Fó shuō wèicéngyǒu yīnyuán jīng 佛說未曾有因緣經
The Buddha’s Sūtra on the Causes-and-Conditions of the Hitherto-Unknown (Adbhuta-nidāna-sūtra?) translated by 曇景 (Tánjǐng, 譯)
About the work
T754 in two fascicles is a Southern Qí 蕭齊 (479–502) translation by 曇景 (Tánjǐng), the same translator who produced the Mahāmāyāsūtra (KR6g0029 / T383). The genre marker wèicéngyǒu “the hitherto-unknown” (Skt. adbhuta, “marvelous, never-before-seen”) indicates a sūtra in the adbhuta-dharma genre — narratives of the Buddha’s marvelous deeds and the wonders of the Dharma.
Abstract
The text presents a series of adbhuta (marvelous) narratives organized around the theme of yīnyuán (causes-and-conditions = nidāna): the wondrous events of the Buddha’s life and the wondrous transformations of his disciples are explained as the karmic working-out of past causes and conditions. The two-fascicle extent allows for fuller narrative elaboration than the typical one-fascicle short sūtra and includes both miraculous-event and doctrinal-explanation segments.
The adbhuta-dharma genre is one of the twelve aṅga of the canonical Buddhist literary classification (twelve types of Buddhist text), corresponding to the wonder-narratives that complement the doctrinal sūtra, the moral jātaka, the avadāna, etc. The Chinese rendering wèi-céng-yǒu preserves the genre-marker explicitly. Tán-jǐng’s two-fascicle work is one of the more substantial Chinese examples of pure adbhuta-dharma literature.
The text became influential in East Asian Buddhist popular literature and provided source material for later Chinese Buddhist tale-collections including the Xuányàn jì 玄驗記 and similar Six Dynasties miracle-anthologies.
Translations and research
- Demiéville, Paul. “Le miroir spirituel,” in Choix d’études bouddhiques (1929–1970). Leiden: Brill, 1973, 131–156.
- Lai, Whalen W. “The Mahā-Parinirvāṇa-Sūtra and Its Earliest Interpreters in China,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 102.1 (1982), 99–105. (Background on Southern Qí Buddhist culture.)
No standalone English translation located.