Fó shuō wúyán tóngzǐ jīng 佛說無言童子經
The Sūtra of the Silent Boy (Avivādya / Aniṣpranāda kumāra-paripṛcchā) by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
The Wúyán tóngzǐ jīng in 2 fascicles is 竺法護 Zhú Fǎhù’s Western-Jìn translation, signed in the Taishō print 「西晉月支三藏竺法護譯」, of an Indic source whose Sanskrit title is uncertain. The work was later incorporated as section 6 (Wúyán púsà pǐn 無言菩薩品) of the [[KR6h0001|Dà jí jīng]]; the Taishō print explicitly cross-references No. 397(6). The protagonist is the eponymous “Silent Boy” Wúyán 無言 “without speech”, born to the chief wife of the Lion General (師子將軍) of Rājagṛha, who has resolved on bodhi-mind from birth and refuses to engage in worldly speech, conversing only in dharma.
Prefaces
The Taishō print preserves only the standard signature; no separate preface accompanies the text.
Abstract
The sūtra opens at Vulture Peak, where the Buddha is in residence with twelve hundred and fifty bhikṣus and innumerable bodhisattvas. In the city below, the chief wife of the Lion General is pregnant, and a celestial voice from the empty sky exhorts the unborn child to embrace the dharma and refuse worldly speech. The boy is born and remains silent throughout childhood. As a youth he travels to Vulture Peak where, in dialogue with Mañjuśrī and Śāriputra, he expounds the doctrine of non-speaking: that the dharma transcends speech, and the silence of the bodhisattva is not absence of teaching but its truest mode. The work belongs with the related Mahāyāna sūtras of aphasic eloquence — most notably the Vimalakīrti (T474, T475) — that argue for the constitutive role of silence in the bodhisattva’s expression of prajñā.
The work is recorded in the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 (T2145, j. 2) among Dharmarakṣa’s translations. The dating window 285–291 follows the bracket of his most active Cháng’ān period; the Lìdài sānbǎo jì gives Tàikāng 6 (285) for several Dharmarakṣa Mahāyāna translations of comparable scope.
Translations and research
- Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. — Background on Dharmarakṣa’s milieu and translation idiom.
- Boucher, Daniel. “Buddhist Translation Procedures in Third-Century China: A Study of Dharmarakṣa and his Translation Idiom.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996.
Links
- CBETA online text
- DDB entry
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (300): [ T ] T = CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. 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. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/1