Fùmǔ ēnzhòng jīng 父母恩重經
Sūtra on the Profound Kindness of Parents Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
The most influential of all Chinese Buddhist apocrypha on filial piety. Set at Vulture Peak before the great assembly, the Buddha enumerates a parent’s — especially a mother’s — successive acts of ēn 恩 (loving kindness) toward a child: the conception, the ten months of pregnancy, the pains of childbirth, the gift of the cradle, the first laughter, the first speech, the unconditional feeding when hungry and nursing when thirsty, etc. Building on this catalogue, the text exhorts children to repay parental kindness through Buddhist ritual practice, especially the offerings of the Yúlánpén assembly. The sūtra was the principal text underlying medieval Chinese Buddhist filial-piety preaching; it is iconographically central to a vast East Asian visual tradition of “Ten Acts of Parental Kindness” panel paintings.
Abstract
T85n2887 is the most widely studied of all Chinese Buddhist apocrypha. The text was composed to bridge the perceived tension between Buddhist renunciation and Confucian xiào 孝, and is a key document of the sinicisation of Buddhist ethics. The catalogue of Zhīshēng (《開元釋教錄》, 730) classifies it as 偽妄, but the work circulated continuously and inspired the closely related, longer, and slightly later expanded recension Fùmǔ ēn zhòng nán bào jīng 父母恩重難報經 — used in the major LiáoSòng “Ten Acts” pictorial cycle and in numerous Korean and Japanese editions. The textual relationship between the short Fùmǔ ēnzhòng jīng (T85n2887) and the longer Nánbào recension (T85n2887 Tibetan-Vinaya retitled as T85n2887*) has been the subject of substantial modern scholarship. Alan Cole’s Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism is the standard English-language treatment; Stephen Teiser, Keiko Suzuki, and Kataoka Tama have all written on the text and its iconography.
Translations and research
- Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) — extensive study and partial translation.
- Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) — context.
- Kenneth K. S. Ch’en, “Filial Piety in Chinese Buddhism,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 28 (1968): 81–97.
- Iyanaga Nobumi 彌永信美, several studies on Chinese filial-piety apocrypha.
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūsho, 1976), Ch. 5.
Other points of interest
The companion expanded recension, Fùmǔ ēn zhòng nán bào jīng 父母恩重難報經, is the more commonly cited text in later East Asian sources and is the direct source of the popular “Ten Acts of Parental Kindness” iconographic cycle.