Fóshuō Mílè púsà fāyuànwáng jì 佛說彌勒菩薩發願王偈
Verses of the Vow-King Aspiration of the Bodhisattva Maitreya (Ārya-Maitreya-praṇidhāna-rāja) by 工布查布 (Gōngbùchábù, Mgon-po-skyabs, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Qing-dynasty translation by Mgon-po-skyabs (工布查布, the Mongol bannerman-scholar and Qing court translator of Tibetan Buddhist texts). Colophon: 內閣掌譯西番蒙古諸文西番學總管儀賓工布查布譯. The text is the Chinese version of the Tibetan ʼPhags-pa Byams-pa’i smon-lam gyi rgyal-po (Ārya-Maitreya-praṇidhāna-rāja) — itself a translation of a well-attested Sanskrit Maitreya-praṇidhāna dating from the early-medieval Indian Buddhist devotional tradition. Mgon-po-skyabs supplies the Sanskrit title in transliteration (ārya-maitreya-praṇidhāna-rāja: 阿喇鴉黑厄答喇巴呢達哈阿納喇阿雜阿) before glossing it 華言聖彌勒願王.
Abstract
The text consists of praṇidhāna (vow) verses ascribed to Maitreya, asking that the practitioner be reborn in Tuṣita to await Maitreya’s descent and to attain bodhi at his future preaching. Mgon-po-skyabs’s translation, dated to the Qiánlóng era (specifically 1736 — the year of his major Yuánzhèngfú jì 御製漢蒙書 production), follows his Tibetan exemplar with the Sanskrit transliteration first → Chinese gloss → translated verse pattern characteristic of his Tibeto-Mongol-Chinese trilingual translation method. The text is part of his project to make Tibetan Buddhist devotional and tantric verse-literature available in literary Chinese for the Qing imperial Buddhist establishment, particularly the Yōnghégōng 雍和宮 and the Manchu-Mongol-Tibetan canonical projects sponsored by the Qiánlóng court. The text is a rare Qing-dynasty addition to the Taishō (most Taishō Esoteric texts predate it by several centuries).
Translations and research
- Uspensky, Vladimir. “The Tibetan Equivalents to the Titles of the Texts in the Beijing Edition of the Mongolian Kanjur.” Bulletin of the IISNC 7 (2002).
- Ng On-cho and Wang Q. Edward, eds. Mirroring the Past: The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2005.
Other points of interest
The text is an unusual chronological outlier in the Taishō Mìjiào (Esoteric) section: a Qing-period Mongol/Manchu-court translation embedded among Tang-Sòng material. It documents the late-imperial continuity of the Mahāyāna-praṇidhāna tradition in the Qing translation bureaus, separate from the ordinary Buddhist canonical streams.
Links
- CBETA T20n1144
- Kanseki DB
- 工布查布 DILA
- Dazangthings date evidence (1750) — 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.