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阿含口解十二因緣經

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Text ID
KR6a0160
Date
181–188
Dynasty
後漢

Āhán kǒujiě shí’èr yīnyuán jīng 阿含口解十二因緣經

Sūtra on the Oral Exposition from the Āgamas of the Twelve Causes-and-Conditions by 安玄 (Ān Xuán, 譯) and 嚴佛調 (Yán Fódiào, 譯)

About the work

A short single-fascicle Eastern-Hàn discourse on the twelve nidānas of dependent arising (十二因緣), opening with their enumeration and proceeding to a layered fourfold typology: each nidāna is correlated to a body-internal and a body-external aspect (inner avidyā / outer “earth”, inner saṃskāra / outer “water”, and so on), and to four “non-permanences” (四非常) that bring about the cessation of the chain. The translators’ signature names them as Ān Xuán 安玄, the Parthian upāsaka-tribune (都尉, lay rank), and Yán Fódiào 嚴佛調, the Hàn-Chinese śramaṇa — one of the earliest documented translation collaborations between a foreign lay master and a native-born monastic.

Prefaces

The text bears no preface or postface. The only paratext is the canonical translator-signature: 「後漢安息優婆塞都尉安玄共沙門嚴佛調譯」.

Abstract

T1508 is conventionally dated to the second half of the 180s CE, when Ān Xuán and Yán Fódiào collaborated at Luòyáng during Hàn Língdì 漢靈帝’s reign (168–189), most concretely during the Guānghé 光和–Zhōngpíng 中平 era; the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145, juan 13) records their joint translation of the Ugraparipṛcchā (= [[KR6f0014|Fǎjìng jīng 法鏡經]], T322) in this period. The narrower 181–188 bracket given here follows the modern critical literature (Zürcher, Buddhist Conquest of China; Nattier, Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations) for the documented joint workshop activity of these two translators. The pair are central figures in early Chinese Buddhist intellectual history: Ān Xuán was a Parthian (安息) lay official resident in Luòyáng, holding a tribune-rank (都尉) under Hàn military administration; Yán Fódiào is one of the earliest named native-born Chinese śramaṇa translators and is sometimes (e.g. by Tāng Yòngtóng) credited as the first Hàn Chinese fully ordained in the Buddhist saṃgha.

The text’s vocabulary is in the same archaic Hàn-Buddhist register as the Ān Shìgāo corpus — liù shuāi 六衰 for the six sense-bases, suǒgēng 所更 for sparśa, suǒzuò xíng 所作行 for saṃskāra — and modern attribution scholarship treats T1508 as a securely attested second-century translation, though its actual relationship to the Ān-Shìgāo workshop output (with which it shares much vocabulary) remains debated. The doctrinal innovation of correlating the twelve nidānas to inner/outer aspects and to four cessation-techniques is unusual and may reflect a hybrid Sarvāstivāda–Sāmkhya doxographical layer in the Indic original.

Translations and research

  • Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Leiden: Brill, 1959 (3rd ed. 2007). (Sections on Ān Xuán and Yán Fódiào.)
  • Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: IRIAB, Soka University, 2008.
  • Tang Yongtong 湯用彤. Hàn Wèi Liǎng-Jìn Nánběicháo Fójiào shǐ 漢魏兩晉南北朝佛教史. Shanghai: Shangwu, 1938. Chapters on Ān Shìgāo’s circle and the early Luòyáng translation school.

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