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佛說阿含正行經

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Text ID
KR6a0156
Date
148–170
Dynasty
後漢

Fóshuō Āhán zhèngxíng jīng 佛說阿含正行經

Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Right Practice of the Āgama by 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, 譯)

About the work

A short single-fascicle Eastern-Hàn translation framed as a Jetavana discourse to the bhikṣus. The Buddha enumerates the five “thieves” (五賊 — form, sensation, conception, birth-and-death, consciousness) that drag the unawakened into the evil destinies; the twelve nidānas of dependent origination; the four meditative smṛti-objects (body, sensation, mind, dharmas); and the five precepts. The discourse closes with the simile of holding the mind firm “like a four-square stone in the courtyard, unmoved by rain, sun, or wind” (持心當如四方石), and with the metaphor of the mind as flowing water carrying twigs that never look back. Five hundred śramaṇas attain arhatship at its conclusion.

Prefaces

The text bears no preface or postface. The only paratext is the canonical translator’s signature at the head: 「後漢安息國三藏安世高譯」.

Abstract

T151 is one of the Āgama-related shorter sūtras attributed to Ān Shìgāo’s Luòyáng workshop (148–170 CE). Like much of his early-Hàn output, the work is short, doctrinally syncretistic (a Jetavana frame, but with content closer to an Abhidharma summary of meditative categories than to a single received Indic recension), and lexically archaic — the cluster 色 / 痛痒 / 思想 / 生死 / 識 used here for the five skandhas is a hallmark of the earliest Chinese Buddhist register. No surviving Indic parallel has been securely identified; modern scholarship (Harrison; Nattier 2008) treats it as one of the more securely Ān-Shìgāo-attributed shorter Āgama-style discourses on the basis of vocabulary and syntactic features. The Chū sānzàng jì jí lists an Āhán zhèngxíng jīng among Ān Shìgāo’s 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, Soka University, 2008. (Comprehensive survey of Ān Shìgāo’s corpus and its attribution problems; treats T151 in the Eastern-Hàn translator inventory.)
  • Zürcher, Erik. “A New Look at the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Texts.” In From Benares to Beijing: Essays on Buddhism and Chinese Religion, ed. Koichi Shinohara and Gregory Schopen, 277–304. Oakville: Mosaic Press, 1991.

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