Sān mí dǐ bù lùn 三彌底部論
Treatise of the Sāṃmitīya School (Sammitīya-nikāya-śāstra) by 失譯 (Shīyì / anonymous translator)
About the work
A three-juǎn anonymous translation of an Indic abhidharma treatise of the Sāṃmitīya school (三彌底部) — one of the eighteen schools of early Indian Buddhism, an offshoot of the Vātsīputrīya whose distinguishing doctrine was the so-called pudgala-vāda (“doctrine of the person”). The Chinese colophon (失譯人名今附秦錄) places it in the Qín catalogue, i.e. tentatively in the late fourth or early fifth century, and it is so listed in the Lì-dài sānbǎo jì 歷代三寶記 (T2034) and the Kāiyuán-lù 開元錄 (T2154). The text is the principal Chinese witness to Sāṃmitīya doctrine — especially their analysis of the pudgala and of the karma-vipāka mechanism — and is one of only a handful of canonically transmitted abhidharma works of any non-Sarvāstivāda school.
Structural Division
CANWWW (T32N1649) does not record an internal sub-division for this text. The Taishō text is divided only by juǎn (上, 中, 下).
Abstract
The Taishō opening line reads “三彌底部論卷上 / 失譯人名今附秦錄”. The work has no named author or translator and is conventionally placed in the late fourth or early fifth century — the latest terminus ante quem being its registration in the Chū sānzàng jì jí 出三藏記集 of Sēng-yòu (T2145, completed c. 515) under the lost translations of the Qín period. The opening sentences, in which a dying person’s karma-vipāka depends on whether the dying mind is 記心 (lit. “marked-mind”, probably vyākṛta-citta — defined or determinate) or 無記心 (avyākṛta-citta — undefined), point to the central concern of the school: how an individual self-continuum (pudgala) carries forward the karman of past lives without being identical to a substantial soul. Modern scholarship (Kanakura Enshō, Skilling, Cox) has used this text alongside Vasumitra’s Samaya-bhedoparacanacakra and the Sāṃmitīya passages of the Abhidharmakośa-bhāṣya to reconstruct Sāṃmitīya doctrine. The Sanskrit original does not survive; a Tibetan translation is also absent. Thus the Sān-mí-dǐ-bù lùn and its companion fragmentary remains in the Pañcavimśati-saṃghīti and the Saṃyukta-abhidharma-hṛdaya are the primary sources for one of the most numerous Indian Buddhist schools of the late first millennium — a school whose physical monasteries dominated the Madhyadeśa for much of that period (according to Xuánzàng’s report in 大唐西域記).
Translations and research
- Skilling, Peter. “Vasubandhu and the Vyākhyāyukti Literature.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 23.2 (2000): 297–350. — Treats the Sāṃmitīya tradition.
- Thich Thien Chau. The Literature of the Personalists of Early Buddhism. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999. — The standard monograph on the pudgalavāda tradition; treats the Sān-mí-dǐ-bù lùn in detail (translation of substantial portions).
- Priestley, Leonard C. D. C. Pudgalavāda Buddhism: The Reality of the Indeterminate Self. Toronto: South Asian Studies Papers, 1999.
- Cox, Collett. “On the Possibility of a Nonexistent Object of Consciousness: Sarvāstivādin and Dārṣṭāntika Theories.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 11.1 (1988). — Comparative abhidharma.
Other points of interest
The Sāṃmitīya school, whose principal monastery in Magadha was Lalitagiri-Udayagiri (according to Xuánzàng), was numerically the largest Indian Buddhist school in the seventh century. Almost all of its literature is lost: the Sān-mí-dǐ-bù lùn, the Tridharmaka-śāstra 三法度論 (T1506, also Sammitīya), and a few citations in critical literature are essentially the entire surviving corpus. The text was almost completely ignored in subsequent Chinese Buddhist exegesis and stands as one of the most significant lost-and-found documents of twentieth-century Indology.
Links
- CBETA
- Wikipedia
- Dazangthings date evidence (390, 417, 565): [ Nattier 2010 ] Nattier, Jan. “Re-evaluating Zhu Fonian’s Shizhu duanjie jing (T309): Translation or Forgery?” Annual Report of The International Research Insitute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University 13 (2010): 256. https://dazangthings.nz/cbc/source/6/