Fóxìng hǎizàng zhìhuì jiětuō pòxīnxiàng jīng 佛性海藏智慧解脫破心相經
Sūtra of the Buddha-Nature Ocean-Treasury, Wisdom-Liberation, and Smashing of Mind-Marks Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A two-fascicle apocryphal sūtra of marked tathāgatagarbha and proto-Chán flavour, set at Kuśinagara on the eve of the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa (the fifteenth of the second month). The Buddha enters parinirvāṇa at midnight; the text describes the assembly’s grief in flagrant terms — earth quakes, springs erupt, the disciples weep blood from every pore. The doctrinal substance combines Buddha-nature (foxìng), an “ocean-treasury” (hǎizàng) womb-of-the-Tathāgata language, and the deconstruction of “mind-marks” (xīnxiàng) characteristic of nascent Chán-style negation.
Abstract
T85n2885 is preserved in Dūnhuáng manuscripts (collated against witness 甲 in the Tàishō). Its mixture of tathāgatagarbha terminology with proto-Chán “smash-the-mind-marks” rhetoric places it firmly in the late 6th- to mid-7th-century stratum of doctrinally inventive apocrypha that include the Fǎwáng jīng KR6u0019, the Foxìng huāyán jīng (lost), and several Awakening of Faith-influenced compositions. Cataloguers from the Suí onward list it as 偽; modern scholarship — particularly that informed by the rediscovery of Northern Chán manuscripts at Dūnhuáng — has reassessed several such texts as documenting the formative doctrinal lexicon of early Chán. Cao Ling (2011) is the fullest bibliographic treatment in modern Chinese.
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).
- Wendi L. Adamek, The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan History and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).