Jué zuìfú jīng 決罪福經
Sūtra Adjudicating Sin and Merit Anonymous Chinese composition; Dūnhuáng manuscript.
About the work
A two-fascicle apocryphon devoted to ritual specifications for accruing merit and atoning for transgressions. The text gives detailed prescriptions for incense burning, lamp lighting, banner-offering (五丈三枚 — banners five zhàng in length, three in number, “five zhàng” because the donor has broken the five precepts and incurred five sins), and the writing of one’s name on the banner; it pairs these material acts with moral schemata of the five precepts and ten evils. The text reads as a homiletic merit manual that turned ordinary lay almsgiving into a quasi-juridical procedure for “settling” karmic accounts.
Abstract
T85n2868 reproduces a Dūnhuáng manuscript with substantial lacunae (visible as boxes 「□」 in the Tàishō) and is preserved as the master witness with collation against the Korean (Gāolí) edition. The Jué zuìfú jīng is listed as a 偽 work in the catalogues of doubtful and forged scriptures from the Suí 《眾經目錄》 onward, although the exact title is not always attested verbatim. Both Tokuno (1990) and Makita (1976) point to the rise of merit-manual apocrypha in the Northern Dynasties: the offering specifications (lamps, banners, donor names) reflect a thoroughly sinicised cultic economy that marries Buddhist karman doctrine to Chinese funerary and ancestor-cultic practice. The work circulates in two fascicles (上 and 下) of which the second contains a more strongly admonitory homily on the consequences of breaking the five lay precepts. Recent scholarship (Wang Juan 汪娟; Cao Ling 曹凌, Zhōngguó fójiào yíwěijīng zōnglù 中國佛教疑偽經綜錄, 2011) catalogues it among Northern-Dynasties to Suí “merit-and-sin” apocrypha.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūsho, 1976).
- Cao Ling 曹凌, Zhōngguó fójiào yíwěijīng zōnglù 中國佛教疑偽經綜錄 (Shànghǎi: Shànghǎi gǔjí, 2011).
- Kuo Li-ying, Confession et contrition dans le bouddhisme chinois du Ve au Xe siècle (Paris: EFEO, 1994) — context for confession-and-merit apocrypha.