Fó shuō dúzǐ jīng 佛說犢子經
The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra of the Calf (Skt. Vatsa-sūtra) translated by 支謙 (Zhī Qiān, 譯)
About the work
T808 in one fascicle is a short narrative sūtra on the curative power of milk produced through the sincere offering of a calf and its mother to the Buddha, attributed to the Wú-period Yuèzhī lay-translator 支謙 (Zhī Qiān, fl. 222–253). The Sanskrit reflex is the Vatsa-sūtra (“Sūtra of the Calf”). A parallel translation by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa) survives as [[KR6i0515|Fó shuō rǔguāngfó jīng 佛說乳光佛經]] (T809), and the two texts are often catalogued together as recensions of the same source-text. The avadāna-style narrative was a popular vehicle for the doctrine of karma operating across species.
Abstract
The Buddha at the Anāthapiṇḍada park in Śrāvastī falls slightly ill with a wind-disorder (風患 fēng-huàn) and requires cow’s milk. He sends Ānanda to a wealthy Brahmin’s herd outside the city to beg for milk. The Brahmin tells Ānanda to milk a particular cow himself; Ānanda discovers that the cow is fierce and dangerous, and as a monk cannot ritually milk her himself.
Indra (帝釋 Dìshì) reads Ānanda’s predicament and assumes the form of a Brahmin to milk the cow on his behalf. He addresses the cow (and her calf), explaining that the milk is for the Buddha, the great teacher of gods and humans, and that her offering will produce immeasurable merit (apramāṇa-puṇya). The cow consents, asking only that the front two teats’ milk be taken for the Buddha and the rear two left for her calf. The calf, hearing the Buddha’s name, miraculously interjects in human speech, telling its mother to give all her milk to the Buddha, since the calf would gladly subsist on grass and water alone — the calf having been a milk-drinker across infinite past lives, this single act of self-denial in offering milk to a Buddha would yield boundless karmic fruit.
The narrative develops the calf’s jātaka-disclosure: in past lives the calf was, like the rest of saṃsāra’s beings, a chain of consciousnesses passing through countless animal incarnations; the encounter with the Buddha is the karmically-decisive moment in which the species-boundary is overcome by the calf’s developed faculty for dharma-discrimination. The text closes with the Buddha receiving the milk, recovering, and prophesying that both the cow and the calf will attain Buddhahood in future lives.
The doctrine — that karma operates uniformly across the boundary between human and animal birth, and that any being capable of meritorious thought may receive a Buddha-prediction — is foundational for the bodhisattva-vow tradition. The text is closely connected to the Lalitavistara and to the legend of the milk-offering by Sujātā at the moment of the Buddha’s awakening.
Translations and research
- Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations: Texts from the Eastern Han 東漢 and Three Kingdoms 三國 Periods. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, 2008. (Treatment of Zhī Qiān’s translation corpus.)
- Karashima Seishi 辛嶋静志. Underlying Languages of Early Chinese Translations of Buddhist Sūtras. Berlin: Steiner, 2014.
Other points of interest
The “calf with prior-life knowledge” topos found here is one of the earliest Chinese textual instances of the doctrine that animal-realm beings can possess developed dharma-faculties — an idea that became central to East Asian Buddhist treatments of universal Buddha-nature.
Links
- CBETA online
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (245, 300, 390): [ 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. https://dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/1/