Fó shuō Jìngyì yōupósāi suǒwèn jīng 佛說淨意優婆塞所問經
The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra of the Questions Asked by the Upāsaka Pure-Mind (Skt. Śuddhi-mati-paripṛcchā-sūtra?) translated by 施護 (Shīhù = Dānapāla, 譯)
About the work
T755 in one fascicle is a brief sūtra-translation by 施護 (Dānapāla, fl. 980–1017) at the Northern Sòng Translation Bureau (譯經院) at the Tàipíngxīngguósì 太平興國寺 in Kāifēng. The catalogue title 淨意 (Jìngyì, “Pure-Mind”) names the lay Buddhist (upāsaka) interlocutor who poses the questions; the alternate short title preserved in CANWWW is Jìngyì wèn jīng 淨意問經 (“Sūtra of Pure-Mind’s Questions”).
Abstract
The text opens with the Buddha residing at the Jeta Grove, Anāthapiṇḍada’s park outside Śrāvastī (祇樹給孤獨園). A man of the Tonneya clan (兜泥耶子) named Jìngyì — Pure-Mind — comes to the Buddha and, after performing the customary acts of veneration, requests permission to ask a series of questions. The text proceeds as a question-and-answer exchange: the upāsaka asks why some beings receive certain karmic results (long life or short, beauty or ugliness, wealth or poverty, intelligence or dullness, high or low birth, etc.), and the Buddha replies by exposing in each case the specific moral cause-and-effect relation that produces the result. The genre is a karma-vipāka-paripṛcchā — a “questions about the maturation of karma” sūtra — paralleling such well-known texts as the [[KR6c0014|Cūḷa-kammavibhaṅga-sutta]] (Pāli MN 135) and its Chinese counterparts.
The Tonneya clan-name is an Indic name preserved by phonetic transcription; comparable forms are found in other Sòng-period translations. The phrasing of the karma-questions is characteristic of late-Indian Buddhist popular catechetical literature, which Dānapāla and his colleagues translated systematically in the 980s–1010s as part of the Sòng imperial project of completing the canon. The Sanskrit original — most likely a short Śuddhamati-paripṛcchā of the kind preserved in fragmentary form in Central Asian discoveries — is not securely identifiable.
Translations and research
No substantial Western secondary literature located on this specific text. For Dānapāla’s translation activity see the studies of the Sòng Translation Bureau by Jan Yün-hua, “Buddhist Relations between India and Sung China,” History of Religions 6.1 (1966) and 6.2 (1966), and Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy, and Trade: The Realignment of Sino-Indian Relations, 600–1400 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003).