Fó shuō sì bùkědé jīng 佛說四不可得經
The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra of the Four Things That Cannot Be Obtained translated by 竺法護 (Zhú Fǎhù = Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
T770 in one fascicle is a brief sūtra-translation by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa, fl. 266–313). The title 四不可得 (sì bùkědé) — “four things that cannot be obtained” — names a doctrinal mātṛkā of four impossibilities or unobtainabilities, corresponding to a Sanskrit catur-aprāpya / catur-alabhya schema.
Abstract
The Buddha enumerates four categories of aprāpya — things that cannot be obtained by ordinary striving in the conditioned world. The standard list comprises: (1) eternal youth (nityā yauvanā) — even the most diligent practitioner cannot prevent the body from ageing; (2) freedom from sickness — even the wisest cannot keep the body free from the affliction of disease; (3) eternal life — death is the certain end of all sentient beings; (4) non-cessation of accumulated wealth and relations — what is gathered must be dispersed; family, possessions, status all eventually fall away. The doctrinal point is the foundational Buddhist contemplation of impermanence (anitya-saṃjñā), here organised as a fourfold mātṛkā to be used in meditation. The Buddha urges his audience to recognise these four as the irreducible features of conditioned existence and to take them as motivation for renunciation and the path.
The schema closely parallels the four upadrava (afflictions) and the four viparyāsa (perversions) treated in abhidharma literature, and the four-fold contemplation pattern is widespread in Indian Buddhist meditation handbooks. Dharmarakṣa’s translation belongs to the corpus of brief mid-length Mahāyāna doctrinal sūtras that he rendered systematically in late third-century Cháng’ān and Dūnhuáng to provide Chinese audiences with stand-alone treatments of central doctrinal categories.
Translations and research
No standalone English translation located. For Dharmarakṣa’s translation programme see Boucher, Daniel. Bodhisattvas of the Forest and the Formation of the Mahāyāna (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).
Links
- CBETA online
- Kanseki DB
- 竺法護 DILA
- Dazangthings date evidence (300): [ 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.nz