Sēngqié héshàng yù rù nièpán shuō liù dù jīng 僧伽和尚欲入涅槃說六度經
Sūtra Spoken by the Reverend Sēngqié on the Six [Categories of Saved Persons] When About to Enter Nirvāṇa
About the work
A short anonymous Chinese Buddhist apocryphon in one juan, edited as Taishō no. 2920 in the gǔyì / yísì section of T85, surviving in Dunhuang manuscripts (most prominently P.2098, S.2474, and others). The text is framed as a parinirvāṇa-discourse delivered by 僧伽 (Sēngqié, 628–710), the Sogdian-origin monk of Sìzhōu 泗州 known posthumously as the Sìzhōu Dàshèng 泗州大聖 / Great Sage of Sìzhōu and identified from the late Tang onwards as a manifestation of Avalokiteśvara. Speaking to “all good men and good women in Jambudvīpa”, he recounts his repeated incarnations from Original-Pure-Land in the Eastern Sea — a land which became inundated and swallowed by five hundred poison-dragons, leaving the inhabitants reborn as turtles, alligators, and fishes — before he was reborn from a kingdom in the West as Śākyamuni and again, in the present life, as Sēngqié. He announces his intent to enter nirvāṇa, leaving his relics to abide at Sìzhōu, and prophesies that in the present age — when the world is sunk in evil, brigandage, war, plague, fire, and flood — only those who keep the six categories of practice (六度, here a vernacular reformulation of the Mahāyāna pāramitā idea) will be ferried by his hundred-boy attendants on jewelled boats across the “Weak Water” 弱水 to a huàchéng 化城 of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and seven jewels, where they will dwell with Sēngqié and the future-Buddha Maitreya 彌勒.
The six categories are:
- filial piety to parents and reverence for the Three Jewels;
- not killing living beings;
- not drinking alcohol or eating meat;
- equal-mindedness, abstention from theft;
- dhūta (頭陀) ascetic practice — building bridges and accumulating merit;
- compassion for the poor and ill, alms of food and clothing.
The text closes with a short dhāraṇī — Námó Sēngqié, Námó Sēng-jìnzhā, suōhē, dáduō zhítāyē-ǎn, bálèshè, suōpóhē 南無僧伽 南無僧禁吒 莎訶 達多姪他耶唵 跋勒攝 娑婆訶 — and the alternate title 僧伽和尚經.
Prefaces
No formal preface; the title and dhāraṇī / mantra at the end function as the only paratexts.
Abstract
The work is a Chinese composition of the late Tang or Five-Dynasties period, generated within the Sìzhōu Sēngqié cult that flourished in the lower Huái 淮 region after Sēngqié’s death in 710. It cannot precede 710 (when Sēngqié dies and his cult begins to take shape) and is most plausibly dated to the eighth–tenth centuries, with a terminus ante quem in the closing of the Dunhuang library cave in the early 11th century. It belongs to a small cluster of Sēngqié-cult apocrypha edited together with the Sēngqié relic-cult literature in the gǔyì section of T85, and represents one of the earliest sustained literary witnesses to the doctrine, well attested by the Song, that Sēngqié is a huàshēn 化身 of Avalokiteśvara who saves devotees by ferrying them in a “transformation citadel” across the cataclysm of the present kalpa. The vocabulary — Weak Water, Eastern-Sea origin, hundred-child crew, the huàchéng trope (drawn from the Lotus Sūtra’s Chapter VII) — fuses Buddhist apocalyptic with the indigenous Daoist-influenced eschatology of the Maitreya cults that gave rise to the Shǒuluó bǐqiū jīng 首羅比丘經 and similar materials. The reformulation of the canonical six pāramitās as a moral catalogue (filial piety, no killing, no meat or wine, no theft, dhūta practice, almsgiving) is characteristic of the popular vernacular Buddhism of the period, with strong overlaps with the lay-precept formularies preserved in Dunhuang.
The text is unrecorded in any of the medieval scripture catalogues; Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (1976) discusses it in his treatment of the Sēngqié-cult apocrypha, alongside the closely related Sēngqié dàshī yù rù nièpán shuō liù dù jīng manuscripts surviving in the Dunhuang collections. Robson and Yü’s studies of the Avalokiteśvara cult treat the Sēngqié materials in their account of the Tang transformation of Guānyīn into the patron of disasters and of pilgrim seafarers.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1976), foundational treatment of Chinese Buddhist apocrypha including the Sēngqié-cult materials.
- Bernard Faure, “Relics and Flesh Bodies: The Creation of Ch’an Pilgrimage Sites,” in Susan Naquin and Chün-fang Yü, eds., Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), with discussion of the Sìzhōu Sēngqié cult.
- Chün-fang Yü 于君方, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), with chapter on the Sēngqié–Avalokiteśvara identification.
- Antonino Forte, “The Maitreyist Huaiyi (d. 695) and Taoism,” T’ang Studies 4 (1986), 15–29, on contemporaneous Tang Maitreya/Avalokiteśvara apocryphal traditions.
- Daniel Stevenson and James Robson, work on Tang devotional cults to local Buddhist saints.
Other points of interest
The “transformation citadel in the Eastern Sea” 東海化城, ferried to via the Weak Water by a hundred attendant boys on jewelled boats, is one of the most remarkable images in the Dunhuang apocryphal corpus and combines the Lotus huàchéng (KR6d0001 Miàofǎ liánhuá jīng ch. 7), the Daoist-mythological Weak Water (弱水) bordering the western paradise of the Queen Mother, and the Maitreyan future-paradise topos. It is one of the clearest witnesses for how the Sìzhōu Sēngqié cult absorbed and recast both Mahāyāna and indigenous millenarian materials in the ninth and tenth centuries.
Links
- CBETA
- CANWWW T85N2920 (canwww/div09.xml)