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賢愚經

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Text ID
KR6b0059
Date
445–459
Dynasty
元魏

Xiányú jīng 賢愚經

Damamūka-nidāna-sūtra (Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish) by 慧覺 (Huìjué, 等譯)

About the work

A thirteen-fascicle avadāna-anthology of 69 narratives illustrating the contrasting karmic destinies of the wise (xián 賢) and the foolish (yú 愚). Translated by 慧覺 Huìjué and his Liángzhōu colleagues at Gāochāng 高昌 in the Northern Wèi. Signature: 「元魏涼州沙門慧覺等在高昌郡譯」. The signature’s “in Gāochāng commandery” (在高昌郡) is one of the few canonical signatures specifying the place of translation.

Prefaces

No preface or postface in the source file; only the canonical translator-signature.

Abstract

T202 is one of the most-influential avadāna-anthologies in the Chinese canon. The Chū sānzàng jì jí records the work’s formation: a delegation of eight śramaṇas from Liángzhōu travelled to Khotan c. 445 CE to attend the pañcavārṣika (“five-year festival”) at the imperial Buddhist court there, and during the festival they heard the avadāna-narratives recited by Khotanese masters; on their return they collated and translated their notes at Gāochāng under Huìjué’s leadership during the Tài’ān 太安 era (455–459) of Wénchéngdì’s reign. The work is thus an unusual case of a jīng compiled directly from oral-discourse notes, rather than from a prior written Indic source.

The anthology’s structure is dyadic: each narrative pairs a xián (a wise being whose karmic actions lead to liberation or supreme good) with a yú (a foolish being whose actions lead to suffering). The work’s narrative flexibility and its plain, narrative-driven Chinese register made it widely received in popular Buddhist literature; it was extensively cited in the biànwén 變文 transformation-text tradition at Dūnhuáng and translated into Tibetan as the mDzangs blun — one of the foundational texts of the Tibetan Buddhist literary canon.

Translations and research

  • Mair, Victor H. “The Linguistic and Textual Antecedents of The Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish.” Sino-Platonic Papers 38 (1993).
  • Schmidt, I. J. Der Weise und der Tor: Aus dem tibetischen übersetzt. St. Petersburg: Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1843. (German translation of the Tibetan mDzangs blun, with notes on T202.)
  • Frye, Stanley, trans. Sutra of the Wise and the Foolish. Dharamsala: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1981.
  • Mair, Victor H. T’ang Transformation Texts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1989. (Discusses the biànwén reception of T202 narratives at Dūnhuáng.)
  • Ohnuma, Reiko. Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. (Discussion of T202’s bodhisattva self-sacrifice narratives.)

Other points of interest

T202 was translated into Tibetan in the early-imperial period (8th–9th c.) as the mDzangs blun zhes bya ba’i mdo — “Sūtra Called ‘The Wise and the Foolish’” — and became one of the foundational narrative texts of Tibetan Buddhism, frequently excerpted in monastic education. The Tibetan version, however, includes some narratives not found in T202, suggesting that the Tibetan translators worked from a Khotanese or Sanskrit recension parallel to but distinct from the Chinese.

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