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 Liùdù jí jīng (T152) by 康僧會 Kāng Sēnghuì and the bodhisattva-jātaka anthology 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
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- 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