Pǔxián púsà shuō zhèngmíng jīng 普賢菩薩說證明經
Sūtra of Samantabhadra Bodhisattva’s Discourse of Verified Testimony Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A messianic-eschatological apocryphon set at Vulture Peak, in which the bodhisattva Samantabhadra (Pǔxián 普賢) asks the Buddha how the masses should be taught after Śākyamuni’s parinirvāṇa but before the advent of Maitreya. The Buddha gives a series of “verified” disclosures: he is at root identical with various past Buddhas (Dīpaṃkara, Kanakamuni, Ratnaketu, etc.); he was once the bodhisattva Ajita (阿逸多 — i.e., the future Maitreya). After his parinirvāṇa, a “Dharma-King” (法王) will rule for thirty years before Maitreya appears. The Pǔxián text is one of the principal “Dharma-King” apocrypha behind early-medieval Chinese millennial movements.
Abstract
T85n2879, with multiple manuscript witnesses (甲, 乙) collated in the Tàishō, is one of the canonical-status apocrypha of the Yuèguāng / Dharma-King messianic complex of the Northern Dynasties. The text is registered as 偽 in Fǎjīng (594), and is closely associated in modern scholarship with KR6u0009 (Shǒuluó bǐqiū jīng) and KR6u0010 (Xiǎo fǎmièjìn jīng) as the scriptural backbone of late-Northern-Dynasties messianic communities. Erik Zürcher’s “Prince Moonlight” (1982) treats it in detail; Antonino Forte (1976/2005) places the Pǔxián text alongside the Mahāmeghasūtra commentary as core to the political-eschatological imagination that later supported Wǔ Zétiān’s manipulation of Maitreyan motifs. The doctrinal claim that the Buddha was previously identical with Maitreya is theologically striking and has no parallel in canonical Mahāyāna scripture; it served the apocryphon’s millennial function — dissolving the gap between the historical Buddha and the future saviour — and is the textual signature of the genre.
Translations and research
- Erik Zürcher, “‘Prince Moonlight’: Messianism and Eschatology in Early Medieval Chinese Buddhism,” T’oung Pao 68.1–3 (1982): 1–75.
- Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century (rev. ed. Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2005), pp. 137 ff.
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūsho, 1976), pp. 245–286.
- Hubert Seiwert, Popular Religious Movements and Heterodox Sects in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2003).
Other points of interest
The “thirty-year reign of the Dharma-King” (法王治三十年) before Maitreya’s advent is one of the most influential prophetic templates in medieval Chinese popular religion and has been invoked in studies of the rebellions of the Northern Dynasties and the Sui–Táng millennial atmosphere.