Qī nǚ guān jīng 七女觀經
Sūtra of the Contemplation of the Seven Daughters Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A short apocryphal sūtra in one fascicle. The “King of Dark-Conditions” 冥緣王 (a transparent Chinese theophoric meaning “King of Dark Karmic Conditions”) has seven daughters who awaken to impermanence: they refuse fine silks and ornaments, refuse the perfumed oils with which to anoint their bodies, observe the three long fasts of the year and the six monthly fasts. They petition their father to leave the inner palace; he protests that they have parks, gardens, lotus-pools, flower-pavilions, and high towers within the palace and need not go out, but they reply that pleasure-grounds are not the proper place for “going-out-and-contemplating” (遊觀). The king grants their request; they go out the eastern gate to a charnel ground, where they see a swollen, putrefying, fox-and-wolf-trampled corpse — and the sūtra unfolds the standard Buddhist nine-stages-of-the-impure body meditation (aśubha-bhāvanā) on the female bodies of the king’s own daughters.
Abstract
T85n2913 is preserved in Dūnhuáng manuscripts (Tàishō witness “orig”). The “seven daughters and the corpse” theme is canonically rooted: the Sapta-strī sūtra (七女經 T556, translated by Zhī Qiān 支謙 in the third century, and a later parallel Qī nǚ jīng T557) preserves the canonical Indic version, set in the time of the Buddha Vipaśyin. The Dūnhuáng Qī nǚ guān jīng is a Chinese-composed expansion or recasting that fuses the Sapta-strī narrative with the aśubha-bhāvanā meditation manual, producing a homiletic-meditation text rather than a jātaka-narrative. Cao Ling (2011) treats it as an instructive apocryphon in the genre of “meditation-narrative” composition; Makita (1976) lists it among the popular-Mahāyāna apocrypha at Dūnhuáng. The “Mìngyuán wáng” 冥緣王 (“King of Dark Conditions”) may be a scribal variant of “Bohémà wáng” (the Pāli Bahuvāka / Bahubhāgika?) or a Chinese coinage; the king of the canonical Qī nǚ jīng is Kṛkin / Jiāntú 堅固 / 堅意.
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).
- Liz Wilson, Charming Cadavers: Horrific Figurations of the Feminine in Indian Buddhist Hagiographic Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) — context for the aśubha-bhāvanā on female bodies.
Links
- CBETA
- Cf. canonical T556 Qī nǚ jīng (Zhī Qiān).