Yī yù jīng 醫喻經
Parable Sūtra of the Physician by 施護 (Dānapāla, 譯)
About the work
A short single-fascicle parable applying the simile of the physician (yī 醫) — the standard Buddhist image for the Tathāgata as healer of the world’s kleśa-disease — to the doctrine of the four noble truths in their cikitsā (“medical-treatment”) schema (disease / cause / cure / treatment-program ↔ duḥkha / samudaya / nirodha / mārga). Translated by 施護 Dānapāla in the Northern-Sòng Yìjīng yuàn. Signature: 「西天譯經三藏朝奉大夫試光祿卿傳法大師賜紫臣施護奉詔譯」.
Prefaces
No preface or postface; only the canonical translator-signature.
Abstract
T219 falls within Dānapāla’s documented Northern-Sòng output (980–1018). The Indic source is the Bhiṣaja-upamā class of short Sūtrāṅga discourses, in which the four-noble-truths cikitsā schema is articulated through medical-treatment imagery — a foundational Buddhist epistemological-soteriological metaphor whose canonical Indic locus classicus is the Mahāvyutpatti and the medical sections of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra.
The text is conceptually consequential as one of the late-Sòng sources for the East-Asian Buddhist understanding of Buddhology-as-medicine, a metaphorical complex that became foundational in East-Asian Buddhist hermeneutics from the Tiāntái pánjiào tradition onward.
Translations and research
- Birnbaum, Raoul. The Healing Buddha. Boulder: Shambhala, 1979. (Background to the Buddhist medical-metaphor tradition; T219 cited.)
Links
- CBETA online text
- Dānapāla (施護) DILA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (1000): [ T ] Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924-1932 — dazangthings.nz