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佛說乳光佛經

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Text ID
KR6i0515
Date
266–313
Dynasty
西晉

Fó shuō rǔguāngfó jīng 佛說乳光佛經

The Buddha Speaks: The Sūtra of the Buddha “Milk-Light” (Skt. Vatsa-sūtra; alt. Rǔguāng jīng 乳光經) translated by 竺法護 (Zhú Fǎhù, Dharmarakṣa, 譯)

About the work

T809 in one fascicle is the parallel translation of [[KR6i0514|Fó shuō dú-zǐ jīng 佛說犢子經 (T808)]] by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa, 239–316), produced during his long Western Jìn translation career at Cháng’ān and Luòyáng. The Chinese title 乳光佛 (“Buddha Milk-Light”) refers to the future-Buddha prediction (vyākaraṇa) that the Buddha gives to the calf at the climax of the narrative — the calf will become a future Buddha named Rǔ-guāng (“Milk-Light”). The two texts (T808 and T809) descend from a common Indian source-text (Skt. Vatsa-sūtra) but were translated independently and differ in many details of phrasing.

Abstract

The narrative is set at the Vaiśālī (維耶離) “music-tree garden” of the Brahmin Módiào 摩調. The Buddha falls slightly ill with a wind-disorder, requiring cow’s milk. He sends Ānanda to the wealthy but irreligious Brahmin Móyélì 摩耶利, who is depicted with caustic vividness as proud, jealous and miserly: he is unwilling to refuse openly (lest he appear stingy) but unwilling to give freely (lest he be thought a follower of the Śramaṇa Gautama), and resolves to send Ānanda to a vicious cow in the hopes that Ānanda will be killed by her, allowing Móyélì to claim plausible-deniability of generosity.

When Ānanda reaches the cow, he reflects that as a śramaṇa he cannot ritually milk her himself. Indra (帝釋), reading his predicament, descends from trāyastriṃśa in the form of a young Brahmin and offers to do the milking. The voice of Vimalakīrti (維摩詰 Wéimójié) is heard from the sky encouraging Ānanda to overcome his hesitation. The cow speaks, asking that the front teats be milked for the Buddha and the rear two left for her calf; the calf, possessing prior-life dharma-faculties, intervenes in verse-form, telling its mother to give all the milk to the Buddha. Three gāthā-speeches follow — Indra’s, the cow’s, and the calf’s — in which each declares its merit-thought toward the Buddha. The calf reveals its jātaka: in countless past lives it had been a miser through bad influences, and was reborn as cattle for sixteen kalpas; the encounter with the Buddha is the karmic turning-point.

The Buddha receives the milk, recovers, and prophesies that the calf will become a future Buddha named Rǔguāng 乳光 (“Milk-Light”); the cow will likewise attain Buddhahood; and Móyélì himself, repenting, will eventually attain liberation. The 500 disciples of Móyélì who witness the events all arouse the anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi aspiration. The text closes with the standard formula of joyful reception.

The doctrine — that an animal capable of dharma-thought can receive a Buddha-prediction, and that the Buddha’s apparent illness is itself a teaching device for converting Brahmins like Móyélì — links the sūtra to the Mahāyāna jātaka-prediction tradition. Compared to its parallel T808, Dharmarakṣa’s translation is markedly more elaborate, with extended gāthā-speeches and a more developed Mahāyāna framing (esp. the cameo of Vimalakīrti).

Translations and research

  • Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Tokyo: International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, 2008.
  • Boucher, Daniel. “On Hu and Fan Again: The Transmission of ‘Barbarian’ Manuscripts to China.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23 (2000): 7–28.
  • Boucher, Daniel. “Dharmarakṣa and the Transmission of Buddhism to China.” Asia Major 19 (2006): 13–37.

Other points of interest

The cameo of Vimalakīrti speaking from the sky is striking: the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa was translated by Zhī Qiān (T474) in the Wú period and was thus already current in third-century South China. Dharmarakṣa’s deployment of Vimalakīrti as a heavenly voice within an Āgama-style narrative reflects the increasing inter-textual presence of Mahāyāna doctrine in early Chinese Buddhist translation.

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