Guān xūkōngzàng púsà jīng 觀虛空藏菩薩經
The Sūtra of the Visualization of the Bodhisattva Ākāśagarbha by 曇摩蜜多 (Dharmamitra, 譯)
About the work
The Guān xūkōngzàng púsà jīng in 1 fascicle is 曇摩蜜多 Dharmamitra’s Liú-Sòng-period translation of a Mahāyāna guānjīng 觀經 “visualization sūtra” centred on the bodhisattva 虛空藏 Ākāśagarbha. The Taishō print signs the entry “宋罽賓三藏曇摩蜜多譯”. The text belongs to the genre of guānjīng — visualization sūtras — characteristic of Dharmamitra’s translation output (see also his Guān Pǔxián púsà xíngfǎ jīng 觀普賢菩薩行法經 T0277 and the Chán mìyào fǎ jīng 禪祕要法經 T0613). It expounds a structured visualization-and-confession ritual whereby practitioners may invoke the bodhisattva to expiate accumulated transgressions, particularly violations of the bodhisattva precepts.
Prefaces
No separate preface is preserved in the canonical print.
Abstract
The text opens at Khalāṭika mountain (佉陀羅山) where the Buddha is in residence with twelve hundred and fifty bhikṣus and the thousand bodhisattvas of the Bhadrakalpa led by 彌勒 Maitreya. The elder 優波離 Upāli rises and asks the Buddha how a practitioner who has violated the bodhisattva precepts may be restored to purity; the Buddha’s reply is the body of the sūtra, which prescribes a ritual of visualization-meditation on Ākāśagarbha, supported by upoṣatha observance and confession-formulas, by which the practitioner may obtain a vision of the bodhisattva and thereby reaffirm his bodhisattva-discipline.
The work is the principal Chinese scriptural source for the Ākāśagarbha confessional tradition — a major component of medieval East Asian Buddhist ritual practice. It pairs structurally with the Guān Pǔxián púsà xíngfǎ jīng 觀普賢菩薩行法經 (the closing companion to the Lotus), the Guān wúliàngshòu jīng 觀無量壽經 (the Amitāyur-dhyāna-sūtra), and other guānjīng of the Liú-Sòng period — a remarkable cluster of visualization texts whose Indic-source status is now generally regarded as ambiguous (cf. Yamabe 1999): they may be Indic, Chinese, or composite translations, and the overall genre may have crystallised as much in fifth-century China as in India.
The dating window 424–442 follows the bracket of 曇摩蜜多’s translation activity at Jiànkāng.
Translations and research
- Yamabe, Nobuyoshi. “The Sūtra on the Ocean-Like Samādhi of the Visualization of the Buddha: The Interfusion of the Chinese and Indian Cultures in Central Asia as Reflected in a Fifth Century Apocryphal Sūtra.” Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1999. — Standard study of the guān-jīng genre.
- Stevenson, Daniel B. “The Four Kinds of Samādhi in Early T’ien-t’ai Buddhism.” In Traditions of Meditation in Chinese Buddhism, ed. Peter N. Gregory, 45–97. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986. — On the use of guānjīng including the present text in Chinese visualization-confession practice.
Links
- CBETA online text
- DDB entry
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (430): [ Chen 2014 ] Chen, Jinhua. “From Central Asia to Southern China: The Formation of Identity and Network in the Meditative Traditions of the Fifth—Sixth Century Southern China (420—589).” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 7, no. 2 (2014): 171–202. 8. n. 27 dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/303