Hé púsà jiè wén 和菩薩戒文
A Chant-Text Reciting the Bodhisattva-Precepts anonymous (Dunhuang manuscript)
About the work
A single-juan anonymous Dunhuang Buddhist liturgical-pedagogical text — a chant-text (hé 和 = chant-form text) for reciting the bodhisattva precepts, preserved at T85 no. 2851. The text is structured as a sequence of verse-prayers each devoted to one of the major bodhisattva precepts (no killing, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, etc.), with each section combining the prohibition itself, the karmic-consequence framing, and a pastoral exhortation.
Prefaces
The text has no auto-preface or byline. It opens directly with the introductory framing: “With cool heart and thirsty admiration, focused-and-pouring on the dharma-sound. Only may the precept-master broadly extend the lake-discourse.” Then the chant begins:
Chant says: Various bodhisattvas — do not kill living beings. Killing living beings, one must necessarily fall into the great pit. Killing fates is born — short-life recompense. The Sahā two eyes wounded, both blind. Asking-and-encouraging the practice-place all assembly-and-others, together cut off the killing-action — there is no need to do it.
Buddha-children, various bodhisattvas — do not steal: obtained things, like the mother-thinness; after death, immediately becoming a beast-body, with hair-loaded horns coming to make recompense. The whole day driven and dragged, no rest, no time to eat water-grass — like the deluded heart not perceiving and knowing. Therefore, with painstaking earnest, weighty recompense.
Buddha-children, various bodhisattvas — [do not commit sexual misconduct]…
[The text continues through the standard list of bodhisattva precepts.]
Abstract
Authorship and date are unrecoverable. The work belongs to the Dunhuang precept-chanting genre — practical liturgical scripts for the recitation of bodhisattva precepts in monastic and lay-bodhisattva-precept-conferral ceremonies. notBefore = 700, notAfter = 1000 (the standard bracket).
The work draws on the Brahmajālasūtra 梵網經 (T1484) — the standard canonical source for bodhisattva precepts in Chinese Buddhism — but renders the precepts in mnemonic verse-form for actual chant-recitation in ceremony. Each precept is paired with a karmic-consequence narrative (the mother-thinness for stealing, becoming a beast-body, etc.) — making the text simultaneously a liturgical script and a karmic-pedagogical instructional resource for new bodhisattva-precept recipients.
The text is one of the principal Dunhuang witnesses to practical precept-conferral culture at the western frontier in the late-Táng / Five-Dynasties / early-Sòng period.
Translations and research
- Paul Groner, The Establishment of the Tendai School (Hawai’i, 1984; reprinted 2000) — context for bodhisattva-precept conferral in East Asian Buddhism.
- Funayama Tōru 船山徹, scholarship on the Brahmajāla tradition in China.
- Heng-Ching Shih 釋恆清, scholarship on Chinese-Buddhist precept literature.
Other points of interest
The text’s mnemonic verse-format and pairing of each precept with a karmic-consequence narrative makes it an exemplary witness to the practical-pedagogical synthesis of canonical doctrine and folk-narrative characteristic of late-Táng / Dunhuang popular Buddhism.