Fó shuō dàshèng zàoxiàng gōngdé jīng 佛說大乘造像功德經
The Buddha’s Mahāyāna Sūtra on the Merit of Making Buddha-Images translated by 提雲般若 (Devaprajñā, 譯)
About the work
T694 in two fascicles is the most extensive of the early Chinese Buddhist sūtras on the Udayana sandalwood-Buddha-image tradition, translated by the Khotanese translator Devaprajñā (active in Cháng’ān / Luòyáng under Empress 武則天 Wǔ Zétiān) at the imperial translation programme. The colophon “大唐于闐三藏提雲般若奉制譯” (“translated by imperial decree by the Tripiṭaka Devaprajñā of Khotan, Great Tang”) attributes the rendering to imperial commission, dated by the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù 開元釋教錄 (KR6s0093, T2154) to the period 689–691 CE.
Abstract
The setting is unique among the Udayana-image sūtras: the Buddha preaches the sūtra in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three (Trāyastriṃśa, 三十三天) under the Pāriśātaka tree (波利質多羅樹), with Maitreya as the principal interlocutor — locating the discourse precisely at the moment in the Buddha’s biography when King Udayana (back on earth) was commissioning the first Buddha-image. The structural innovation is to make the zàoxiàng (image-making) doctrine the substantive content of what the Buddha was preaching to his mother and the gods of the Trāyastriṃśa during the same period — thus uniting the legend’s two ends (the Buddha in heaven; Udayana on earth making the image of the absent Buddha) into a single doctrinal narrative.
The work is a substantial expansion of the brief older versions KR6i0382 / T692 and KR6i0383 / T693; it incorporates the doctrinal apparatus of late-seventh-century Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism (the bodhisattva path, the merit of image-making in relation to the pāramitās, the cosmic-buddha visualization), and treats the Udayana legend as the canonical scriptural ground for the entire Mahāyāna Buddhist image-cult. The text was widely cited in Tang and Sòng liturgical and apologetic literature.
Related canonical texts: earlier short versions KR6i0382 (T692), KR6i0383 (T693); related cluster on image / stūpa merit KR6i0385–KR6i0390.
Translations and research
- Carter, Martha L. The Mystery of the Udayana Buddha. Naples: Istituto Universitario Orientale, 1990.
- Soper, Alexander C. Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China. Ascona, 1959.
- McCallum, Donald F. Zenkōji and Its Icon. Princeton, 1994.
- Forte, Antonino. Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the Astronomical Clock. Rome: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1988 (background on Wǔ Zétiān-era translation programmes).
No standalone English translation of T694 located.