Quànshàn jīng 勸善經
Sūtra Exhorting to Good
About the work
A very short anonymous Dunhuang apocryphon in one juan, edited as Taishō no. 2916 in the gǔyì / yísì (古逸部・疑似部) section of T85. It opens by invoking an imperial edict issued through the Left Chancellor 賈耽 (Jiǎ Dān, 730–805) instructing all prefectures that beings should each day recite Amituó Fó 阿彌陀佛 a thousand times, abandon evil and practise good. The text then catalogues seven epidemic-style fatal diseases that will strike in the present hot summer (malaria, “current-circulating disease” 天行病, red-and-white dysentery, eye disease, death in childbirth, watery dysentery, “wind-disease”), and closes with the standard apocryphal merit formula: one copy saves the household, six copies save the six relations, those who refuse to copy will perish, those who post the text on their door will pass through the calamity unscathed. A series of further omens — the appearance of a four-year-old boy in a thunderstorm on the first day of the first month, a thousand-foot serpent with a bird’s head in the road, the mountain-god Tàishān demanding ten thousand human lives and ten thousand cattle — frame the apocalypse, after which the chancellor’s exhortation is repeated and the scripture ends.
Prefaces
The text has no preface other than the opening edict-style frame; the colophon repeats only the title 勸善經一卷.
Abstract
The Quànshàn jīng is one of a tightly linked cluster of late-Tang Dunhuang “warning sūtras” (jǐngshì jīng 警世經) that includes KR6u0053 Xīn púsà jīng 新菩薩經 (T2917A) and KR6u0054 (T2917B) — the three texts share vocabulary, the catalogue of fatal diseases, the merit-copying formula, the pseudo-edict frame, and even the omen of the heavenly child. The chancellor’s name 賈耽 supplies the key dating evidence: Jiǎ Dān entered the central chancellery as 同中書門下平章事 in 793 and died in 805, so the text in its present recension cannot have been composed earlier than 793 and most plausibly belongs to the late Zhēnyuán 貞元 (785–805) and post-Zhēnyuán years (note that the parallel T2917B carries the colophon date 長安四年 = 704, indicating a recension lineage that was repeatedly re-anchored to different reign-titles as the text was recopied). The Taishō text shows a textual corruption at the head — “勅左丞相賈。恍頒下” almost certainly conceals an original “勅左丞相賈耽頒下”, as the parallel passage of KR6u0053 makes plain.
The text is unattested in the Kāiyuán 開元 (730), Zhēnyuán 貞元 (800), and other medieval Buddhist registers; it survives only because copies entered the Dunhuang library cave. The classic study is Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū (1976), where the Quànshàn jīng and Xīn púsà jīng are analysed together as paired apocrypha responding to a particular outbreak of disease (Makita reads the prophecy as referring to the epidemic and famine of Zhēnyuán 19 [803]); see also Sunayama Minoru 砂山稔’s textual studies of the cluster.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1976), with detailed treatment of Quànshàn jīng / Xīn púsà jīng as paired warning sūtras.
- Antonino Forte, Political Propaganda and Ideology in China at the End of the Seventh Century (Naples 1976; rev. ed. Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2005), context for chancellor-attributed apocryphal edicts.
- Kyoko Tokuno, “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues,” in R. E. Buswell, ed., Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu, 1990), 31–74.
Other points of interest
The text is unique in the Dunhuang apocryphal corpus in citing a named, datable Tang chancellor as the conduit of the prophetic edict; this allows it to be dated more precisely than most of its sisters, and provides direct evidence for the late Zhēnyuán reign as a period of acute popular anxiety about plague and famine.
Links
- CBETA
- CANWWW T85N2916 (canwww/div09.xml)