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正法華經

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Text ID
KR6d0002
Date
286–286
Dynasty
西晉

Zhèng fǎhuá jīng 正法華經

Sūtra of the True Dharma-Lotus (Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra) by 竺法護 (Zhú Fǎhù / Dharmarakṣa, 譯)

About the work

The earliest complete Chinese translation of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra, in ten juan and twenty-seven chapters, completed by Dharmarakṣa 竺法護 (Zhú Fǎhù, c. 233–c. 311) at Cháng’ān on the 10th day of the 8th month of Tàikāng 太康 7 of the Western Jìn (= 286 CE). Catalogued in the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145) and reaffirmed in subsequent canon catalogues, this is the version that Kumārajīva’s Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng (KR6d0001, T262) eventually displaced as the standard liturgical and exegetical text but which remained continuously transmitted in the canon as the principal earlier witness.

Prefaces

The text in the Taishō recension carries no separate translator’s preface in the front matter. The translation circumstances are recorded in the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145, scroll 8), which preserves a contemporary preface (《正法華經記》) attributed to the translation team noting that Dharmarakṣa, having brought the Sanskrit text from the Western Regions, dictated and rendered the work into Chinese with the assistance of the lay scholar Niè Chéngyuǎn 聶承遠 and his son Niè Dàozhēn 聶道真, the upāsaka Zhāng Shìmíng 張仕明, and others; the rendering was finalised at the Báimǎsì 白馬寺 in Cháng’ān in Tàikāng 7. The same source preserves a colophon noting a re-recitation and emendation in Yǒngxī 永熙 1 (290 CE).

Abstract

T263 is the principal early Chinese witness to the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka and the foundational text of the East-Asian Lotus tradition before Kumārajīva. Dharmarakṣa worked from a Sanskrit (or Indic Prakrit) manuscript he had himself brought back from the Western Regions; the translation belongs to the early period of Chinese Buddhist translation when Indic doctrinal and technical vocabulary had not yet been standardised, and the diction is consequently more Sinitic-paraphrastic and less terminologically fixed than Kumārajīva’s later version.

The chapter division differs from Kumārajīva’s: T263 has twenty-seven chapters (Kumārajīva’s received text has twenty-eight after the later interpolation of the Devadatta chapter and the second half of the Avalokiteśvara chapter from Jñānagupta’s translation). Several chapters preserve materials and readings closer to the Indic original than Kumārajīva’s translation; in particular Karashima Seishi 辛嶋静志 and other recent philologists have demonstrated that the Indic source-text underlying T263 was in some passages closer to a proto-Saddharmapuṇḍarīka recension than the Kashgar/Petrovsky Sanskrit known today, making T263 a key witness for the comparative reconstruction of the early Saddharmapuṇḍarīka.

The translation circulated widely in Western Jìn and Eastern Jìn Buddhist circles and was extensively cited by Dàoān 道安 (312–385); however, after Kumārajīva’s translation appeared in 406, T263 was rapidly superseded for liturgical and exegetical use, though it continued to be copied in the canon and was occasionally cited in scholastic commentaries.

Translations and research

  • Karashima Seishi 辛嶋静志. A Glossary of Dharmarakṣa’s Translation of the Lotus Sutra. Bibliotheca Philologica et Philosophica Buddhica 1. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 1998. (Comprehensive philological glossary correlating T263’s Chinese vocabulary with the Sanskrit and Khotanese.)
  • Karashima Seishi 辛嶋静志. The Textual Study of the Chinese Versions of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra in the Light of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Versions. Studia Philologica Buddhica Monograph Series 3. Tokyo: Reiyukai, 1992.
  • Boucher, Daniel. “Buddhist Translation Procedures in Third-Century China: A Study of Dharmarakṣa and his Translation Idiom.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996.
  • Boucher, Daniel. “Gāndhārī and the Early Chinese Buddhist Translations Reconsidered: The Case of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 118.4 (1998): 471–506.
  • Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna: A Study and Translation of the Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā-sūtra. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. (For Dharmarakṣa’s translation methodology.)
  • Lancaster, Lewis R. The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. (Cat. no. K. 116.)
  • Tsukamoto Zenryū 塚本善隆. Chūgoku Bukkyō tsūshi 中国仏教通史. Vol. 1. Tokyo: Suzuki Gakujutsu Zaidan, 1968. (Foundational treatment of Dharmarakṣa’s translation activity.)

Other points of interest

T263 is one of the texts on which Karashima Seishi has built much of his reconstruction of a “proto-Saddharmapuṇḍarīka” Indic recension; certain chapters in T263 preserve (in Sinitic translation) passages whose closest parallels are in the Khotanese fragments rather than in the surviving Sanskrit, demonstrating that the Indic textual history of the Lotus Sūtra was substantially more diverse than the surviving Nepalese recension alone would suggest. The translation also preserves the verse / prose alternation pattern of the Indic original more closely than Kumārajīva, which often abridges or verse-paraphrases the Indic gāthā sections.

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