Fó shuō yúlánpén jīng 佛說盂蘭盆經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Yúlán Bowl (also known in the West as the “Ullambana Sūtra”) translated by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
T685 in one fascicle is the famous Yúlánpén jīng — the scriptural foundation of the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese Buddhist Ghost Festival (中元節 / 盂蘭盆會, Jp. Obon), celebrated annually on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. The Taishō colophon attributes the translation to Dharmarakṣa of the Western Jìn (西晉月氏三藏竺法護譯). The sūtra recounts how the disciple Maudgalyāyana (大目乾連 / Mùlián), having attained the six superknowledges, sees his deceased mother reborn as a hungry ghost and learns from the Buddha that her release requires the collective offerings of the saṅgha on the day of pravāraṇā (僧自恣日), the fifteenth day of the seventh month.
Abstract
Although the text-internal date and the 竺法護 attribution are conventional, modern scholarship — most influentially Iwamoto Yutaka 岩本裕 (1968) — has argued that the Yúlánpén jīng is not in fact a translation from Sanskrit / Indic but a Chinese-composed apocryphon (疑偽經) created sometime between the late Eastern Hàn and the early Liùcháo, drawing on Chinese ritual and ancestor-cult sensibilities and grafting them onto the Indic Mūlasarvāstivādin Maudgalyāyana legends. The non-Indic etymology of yúlánpén 盂蘭盆 (variously hypothesized as avalambana “hanging upside down,” but with severe phonological problems) and the sūtra’s celebration of post-mortem filial obligation in distinctly Chinese terms support this view. Nonetheless, the sūtra’s enormous ritual and cultural footprint in East-Asian Buddhism is matched by few other texts. The conventional 竺法護 attribution gives a working bracket of 265 (the founding of the Western Jìn) to 311 (the Yǒngjiā disorders), but the actual date of composition is uncertain and may post-date 竺法護 (b. c. 230 – d. c. 308).
The text was the object of intensive medieval commentary — see [[KR6i0365|Zōngmì’s Yúlánpén jīng shū 盂蘭盆經疏]] (T1792), the most influential Tang commentary, and the cluster of Sòng commentaries from KR6i0367 (元照 Xīnjì 新記) through KR6i0368 (普觀 Huìgǔ tōngjīn jì), KR6i0370 (遇榮 Xiàohéng chāo 孝衡鈔), and KR6i0371 (日新 Yúyì 餘義). A Míng “new commentary” by 智旭 is preserved as KR6i0372, and a Qīng commentary by 靈耀 as KR6i0373. The sūtra is closely related to a shorter Chinese variant, KR6i0376 (T686 Bàoēn fèngpén jīng 報恩奉盆經, attributed to “失譯” / unknown translator) — which the Taishō itself notes as a parallel to T685 — and to the wider cluster of Maudgalyāyana–Mother narratives.
Translations and research
- Teiser, Stephen F. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. The single most authoritative monograph in any language; treats the textual, ritual, and social history of the festival from its scriptural roots through the Tang.
- Cole, Alan. Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.
- Iwamoto Yutaka 岩本裕. Mokuren densetsu to urabon 目連伝説と盂蘭盆. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1968. The classic argument for Chinese composition.
- Karashima Seishi 辛島静志. “Some Lexical Issues in the Ullambana-sūtra”. Sōka daigaku kokusai bukkyōgaku kōtō kenkyūjo nenpō 16 (2013).
- Beal, Samuel. “The Ullambana Sūtra”. In A Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese. London: Trübner, 1871. The earliest English translation.
Other points of interest
The festival the sūtra grounds — the seventh-month Yúlánpén offering — is one of only a handful of Buddhist liturgical events to have penetrated deeply into Chinese popular religion and the imperial calendar; the zhōngyuánjié 中元節 became one of the standard “three primes” (三元) of late-imperial Daoist–Buddhist syncretic festival practice.