Dàfāngbiàn fó bào’ēn jīng 大方便佛報恩經
Sūtra on the Buddha’s Great Skilful-Means Repayment of Kindness by 失譯 (anonymous translator, 譯; appended to the Hàn register)
About the work
A seven-fascicle Mahāyāna jātaka / avadāna anthology framed as a discourse on filial piety and gratitude — the title’s “bào ēn” 報恩 (“repayment of kindness”) signals the work’s central thematic claim, that the Buddha’s previous lives are organised around the ethical principle of repaying parental, royal, teacherly, and saṃgha benefactions. The signature reads 「失譯人名在後漢錄」 (“translator’s name lost; in the Hàn register”). The text is structured by a xù-pǐn 序品 (introduction) followed by chapters on the Buddha’s repayment of his mother’s kindness (Mǔ-bào’ēn-pǐn 母報恩品), filial piety toward father (Fù-bào’ēn-pǐn), the bodhisattva’s perfection of patience under filial affliction, and so on.
Prefaces
The text bears no preface or postface in the source file; the only paratext is the canonical signature 「失譯人名在後漢錄」 (“translator’s name lost; in the Hàn register”).
Abstract
T156 has historically been classed in Chinese catalogs as a Hàn-period (25–220 CE) anonymous translation, but this attribution is now widely doubted: the doctrinal content (mature Mahāyāna upāya-doctrine, fully-developed bodhisattva-pāramitā framework, sinicised filial-piety frame), vocabulary, and style place the actual translation considerably later — most modern scholarship (Yoshikawa; Kuo Liying; Cole) places it tentatively between the late fourth and early fifth century, and there are arguments (most strongly Cole 1998) for treating it as in part a Chinese-composed apocryphon (偽經) using the canonical jātaka genre to articulate a distinctively Chinese Buddhist filial-piety doctrine. The work is one of the principal scriptural sources for the East-Asian Buddhist filial-piety tradition that culminates in the Tang-period Yúlánpén jīng 盂蘭盆經 (KR6i0364) cult and beyond.
The thematic emphasis on bào ēn — filial debt and its repayment — is the text’s distinctive contribution. The bodhisattva’s previous-life acts of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice for parents, sovereigns, teachers, and the saṃgha are organised under this rubric and served as the canonical scriptural warrant for the East-Asian Buddhist accommodation of Confucian filial-piety values.
Translations and research
- Cole, Alan. Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. (Sustained treatment of T156 and its filial-piety doctrine; argues for a partly Chinese-apocryphal status.)
- Kuo Liying 郭麗英. “Yúlán-pén yǔ Bào’ēn jīng” 盂蘭盆與報恩經. Hsüeh-shù chí-k’ān 1992.
- Yoshikawa Tadao 吉川忠夫. Bukkyō no Chūgoku-teki tenkai 仏教の中国的展開. Tokyo: Iwanami, 1985. (Section on T156.)
- Knapp, Keith N. Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
Other points of interest
T156 has been one of the principal pieces of evidence in the long-running scholarly debate about the boundary between “translated” and “Chinese-composed” Mahāyāna scripture in the early-medieval canon: the dating discrepancy between catalog attribution (Hàn) and linguistic evidence (Eastern-Jìn / LiúSòng) is unusually large, and the work presents in unusually pure form the synthesis of bodhisattva-ethics with Confucian filial-piety doctrine that is conventionally taken as a sinicising overlay.
Links
- CBETA online text
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (317, 420): Shi Guanghui 史光輝. “Cong yuyan jiaodu kan Da fangbian Fo bao’en jing de fanyi niandai” 從語言角度看《大方便佛報恩經》的翻譯時代. Gu Hanyu yanjiu 古漢語研究 3 (2009): 44–50 — dazangthings.nz