Fóshuō yùxiū Shíwáng shēngqī jīng 佛說預修十王生七經
Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha for the Preparatory Cultivation of the Ten Kings and the Seven [Sevenths-Day] Rebirths by 藏川 (Cángchuān, 述)
About the work
A short single-fascicle apocryphal Chinese Buddhist sūtra (X01 no. 021) and the principal liturgical-ritual text of the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties Shíwáng 十王 (“Ten Kings of the Underworld”) corpus, of which the doctrinal-and-narrative companion piece is KR6i0583 Fóshuō Dìzàng Púsà fāxīn yīnyuán Shíwáng jīng. Both texts are attributed to 藏川 Cángchuān 藏川 of the Dà Shèngcísì 大聖慈寺 in Chéngdū. The full title of the main scripture is given in the work’s headnote as Fóshuō Yánluówáng shòujì sìzhòng nìxiū shēngqī wǎngshēng jìngtǔ jīng 佛說閻羅王授記四眾逆修生七往生淨土經 — “Sūtra of the Buddha’s Granting of Prophetic Assignment to King Yama, with the Four Assemblies’ Reversal-Cultivation of the Seven [Seventh-day Rites] for Rebirth in the Pure Land”.
Abstract
The Yùxiū Shíwáng shēngqī jīng establishes the canonical Buddhist account of the qīqī 七七 (“seven-sevens”) post-mortem ritual cycle: the deceased passes successively through ten judicial courts at intervals of seven days and at the centennial markers (one hundred days, one year, three years), each presided over by one of the Ten Kings. Yùxiū 預修 (“preparatory cultivation”) is the practice of performing these ritual sevenths-day rites for oneself in advance of one’s death, securing meritorious karmic store against the post-mortem reckoning. The text supplies the textual basis for the entire late-imperial East Asian Buddhist qīqī funerary apparatus: the seven rite-day cycle (頭七, 二七, 三七, 四七, 五七, 六七, 七七), the hundred-day rite (百日), and the first-and-third-anniversary memorial rites — together making up ten ritual occasions corresponding to the ten judicial courts.
The text is canonically incorporated into the Wànzì xùzàngjīng and survives also in Dūnhuáng manuscript witnesses (especially P.3304 with its associated illustrations) showing the integration of textual and pictorial transmission characteristic of the late-Táng popular-Buddhist tradition. Bibliographic and ritual-historical analysis of the Shíwáng corpus is comprehensively treated in Stephen Teiser’s The Scripture on the Ten Kings (1994).
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. — Foundational English-language study with full translation of the Shíwáng corpus.
- Teiser, Stephen F. Reinventing the Wheel: Paintings of Rebirth in Medieval Buddhist Temples. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. — On the Shíwáng iconography.
- Sawada Mizuho 沢田瑞穂. Jigoku-hen 地獄変. Kyoto: Hōzōkan, 1968. — On Chinese Buddhist hell-cosmology.
Other points of interest
The yùxiū 預修 (“preparatory cultivation”) doctrine articulated by this text — that one should perform one’s own funerary rites before one’s own death to secure post-mortem merit — is one of the most distinctive practical-religious doctrines of late-imperial Chinese Buddhism, and remains a living tradition in much of contemporary Chinese-Buddhist practice. The associated devotional songs (shànqǔ 讚曲), some of which are preserved in the textual apparatus of the Shíwáng jīng, are the earliest extant examples of the wǔhuì 五會 (“five-assembly”) chant tradition that would become foundational for late-Táng Pure-Land liturgy.