Dìzàng púsà shízhāirì 地藏菩薩十齋日
The Ten Fasting-Days of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva anonymous (Dunhuang manuscript)
About the work
A single-juan anonymous Dunhuang Buddhist devotional text on the ten fasting-days under the patronage of Kṣitigarbha Bodhisattva 地藏菩薩, preserved at T85 no. 2850. Each fasting-day is keyed to a specific descending divine inspector (the same set as in KR6s0041 but somewhat differently associated), the buddha to whom one chants that day, the specific hell that one is exempted from by fasting, and the kalpa-quantity of sin that fasting on that day removes.
Prefaces
The text has no auto-preface or byline. It opens directly with the table:
Day 1: the boy descends. Chant Dīpaṅkara Tathāgata. Not painted by the knife-spear hell. Maintaining the fast removes sin for 40 kalpas.
Day 8: the crown prince descends. Chant Bhaiṣajyaguru-vaiḍūryaprabha Buddha (Medicine-Master). Not painted by the excrement-and-urine hell. Maintaining the fast removes sin for 30 kalpas.
Day 14: the life-investigator descends. Chant the thousand buddhas of the worthy kalpa. Not painted by the boiling-cauldron hell. Maintaining the fast [removes] …
Abstract
Authorship and date are unrecoverable. The text belongs to the Kṣitigarbha cult literature of late-Táng / Five-Dynasties Dunhuang, in which Kṣitigarbha — the Bodhisattva of the underworld realms — served as the principal patron of fasting and merit-generation aimed at salvation from infernal consequences. notBefore = 700 (the Tang-period rise of the Kṣitigarbha cult under the influence of the Dì-zàng pú-sà běn-yuàn jīng 地藏菩薩本願經 / Kṣitigarbhabodhisattvapūrvapraṇidhāna-sūtra); notAfter = 1000 (the standard Dunhuang bracket).
The work’s detailed mapping of fasting-day → descending inspector → buddha-chant → exempted hell → removed-sin-quantity is characteristic of the practical-pedagogical popular Buddhism of Dunhuang, in which abstract doctrinal categories were rendered into operational concrete-scheduled practice. The text complements KR6s0041 (Dàshèng sìzhāirì) as the principal Dunhuang witnesses to the lay-Buddhist fasting calendar of the western frontier.
Translations and research
- Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings (Hawai’i, 1994) — extensive treatment of late-Tang Kṣitigarbha and underworld-related literature.
- Zhī-rú 智儒, The Making of a Savior Bodhisattva: Dizang in Medieval China (Hawai’i, 2007) — comprehensive English study of the Kṣitigarbha cult.
- Françoise Wang-Toutain, Le bodhisattva Kṣitigarbha en Chine du Ve au XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1998) — comprehensive French study.
Other points of interest
The detailed enumeration of specific hells (knife-spear, excrement-and-urine, boiling-cauldron, etc.) reflects the elaborate hellish-cosmology that developed in medieval Chinese Buddhism through the influence of the Dìzàng púsà běnyuàn jīng and the Shíwáng jīng 十王經 (T2870, also in T85). The text is therefore a primary witness to the systematic Buddhist underworld topography of late-Táng / Five-Dynasties Dunhuang.
Links
- DILA authority: (no preserved authority entry)
- CBETA: T85n2850
- Companion fasting-day text: KR6s0041 Dàshèng sìzhāirì (T2849)
- Doctrinal background: Dì-zàng pú-sà běn-yuàn jīng (Kṣitigarbha-pūrvapraṇidhāna-sūtra); Shí-wáng jīng 十王經 (T2870)