Jiù zhū zhòngshēng yīqiè kǔnàn jīng 救諸眾生一切苦難經
Sūtra on Rescuing All Sentient Beings from Every Suffering and Calamity
About the work
A very short anonymous Chinese Buddhist apocryphon (gěijīng 偽經 / yíjīng 疑經) preserved in a single juan among the Dunhuang manuscripts and edited as Taishō no. 2915 in the gǔyìbù / yísìbù 古逸部・疑似部 (lost and apocryphal section) of T85. The text consists of a brief frame story in which an aged master on Mt. Tiāntái 天台山, weeping tears of blood, prophesies to his disciple Huìtōng 惠通 that disasters — particularly demonic armies (鬼兵) raging in the third, fourth, eighth and ninth months in the territories of Xiāng 相 and Wèi 魏 (modern HénánHéběi border) — will sweep over the world at the end of the present kalpa, and that only those who recite the name of Maitreya 彌勒, fast, abstain from wine and meat, and copy this scripture will be spared. A short verse coda (黑風西北起 / 東南興鬼兵 …) repeats the warning. The text closes with the standard apocryphal copying-merit formula: copying one scroll saves a household, two scrolls save the six relations, three scrolls save a village; those who slander or refuse to copy fall into Avīci hell.
Prefaces
The text has no preface or paratext beyond its own opening and closing frames; only the bare title 救諸眾生一切苦難經 and the colophon 救諸眾生一切苦難經一卷 are preserved.
Abstract
The scripture belongs to the well-known cluster of late-Tang to Five-Dynasties Dunhuang “warning sūtras” (jǐngshì jīng 警世經) which combine apocalyptic prophecy of plague and war with merit formulas for copying the text — a genre studied as a whole by Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮 in Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyoto: Jinbun kagaku kenkyūjo, 1976). Like its sister texts KR6u0052 Quànshàn jīng 勸善經, KR6u0053 Xīn púsà jīng 新菩薩經 (T2917A), and KR6u0054 (T2917B), it places the prophecy in the mouth of a saintly intermediary (here an anonymous Tiāntái master rather than a chancellor or a stone-encased scripture) and links survival to copying and circulating the scroll. The geographical horizon (XiāngWèi) and the Maitreya-recitation devotion point to a north-Chinese provenance and to a date in the eighth or ninth century, after the spread of Maitreya devotion in the lower Yangzi and during the Tang-period anxiety over rebellions and epidemics. The work was unknown to the official medieval catalogues (it appears in none of the Kāiyuán, Zhēnyuán, or earlier registers) and survives only because copies entered the Dunhuang library cave; it was edited from the Stein and Pelliot collections for inclusion in the Taishō.
The fragmentary state of the source (multiple lacunae marked □ in T) reflects the physical condition of the Dunhuang manuscript witness rather than a corrupt transmission line.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1976), the foundational survey of Chinese Buddhist apocrypha including the Dunhuang warning-sūtra cluster.
- Kyoko Tokuno, “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues,” in Robert E. Buswell, Jr., ed., Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1990), 31–74.
- Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), context for the Dunhuang merit-copying genre.
Links
- CBETA
- CANWWW T85N2915 (canwww/div09.xml)