Dà wēidēngguāng xiānrén wènyí jīng 大威燈光仙人問疑經
The Sūtra of the Sage of Great-Awesome-Lamp-Light Asking the Buddha to Resolve Doubts (Skt. Paramārtha-dharma-vijaya-sūtra; alt. Dà wēidēng xiānrén wènyí jīng 大威燈仙人問疑經) translated by 闍那崛多 (Shénàjuéduō, Jñānagupta, et al., 等譯)
About the work
T834 in one fascicle is the parallel translation of [[KR6i0539|Dìyī yì fǎshèng jīng 第一義法勝經 (T833)]] by the Suí Indian translator 闍那崛多 (Jñānagupta, 523–600) at Cháng’ān during his Suí Wéndì translation career (581–600). Both texts descend from the same Indian source (Skt. Paramārtha-dharma-vijaya), but Jñānagupta’s title 大威燈光仙人問疑經 (“Sūtra of the Sage of Great-Awesome-Lamp-Light Asking the Buddha to Resolve Doubts”) names the principal interlocutor instead of the doctrinal content.
Abstract
The narrative frame is identical to that of T833: the Buddha at Gayā shortly after his awakening, with the great assembly of bhikṣu-arhats, bodhisattvas, devas, and 84,000 five-knowledge sages plus 12 koṭi of Nirgrantha-Jains gathered to dispute with him. The Buddha enters samādhi and emanates countless beings of every kind. The principal interlocutor in Jñānagupta’s translation is the sage Dà wēidēngguāng 大威燈光 (“Great-Awesome-Lamp-Light”), who in T833 is unnamed; he asks the Buddha to resolve the assembled sages’ doubts about the paramārtha-doctrine.
The body of the sūtra proceeds parallel to T833, with the Buddha’s exposition of the victory of the paramārtha through the bodhisattva’s upāya-kauśalya and the integration of paramārtha and saṃvṛti in prajñā-pāramitā. Jñānagupta’s late-sixth-century translation idiom is more polished and standardised than Prajñāruci’s mid-sixth-century rendering, with developed Buddhist Chinese technical vocabulary throughout. See KR6i0539 for the full doctrinal summary.
Translations and research
See KR6i0539 for the relevant secondary literature.
Links
- CBETA online
- Kanseki DB
- Dazangthings date evidence (590): [ 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/