Dàfàntiānwáng wèn fó juéyí jīng 大梵天王問佛決疑經
Sūtra of the Great Brahmā King’s Questions Resolving the Buddha’s Doubt (apocryphal; author unknown)
About the work
The Dà-fàntiān-wáng wèn fó juéyí jīng (X26) is a two-fascicle Chinese-composed apocryphal sūtra (wěijīng 偽經), preserved in the Xùzàngjīng. It is the locus classicus of the famous “flower-sermon” episode (niānhuā wéixiào 拈花微笑): Brahmā offers a flower to the Buddha; the Buddha holds it up; only Mahākāśyapa smiles, and receives the unspoken transmission. The Chán school cites this sūtra as the scriptural warrant for its self-understanding as a “transmission outside the teachings” (jiào-wài bié-chuán 教外別傳).
Prefaces
The Xùzàngjīng edition preserves no prefaces; the text presents itself as a translation but is universally agreed to be a Chinese composition.
Abstract
An East-Asian apocryphal sūtra of considerable importance: the niānhuā wéixiào episode — Mahākāśyapa’s silent reception of the Buddha’s flower-teaching — appears for the first time in this text and not in any Indic source. Modern scholarship (Foulk 1993; Welter 2000) places the composition in the Sòng period, certainly after the rise of the Chán “transmission outside the teachings” rhetoric in the tenth century, and probably before the Wǔdēng huìyuán 五燈會元 (KR6q0012) of 1252. The bracket of 900–1300 reflects this scholarly horizon. The two-fascicle X26 redaction is one of two related apocrypha in this title-cluster (cf. KR6i0238, a one-fascicle parallel/excerpt).
Translations and research
- Welter, Albert. “Mahākāśyapa’s Smile: Silent Transmission and the Kung-an (Kōan) Tradition.” In The Kōan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, ed. S. Heine and D. S. Wright. Oxford, 2000, 75–109.
- Foulk, T. Griffith. “Myth, Ritual, and Monastic Practice in Sung Ch’an Buddhism.” In Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China, ed. P. B. Ebrey and P. N. Gregory. Honolulu, 1993, 147–208.
Other points of interest
The text is the single most important scriptural source cited in Chán literature for the “flower-sermon” myth. Its apocryphal status was already noted by Sòng-period bibliographers (cf. Fózǔ tǒngjì 佛祖統紀 (KR6r0012) entries on suspect sūtras).