Chánmìyào fǎ jīng 禪祕要法經
Sūtra of the Secret Essential Methods of Meditation translated by 鳩摩羅什 (Jiūmóluóshí / Kumārajīva, 等譯)
About the work
The Chán-mìyào fǎ jīng (T613) is a three-fascicle Mahāyāna meditation manual ascribed in the canonical bibliography to Kumārajīva 鳩摩羅什 (鳩摩羅什) and his Cháng’ān team. It presents a sequenced program of kasiṇa / impurity / loving-kindness / mindfulness-of-the-buddha dhyāna leading toward the visualization of the Buddha — overlapping in part with the KR6i0251 Zuòchán sānmèi jīng 坐禪三昧經 (T614) and the Pratyutpanna-samādhi tradition.
Prefaces
The text opens with the canonical formula. The catalogs ascribe the text to Kumārajīva’s Cháng’ān workshop (“等譯” — “translated together with [his team]”).
Abstract
A central work of early-fifth-century Chinese chán practice, datable to Kumārajīva’s Cháng’ān period (401–413 CE). Modern scholarship — notably Yamabe Nobuyoshi (1999) — has shown that T613 contains substantial Chinese-composed elements alongside Indic source material; it should be read as a compilation/redaction by Kumārajīva’s circle of older Sarvāstivāda yoga sources combined with vivid visualization material that may be partly Chinese in origin. Together with KR6i0251, KR6i0252, KR6i0253, KR6i0254 it forms the core Kumārajīva-period meditation corpus.
Translations and research
- Yamabe, Nobuyoshi. The Sūtra on the Ocean-like Samādhi of the Visualization of the Buddha. PhD dissertation, Yale University, 1999 — extensive analysis of T613.
- Greene, Eric. Chan Before Chan: Meditation, Repentance, and Visionary Experience in Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021.
Links
- CBETA T15n0613
- Kanseki DB
- 鳩摩羅什 DILA
- Dazangthings date evidence (405, 430) — 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.