Miàohǎo bǎochē jīng 妙好寶車經
Sūtra of the Wondrous Jewelled Carriage Anonymous Chinese composition; Dūnhuáng manuscript.
About the work
A short apocryphal sūtra in one fascicle structured around an extended series of similes — “as a prisoner thinks of release, as a sick man thinks of recovery, as a man in darkness thinks of light, as a kindly mother thinks of her child, as a traveller thinks of returning home, as a widow thinks of a husband, as a lame man thinks of walking, as a poor man thinks of clothing, as a cold man thinks of fire, as a farmer thinks of grain, as a blind man thinks of seeing” — culminating in the figure of the “wondrous jewelled carriage” that conveys the faithful to liberation. The accumulating-similes trope is borrowed from canonical sūtra rhetoric (compare the parable of the burning house in the Lotus) but its deployment as a freestanding short text is a Dūnhuáng-style apocryphal genre.
Abstract
T85n2869 was edited from a Dūnhuáng manuscript that the Tàishō editors classify as “orig” (原 — non-canonical witness only). The text is not registered in pre-Táng catalogues. Cao Ling (2011) places it among popular-piety apocrypha on themes of universal liberation, related stylistically to the Pǔxián púsà shuō zhèngmíng jīng KR6u0015 and to other “wondrous-vehicle” apocrypha that develop Lotus-style imagery for popular consumption. The opening of the manuscript is broken (visible as ”□” lacunae in the Tàishō); the surviving discourse is delivered to a bodhisattva interlocutor whose name is lost in the lacuna at the head of the text.
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).