Fó shuō xiàozǐ jīng 佛說孝子經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Filial Son translator unknown (失譯, 譯)
About the work
T687 in one fascicle is a very brief sūtra of the Sino-Buddhist filial-piety cluster, registered by the Taishō as “失譯〔人名〕… 人名今附西晉錄” — “translator unknown, the name now appended to the Western Jìn catalogue (265–316 CE).” The text consists of a brief discourse in which the Buddha asks the assembled monks how children may repay the deep kindness of their parents, and is told the standard Confucian-style answer (loving-care, ritual offerings, social honour); the Buddha then corrects this with the Buddhist higher answer: only by leading the parents to take refuge, observe the precepts, and engage in dharma-listening can one truly repay them.
Abstract
The text is one of three to five short sūtras around T684–T687 (= KR6i0363, KR6i0364, KR6i0376, KR6i0377) that form the Sino-Buddhist filial-piety cluster of the early Six Dynasties period. Modern scholarship — particularly Cole (1998) — reads these texts as products of the early Chinese Buddhist project of demonstrating that Buddhism is compatible with Confucian filial-piety values; the sūtras’ literary register, with its dialogue-form between the Buddha and the zhū shāmén 諸沙門 (the assembled monks), and its typically Chinese parental-debt rhetoric (“懷之十月，身為重病…精誠之至血化為乳” — “ten months of carrying [the unborn child], becoming gravely ill; her sincerity reaching such an extent that her blood transformed into milk”), suggests Chinese composition or substantial Sinitic adaptation rather than direct translation from Sanskrit.
The Western-Jìn cataloguing is conventional and may not reflect actual date of composition; modern scholarship leans toward viewing the work as either an early-fifth-century Chinese-composed text or a substantially Sinicized translation. The Buddha’s distinction between shìjiānfǎ zhī xiào (worldly filiality, which Confucians know) and chūshìjiānfǎ zhī xiào (supra-worldly filiality, the Buddha’s higher teaching) — leading parents to take the three refuges, observe the five precepts, and so on — became a defining trope of East-Asian Buddhist filial-piety literature.
Related Sino-Buddhist filial-piety cluster: KR6i0363 (T684), KR6i0364 (T685, Yúlánpén jīng), KR6i0376 (T686).
Translations and research
- Cole, Alan. Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Stanford, 1998. (The principal English-language study of the Sino-Buddhist filial-piety cluster.)
- Knapp, Keith N. Selfless Offspring: Filial Children and Social Order in Medieval China. Honolulu, 2005.
- Teiser, Stephen F. The Ghost Festival in Medieval China. Princeton, 1988.
No standalone Western-language translation located.