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佛說出家緣經

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Text ID
KR6i0495
Date
148–170
Dynasty
後漢

Fó shuō chūjiā yuán jīng 佛說出家緣經

The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra of the Causes of Going Forth into Homelessness translated by 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, 譯)

About the work

T791 in one fascicle is a brief sūtra-translation traditionally attributed to the Parthian translator 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, fl. 148–170) of Eastern Hàn Luòyáng 洛陽. The title 出家緣 (chūjiā yuán) — “the causes of going forth [into homelessness]” — names the doctrine of pabbajjā-pratyaya / pravrajyā-pratyaya: the karmic and intentional causes that lead a person to renounce household life and enter the monastic saṅgha.

Abstract

The text expounds the karmic and dispositional causes that bring a person to pravrajyā — going forth from household life into the monastic order. The Buddha addresses an audience on the multiple categories of causes: (1) karmic causes from past lives — the ripening of past bodhisattva-vows or kuśala-mūla (roots of merit) accumulated under previous Buddhas; (2) present-life motivational causes — direct insight into impermanence, suffering, and the futility of saṃsāric pursuits; (3) proximate occasions — the encounter with a kalyāṇa-mitra, the hearing of the Dharma, the witnessing of the saṅgha’s practice, etc. The text rehearses these in an exhortational sūtra-frame, urging the audience to recognise the rare and precious confluence of conditions that makes possible the pravrajyā and to value the renunciate life accordingly.

Ān Shìgāo’s translation programme at Eastern Hàn Luòyáng focused on the Saṃyukta-āgama-class doctrinal-ethical texts of mainstream (proto-Sarvāstivāda) Buddhism. The Chūjiā yuán jīng fits this profile and corresponds to the kind of ethical-narrative material that he is securely known to have translated (as established in Antonino Forte’s and Stefano Zacchetti’s studies of the Ān Shìgāo corpus). Jan Nattier’s reassessment (2008) treats the attribution as plausible though not provable.

Translations and research

  • Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: Soka University IRIAB, 2008. (Reassessment of the Ān Shìgāo corpus.)
  • Zacchetti, Stefano. In Praise of the Light: A Critical Synoptic Edition with an Annotated Translation of Chapters 1–3 of Dharmarakṣa’s Guang zan jing 光讚經. Tokyo: Soka University IRIAB, 2005. (Background on early Chinese Buddhist translation.)
  • Forte, Antonino. “An Shigao 安世高,” in L’antica versione cinese dell’Anāpāna-smṛti-sūtra (Naples, various publications).

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