Fó shuō Fǎ shòu chén jīng 佛說法受塵經
The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra on the Dharma Receiving Defilement translated by 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, 譯)
About the work
T792 in one fascicle is a brief sūtra-translation traditionally attributed to 安世高 (Ān Shìgāo, fl. 148–170). The title 法受塵 (fǎ shòu chén) — “the Dharma receiving dust/defilement” — uses chén (塵, “dust”) in the standard Buddhist metaphorical sense of the kleśas (defilements) that obscure the mind’s natural purity. The text expounds the doctrine of the obscuration of the dharma-nature by the defilements.
Abstract
The text addresses the doctrinal question: if the dharma-nature is intrinsically pure, how is it that the mind comes to be defiled? The Buddha replies through a series of metaphors: just as the bright sun is sometimes obscured by passing clouds, just as a clean mirror is sometimes obscured by dust, just as clear water is sometimes muddied by the wind stirring the silt at its bottom — so the naturally pure dharma-nature is obscured by the adventitious arising of the kleśas. The path consists in removing the obscuring defilements; the dharma-nature itself is not transformed but only revealed. The text thus presents an early Chinese-language formulation of the doctrine of the adventitious nature of defilement (āgantuka-kleśa) — a doctrine that would prove foundational to the tathāgata-garbha tradition and to East Asian Buddhist soteriology more broadly.
The doctrine of āgantuka-kleśa is well-attested in the Pāli Aṅguttara-nikāya (“This mind is luminous, monks, but it is defiled by adventitious defilements”) and in the Saṃyukta-āgama parallels, and was a foundational premise of the early abhidharma analysis of the path. Ān Shìgāo’s brief Chinese rendering of a free-standing exposition of the doctrine is one of the early Chinese sources for the teaching, providing the conceptual ground on which later Chinese tathāgata-garbha and Chán doctrines would build.
Translations and research
- Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: Soka University IRIAB, 2008. (For the Ān Shìgāo corpus.)
- King, Sallie B. Buddha Nature. Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. (Background on the tathāgata-garbha tradition.)
- Zacchetti, Stefano. “An Shigao’s Texts Preserved in the Newly Discovered Kongō-ji Manuscript: A Preliminary Survey,” in Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University 5 (2002), 167–209.
Links
- CBETA T17n0792
- Dazangthings date evidence (160): 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.
- Kanseki DB
- 安世高 DILA