Tàizǐ ruìyìng běnqǐ jīng 太子瑞應本起經
Sūtra of the Auspicious-Marks Origins of the Prince by 支謙 (Zhī Qiān, 譯)
About the work
A two-fascicle Wú-period Buddha-biography sūtra retelling the life of Prince Siddhārtha — his past lives, descent, birth, and youth — in stylistically polished Chinese. Translated by 支謙 Zhī Qiān. Signature: 「吳月支優婆塞支謙譯」. The work is one of the early Buddha-biography Chinese sūtras, paralleling T184 and T196 from the Eastern-Hàn collaborative-translation circle.
Prefaces
No preface or postface; only the canonical translator-signature.
Abstract
T185 is one of Zhī Qiān’s most stylistically refined translations and is among the earliest Wú-period Chinese Buddha-biographies. Its title 瑞應 (“auspicious-marks corresponding”) refers to the cosmic auspicious signs that accompany the Buddha’s descent and birth — the thirty-two marks of the great man, dreams of his mother Māyā, the trembling of the earth, and so on — which form the structural core of the bodhisattva-descent narrative.
The Indic source is unidentified but draws on Lalitavistara-class material, possibly representing an early form of that text or a parallel Mahāsāṃghika-related Buddha-biography. The work was foundational in the Wú-period reception of Buddha-biography literature and was widely cited in later medieval Chinese Buddhist hagiography. Modern scholarship (Nakamura; Karetzky) treats T185 alongside T184 as the principal pre-Kumārajīva Chinese Buddha-biography corpus.
Translations and research
- Karetzky, Patricia E. The Life of the Buddha: Ancient Scriptural and Pictorial Traditions. Lanham: University Press of America, 1992.
- Mizuno Kōgen 水野弘元. Bukkyō no genten 仏教の原典. Tokyo: Daihōrin-kaku, 1990.
- Nakamura Hajime 中村元. Gotama Buddha. Los Angeles: Buddhist Books International, 2000.
Links
- CBETA online text
- Zhī Qiān (支謙) DILA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (245): Sakaino Kōyō 境野黄洋. Shina Bukkyō seishi 支那佛教精史. Tokyo: Sakaino Kōyō Hakushi Ikō Kankōkai, 1935, 117–119 — dazangthings.nz