聞分館君 Ask BunKanKun

佛說佛印三昧經

2 min read

Text ID
KR6i0258
Date
148–220
Dynasty
後漢

Fóshuō Fóyìn sānmèi jīng 佛說佛印三昧經

The Sūtra on the Buddha-Seal Samādhi as Spoken by the Buddha attributed to 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, 譯)

About the work

The Fóyìn sānmèi jīng (T621, one fascicle) is a short Mahāyāna samādhi-sūtra catalogued under the name of 安世高 (An Shigao, fl. 148–170), the Parthian translator who founded the early Luòyáng translation enterprise. The attribution is, however, almost certainly spurious. The text concerns the fóyìn sānmèi (the “Buddha-Seal Samādhi”), a meditative state in which all dharmas are sealed by the absolute buddha-mark.

Abstract

T621 is ascribed to An Shigao only from the [[KR6r0011|Lìdài sānbǎo jì]] (597 CE) onward; earlier catalogs do not list it among An Shigao’s authentic works. Modern scholarship — notably Erik Zürcher (1959, 1991), Antonino Forte (1968), and Jan Nattier (A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations, 2008) — has established that An Shigao’s reliable corpus consists almost entirely of Hīnayāna meditation and abhidharma manuals, and that Mahāyāna samādhi-sūtras of this kind in An Shigao’s name are pseudepigraphic. The text’s vocabulary, syntax and Mahāyāna content are inconsistent with the attested style of An Shigao, and the Fóyìn sānmèi is most plausibly a Wu-Eastern Jin (third- or fourth-century) Chinese composition or anonymous translation later attached to his name. Following Nattier, the date bracket is left as the Later Han horizon, but the actual attribution should be treated as uncertain. The text shares the yìn sānmèi (seal-samādhi) imagery with T632 (Huìyìn sānmèi jīng).

Translations and research

  • Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han 東漢 and Three Kingdoms 三國 Periods. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2008. — establishes the unreliability of post-Lìdài attributions to An Shigao.
  • Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China. Leiden: Brill, 1959 (3rd ed. 2007).

No book-length translation of T621 has been published in a Western language.

Graph View

Backlinks