Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng 善惡因果經
Sūtra of Good and Evil Cause and Effect Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A widely circulating one-fascicle apocryphal catechism on karmic retribution, set at Śrāvastī’s Jetavana. Ānanda asks the Buddha why people, all “born equally human,” differ so radically in beauty and ugliness, strength and weakness, wealth and poverty, longevity and early death. The Buddha replies with a long itemised list of past-life moral causes for each present-life condition: handsome face from past forbearance, wealth from past charity, longevity from past non-killing, etc. The work is the most prominent of the Chinese-composed yīnguǒ (cause-and-effect) apocrypha.
Abstract
T85n2881 is preserved in multiple Dūnhuáng manuscripts (collated in the Tàishō with witnesses 原, 甲) and is one of the most widely transmitted apocryphal scriptures of medieval China. The text is registered as 偽妄 in Fǎjīng (594) and consistently classified as a forged work in subsequent catalogues, yet enjoyed enormous popular currency because of the homiletic clarity and the emotive force of its karmic ledger. Recent scholarship has treated it as a key document in the popularisation of Buddhist karmic ethics for lay audiences in China and Japan: the text was extensively copied at Dūnhuáng, was inscribed at Fángshān 房山, and was the principal source-text for medieval Japanese setsuwa preaching on inga ōhō 因果應報. There is a long-standing parallel/derivative work — also entitled Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng — preserved in the Manji shinshū zōkyō; both texts circulate together. Stephen Teiser’s The Scripture on the Ten Kings (1994) and Alan Cole’s Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (1998) make extensive use of this apocryphon for the reconstruction of medieval Chinese popular karma-belief.
Translations and research
- Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994) — context.
- Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) — uses the text extensively.
- 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).
Other points of interest
The text was a fundamental homiletic source-text for medieval East Asian preaching on karma, with clear influence on Japanese setsuwa literature and the Konjaku monogatari shū.