Fó shuō fùmǔēn nánbào jīng 佛說父母恩難報經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Difficulty of Repaying the Kindness of Parents translated by 安世高 (An Shigao, 譯)
About the work
T684 in one fascicle is a very short sūtra (some 250 characters in the Taishō witness) on the difficulty of repaying the kindness of one’s parents — a foundational text in the East-Asian Buddhist filial-piety canon. The colophon “後漢安息國三藏安世高譯” (“translated by the Parthian-state Tripiṭaka An Shigao under the Later Hàn”) attributes the rendering to An Shigao 安世高, the Parthian translator-monk active at Luòyáng from c. 148 to 170 CE — though, as Jan Nattier notes, 安世高 attributions in the Lìdài sānbǎo jì are often unreliable and many works credited to him in the Taishō are very probably anonymous later translations.
Abstract
The text consists of a single discourse delivered by the Buddha at Śrāvastī (舍衛城祇樹給孤獨園) in which he declares that the debt one owes one’s parents is so deep that even if one carried one’s father on the right shoulder and one’s mother on the left, walking around the world for many kalpas, one could not repay them. The only effective way to repay them is to bring them to Buddhist faith — to take the three refuges, to keep the precepts, to give alms, and to engage in dharma-listening. The text is one of the small cluster of Chinese Buddhist sūtras (with KR6i0364 Yúlánpén jīng 盂蘭盆經 / T685, KR6i0377 Xiàozǐ jīng 佛說孝子經 / T687, etc.) that established the Sino-Buddhist genre of xiàojīng 孝經 (“filial-piety sūtras”) used in late-imperial popular Buddhism. Its parallel in the Pāli Aṅguttara-nikāya (AN 2.4.2) attests its general antiquity in the Indian tradition; the 安世高 attribution is conventional and the date bracket (148–170) reflects 安世高’s Luòyáng career rather than a specifically datable colophon.
Translations and research
- Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: Soka University, 2008. The principal authority on which Han-dynasty translations are securely 安世高 and which are not — Nattier classifies T684 among the doubtfully-attributed Han-dynasty texts.
- Cole, Alan. Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. (The principal English-language study of the filial-piety sūtra cluster.)
- Knapp, Keith N. Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2005.
No standalone book-length English translation located. Brief renderings appear in anthologies.