Xīn púsà jīng 新菩薩經 (T2917A)
Sūtra of the New Bodhisattva (recension A)
About the work
A very short anonymous Dunhuang apocryphon in one juan, edited as Taishō no. 2917A in the gǔyì / yísì section of T85. The text opens with the edict-frame 賈耽 (Jiǎ Dān, 730–805), then-Left-Chancellor of the Tang, transmitting an imperial command to all prefectures: that beings should daily recite Amituó Fó 阿彌陀佛 a thousand times, abandon evil and practise good. There follows a list of ten fatal diseases that will sweep through the realm in the present hot summer — malaria, “current-circulating” disease 天行病, sudden death, swelling-disease, death in childbirth, abdominal disease, blood-abscess, wind-jaundice, drowning, and eye-disease — and the standard apocryphal merit-copying formula: one copy saves the body, two save the household, three save the village, those who refuse to copy will perish, those who post the text by their door will pass through the calamity. A short closing frame reports an omen: in the second month of the present year, in Liángzhōu 涼州 of the western Hexi corridor, a stone the size of a dǒu fell from the sky during a thunderstorm; when it broke open it revealed this scripture.
Prefaces
No paratext beyond the opening edict-frame and closing colophon 新菩薩經一卷.
Abstract
The Xīn púsà jīng belongs together with KR6u0052 Quànshàn jīng 勸善經 and KR6u0054 (T2917B) to a tightly linked cluster of late-Tang Dunhuang “warning sūtras”, with which it shares vocabulary, the disease list, the merit formula, and the chancellorial frame. The mention of 賈耽 dates this recension to between 793 (when Jiǎ Dān entered the central chancellery) and his death in 805 — almost certainly to the late Zhēnyuán years, with a connection (proposed by Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮 in Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究, 1976) to the famine and epidemic of Zhēnyuán 19 (803) recorded in Jiù Tángshū 13. The “stone-fallen-from-heaven” trope, with the scripture revealed inside it at Liángzhōu, is a classical sūtra-discovery topos used to certify apocryphal scriptures as celestial in origin and is paralleled in many other warning sūtras of the genre. The Taishō editors split the two surviving Dunhuang recensions into 2917A (this text) and KR6u0054 2917B; the latter carries the colophon date 長安四年 (= 704 CE, Wǔ Zétiān period), evidence that the text was reattributed to different reign periods as it was recopied.
The text is unattested in any of the Kāiyuán, Zhēnyuán, or earlier medieval Buddhist registers, and has survived only because copies entered the Dunhuang library cave. As with its sister apocrypha, the text was edited from manuscripts in the Stein and Pelliot collections.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1976), the foundational analysis of the Quànshàn jīng / Xīn púsà jīng / Jiù zhū zhòngshēng cluster.
- Sunayama Minoru 砂山稔, “Tonkō shahon shoshū Shin-Bosatsu-kyō / Kanzen-kyō / Kyū-shoshujō issai kunan-kyō ni tsuite,” and related studies of the disaster-warning apocrypha.
- Kyoko Tokuno, “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues,” in R. E. Buswell, ed., Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu, 1990), 31–74.
Links
- CBETA
- CANWWW T85N2917A (canwww/div09.xml)