Fó shuō dàshèng dàogǎn jīng 佛說大乘稻芉經
The Buddha’s Mahāyāna Sūtra on the Stalk of Rice (Śālistamba-sūtra, anonymous Tang version) translator unknown (失譯, 譯)
About the work
T712 in one fascicle is an anonymous Tang-period rendering of the Śālistamba-sūtra, the fifth of the seven Chinese versions. The text is preserved without any translator-attribution and without an explicit catalogue date; the Tang dating is conventional. It is the base text for the KR6i0405 / T2782 commentary by the Tibetan-Chinese translator 法成 (Chos-grub).
Abstract
The text follows the standard Śālistamba structure — opening preface, the Buddha’s gnomic utterance “見十二因緣即是見法即是見佛” before a stalk of rice, the encounter between Maitreya and Śāriputra at the kuṭi — but in a register midway between the terse Wú-period KR6i0400 (Zhī Qiān) and the elaborated Tang KR6i0402 (Amoghavajra) versions. The exposition pairs internal and external causation (內因緣 / 外因緣), running through the twelve nidānas with the rice-stalk simile.
法成’s commentary KR6i0405 / T2782 (Dàshèng dàogǎn jīng suítīng shū) takes this text — not Amoghavajra’s nor Dānapāla’s — as its base. This is significant: in the early ninth century, when Chos-grub was active at Dūnhuáng 敦煌, the text he had to hand for commentarial purposes was this anonymous Tang version, not the more prestigious Amoghavajra rendering. The textual genealogy points to a wider Tang-period circulation than the Amoghavajra version alone.
Related canonical Chinese versions of the Śālistamba: KR6i0400 / T708, KR6i0401 / T709, KR6i0402 / T710, KR6i0403 / T711, this work KR6i0404 / T712, KR6i0405 / T2782 (commentary on this text), KR6i0407 / T713.
Translations and research
- Schoening, Jeffrey D. The Śālistamba-sūtra and Its Indian Commentaries. Vienna: Arbeitskreis für Tibetische und Buddhistische Studien, 1995.
- Ueyama Daishun 上山大峻, Tonkō bukkyō no kenkyū 敦煌仏教の研究. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1990. (On the Dūnhuáng Buddhist textual circulation including this Śālistamba version.)