Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng Mǎmíng púsà pǐn dì sānshí 妙法蓮華經馬明菩薩品第三十
The Lotus Sūtra, Chapter 30: On Mǎmíng Bodhisattva Anonymous Chinese composition, ascribed as a chapter of the Lotus.
About the work
A pseudo-chapter of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka-sūtra, claiming to be its thirtieth chapter. Like its companion piece KR6u0008 (chapter 29 on “Measuring Heaven and Earth”), the text is a Dūnhuáng-circulating Chinese composition that grafts cosmographic content onto the authority of the Lotus. The “Mǎmíng” 馬明 named in the title is the bodhisattva Aśvaghoṣa — the renowned 1st–2nd-century CE Indian poet — whose name is here used to authorise a discourse on the precise depths of earth, water-realm, golden-particle realm, vajra-realm, great-water, and “extreme wind” beneath the four-continent cosmos, given by the Buddha to Aśvaghoṣa.
Abstract
T85n2899 forms a pair with KR6u0008: both are pseudo-chapters of the Lotus, both deploy Lotus-style framing for non-canonical cosmographic content, and both circulate as autonomous one-fascicle Dūnhuáng manuscripts. Cataloguers register both as 偽; modern scholarship (Makita 1976; Cao Ling 2011) treats them as a clear case of the apocryphal practice of attributing supplementary chapters to canonical scripture. The cosmographic numbers (“地深二十億萬里…”) parallel — and may directly depend on — the Qǐshìjīng / Lokaprajñapti tradition. The use of Aśvaghoṣa as the interlocutor is anachronistic (Aśvaghoṣa lived centuries after the historical Buddha) and signals the text’s apocryphal nature.
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).