Púsà běnxíng jīng 菩薩本行經
Sūtra of the Bodhisattva’s Past Practice by 失譯 (anonymous translator, 譯; appended to the Eastern-Jìn register)
About the work
A three-fascicle bodhisattva-jātaka anthology framed as a discourse to Ānanda on the perils of indolence and the model of the Bodhisattva’s diligence (vīrya) across his past lives. The opening sequence establishes the moral: “Indolence is the burden of all conduct: in the householder, indolence means clothing and food fail and one’s livelihood collapses; in the renunciant, indolence means one cannot escape saṃsāra…”; the body of the work follows with a series of jātaka episodes illustrating the bodhisattva’s excellence in vīrya and the other perfections.
The translator’s name is lost; the catalog signature reads 「失譯人名今附東晉錄」 (“translator’s name lost; presently appended to the Eastern-Jìn register”). The Eastern-Jìn dating-bracket (317–420) is therefore a register-attribution rather than documented evidence.
Prefaces
The text bears no preface or postface in the source file; the only paratext is the canonical signature 「失譯人名今附東晉錄」.
Abstract
T155 is one of the more substantial of the anonymous bodhisattva-jātaka anthologies in the Taishō. Its register-attribution to the Eastern Jìn is by Fèi Chángfáng’s Lìdài sānbǎo jì 歷代三寶紀 (597), where it is listed under the lost-translator section of the Eastern-Jìn translations; modern scholarship (Mizuno; Storch) accepts the Eastern-Jìn dating as broadly plausible on linguistic grounds (vocabulary intermediate between Dharmarakṣa and Kumārajīva), but no narrower window can be defended without further documentary evidence. The work shares many narrative episodes with [[KR6b0001|Liùdù jí jīng (T152)]] and [[KR6b0003|Shēng jīng (T154)]] but the inter-textual relationships are complex; modern scholarship treats the three texts as drawing variously on a common pool of Indic jātaka material and on each other.
Translations and research
- Mizuno Kōgen 水野弘元. Bukkyō no genten 仏教の原典. Tokyo: Daihōrin-kaku, 1990. (Discusses T155 in the early-Chinese jātaka corpus.)
- Storch, Tanya. The History of Chinese Buddhist Bibliography: Censorship and Transformation of the Tripitaka. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2014.
- Hóbógirin 法寶義林. Various entries on individual jātaka-narratives in T155.
Links
- CBETA online text
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (420): Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經 (CBETA reference index) — dazangthings.nz