǐ liú-shù jīng is a single-fascicle Liú-Sòng 劉宋 translation by Guṇabhadra of a discourse using the simile of a tree floating in the Ganges to illustrate the disciplined Buddhist disciple, who is carried by the current of the Dharma neither toward this bank nor toward the far bank but to the great sea of nirvāṇa. The Pāli parallel is SN 35.241 (the Dāru-kkhandhopama-sutta); the Chinese parallel is T99[1248], which T125 partially overlaps with, although they differ in detail.
T125 is unusual in this division of the catalogue: it is not preserved in the Taishō Tripiṭaka, but only in the Fangshan stone scriptures (房山石經), the great medieval Buddhist text-corpus carved on stone tablets at the Yúnjū-sì 雲居寺 in Fángshān 房山 (Beijing area) from the early Suí period onward. CBETA digitises the Fangshan scriptures as the F-series; T125’s CBETA id is therefore F03n0089 rather than a Taishō T-id.
Prefaces
The text bears no preface or postface. The only paratext is the Fangshan-edition rubric at the head: 「佛說恒水流樹經一卷」 (and identifies Guṇabhadra as the translator from the catalogue meta).
Abstract
The text was conventionally produced by Guṇabhadra during his Liú-Sòng career (435–468 CE), recorded in the frontmatter, although the Fangshan-only transmission means the conventional ascription has not been thoroughly cross-checked against early catalogues. The Indic source is presumed lost.
Translations and research
- No dedicated study of T125 specifically has been located. For the Fangshan stone scriptures generally:
- Lin, Wei-cheng. Building a Sacred Mountain: The Buddhist Architecture of China’s Mount Wutai. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014. — Background on stone-scripture culture.
- Ledderose, Lothar. “Carving Sutras into Stone before the Catastrophe: The Inscription of 1118 at Cloud Dwelling Monastery near Beijing.” Proceedings of the British Academy 125 (2004): 381–454.
Other points of interest
- T125 is one of the very few KR6a entries that depends on the Fangshan stone scriptures rather than the Taishō. Its CBETA id F03n0089 reflects that — and is one of the rare cases in this division where the cbetaid frontmatter field uses the F-prefix rather than the T-prefix.
Links
- CBETA F03n0089 CBETA online text
- Kanseki DB
- 求那跋陀羅 DILA