DàMíng Rénxiào Huánghòu mènggǎn Fóshuō dìyī xīyǒu dàgōngdé jīng 大明仁孝皇后夢感佛說第一希有大功德經
Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha — The First Most-Rare Great Merit Scripture, Received in a Dream by Empress Rén-xiào of the Great Míng attributed (via dream-revelation) to 徐皇后 (Empress Rénxiào, née Xú, 受 — “received”)
About the work
A 2-fascicle Míng-imperial dream-revelation sūtra (X01 no. 010) presented as a Buddha-spoken scripture revealed to Xú 徐, 徐皇后 Empress Rénxiào 仁孝 (1362–1407), principal consort of the Yǒnglè 永樂 emperor (Míng Chéngzǔ 明成祖, 朱棣 Zhū Dì, r. 1402–1424). The text’s preface — written in the Empress’s own voice — describes a vision-experience on the first day of the first lunar month of Hóngwǔ 31 (1398): while sitting at incense-meditation in her private quarters reading the classics, she fell into a dreamlike trance and was transported by celestial vehicle to Qíshéjué jìng 耆闍崛境 (the Vulture Peak), where the Buddha, surrounded by the assembly, spoke to her this scripture in fully Mahāyāna form. The work was subsequently committed to writing and printed under imperial patronage. The two-fascicle layout gives the dream-vision-preface in fascicle one and the dream-spoken sūtra-proper in fascicle two.
Abstract
The work is one of the most striking specimens of late-imperial Buddhist yiwei 疑偽 / pseudo-canonical literature: a fully formed Mahāyāna sūtra produced not as a translation from an Indic original (or pretending to be one) but as a personal revelation-text by an individual female imperial figure, presented to the world through imperial publishing channels and inserted into the Wànzì xùzàngjīng in the Edo period. Empress Xú was the daughter of the Hóngwǔ-era general 徐達 Xú Dá (1332–1385), married Zhū Dì in 1376 (then Prince of Yān 燕王), and became Empress Rénxiào on Zhū Dì’s accession to the throne in 1402. She was a devout Buddhist throughout her life, the patron of major Buddhist publishing projects, and the author of the Quànshàn shū 勸善書 (a moral admonition-text) and the Mènggǎn Fóshuō dìyī xīyǒu dàgōngdé jīng — the present text. Her death in 1407 fixes the terminus ad quem; the dream-vision preface dates the originary experience to 1398 and provides the terminus a quo.
The internal evidence — the elevated diction, the systematic Mahāyāna scenography, the use of canonical prajñāpāramitā and tathāgatagarbha phrasing — indicates that the actual prose of the sūtra was assisted by experienced monastic editors who would have served the imperial-Buddhist court. The Empress is the 受 (“recipient”) and authorial voice; the printed text is a polished classical-Buddhist Chinese composition. The work circulated within the late-Míng imperial-Buddhist milieu but received no canonical recognition, finding its way into the Buddhist textual record only through the Edo-Japanese Xùzàng compilation.
Translations and research
- Brook, Timothy. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1993. — On the broader context of late-Míng imperial-Buddhist patronage.
- Yü Chün-fang 于君方. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. — Treats Empress Xú as a major Míng-period female devotional figure.
Other points of interest
The dream-revelation prologue is one of the most vivid first-person devotional narratives in Míng-period Chinese Buddhist literature, comparable in genre to the Sòng-period revelation narratives that produced texts like the Yánluó wáng shòujì 閻羅王授記 — though with the unique distinction of being the personal vision of a reigning empress.