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 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
Reminder: AI generated list - beware of hallucinations. Corrections and additions welcome
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/