Shí wǎngshēng Ēmítuó fó guó jīng 佛說十往生阿彌陀佛國經
Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Ten [Conditions for] Rebirth in the Land of Amitābha (Anonymous, attested in the Zhōu 周 catalogue)
About the work
A single-juǎn Pure Land sūtra of unattested translator-name, classed as 失譯人名 出周錄 (the Zhōu lù — i.e. the Wǔzhōu kāndìng zhòngjīng mùlù 武周刊定眾經目錄 of 695, compiled under Empress Wǔ Zhāo). The text presents itself as a Buddha-discourse on Vulture Peak setting out ten conditions under which the practitioner attains rebirth in Amitābha’s Pure Land. Like the other shorter Pure Land sūtras in this section of the Xùzàngjīng (KR6p0031, KR6p0032, KR6p0033), the work is widely understood by modern scholars to be a Chinese-composed apocryphon rather than an Indian translation.
Abstract
The text opens with the Buddha at Wáng-shè chéng Qí-shé-jué shān 王舍城耆闍崛山 (Vulture Peak), accompanied by twelve thousand bhikṣus, an assembly of bodhisattvas including Miào-jí-xiáng 妙吉祥 (Mañjuśrī), Wú-néng-shèng 無能勝 (Ajita-Maitreya), Cháng-jīng-jìn 常精進 (Nityodyukta), and Bù-xiū-xī 不休息 (Aniketana), together with Shìjì hēng-yīn 釋提桓因 (Indra), the four guardian kings, and a host of devas. Ānanda asks the Buddha to expound the conditions for rebirth in Sukhāvatī, and the Buddha sets out ten such conditions — covering moral conduct (śīla), faith (xìn 信), mental concentration on the Buddha’s name (niàn-fó), the merits of the bodhisattva path, the liù dù 六度 (six perfections), and the dedication of merit. The text closes with the standard liú-tōng 流通 transmission section.
The Wǔzhōu (Empress Wǔ) catalogue placement of 695 places the terminus by the late seventh century, but the doctrinal content — particularly the structured ten-fold enumeration and the technical Pure Land vocabulary — points to a Chinese late-Tang composition reflecting the maturation of Pure Land devotional literature. The dating bracket (c. 600–800) is therefore the safe range. The text is occasionally cited in later Pure Land literature but is not part of the canonical Pure Land triad of Wúliángshòu jīng / Guānjīng / Ēmítuó jīng.
Translations and research
- Buswell, Robert E. (ed.). Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha. University of Hawai’i Press, 1990.
- Tokuno Kyoko. “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues.” In Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, ed. Buswell.
- Mochizuki Shinkō, Bukkyō kyōten seiritsushiron. Kyoto, 1946.