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 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 Chū sānzàng jì jí.
Translations and research
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
- 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.