Zhūfó yàojí jīng 諸佛要集經
The Sūtra of the Essential Compilation of [the Teaching of] All Buddhas (Skt. Buddhasaṅgīti-sūtra; alt. Yào-jí jīng 要集經) translated by 竺法護 (Zhú Fǎhù, Dharmarakṣa, 譯)
About the work
T810 in two fascicles is a Mahāyāna sūtra on the convocation of the Buddhas of the ten directions for a “compilation” (saṅgīti) of essential teachings, translated by 竺法護 (Dharmarakṣa) at Cháng’ān during his Western Jìn translation career. The Sanskrit reflex Buddhasaṅgīti-sūtra is preserved in Tibetan and identified by modern scholarship; the doctrinal content centres on the bodhisattva’s training in upāya-kauśalya and the dharmadhātu-cognition.
Abstract
The text opens at Mt Yīnshājiù 因沙舊 (“Indra-Tree Stone-Chamber”) in Magadha, where the Buddha is seated with five thousand bhikṣus and twenty thousand bodhisattvas including Mañjuśrī and Maitreya, and an audience of eighty-four thousand devas. The fourfold assembly comes but is distracted: caught in the five impurities (pañca-kaṣāya, 五濁), they cannot concentrate on the teaching. The Buddha mentally resolves to absent himself in apparent retreat (示現如像燕處) — leaving a phantom-form behind — and to travel in his true person to the Buddha-fields of the ten directions to conduct the Buddha-convocation (諸佛之要) at which the essential Mahāyāna teaching will be revealed.
The body of the sūtra unfolds in two fascicles. Fascicle one sets the narrative frame and introduces the Buddha’s invisible-departure from the Magadhan assembly. The Buddha travels to a distant Buddha-field where he convenes a council of the Buddhas of the ten directions, who proceed to compile the zhūfó yào — the “essentials of all Buddhas” — through a series of dhāraṇī-pronouncements and doctrinal vignettes on the prajñā-pāramitā, the bodhisattva-bhūmis, and the upāya-kauśalya. Fascicle two continues the convocation with the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī’s deliberate violation of meditative protocol — he attempts a contest of samādhi with a celestial bodhisattva named Líyìniàn 離意念 (“Free-of-Mental-Activity”), who, being more advanced, defeats him. Mañjuśrī confesses the defeat, the Buddha returns to the Magadhan assembly, and the lesson is drawn that even Mañjuśrī’s pre-eminent wisdom is exceeded by the anuttara-samādhi of advanced bodhisattvas.
The doctrinal core is the inexhaustibility of the bodhisattva-mārga: there are stages beyond every stage; the anuttara-samyak-saṃbodhi is reached only through the cumulative practice of all pāramitās without any sense of attainment. The Mañjuśrī-Líyìniàn contest is a celebrated narrative episode in the Mahāyāna tradition and is cited in later Yogācāra commentaries as evidence for the doctrine of aprameya-Buddha-bhūmi.
Translations and research
- Boucher, Daniel. “Dharmarakṣa and the Transmission of Buddhism to China.” Asia Major 19 (2006): 13–37.
- Skilton, Andrew. A Concise History of Buddhism. Birmingham: Windhorse Publications, 1994.
- Tibetan parallel preserved in the Tibetan canon (sangs rgyas gyi mdo, Buddhasaṅgīti); cf. P. Skilling, “Mahāsūtras: Great Discourses of the Buddha,” in Sacred Sanskrit Words: For Yoga, Chant and Meditation (Berkeley: Stone Bridge Press, 2006).
Other points of interest
The Mañjuśrī-vs.-Líyìniàn samādhi contest in fascicle two is one of the most famous narrative episodes in the early Chinese Mahāyāna corpus and is referenced repeatedly in Tiāntái and Huáyán commentarial literature.
Links
- CBETA online
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (296, 300): [ Boucher 1996 ] Boucher, Daniel. “Buddhist Translation Procedures in Third-Century China: A Study of Dharmarakṣa and his Translation Idiom.” PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1996. 271 https://dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/289/