Shēng jīng 生經
Sūtra of Births (Jātakas) by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
A five-fascicle jātaka anthology in 55 narratives translated by Dharmarakṣa 竺法護 (*Dharmarakṣa, c. 233–c. 311) of the Western Jìn 西晉 — the most prolific translator of the late third / early fourth century, whose corpus encompasses almost the entire surviving early-medieval Chinese rendering of Mahāyāna sūtra literature prior to Kumārajīva. The Indic title jātaka / jātaka-kathā underlies the Chinese rendering 生經 (“Sūtras of Births”). The translator’s signature reads 「西晉三藏竺法護譯」.
Prefaces
The text bears no preface or postface in the source file; the only paratext is the canonical translator-signature. Each of the 55 narratives is titled separately as 佛說 X 經 (“Sūtra spoken by the Buddha on X”), giving the impression of a curated anthology rather than a translation of a single Indic jātaka recension.
Abstract
T154 is the principal Western-Jìn-period Chinese jātaka collection and complements the Wú-period anthology [[KR6b0001|Liùdù jí jīng (T152)]] by 康僧會 Kāng Sēnghuì and the bodhisattva-jātaka anthology [[KR6b0002|Púsà běnyuán jīng (T153)]] by 支謙 Zhī Qiān. The colophons in the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145, juan 7) record that the translation was completed in the Tàikāng 太康 6 year (= 285 CE) at Cháng’ān, with 聶承遠 Niè Chéngyuǎn acting as scribe — one of several Dharmarakṣa-translation colophons of that year. Modern scholarship (Boucher 2006; Nattier 2008) treats T154 as a securely attested Dharmarakṣa translation, in part because it shows the characteristic vocabulary and syntactic profile of his late-third-century Cháng’ān workshop output.
The 55 narratives draw on multiple Indic jātaka sources without obvious correspondence to any single surviving Indic recension; some have parallels in the Pāli Jātaka-collection, others in Sarvāstivāda Vinaya narratives or in the Mahāvastu. The Chinese compilation may reflect Dharmarakṣa’s translation of a now-lost Sarvāstivāda Jātaka-mālā compilation, or a curated selection from multiple manuscript sources. The work is doctrinally important as a Western-Jìn witness for early Chinese Buddhist narrative pedagogy and stands behind much of the jātaka material later cited in the Six-Dynasties zhì-guài 志怪 narrative literature.
Translations and research
- Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna: A Study and Translation of the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā-sūtra. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. (Discusses Dharmarakṣa’s translation procedure and corpus, including T154.)
- Boucher, Daniel. “Dharmarakṣa and the Transmission of Buddhism to China.” Asia Major (third series) 19/1–2 (2006): 13–37.
- Chavannes, Édouard. Cinq cents contes et apologues extraits du Tripitaka chinois. Paris: Leroux, 1910–1934. (Translations of selected T154 narratives.)
- Nakamura Hajime 中村元 (ed.). Jātaka zenshū. Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1982–1991. (Comparative apparatus.)
- Karashima Seishi 辛島静志. “Some Lexical Notes on Dharmarakṣa’s Translation of Saṅghāṭa-sūtra.” Various articles in ARIRIAB; the lexical methodology is applicable to T154.
Other points of interest
T154’s narrative no. 1 (Nàlài jīng 那賴經) survives nowhere else in the Chinese canon and is one of the earliest jātakas in Chinese to feature a brāhmaṇa protagonist sympathetically — a notable departure from the more common adversarial brāhmaṇa characterisation in Hàn-period translations.
Links
- CBETA online text
- Dharmarakṣa (竺法護) DILA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (300): Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經 (CBETA reference index) — dazangthings.nz