Fó shuō yīnyuán sēnghù jīng 佛說因緣僧護經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Causes-and-Conditions of Saṃgharakṣita (Saṃgharakṣita-avadāna?) translator unknown (失譯, 譯)
About the work
T749 in one fascicle is an anonymous Chinese sūtra recounting the avadāna of the monk Sēng-hù 僧護 (Skt. Saṃgharakṣita, “Protected by the Saṃgha”). The text is set as a series of karmic case-studies witnessed by Saṃgharakṣita, who serves as the narrative frame for a sequence of supernatural-vision-and-explanation episodes.
Abstract
The narrative frame: the monk Saṃgharakṣita travels with five hundred merchants by sea; the ship is wrecked and he is washed ashore in a strange land where he witnesses a series of extraordinary scenes — beings undergoing strange tortures, monks engaged in incomprehensible behaviors, etc. He returns to the Buddha, who explains each scene as a karmic consequence: each tortured being is suffering the recompense of a specific past-life sin (typically vinaya transgressions by monks); each strange behavior is the karmic working-out of a past-life action.
The text is one of the principal Indian Buddhist sources for the genre of saṃghasthavira-avadāna — narratives in which a monk-witness is the frame for karmic case-studies. The structure parallels the Avadānaśataka and the Divyāvadāna. The text became influential in East Asian Buddhism as a source of vivid karmic narratives; many of the scenes Saṃgharakṣita witnesses became standard topoi in later Chinese Buddhist popular literature on the karmic consequences of monastic transgressions.
Translations and research
- Strong, John S. The Legend of King Aśoka: A Study and Translation of the Aśokāvadāna. Princeton, 1983. (Background on the avadāna genre.)
- Tatelman, Joel. The Heavenly Exploits: Buddhist Biographies from the Divyāvadāna. New York: NYU Press, 2005.