Fó shuō Shuǐyuèguāng Guānyīn púsà jīng 佛說水月光觀音菩薩經
The Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha on the Water-Moon-Light Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara anonymous Chinese composition; critical edition by 方廣錩 (整理)
About the work
A short apocryphal Avalokiteśvara cult sūtra in one fascicle (also titled Shuǐyuè Guānyīn jīng 水月觀音經), consisting of a vow-formula by which the practitioner — invoking Dàbēi Guānshìyīn 大悲觀世音 in nine refrains — pledges to attain wisdom, salvation, upāya skill, the prajñā-vessel, the precepts, the unconditioned dwelling, and bodily union with fǎxìng-shēn 法性身. Each refrain is matched with a salvific guarantee: knife-mountains shatter, fire-pits cool, hells dry up, hungry ghosts are satisfied, asura hostility subsides, and animal rebirth yields wisdom.
Abstract
Unrecorded in any Chinese Buddhist catalogue and excluded from all canonical editions. The sole surviving witness is Tianjin Art Museum 4532. The work is closely tied to the rise of the Shuǐyuè Guānyīn 水月觀音 (Water-Moon-Light Avalokiteśvara) iconography that emerged in the Hexi Corridor and Sìchuān during the late Táng and Five Dynasties — the bodhisattva contemplating the moon in water, an iconographic type made famous by Zhōu Fáng 周昉 (c. 730–800) and disseminated widely through the Dūnhuáng cave-paintings of the ninth and tenth centuries. The text’s vow-structure echoes the Daśabhūmika praṇidhāna form, but the cult-content is purely Chinese-popular. Composition is therefore plausibly mid-Táng to Five Dynasties, contemporary with the iconographic emergence.
Translations and research
- Yü, Chün-fang, Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), ch. 6 — the standard treatment of the Shuǐyuè Guānyīn cult and its textual milieu.
- Cornu, Philippe, Dictionnaire encyclopédique du bouddhisme (Paris: Seuil, 2001), s.v. “Avalokiteśvara à la lune dans l’eau.”
- Fāng Guǎngchāng 方廣錩, “Guānyú Fó shuō shuǐyuèguāng Guānyīn púsà jīng 關於《佛說水月光觀音菩薩經》,” appended to the 1995 Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn edition of KR6v0012.
Other points of interest
The text is one of the principal textual witnesses to the textualisation of the Water-Moon-Light Avalokiteśvara cult; it complements the iconographic evidence at Mògāo 莫高 and Yúlín 榆林 caves and clarifies that the cult had a circulating sūtra base, not merely a painterly tradition.