Fóshuō Wénshū huǐguò jīng 佛說文殊悔過經
Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on Mañjuśrī’s Repentance translated by 竺法護 Zhú Fǎhù (Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
The Fóshuō Wénshū huǐguò jīng (T459) is a one-fascicle sūtra translated by the great Western Jìn translator Dharmarakṣa 竺法護 (竺法護; ca. 230–308 CE), of Yuèzhī ancestry. It is a doctrinal sūtra on Mahāyāna repentance practice (huǐguò 悔過) framed as Mañjuśrī’s instruction to a śrāvaka audience. The Sanskrit title is reconstructed by Bagchi (1927) as Mañjuśrī-vikrīḍita-sūtra (a text on Mañjuśrī’s pedagogical play); other reconstructions include Mañjuśrī-praṇidhāna-sūtra. In the Taishō Mahāyāna repentance corpus this text is foundational, predating the more famous repentance texts of the fifth and sixth centuries.
Prefaces
The text opens directly with the standard jīngshǒu 經首 formula: “聞如是。一時佛在羅閱祇耆闍崛山中” (“Thus have I heard. At one time the Buddha was at the Mount Vulture-Peak in Rājagṛha”). The frame narrative places Mañjuśrī roaming Mount Gṛdhrakūṭa with bodhisattvas, gods, dragons, and the eight-fold sentient assembly, expounding the sānchéng 三乘 (three vehicles) doctrine. Śrāvakas in the audience question Mañjuśrī about the four noble truths; Mañjuśrī responds with a Mahāyāna reframing that incorporates the practice of repentance.
Abstract
This is a foundational Mahāyāna repentance text in the Chinese canon. It develops the concept that repentance (huǐguò 悔過, Sanskrit deśanā) in Mahāyāna context is not merely confession of past misdeeds but the metanoetic transformation of the practitioner’s understanding of the dharma. Mañjuśrī acts as the chief bodhisattva-instructor on this practice, situating him as the patron of Mahāyāna metanoia. The text precedes by several centuries the major Tiantai repentance manuals (Zhīyǐ’s Făhuá sānmèi chànyí, etc.) but provides the doctrinal grounding from which they later draw.
Dharmarakṣa was active 266–308 CE, working primarily at Cháng’ān and Luòyáng with a team of Indian and Central Asian assistants. His translation idiom is intermediate between the archaic Lokakṣema style and the polished Kumārajīva style — phonetic transliterations remain frequent but the syntax is closer to literary Chinese. The dating of this translation cannot be precisely fixed; it is placed within Dharmarakṣa’s overall translation activity span (266–308 CE).
The text was little commented on in classical Chinese exegesis but was preserved consistently across all canonical recensions (Sòng, Yuán, Míng, Gōng witnesses). Its theological position — making Mañjuśrī rather than Samantabhadra the Mahāyāna repentance bodhisattva — is unusual; later Chinese repentance liturgy preferred Samantabhadra.
Translations and research
- Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008 — Dharmarakṣa context.
- Boucher, Daniel. “Dharmarakṣa and the Transmission of Buddhism to China.” Asia Major 19 (2006): 13–38.
- Williams, Bruce C. “Mea Maxima Vikalpa: Repentance, Meditation, and the Dynamics of Liberation in Medieval Chinese Buddhism, 500–650 CE.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2002.