Fóshuō zìshì sānmèi jīng 佛說自誓三昧經
The Sūtra on the Self-Vow Samādhi as Spoken by the Buddha attributed to 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, 譯)
About the work
The Zìshì sānmèi jīng (T622, one fascicle, alt. title 龍施本起經) is a short Mahāyāna samādhi-sūtra catalogued under 安世高 (An Shigao). It is the earlier-attributed parallel of T623 (Rúlái dúzhèng zìshì sānmèi jīng), translated by 竺法護 in the Western Jin. Both texts narrate the Buddha’s induction into the zìshì sānmèi — the samādhi of the self-made vow — through a story in which a young naga maiden, Lóngshī 龍施, takes the bodhisattva vow.
Abstract
T622 is ascribed to An Shigao from the [[KR6r0011|Lìdài sānbǎo jì]] (597) onward, but as with T621, modern scholarship considers the attribution doubtful. Jan Nattier (2008) explicitly treats T622 as outside An Shigao’s reliable corpus; the Mahāyāna content (a vow-taking ceremony presented in prajñāpāramitā-style vocabulary) and the vocabulary do not match An Shigao’s authentic abhidharma-meditation translations. The text is most probably a Wu or Eastern Jin Chinese rendering or composition later assigned to An Shigao for prestige. The narrative core — a naga princess who takes the bodhisattva vow and is then transformed and predicted to buddhahood — is clearly Mahāyāna, comparable to the Lóngshī material and to T557 (Lóngshī nǚ jīng).
T622 is a “different translation” (異譯) of the same Indic text underlying T623 (Dharmarakṣa’s Rúlái dúzhèng zìshì sānmèi jīng), as already noted in the [[KR6s0084|Chū sānzàng jì jí]].
Translations and research
- Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: IRIAB, 2008. — establishes that T622 is not reliably An Shigao’s.
- Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China. Leiden: Brill, 1959.
No book-length Western translation located.
Links
- CBETA T15n0622
- Kanseki DB
- 安世高 DILA
- Dazangthings date evidence (160, 300, 420) — Fèi Chángfáng 費長房. Lìdài sānbǎo jì (LDSBJ) 歷代三寶紀 T2034. T2034 (XLIX) 51b5, 63b11, 71c11.