Fó shuō zàotǎ gōngdé jīng 佛說造塔功德經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Merit of Constructing Stūpas translated by 地婆訶羅 (Divākara, 譯)
About the work
T699 in one fascicle is the principal Mahāyāna scriptural authority for the meritorious practice of stūpa-construction in East-Asian Buddhism, translated by 地婆訶羅 / Divākara (613–688) at the WǔZhōu translation programme between his arrival in China in 676 and his death in 688. The Taishō witness opens with an unusually elaborate Chinese-style preface — “夫塔者，梵之稱，譯者謂之墳” (“‘Stūpa’ is the Sanskrit term; in translation it is called fén, ‘tomb-mound’”) — that locates the Indian stūpa within the Chinese mortuary tradition and develops a sustained etymology of the term.
Abstract
The preface, philological and rhetorically dense, glosses tǎ 塔 (a Chinese phonetic loan for stūpa / Pali thūpa) as a fén 墳 (Chinese tumulus or burial mound), and then distinguishes the Buddhist tǎ by its function — not the storage of a deceased ruler’s regalia, but the enshrinement of relics of the awakened ones, expressing infinite “Héshā zhī dé” 河沙之德 (“merits of the [Ganges] sand-grains”) and serving “塵劫之勞” (“the toil [accumulated through] dust-eon”). The doctrinal body recounts the merit accruing to those who construct stūpas of varying sizes, from those equal in size to the tri-sahasra-mahāsahasra (大千) world-system to those as small as a jujube fruit or the head of a needle. The graduated comparative-merit structure aligns with KR6i0378 / KR6i0379 (the Wèicéngyǒu / Shènxīyǒu jīng on stūpa-image merit) and with KR6i0380 / KR6i0381 (the refuge-merit sūtras).
地婆訶羅’s rendering style — exemplified also in his [[KR6i0359|Mìyánjīng 大乘密嚴經]] / T681 — combines Tang-period precision in technical terminology with literary polish suited to imperial reading. Composition window: 676–688, the period of his Cháng’ān / Luòyáng translation activity.
Related canonical text: closely-related KR6i0390 (右繞佛塔功德經 / T700, by 實叉難陀) on the merit of circumambulating stūpas.
Translations and research
- Strong, John S. Relics of the Buddha. Princeton, 2004 (foundational on the Buddhist relic / stūpa cult).
- Wang, Eugene Y. Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005 (background on the East-Asian Buddhist stūpa tradition).
- Schopen, Gregory. Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997.
No standalone English translation located.