Fó shuō Xiàoshùnzǐ xiūxíng chéngfó jīng 佛說孝順子修行成佛經
The Sūtra of the Filial Son Who Practised the Way and Attained Buddhahood anonymous translation; critical edition by 方廣錩 (整理)
About the work
A jātaka-style Buddhist sūtra in one fascicle, also titled Xiàoshùnzǐ yìngbiàn pò èyè xiūxíng jīng 孝順子應變破惡業修行經 or Yíntí jīnjiǎo dúzǐ jīng 銀蹄金角犢子經 (“The Sūtra of the Silver-hoofed Golden-horned Calf”). The narrative concerns the Caṇḍāla (栴陀羅) king Pālī’s third-queen son who, slated for execution by the senior queens’ jealousy, transforms himself into a silver-hoofed golden-horned calf and escapes with the help of a butcher; the prince later marries a neighbouring princess, returns home, rescues his mother, and “does not transform back — but attains Buddhahood in this very ordinary body” (bù zhuǎn fán shēn chéng fó 不轉凡身成佛). The opening of the surviving manuscript is lost; the title-element yìngbiàn pò èyè 應變破惡業 (“transformative breaking of evil karma”) suggests the lost portion narrated the prior-life evil karma that triggered the persecution.
Abstract
The sūtra is first catalogued in the Zhòng jīng mùlù 眾經目錄 of Rénshòu 2 (602 CE), where Fǎjīng’s 法經 successors classed it as 疑偽 (“doubtful or forged”); the source-language is left unstated, and all later catalogues followed Fǎjīng. The work was excluded from all Chinese canons and was lost. Fāng Guǎngchāng’s analysis of vocabulary, narrative structure, and the strikingly Indian jātaka form, however, leads him to the firm conclusion that this is a genuine translation from an Indian source — most plausibly translated in the late Northern Dynasties or early Suí. The cataloguers’ mistake is treated as a representative case of mistakenly 疑偽 classification of authentic foreign translations, and the discovery has reopened the question of how reliable the 疑偽 designation is as an evidentiary tool. The Beijing Library Yù 玉 64 (= Běi 8300) manuscript, the unique surviving witness, shows several WǔZhōu 武周 era reformed characters in inconsistent use, and is dated by paleography to early-late Táng (i.e., the manuscript is c. 700–750, but the work is significantly earlier).
Translations and research
- Fāng Guǎngchāng 方廣錩, “Dūnhuáng xiějīng 〈Fó shuō Xiàoshùnzǐ xiūxíng chéngfó jīng〉 jiǎn xī 簡析,” Nányà yánjiū 南亞研究 1988.2 — the principal study, makes the case for genuine Indian provenance.
- Tokuno, Kyoko, “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues,” in Buswell, ed., Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990) — methodological context.
- Ohnuma, Reiko, Head, Eyes, Flesh, and Blood: Giving Away the Body in Indian Buddhist Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007) — jātaka scholarship relevant to the calf-prince motif.
Other points of interest
The Indian jātaka tradition contains numerous “child-as-animal” or “innocent-prince persecuted by stepmothers” motifs (cf. the Daśaratha-jātaka, the Sāma-jātaka); the silver-hoofed golden-horned calf is unusual in being a continuous transformation that the prince retains even after attaining Buddhahood, doctrinally rejecting the very category of “ordinary body” vs. “Buddha body.” The closing “bù zhuǎn fán shēn chéng fó” 不轉凡身成佛 has been read as an early iteration of the bensheng / běnshēn 本身 discourse later prominent in Chán.