Fó shuō zhūxíng yǒuwéi jīng 佛說諸行有為經
The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra on All Conditioned Formations (Skt. Sarva-saṃskāra-saṃskṛta-sūtra?) translated by 法天 (Fǎtiān = Dharmadeva, 譯)
About the work
T758 in one fascicle is a brief sūtra-translation by 法天 (Fǎtiān = Dharmadeva, fl. 973–1001), the Magadhan monk who arrived in Kāifēng in 973 and became one of the founding translators of the Sòng Imperial Translation Bureau. The title 諸行有為 (zhūxíng yǒuwéi) glosses the doctrinal pair “all saṃskāras are saṃskṛta” — i.e. all conditioned formations are compounded and therefore subject to arising-and-passing-away. The text is a short doctrinal exhortation on the impermanence of the conditioned.
Abstract
The Buddha addresses an audience of monks on the impermanence of all conditioned phenomena (sarva saṃskārā anityā), one of the most basic doctrinal mātṛkās of Buddhism — the first of the Tilakkhaṇa / Trilakṣaṇa (three marks) and the first of the four “summary statements of the Dharma” (dhamma-uddeśa / 法印 fǎyìn). The text rehearses the standard scheme: all conditioned things are impermanent, the impermanent is suffering, the suffering is non-self, and so on. The Buddha urges his audience to use the contemplation of impermanence as the foundation of practice.
The genre is the doctrinal-exhortation short sūtra: a brief Indian text of perhaps a few hundred ślokas extracted from the Saṃyuktāgama / Saṃyutta-nikāya tradition or compiled as a free-standing didactic piece. Fǎtiān’s Zhūxíng yǒuwéi jīng 諸行有為經 belongs to the corpus of brief late-Indian sūtra compilations on standard mātṛkā topics that the Sòng Bureau translated systematically.
Translations and research
No substantial Western secondary literature located on this specific text. For Dharmadeva’s translation activity see Jan Yün-hua, “Buddhist Relations between India and Sung China,” History of Religions 6.1 (1966), 24–42, and 6.2 (1966), 135–168.
Links
- CBETA online
- Dazangthings date evidence (980): [ T ] T = CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924-1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014. Dazangthings source 1
- Kanseki DB
- 法天 DILA