Shòuyòng sānshuǐ yàoxíng fǎ 受用三水要行法
The Essential Method of Using the Three Kinds of Water by 義淨 (Yìjìng, 撰)
About the work
A short single-fascicle Vinaya manual on the canonical handling of sānshuǐ 三水 (“three waters”) in Buddhist monastic practice by Yìjìng 義淨 (義淨, 635–713). Author signature: 唐三藏法師義淨撰.
Prefaces
The work opens with no separate preface; the body opens directly: 准依聖教，及西方現今眾生所用之水。有其三別 (“according to the holy teaching, and to the water currently used by the people of the West [= India], there are three categories”). Yìjìng then enumerates: (1) shíshuǐ 時水 (water that may be drunk at any time, kālika), (2) fēishíshuǐ 非時水 (water for non-meal-time use), (3) chùyòng shuǐ 觸用水 (water for ritual contact-use, requiring purification before drinking).
Abstract
The Sānshuǐ yàoxíng fǎ is the most canonical of Yìjìng’s three short Vinaya manuals (with KR6k0188 and KR6k0190) and represents his programmatic application of South-Asian Mūlasarvāstivāda-Vinaya practice to Chinese monastic life. As the Vinaya manual that Yìjìng dispatched on the canonical handling of drinking and ritual water, the work supplements the larger Nánhǎi jìguī nèifǎ zhuàn 南海寄歸內法傳 (T2125), where Yìjìng’s broader programme of Mūlasarvāstivāda-correction of Chinese practice is set out. The text is precisely keyed to Indian Buddhist hot-climate pragmatics — water purification, mid-day meal restrictions, the use of strained water from the lùshuǐnáng 漉水囊 (water-strainer) — that had no exact Chinese antecedents and required his explicit pedagogical attention. Composition belongs to Yìjìng’s post-695 Luòyáng / Chángān decades.
Translations and research
- Takakusu Junjirō. A Record of the Buddhist Religion as Practised in India and the Malay Archipelago (Oxford 1896): translation of Yìjìng’s larger Nánhǎi jìguī, of which the present manual is a programmatic supplement.
- Heirman, Ann, and Tom De Rauw. Studies on Vinaya pragmatics.