Fóshuō dàfāngguǎng Mànshūshìlì jīng 佛說大方廣曼殊室利經
Vast and Expansive Mañjuśrī Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha (extract: Avalokiteśvara-vyākaraṇa-parivarta) by 不空 (Bùkōng, Amoghavajra, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Tang Esoteric sūtra translated by Amoghavajra (不空) — though titled as a Mañjuśrī text (大方廣曼殊室利, Mahā-vaipulya-Mañjuśrī-sūtra), the surviving Chinese fascicle preserves only the chapter Guānzìzài púsà shòujì pǐn 觀自在菩薩授記品 (“Chapter on the vyākaraṇa / Future-Buddhahood Prophecy of Avalokiteśvara”). The chapter-numbering of the Taishō text — given variantly as 第一 (“first”) or 第三十一 (“thirty-first”) — suggests this fascicle is a fragment extracted from a much larger Indic Mahā-vaipulya compendium that was never fully translated into Chinese. The colophon repeats Amoghavajra’s full court titulature.
Abstract
The opening situates the discourse at the Śuddhāvāsa heaven (淨居天宮) where the Buddha turns to Avalokiteśvara and praises him: “Excellent, excellent, good son! Out of compassion for the multitude of sentient beings, you abide in the dhāraṇī-form and expound for them the establishment of liberation, exhorting them, sharing their joy, opening their understanding of the Dharma’s import — for those of cultivation, opening the essentials of the Dharma and the various homa-rituals, the skilful expedient means by which they may attain unsurpassed Bodhi and the two attainments…” The chapter unfolds as Avalokiteśvara’s vyākaraṇa-prophecy of his own future Buddhahood as Pǔguānggōngdéshānwáng 普光功德山王 (Skt. Samanta-prabha-guṇa-girīndra-rāja) in a future kalpa, with the Mahāyāna-tantric apparatus of dhāraṇī-recitation, homa-fire-offering, and abhiṣeka sequences integrated into the prophetic narrative.
The text is doctrinally adjacent to the Karuṇāpuṇḍarīka and Avalokiteśvara-vyākaraṇa-sūtra traditions but reframes the Avalokiteśvara prophecy in the operative Tang Esoteric idiom. Its inclusion in the Mahā-vaipulya-Mañjuśrī corpus — where Mañjuśrī rather than Avalokiteśvara is the principal — is unusual and suggests a Tang kalpa-rāja-style anthology of prophetic-bodhisattva chapters circulating in Amoghavajra’s Indic source-materials.
Translations and research
- Sørensen, Henrik H. “Esoteric Buddhism (Mijiao) and the Avalokiteśvara cult in Tang China.” In Sørensen et al. (eds.), Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
- Lewis Lancaster (with Sung-bae Park). The Korean Buddhist Canon: A Descriptive Catalogue. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979 — entry K.1382 / T1101.
Links
- CBETA T20n1101
- Kanseki DB
- 不空 DILA
- Dazangthings date evidence (750) — 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.