Fànběn Bōrě bōluómìduō xīn jīng 梵本般若波羅蜜多心經
Sanskrit Original of the Heart of the Perfection of Wisdom Sūtra attributed to 不空 (譯, Skt. Amoghavajra)
About the work
A Chinese phonetic transliteration of the Sanskrit short-recension Heart Sūtra, preserved among the Fángshān Stone Sūtras 房山石經 (Fángshān shíjīng) at Yúnjūsì 雲居寺 in present-day Beijing’s Fángshān District, and admitted into modern Chinese-canon editions as F27n1056. Closely related to T256 (KR6c0133) but without the long Cí’ēn-attributed preface and without the parallel Chinese gloss: this is essentially the bare Sanskrit-in-Chinese-phonographs sūtra, opening with the title transcribed in Sanskrit (“鉢囉枳孃播囉弭跢𠶹㗚乃野素怛囕” = prajñāpāramitāhṛdayasūtra) and closing with the dhāraṇī “唵 誐諦 誐諦 播囉誐諦 播囉僧誐諦 冒地 娑嚩賀” (oṃ gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā). One fascicle, very brief.
Prefaces
The text bears no narrative preface — only the title and the long titulature of the attributed translator: 「唐開元三朝灌頂國師和尚特進試鴻臚卿開府儀同三司肅國公食邑三千戶實封三伯戶贈司空謚辯正大廣智大興善寺三藏沙門不空奉詔譯」 — “Translated by imperial decree by Bùkōng, Tripiṭaka of Dàxīngshàn Monastery in the Western Capital, Abhiṣeka State Preceptor of Three Reigns of the Kāiyuán Era, Specially Promoted, Tested Director of the Court of Diplomatic Reception, Opening Office Equal to the Three Excellencies, Duke of Sù State, holder of a fief of three thousand households with a personally enfeoffed three hundred households, posthumously Minister of Works, with posthumous title Biànzhèng Dàguǎngzhì.” The conjoint title 「梵本」 (“Sanskrit original”) in the head and tail (「梵本般若波羅蜜多心經 感」 — the final 感 is the radical/fascicle marker used in the Fángshān engraving system) is the only paratext.
Abstract
F27n1056 is one of the small group of Tang-era Sanskrit-in-Chinese-phonographs Heart Sūtra transcriptions, alongside T256 (Stein 700, with the Cí’ēn preface and Chinese gloss) and certain Pelliot fragments. The Fángshān version transmits essentially the same Sanskrit text as T256’s Sanskrit side but with a minimum of paratext, suggesting that the Fángshān engravers had access to a “stripped” version of the Amoghavajra-circle transliteration without the Dūnhuáng-style preface frame.
The Fángshān stone engraving project began under Jìngwǎn 靜琬 (d. 639) in the late Suí and continued through the Liáo, Jīn, Yuán, and Míng dynasties; the Heart Sūtra texts in volume 27 of the modern Fángshān shíjīng are largely Liáo-era engravings from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, reproducing earlier text traditions. The composition of the underlying transliteration must therefore be dated to Amoghavajra’s active period at Cháng’ān (746–774) or, more cautiously, to the broader Tang esoteric milieu through the early- to mid-ninth century, allowing for the possibility that the attribution to Amoghavajra is a later honorific. The bracket notBefore 746 / notAfter 850 reflects this composite uncertainty.
The Fángshān witness was unknown to Western scholars until the systematic photographic survey of Yúnjūsì in the 1950s (organised by the Buddhist Association of China). Yán Wényí 嚴文儒 and others have catalogued the Heart Sūtra group within the Fángshān corpus; F27n1056 is one of several Heart Sūtra texts included in the Liáo additions to the engraved canon.
The present text is one of the primary Chinese sources for reconstructing the Sanskrit short-recension Hṛdaya, and is regularly cited alongside T256 in modern critical editions (Conze, Nattier, Lopez).
Translations and research
- Edward Conze, “The Prajñāpāramitā-hṛdaya Sūtra,” JRAS 80 (1948): 33–51, revised in Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Cassirer, 1967), 148–167.
- Jan Nattier, “The Heart Sūtra: A Chinese Apocryphal Text?” JIABS 15.2 (1992): 153–223.
- Donald S. Lopez Jr., Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
- Lothar Ledderose, ed., Buddhist Stone Sutras in China — Shandong Province (multi-volume) and the parallel publication on the Fángshān corpus, with palaeographic and stratigraphic analysis of the engraved sūtra layers.
- Lin Shih-Hsuan 林士鉉 and other modern Chinese scholarship on Fángshān shíjīng cataloguing Tang and Liáo engraving phases.
Other points of interest
The single character 「感」 appearing at the head and foot of the engraving is not part of the title but a section/fascicle marker from the Fángshān engraving’s organisation by Qiānzì wén 千字文 sequence — each cave’s stone tablets were ordered using successive characters of the Thousand Character Classic as catalogue keys. 「感」 is character 192 in the Qiānzì wén sequence, helping to identify the engraving’s location and date within the Fángshān corpus.
Links
- 不空 DILA
- CBETA online
- Wikipedia, “Fangshan Stone Sutras”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fangshan_Stone_Sutras - Wikipedia, “Heart Sutra”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heart_Sutra - Kanseki DB