Shìjiā Rúlái chéngdào jì 釋迦如來成道記
Record of the Tathāgata Śākyamuni’s Attainment of the Way
composed by 王勃 (Wáng Bó, 650–676, 撰), the Early Táng poet
About the work
A short literary hagiography of the Buddha in one juan, composed in elegant parallel prose (piántǐwén 駢體文) by the Early Táng poet 王勃 (Wáng Bó, 650–676) — one of the Sì jié 四傑 (“Four Outstanding Talents”) of the early Táng. Preserved in the Manji Xuzangjing (X75 no. 1508). The work is unusual in being not a monastic but a literary product: a Buddhist biographical sketch by one of the great Early-Táng prose stylists, written presumably for educated lay readers in the courtly literary milieu.
Abstract
王勃’s text condenses the major events of the Buddha’s life into a polished four- and six-character parallel-prose composition: the ancestry, the descent from Tuṣita, the birth, the four signs, the renunciation, the six years of austerity, the enlightenment, the first turning of the wheel of the Dharma, and the parinirvāṇa. The dense allusive style — typical of Wáng Bó’s piánwén — packs canonical narrative into a small compass and depends on the reader’s familiarity with the underlying scriptural sources.
The dating is bracketed by Wáng Bó’s lifedates: he died at twenty-six (sui twenty-seven) in 676, drowning while crossing a river in northern Vietnam. The composition therefore must fall in the mid-660s to mid-670s. The text presupposes the Buddha-biography material assembled by 僧祐 in KR6r0025 and 道宣 in KR6r0026 and may have been composed as a literary exercise on those models.
The text is a small but interesting witness to early-Táng literati Buddhism, demonstrating the integration of Buddhist subject-matter into mainstream literary culture. It attracted commentary in the Táng and Sòng — most notably the commentarial expansion by 道誠 in KR6r0028.
Translations and research
- Discussions of 王勃’s Buddhist writings appear in studies of his literary career: e.g. Owen, Stephen, The Poetry of the Early T’ang (New Haven: Yale UP, 1977).
- No dedicated Western-language translation of the KR6r0027 located.
Links
- CBETA: X75n1508