Fó wèi Xīnwáng púsà shuō Tóutuó jīng (fù zhùshū) 佛為心王菩薩說頭陀經（附註疏）
The Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha to Bodhisattva Mind-King on the Dhūta Practice (with attached commentary) host text anonymous Chinese composition; commentary by 惠辯 (註); critical edition by 方廣錩 (整理)
About the work
An apocryphal Chinese Buddhist sūtra in one fascicle (also titled Xīnwáng púsà shuō tóutuó jīng 心王菩薩說頭陀經, Tóutuó jīng 頭陀經, or Xīnwáng jīng 心王經), framed as a teaching delivered by Śākyamuni at the request of Xīnwáng púsà 心王菩薩 (Bodhisattva Mind-King) on the supreme value of the dhūta (頭陀, ascetic) practice. The present edition uniquely combines the bare sūtra (one Tianjin Art Museum witness) with the only known commentary, by the otherwise unattested Chán master Huìbiàn 惠辯 of the Wǔyīnshān Kōngsì 五陰山空寺, which annotates only the first half of the sūtra and was apparently never completed.
Abstract
The host sūtra is first listed in DàZhōu kāndìng zhòng jīng mùlù 大週刊定眾經目錄 (j. 15, 695 CE), already classed as 疑偽 (“suspect-or-forged”), and was excluded from canonical editions thereafter. Fāng Guǎngchāng identifies one complete Dūnhuáng witness (Tianjin Art Museum, intact) and four manuscripts of Huìbiàn’s commentary version (Beijing Library Běixīn 1569 — base text — complete; British Library S.2474 — the basis of the older T85n2886, but full of errors; Pelliot chinois 2052; Mitsui Bunko 三井文庫, complete). A separately preserved Sogdian translation fragment also survives (British Library S.ch353), studied by Ibuki Atsushi 伊吹敦 (1993) and Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豐. The composite Chinese-Sogdian textual situation, plus the heavy citation of this sūtra in Táng Chán literature (it was much loved by the early Northern school), indicates a composition window broadly between the early Suí and the early Táng. The doctrinal core — that the dhūta austerities, far from being an inferior Hīnayāna practice, are foundational to Mahāyāna realisation — places the work within the Chán-Vinaya synthesis of the seventh century. The commentator Huìbiàn’s lectern style (“six-classics-comment-on-me”, liù jīng zhù wǒ 六經註我) is a textbook example of the freewheeling early-Chán hermeneutic.
Translations and research
- Ibuki Atsushi 伊吹敦, “Shinnō-kyō no fukugen — kanbun danpen to Sogudo-go yaku ni motozuite 〈心王經〉の復元，——漢文斷片とソグド語譯に基づいて,” Ronsō, Ajia bunka to shisō 論叢，アジア文化と思想 2 (1993): 48–104 — the principal study, reconstructs the sūtra by collating the Chinese and Sogdian witnesses.
- Yoshida Yutaka 吉田豐, “Sogdian Buddhist Texts,” Encyclopedia Iranica (1992 onwards) — situates the Sogdian fragment.
- Tanaka Ryōshō 田中良昭, Tonkō Zenshū bunken no kenkyū 敦煌禪宗文獻の研究 (Tōkyō: Daitō shuppansha, 1983) — Chán reception.
- Buswell, Robert E., Jr., ed., Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990) — methodological framework for evaluating yí wěi jīng.
Other points of interest
The Sogdian translation is one of only a handful of cases where a Chinese Buddhist apocryphon was translated out of Chinese into a Central Asian vernacular — evidence of the soteriological importance the Tóutuó jīng held for the Chinese-speaking Sogdian diaspora of the Hexi Corridor. The Mitsui Bunko 三井文庫 manuscript bears one of the cleanest end-of-Táng commentary signatures in the Dūnhuáng corpus.
Links
- CBETA
- IDP record for S.2474
- IDP record for P.2052
- IDP record for S.ch353 (Sogdian)
- Cf. T85n2886 (older, error-prone Taishō recension)