Xiànbào dāngshòu jīng 現報當受經
Sūtra on Karmic Retribution to Be Received in This Life Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A short one-fascicle apocryphal narrative on present-life karmic retribution. The text opens with a story of an elder’s son who encounters on the road a woman whose face is haggard from suffering; she explains that she had been a faithful wife who was buried alive in her husband’s tomb upon his unexpected death, was rescued (only to be raped) by tomb-robbers seven days later, became their wife, was buried again three days after their leader’s death in a raid, and was rescued the second time by foxes who came to scavenge the corpses — only to be left destitute and unrecognised by her natal family. The elder’s son takes her as his second wife. This grim tale of compounded suffering serves as a meditation on the inescapability of xiànbào 現報 — present-life karmic retribution.
Abstract
T85n2892 is preserved in Dūnhuáng manuscripts. The text deploys the avadāna-style storytelling format characteristic of much Chinese-composed Buddhist popular literature; while the form ultimately depends on Indic avadāna models, the specific narrative — drawn from the universe of medieval Chinese sexual-and-marital catastrophe rather than from Indic jātaka templates — marks it as a Chinese composition. Cataloguers from the Suí onward classify it as 偽. The text has been studied for the medieval Chinese imagination of female suffering and as part of the broader jiétuō and yīnguǒ karmic-retribution apocryphal corpus (cf. Shàn’è yīnguǒ jīng KR6u0017).
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).
- Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998) — context for medieval Chinese Buddhist representations of female suffering.