Fó shuō pínqióng lǎogōng jīng 佛說貧窮老公經
The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra of the Destitute Old Man (recension a) translated by 慧簡 (Huìjiǎn, 譯)
About the work
T797a in one fascicle is a short jātaka-type sūtra on the karmic biography of an extraordinary old beggar, translated by the Liú-Sòng monk 慧簡 (Huìjiǎn, also written 惠簡), who was active at the Lùyě Monastery in Mòlíng (Jiànkāng) around Dàmíng 1 (457). The same translation is preserved in a parallel recension as T797b (q.v.), with minor textual divergences but identical narrative content. The Sòng monk Huìjiǎn is also the translator credited with [[KR6i0533|Fó shuō xièdài gēngzhě jīng (T827)]] (under the alternate spelling 惠簡) and the [[KR6a0043|Yánluówáng wǔ tiānshǐzhě jīng 閻羅王五天使者經]].
Abstract
The narrative is set at the Jetavana monastery in Śrāvastī, where a destitute old man of two hundred years, marked nevertheless with the auspicious physical signs (lakṣaṇa) of long life — ample brows, prominent ears, even teeth, and arms reaching past his knees — comes begging for an audience with the Buddha. Released by Indra and Brahmā at the gate, the old man crawls into the Buddha’s presence and pleads to be relieved of his suffering before he dies. The Buddha tells him his prior-life biography: in a former existence the old man was the crown prince of a powerful state, gifted with every advantage but proud, parsimonious and cruel; when a poor śramaṇa named Jìngzhì 靜志 came to him to beg for a robe, he refused even food and water and detained the monk for seven days and nights as entertainment, until a counsellor finally persuaded him to release the dying mendicant. This single act of tormenting a holy ascetic has produced his present condition: poverty, longevity, and the simultaneous co-existence of auspicious bodily marks (the residue of his royal birth-merit) with extreme destitution (the karmic fruit of his cruelty).
The doctrinal point — that good and bad karma both ripen but cannot cancel each other out, and that the agent must endure the mature fruit of each act separately — is made through the dramatic conjunction of the old man’s mahāpuruṣa-lakṣaṇa with his abject suffering. The narrative culminates in the Buddha’s confession that the śramaṇa Jìngzhì of that long-ago kingdom was the Buddha himself in a former life, and that the old man’s present audience with the Buddha is the karmic completion of the encounter that began with the seven-day torment. The text concludes with the old man’s death and rebirth in the Trāyastriṃśa heaven, having exhausted the negative karma through his confession to the Buddha.
The narrative belongs to the genre of “previous-life encounter” stories that explain present circumstances through past-life acts; similar narrative structures are found across the Avadāna literature.
Translations and research
No standalone Western translation located. See:
- Demoto, Mitsuyo. “Avadāna Literature in Buddhist Sanskrit.” In Pāsādikadānaṁ: Festschrift für Bhikkhu Pāsādika. Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 2009.
- Strong, John S. The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations. 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2008.