Fóshuō chāorìmíng sānmèi jīng 佛說超日明三昧經
Sūtra on the Sūrya-Surpassing Brilliance Samādhi as Spoken by the Buddha translated by 聶承遠 (Niè Chéngyuǎn, 譯)
About the work
T638 (two fascicles, alt. title 超日明經) is a Mahāyāna samādhi-sūtra translated in the Western Jin by the lay scholar 聶承遠 (Niè Chéngyuǎn, fl. c. 290–308) on the basis of an earlier translation by Dharmarakṣa. The chāorìmíng sānmèi — the samādhi “surpassing the brilliance of the sun” — is described as a meditative concentration in which the bodhisattva’s wisdom outshines all other lights, including the cosmic luminaries.
Abstract
聶承遠 (Niè Chéngyuǎn) was the close lay collaborator of Dharmarakṣa at the Cháng’ān–Luòyáng translation workshop in the late Western Jin; the [[KR6s0084|Chū sānzàng jì jí]] (T2145, juan 13) gives his biography. He worked together with his son 聶道真 Niè Dàozhēn as Dharmarakṣa’s principal Chinese assistants and is independently credited with redacting and re-editing earlier Dharmarakṣa drafts into more polished Chinese. The [[KR6r0011|Lìdài sānbǎo jì]] explicitly notes that T638 was originally drafted by Dharmarakṣa and revised by Niè Chéngyuǎn into its present form; modern scholarship (Boucher 2008) treats it as a joint work. Date bracket follows Niè Chéngyuǎn’s attested productive period (c. 290–308). The text develops the bodhisattva-path through the figure of light surpassing the sun and is one of the early Chinese sources for the Mahāyāna doctrine of the bodhisattva’s supernal radiance.
Translations and research
- Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008. — discusses the Dharmarakṣa / Niè family workshop.
- Zürcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China. Leiden: Brill, 1959.
No book-length Western translation located.
Links
- CBETA T15n0638
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (300) — Kawano Satoshi 河野訓. Shoki kan’yaku butten no kenkyū: Jiku Hōgo o chūshin to shite 初期漢訳仏典の研究 : 竺法護を中心として. Ise: Kōgakkan Daigaku Shuppanbu, 2006. Table 6, p. 87.