Fó shuō fēnbié jīng 佛說分別經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on Discrimination (Vibhaṅga-sūtra?) translated by 竺法護 (Zhú Fǎhù / Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
T738 in one fascicle is another short Dharmarakṣa rendering, on the Buddhist exercise of moral discrimination (vibhaṅga / fēnbié 分別). The text is set as a Buddha-discourse on how to discriminate the wholesome from the unwholesome in thought, speech, and action.
Abstract
The text exposits fēnbié — moral discrimination as a fundamental Buddhist mental practice — through paired examples: discriminating between right and wrong views, between true and false speech, between motivated and unmotivated action. Each pair is illustrated with brief examples drawn from monastic and lay life. The Buddha closes by exhorting the practitioner to cultivate continuous fēnbié as the foundation of the path.
The lexical choice fēnbié (rather than the later-standard vipaśyanā / guān 觀 for “discriminating insight”) reflects the early-translation period when calques were still being negotiated. By the Six Dynasties, fēnbié would acquire a more specific philosophical meaning (closer to vikalpa “conceptual elaboration”); in the early Western Jìn, the term was still used for the broader vibhāga / vibhaṅga sense of “analytical division.”
Related: KR6i0430, KR6i0431 — Dharmarakṣa’s cluster of brief moral-doctrine sūtras. Together they form a small portfolio of Western-Jìn-period brief vinaya-style and moral-discrimination Buddha-discourses.
Translations and research
- Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008.
- Zacchetti, Stefano. In Praise of the Light. Tokyo, 2005.