Fómǔ jīng 佛母經
Sūtra of the Buddha’s Mother
About the work
A short anonymous Chinese Buddhist apocryphon in one juan, edited as Taishō no. 2919 in the gǔyì / yísì section of T85, surviving in Dunhuang manuscripts (Stein and Pelliot collections). The text relates the Buddha’s mother — Māyā 摩耶 / Móyé, residing in Trāyastriṃśa heaven (Dāolì 忉利) — and her response to the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa. As the Buddha lies between the śāla trees, he sends Upāli 憂波梨 (here read as a celestial messenger rather than the canonical disciplinary disciple) up to Trāyastriṃśa to summon her. Māyā sees six terrifying dream-omens (a precious mountain collapsing, the four oceans dried up, frost in the fifth month, a banner-pole shattered, four fires burning her body, milk flowing spontaneously from her breasts), and Upāli arrives to announce the parinirvāṇa. Māyā collapses “like a pāriyātraka flower”; revived by two heavenly attendants, she descends with her train, finds the śāla grove, and sees only the funerary wrappings, the saṃghāṭī robe folded by the coffin, the alms-bowl and staff hanging in the tree, two lions self-immolated, and the ten great disciples lamenting toward heaven. She circles the coffin three times, addresses the dead Buddha in a piteous reproach for his failure to leave even half a verse for her, and the Buddha — moved — opens the coffin, sits upon a thousand-petal lotus, and recites a single canonical verse for his mother:
世間苦空，諸行無常，是生滅法，生滅滅已，寂滅為樂。
He then resumes his entry into nirvāṇa. Māyā, momentarily consoled, returns to heaven; suspended in the air she breaks down weeping, the heavens shake, and the cloud-birds wail in chorus. The text closes with the line 大般涅槃經佛, a corrupted canonical reference (probably 大般涅槃經 plus an erroneously appended 佛).
Prefaces
No preface or paratext; the text opens 爾時，世尊入般涅槃 and breaks off at the corrupt closing line.
Abstract
The Fómǔ jīng is a Chinese composition that combines two strands of canonical material into a new emotional narrative: (1) the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra episode of Māyā’s descent from Trāyastriṃśa, found in the Móhē Móyé jīng 摩訶摩耶經 (T383, attributed to Tánjǐng 曇景, late 5th c.); and (2) the four-line anitya gāthā 諸行無常 / 是生滅法 / 生滅滅已 / 寂滅為樂, which is a stock canonical uddāna familiar from the Mahāparinirvāṇa-sūtra tradition and the Niè-pán jīng 涅槃經 of Dharmakṣema (T374). The work has no Indic original and is unrecorded in any catalogue of translated scripture, including the Kāiyuán 開元 (730) and Zhēnyuán 貞元 (800) registers; it is classified by the Taishō editors as 疑似 (suspected apocryphon). The expanded role of Māyā as a grieving, reproachful mother has been read as an instance of the broader Tang-period assimilation of Buddhist literature to Chinese filial-piety norms — the same impulse that produced the Fùmǔ ēn zhòng jīng 父母恩重經 (KR6u0023) and related “filial sūtras”. Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮 in Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (1976) places the text in this filial-apocryphon cluster and dates the cluster broadly to the Sui-Tang period (c. 6th–10th c.); a tighter date is not defensible.
The work survives in multiple Dunhuang manuscript witnesses (S.2084, P.2055, etc.); it remained popular outside the printed canon and circulated through Tang-Song China as a devotional and ritual text rather than a canonical scripture.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1976), with chapter on the Fómǔ jīng and related Buddhist filial-piety apocrypha.
- Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), context for Tang Buddhist filial-piety literature.
- Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), broader study of the maternal motif in medieval Chinese Buddhist 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.
Other points of interest
The text is a key witness to the Chinese reimagining of Māyā as an active participant in the parinirvāṇa narrative. Its core dramatic device — the dead Buddha opening his coffin and rising once more to speak to his mother — is unprecedented in the Indic Mahāparinirvāṇa materials and depends on a Chinese sense of the proprieties of mother-son parting. The single verse the Buddha speaks for her (世間苦空 …) is the same verse that, in the Mahāyāna-Mahāparinirvāṇa tradition, the youthful Bodhisattva offers his life for; here it is repurposed as a final maternal consolation.
Links
- CBETA
- CANWWW T85N2919 (canwww/div09.xml)