Fóshuō guàndǐng zhāngjù báchú guòzuì shēngsǐ dé dù jīng 佛說灌頂章句拔除過罪生死得度經
Sūtra of Consecration Verses for Eradicating Sins and Crossing over Birth-and-Death attributed to 帛尸梨蜜多羅 Bóshīlímìduōluó (Śrīmitra)
About the work
The Fóshuō guàndǐng zhāngjù báchú guòzuì shēngsǐ dé dù jīng is the Fángshān stone-canon (房山石經) witness of the twelfth and final fascicle of the Guàndǐng jīng 灌頂經 (KR6i0051 = T1331), here transmitted as an independent one-fascicle text. It is the earliest Chinese version of the Bhaiṣajyaguru sūtra, narrating the twelve great vows of the Medicine Master Lapis-Lazuli-Radiance Tathāgata 藥師琉璃光如來. The text is nominally attributed to Śrīmitra 帛尸梨蜜多羅 (帛尸梨蜜多羅) following the convention of the larger Guàndǐng compilation, but Liáng catalogers (Sēngyòu’s Chū sānzàng jì jí) already identified it as a fifth-century Chinese composition by Huìjiǎn 慧簡 of Lùyě sì 鹿野寺, dated 457 CE.
Prefaces
The Fángshān stone-canon witness opens directly with the sūtra. The frame narrative places the Buddha at Vaiśālī (維耶離) under the Music Tree (音樂樹下), with eight thousand monks, thirty-six thousand bodhisattvas, kings, ministers, and the gods, dragons, and aṣṭasena assembled. Mañjuśrī 文殊師利 rises from his seat and asks the Buddha to expound the names and pure-land qualities of past Buddhas for the benefit of beings in the Image Dharma age (像法). The Buddha responds with the description of Bhaiṣajyaguru’s eastern Pure Land 淨琉璃 and his twelve original vows.
Abstract
This text is the first fascicle’s worth of the proto-Yakuṣī material in the Chinese canon, traditionally placed at the end of the Guàndǐng jīng (T1331/12) and circulated independently in some recensions, including the present Fángshān stone-canon copy (carved in the Liáo dynasty, mid-eleventh century). The text articulates the twelve Vows that distinguish Bhaiṣajyaguru and that became the dogmatic core of all later Chinese Yakuṣī worship, fully reproduced (in modified form) in the canonical translations of Dharmagupta (KR6i0047), Xuánzàng (KR6i0048), and Yìjìng (KR6i0049). Sēngyòu’s catalog observed that the text was composed by Huìjiǎn at Lùyě sì in the second year of the Dàmíng 大明 era (i.e., 458 CE; the colophon-implied date may also be read as the Xiàojiànwǔ 孝建五 year, 457 CE) and that it was wrongly bundled into the Guàndǐng jīng under Śrīmitra’s name. Modern Sino-Indological scholarship (Schopen 1978, Birnbaum 1979, Strickmann 2002) confirms that the text has no independent Indic Vorlage — it is a Chinese composition that distills sūtra and ritual elements known in fourth- and fifth-century Chinese Buddhism into a coherent sectarian-foundational text for the Bhaiṣajyaguru cult. The Fángshān stone-canon preservation testifies to its continuous liturgical importance into the Liáo period.
Translations and research
- Birnbaum, Raoul. The Healing Buddha. Shambhala, 1979 — definitive English study; full translation of the parallel T449 with extensive comparison to T1331/12.
- Strickmann, Michel. Chinese Magical Medicine. Stanford University Press, 2002 — chapter on the Guàndǐng and proto-Yakuṣī.
- Schopen, Gregory. “The Bhaiṣajyaguru-sūtra and the Buddhism of Gilgit.” PhD dissertation, Australian National University, 1978.
- Yoritomi Motohiro 頼富本宏. Yakushi shinkō 薬師信仰. Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1986.
Other points of interest
The Fángshān stone canon (房山石經) was carved over many centuries beginning with Jìngwǎn 靜琬 in the early seventh century and continuing into the Liáo and Jīn dynasties. The independent witness of this Bhaiṣajyaguru text in the Fángshān corpus indicates its independent ritual circulation outside of the bundled Guàndǐng compendium.