Fó shuō shànyè jīng 佛說善夜經
Sūtra of the Auspicious Night by 義淨 (Yìjìng, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Táng translation by 義淨 Yìjìng (635–713), the colophon “唐三藏法師義淨奉制譯”. Imperially commissioned (fèng zhì yì), placed in his most active translation period (700–712). The text is the Chinese version of the Bhadrakarātrīyasūtra (the “Sūtra of the Excellent Night” / “One Auspicious Attachment”) — a famous short work, well known in the Pāli canon as the Bhaddekaratta-sutta (Majjhima-nikāya 131) and in the Sanskrit Mūlasarvāstivāda tradition.
Abstract
A bhikṣu dwells beside a hot-spring outside Rājagṛha 王舍城; at the close of the first watch a brilliant deity comes to him and asks whether he has heard the Shànyè jīng 善夜經. The bhikṣu has not, the deity has not either, the deity directs him to the Buddha at the Bamboo-Grove (Veṇuvana 竹林園). At dawn the bhikṣu goes; the Buddha identifies the deity as the great-general Candana 栴檀 of the Trāyastriṃśa heaven, sent to awaken him to ask the question. The Buddha then teaches the sūtra: a verse on the futility of pursuing the past or pining for the future, the necessity of clear-seeing of the present, with a dhāraṇī appended.
The work is one of the most reliably attested early Buddhist short sūtras to survive in independent Chinese, Pāli and Sanskrit forms. Yìjìng’s version preserves both the avadāna-style frame (the deity-encounter) and the doctrinal verse-and-dhāraṇī kernel; it is one of his more polished short translations. Recorded in the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù. Nanjio N0791.
Translations and research
- Schmithausen, Lambert. “Beiträge zur Schulzugehörigkeit und Textgeschichte kanonischer und postkanonischer buddhistischer Materialien,” in H. Bechert (ed.), Zur Schulzugehörigkeit von Werken der Hīnayāna-Literatur, vol. 2 (Göttingen 1987), 304–406. — discussion of the Bhadrakarātrīya/Bhaddekaratta tradition including the Chinese versions.
- Anālayo, Bhikkhu. “The Bhadrekaratta-Discourse,” Journal of the Centre for Buddhist Studies, Sri Lanka 4 (2006), 1–22.