Fó wèi xīnwáng púsà shuō tóutuó jīng juǎn shàng 佛為心王菩薩說投陀經卷上
Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha for the Mind-King Bodhisattva on Tóutuó (Dhūta), Fascicle One With commentary by 惠辨 (Huìbiàn) of Wǔyīn Shānshì Temple 五陰山室寺.
About the work
A one-fascicle apocryphal sūtra preserved with the inline commentary “五陰山室寺惠辨禪師註” — the comments of chánshī Huìbiàn of Wǔyīn Shānshì sì. The “Mind-King” bodhisattva (Xīnwáng púsà 心王菩薩) is a uniquely Chinese designation; the title’s “tóutuó” 投陀 stands for dhūta, the ascetic disciplines of monastic austerity. The sūtra and commentary together expound a xīnwáng / xīn-centred meditation discourse with marked Chán affinities, framing the heart-mind as ruler-and-king of the body whose perception “supports the six senses” and “preserves the seeds of good and evil” without obstruction. The work is one of the principal “Chán apocrypha” of Dūnhuáng.
Abstract
Only the upper fascicle survives at Dūnhuáng. The interest of the text is twofold: as one of the rare apocrypha that survives with an attached medieval Chán commentary, and as a doctrinal source for the early-medieval “Mind-King” / xīn-as-sovereign trope that pervades early Chán writing (compare the Xīnwáng míng attributed to Fù Xī 傅翕). The apocryphal status was already recognised by Suí–Táng cataloguers; modern scholarship (Yanagida, Sørensen) treats the text as one of the formative documents of early Chán as articulated outside the polished Northern Chán tradition. The commentary attributed to Huìbiàn of Wǔyīn Shānshì sì is otherwise unattested and the figure is not recorded in the standard Gāosēng zhuàn literature; the colophon is the only evidence for his existence and his place of activity.
Translations and research
- Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山, “Tōdaki to Shōshu Zen” 投陀經と初期禪 in Yanagida Seizan shū (Kyōto: Hōzōkan).
- 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 “five aggregates mountain-chamber temple” (Wǔyīn shānshì sì) named in the colophon is otherwise unknown; it may be a small medieval Northern Chinese establishment known only from this manuscript.