Rúlái chéngdào jīng 如來成道經
Sūtra of the Tathāgata’s Attainment of the Way Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A short apocryphal sūtra in one fascicle that begins with an extended praise-poem (with conspicuous Chinese rather than Indic stylistic markers — strings of binary parallel couplets) describing the Buddha’s body-marks: feet treading thousand-spoked wheels, robe of light, the kalaśa held before, the svastika before the chest, the radiant aureole behind, the lion-king cheeks, the long broad tongue covering the dark realms, the radiance surpassing the sun. The poem then turns to a paradoxical doctrinal description: “párinirvāṇa-but-not-dying, immersion-but-not-being-born, stirred-but-not-clouded, settled-but-not-clear, carried-and-not-heavy, set-down-and-not-light…” — a mode strikingly characteristic of Chinese Buddhist xuányán (玄言) parallelism with Daoist resonances.
Abstract
T85n2890 is preserved in Dūnhuáng manuscripts. The text is structurally and stylistically distinct from most of the parinirvāṇa-frame apocrypha because it is given over to a single sustained eulogy of the awakened Buddha rather than a homily-and-petition cycle. The strongly Chinese parallel-couplet style and the xuán-discourse paradox-language place the text in a Chinese literary register absent from translated Indic scripture; modern scholarship (Makita 1976; Cao Ling 2011) treats it as a clear case of Chinese-composed devotional poem repurposed as scripture. The text is registered as 偽 in the catalogues from the Suí onward.
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).