Fóshuō Dìzàng Púsà fāxīn yīnyuán Shíwáng jīng 佛說地藏菩薩發心因緣十王經
Sūtra of Kṣitigarbha’s Generation of the Bodhi-Mind and the Conditions of the Ten Kings by 藏川 (Cángchuān, 述)
About the work
A short single-fascicle apocryphal Chinese Buddhist sūtra (X01 no. 020) attributed in its own signature line — Chéngdū Mádà Shèng-cí’ēn-sì shā-mén Cángchuān shù 成都麻大聖慈恩寺沙門藏川述 — to the Táng-and-Five-Dynasties Sichuan monk 藏川 Cángchuān 藏川, whose other extant work is the closely related KR6i0584 Fóshuō yùxiū Shíwáng shēngqī jīng 佛說預修十王生七經. The two texts are companion pieces in the Shíwáng 十王 (“Ten Kings of the Underworld”) tradition that became one of the most influential popular-Buddhist literary corpora in late-Táng and Sòng-period East Asia. The setting is the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa at Kuśinagara on the banks of the Hiraṇyavatī (鳩尸那城䟦提河邊沙羅雙樹). In the moments immediately before the parinirvāṇa — qiánfēn zhī hòu, yíjiào zhī qián 前分之後遺教之前 (“after the earlier portion [of the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra] but before the [final] bequeathed teachings”) — the Buddha emanates a great light to Yánmó guó 閻魔國 (the realm of King Yama) and conducts a comprehensive interview with King Yama and the ten judicial-kings of the underworld, instructing them in the yīnyuán (causal-conditions) of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva’s vow to deliver beings from hell.
Abstract
The Shíwáng jīng tradition is a securely identified Chinese-Buddhist apocryphal corpus, foundational to East Asian popular-Buddhist representations of the underworld, the post-mortem judicial process, and the intercessory role of Kṣitigarbha. Modern scholarship — particularly Stephen Teiser’s The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994) — establishes the works as Chinese productions of the late-Táng and Five-Dynasties period (circa 800–950), composed in Sichuan and circulated through the Sòng-period Eastern-Asian Buddhist textual networks. Dūnhuáng manuscript witnesses (e.g. P.2003) preserve illustrated and short-form versions of the Shíwáng jīng corpus in the late ninth and early tenth centuries.
The “translator” Cángchuān is otherwise undocumented and is most plausibly a literary persona constructed for the Shíwáng jīng tradition rather than a historical figure; the Sichuan monastic context (Chéngdū) within which the texts emerged is, however, well-attested in late-Táng Shíwáng iconography and inscriptional remains. The pair of texts — the present Fāxīn yīnyuán Shíwáng jīng and the KR6i0584 Yùxiū Shíwáng shēngqī jīng — represent two complementary aspects of the Shíwáng program: the first establishing the doctrinal and narrative grounds, the second providing the practical liturgical-ritual program for yùxiū 預修 (anticipatory cultivation) — pre-mortem ritual cultivation of the seven post-mortem courts of judgement.
Translations and research
- Teiser, Stephen F. The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994. — The foundational English-language study, with translation of the principal Shíwáng texts and analysis of the manuscript and iconographic record.
- Sawada Mizuho 沢田瑞穂. Jigoku-hen 地獄変. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1968. — Standard Japanese study of Chinese Buddhist hell-cosmology including the Shíwáng tradition.
- Ng, Zhiru. The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva: Dizang in Medieval China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. — On Kṣitigarbha as the principal bodhisattva of the Shíwáng corpus.
Other points of interest
The Shíwáng iconography that emerges from these texts — the ten-kings court-by-court progression of the deceased through the underworld, the reckoning of merit and demerit at each court, the intercession of Kṣitigarbha and his bodhisattvic retinue — became the standard East Asian popular-Buddhist representation of the post-mortem state and is the iconographic source of innumerable Sòng-and-after wall-paintings and album-paintings. Its influence extends from Chinese to Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese popular Buddhism.