Fǎwáng jīng 法王經
Sūtra of the Dharma-King Anonymous Chinese composition; an early Chán-influenced apocryphon.
About the work
A one-fascicle Mahāyāna apocryphon on the eve of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa. Ākāśagarbha bodhisattva (Xūkōngzàng 虛空藏) circumambulates the Buddha and pleads for a “great-vehicle definitive teaching” (大乘決定真實) for the worlds 1500 years after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa, when sentient beings will be steeped in the ten evils, of weak merit, and unable to penetrate the multifarious twelvefold scriptural canon. The Buddha responds with a doctrinal exposition that has marked early Chán affinities — emphasis on a single direct realisation rather than scholastic exegesis — and the text is one of the principal apocrypha to be cited by early Chán authors.
Abstract
The Fǎwáng jīng is one of the most important early-Táng “Chán-flavoured” apocrypha. Its 1500-year-after-parinirvāṇa setting is consonant with the late-7th to early-8th-century mòfǎ periodisation, and the text is cited approvingly by early Chán authors — most notably in the Liǎngxiū yuán / Lìdài fǎbǎo jì milieu — as scriptural authority for the abandonment of scholastic exegesis in favour of direct meditative awakening. Yanagida Seizan, Robert Sharf, Wendi Adamek, and John McRae have all discussed the Fǎwáng jīng as a stratum-marker of nascent Chán self-presentation. Cataloguers such as Zhīshēng (730) classify it as doubtful (偽妄). Cao Ling (2011) provides extensive bibliographic detail; the modern Chinese-language critical edition is in Fāng Guǎngchāng 方廣錩, ed., Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn 藏外佛教文獻.
Translations and research
- Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山, “Hōōkyō to Shoki Zen” 法王經と初期禪 in Yanagida Seizan shū (Kyōto: Hōzōkan).
- Wendi L. Adamek, The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan History and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) — context.
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūsho, 1976).
- Fāng Guǎngchāng 方廣錩, ed., Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn 藏外佛教文獻 (Beijing: Zōngjiāo wénhuà chūbǎnshè, multiple vols.) — modern critical text.
Other points of interest
The 1500-year span before fǎmiè is one of several competing periodisations in medieval China (5,000-year, 1,500-year, 1,000-year, etc.); the Fǎwáng jīng’s adoption of 1,500 places its composition window in the time when this scheme was current — late 7th to early 8th century.