Fó shuō pútísà shízhù jīng 佛說菩薩十住經
The Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Bodhisattva’s Ten Abodes by 祇多蜜 Gītamitra (譯)
About the work
This one-fascicle proto-Avataṃsaka text by 祇多蜜 Gītamitra is an early Eastern-Jìn-period translation of the Shízhù pǐn 十住品 (“Chapter on the Ten Abodes”) material that was later incorporated into the larger Avataṃsaka compilations as chapter 11 of the [[KR6e0001|60-fascicle Huáyán]] and chapter 15 of the [[KR6e0010|80-fascicle Huáyán]]. The Taishō apparatus also notes parallels with T0281 (Zhī Qiān) and T0283 (Zhú Fǎhù), so the present translation is the fourth distinct Chinese rendering of this fundamental bodhisattva-path material.
The opening reads: “When the Buddha had finished speaking the bodhisattva precepts of the Twelve Hours, Wén-shū-shī-lì 文殊師利 / Mañjuśrī addressed the Buddha, saying: ‘O bodhisattva…’ ” (佛說菩薩戒十二時竟。文殊師利白佛言：「菩…).
Prefaces
No formal preface; the title-line preserves complex variant attribution lines, attributable in the standard reading to “東晉三藏祇多蜜譯” — “translated by the Tripiṭaka Gītamitra of the Eastern Jìn.” Variant readings note the alternative attribution “西域三藏” (“Tripiṭaka of the Western Regions”) in the Sòng (宋), Yuán (元), Míng (明) editions.
Abstract
祇多蜜 Gītamitra was an early-Eastern-Jìn-period Indian translator-monk; his birth and death dates are not preserved (the bracket adopted here, 317 – 380 CE, reflects the conventional period of his attested translation activity). His translation corpus includes about a dozen Mahāyāna sūtras, several of them now lost or surviving only in fragments. The Pútísà shízhù jīng is one of his more substantial extant works.
The text is one of the four Eastern Hàn / Three Kingdoms / Western Jìn / Eastern Jìn translations of the Shízhù material — alongside Zhī Qiān’s T0281, Zhú Fǎhù’s T0283, and Niè Dàozhēn’s T0282 — and in conjunction with these and with the great Eastern-Jìn complete Avataṃsaka of Buddhabhadra (T0278) it documents the early Chinese reception of the Avataṃsaka’s bodhisattva-path doctrine. Modern scholarship (Hamar 2007, Nattier 2008) reads the four parallel translations as evidence that the Shízhù material circulated independently in Chinese Buddhist circles for nearly two centuries before being incorporated into the complete Avataṃsaka compilation.
The Taishō text is established on the standard apparatus.
Translations and research
- No substantial Western-language translation located.
- Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: IRIAB Soka University, 2008.
- Hamar, Imre. “The History of the Buddhāvataṃsaka-sūtra,” in Reflecting Mirrors (2007).
Other points of interest
- The variant Indic-Latinized title-attribution (Sānzàng / 三藏 in different witnesses) in different editions of the Taishō apparatus reflects an unstable transmission of the translator’s institutional identity in the early-Chinese-translation period; this kind of variant is characteristic of translations of the late third / fourth century, when monastic-bureaucratic norms had not yet been formalised in Chinese Buddhism.
Links
- CBETA T10n0284
- Gītamitra DILA
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (420) — Ono & Maruyama 1933–1936 — Ono Genmyō 小野玄妙 and Maruyama Takao 丸山孝雄, eds. Bussho kaisetsu daijiten 佛書解說大辭典. Tokyo: Daitō shuppan, 1933–1936, vol. 9, pp. 401–402 (entry by Wada Tetsujō 和田徹城).