Dàzàng zhèngjiào xuèpén jīng 大藏正教血盆經
The Tripiṭaka Orthodox-Teaching Blood-Pool Sūtra anonymous (apocryphon, 偽經)
About the work
The Xuèpén jīng 血盆經 (“Blood-Pool Sūtra”) in one short fascicle is one of the most widely-circulated Chinese Buddhist apocryphal sūtras (wěijīng 偽經) of the late-imperial period, preserved in the Manji Zoku-zōkyō (CBETA X01 No. 23) under the title Dàzàng zhèngjiào xuèpén jīng — the “Sūtra of the Blood Pool, [Genuine Teaching of the] Great Treasury.” The text is unattributed; no Indian source is known and no Indian-language analogue exists. It is universally regarded by modern scholarship as a Chinese composition, probably of the Northern-Sòng or Yuán period, that came to enormous popularity in the Míng-Qīng era and circulated even more widely in Japan as the Ketsubon-kyō 血盆經.
Abstract
The narrative frame is set in the Buddhist underworld: the disciple Mùlián 目連 (目犍連 Maudgalyāyana) descends into the hells in search of his mother, where he discovers a vast pool filled with blood and pus. He learns from the wardens that the women suffering in the pool are being punished for the ritual pollution of menstrual and parturition blood, which is said to defile the earth and the deities of the soil and water by running into wells and streams. The Buddha then instructs Mùlián that the way to release one’s mother (or any female ancestor) from the pool is to copy and recite the Xuèpén jīng, hold a Xuèpénzhāi 血盆齋 (Blood-Pool feast), and perform offerings on her behalf. The merit so generated is said to lift the soul from the pool into the Pure Land.
The text stands at the intersection of three currents of late-imperial Chinese religion: the Buddhist underworld-cosmology associated with the Mùlián / Maudgalyāyana legend (cf. the Yúlánpén jīng 盂蘭盆經 (KR6i0364) and the Mùlián jiùmǔ 目連救母 dramatic tradition); the indigenous-Chinese ritual-impurity discourse around women’s bodies and pollution of water-deities; and the Daoist purgatory-and-redemption schema. The Xuèpén jīng fuses these into a theology in which female bodily existence as such generates ritual debt requiring posthumous filial intervention — a doctrine widely criticized in modern Buddhist studies for its gender-political function but enormously influential in popular religion across China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Multiple recensions and expanded versions circulated, and the text is one of the principal scriptures of various Míng-Qīng “redemptive societies” and pure-land sectarian traditions.
The dating window adopted here (ca. 1100–1500) brackets the Sòng-Yuán emergence and Míng efflorescence of the Blood-Pool tradition. Michel Soymié’s foundational study (1965) traces the earliest direct citations to the late Northern Sòng / early Southern Sòng; the version included in the Japanese Edo-period canons descends from a Yuán recension carried to Japan with the Sōtō and Pure-Land traditions.
Translations and research
- Soymié, Michel. “Ketsubonkyō no shiryōteki kenkyū” 血盆経の資料的研究. Dōkyō kenkyū 道教研究 1 (1965): 109–166. (Foundational philological-historical study.)
- Glassman, Hank. The Face of Jizō: Image and Cult in Medieval Japanese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012. (Chapter on the Blood-Pool Sūtra in Japan.)
- Cole, Alan. Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. (On the gender-politics of Mùlián texts including the Xuèpén jīng.)
- Seaman, Gary. “The Sexual Politics of Karmic Retribution,” in The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, ed. E. M. Ahern and H. Gates (Stanford, 1981), 381–396.
- Ahern, Emily Martin. “The Power and Pollution of Chinese Women,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. M. Wolf and R. Witke (Stanford, 1975), 193–214.
- Yü Chün-fang. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. (For the broader context of late-imperial Chinese Buddhist apocryphal literature.)
Other points of interest
The Xuèpén jīng is one of the canonical examples — alongside the Yúlánpén jīng 盂蘭盆經 (KR6i0364) — of the way in which Chinese apocryphal Buddhist literature shaped popular religion to a degree that translated Indian texts did not. Its inclusion in the Japanese Manji Zoku-zōkyō (and absence from any Chinese imperial canon other than supplementary collections) reflects its peripheral-but-unsuppressable status in elite Buddhist scholasticism.