Fó shuō yùxiàng gōngdé jīng 佛說浴像功德經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Merit of Bathing the Buddha-Image translated by 寶思惟 (Ratnacinta / Manicintana, 譯)
About the work
T697 in one fascicle is the Tang-period rendering of the Yùxiàng gōngdé jīng by the Kashmiri translator 寶思惟 / Ratnacinta (Manicintana / Ratnacintamanin), who arrived at Cháng’ān in 693 under Empress 武則天 Wǔ Zétiān and worked there until his death in 721. The Taishō places the translation in the Tiānzhúkè 天竺國 / Indian-translator workshop period at Cháng’ān, dated by the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù 開元釋教錄 (KR6s0093) between 693 and the close of 武則天 Wǔ Zétiān’s reign (706).
Abstract
The setting is Vulture Peak (鷲峯山) at Rājagṛha; the principal interlocutor is the bodhisattva Qīngjìnghuì 清淨慧 (“Pure Wisdom” — Sanskrit Viśuddhamati), who asks the Buddha “by what causes do all the Tathāgatas obtain a pure body?” The Buddha responds with a discourse on the merit of bathing Buddha-images: the rite produces purification of body, speech, and mind, generates the four bodhisattva-protections, and earns the practitioner the same merit as offering personal service to the Buddha during his lifetime. The text is the fullest of the Chinese-Buddhist Buddha’s-Birthday image-bathing sūtras and supplies the Mahāyāna doctrinal framework for the guānfó / yùfó rite that the older KR6i0385 / KR6i0386 had recounted only narratively.
寶思惟 was a major late-seventh-century translator at the Wǔzhōu / Tang court, responsible for several dhāraṇī-class sūtras in the Mìjiào register; his rendering of the Yùxiàng gōngdé jīng is in the polished late-Tang Mahāyāna style. The same Indian sūtra was retranslated less than a generation later by 義淨 / Yìjìng as KR6i0388 (T698, also titled Yùfó gōngdé jīng 浴佛功德經).
Related canonical texts: parallel KR6i0388 (T698); related image-cult cluster KR6i0385 (T695), KR6i0386 (T696).
Translations and research
- Hamada Yoshie 浜田吉江. Yokubutsu shiki no shisō to bunka. Tokyo: Hōzōkan, 2009.
- Forte, Antonino. The Hostage An Shigao and His Offspring: An Iranian Family in China. Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 1995 (background to Wǔzhōu translation milieu).
No standalone English translation located.