Fó shuō Guānfó sānmèihǎi jīng běnxíng pǐn dìbā 佛說觀佛三昧海經本行品第八
The Eighth Original-Practice Chapter of the Buddha’s Spoken Sūtra on the Ocean of Buddha-Visualisation Samādhi (recension a, system 1) anonymous Chinese composition; critical edition by 黃霞 (整理)
About the work
A short apocryphal Fó shuō xiānghǎo jīng 佛說相好經 (also titled Fó shuō Guān-fó sānmèi-hǎi jīng běnxíng pǐn dì-bā) — the first of five recensions edited together as KR6v0038–KR6v0042. The text is a jié liè 割裂 collage cut-and-pasted from the canonical Fó shuō Guān-fó sānmèi-hǎi jīng 佛說觀佛三昧海經 (T15n0643)‘s Guān xiàng pǐn 觀相品 and Běnxíng pǐn 本行品, listing the Buddha’s 32 mahāpuruṣa-lakṣaṇa (大人相), 80 anuvyañjana (隨形好), and 84,000 minor marks, with the rubric “sān niàn fó” 三念佛 (“three Buddha-recitations”) inserted after each mark — a clear indication that the text was compiled for liturgical use as a guān-fó sānmèi 觀佛三昧 (Buddha-visualisation-samādhi) recitation manual.
Abstract
Five recensions group into two textual systems: System 1 (recensions KR6v0038 = lùwén yī and KR6v0039 = lùwén èr) lacks a substantial closing block of text; System 2 (recensions KR6v0040, KR6v0041, KR6v0042) adds two passages — “ruò wǒ mièdù hòu… cǐ rén yì chú què bāshí yì jié shēngsǐ zhī zuì” 若我滅度後…此人亦除卻八十億劫生死之罪 and “Fó gào Ānán… hékuàng xìniàn guānfó sānmèi” 佛告阿難…何況繫念觀佛三昧. Within each system the recensions further differ in the presence/absence of shùnguān nìguān 順觀逆觀 (ascending/descending visualisation) instructions and of the “sān niàn fó” rubric. The full witness-table is given in KR6v0042; the present recension a is the system-1, with-shun-ni-guan version, edited from Beijing Library Běi 245 (閏 55) + S. 2686 (rejoined to form a complete text) plus P. 2300 (head-intact, tail-damaged) and IOM RAS Φ363.
The work is unrecorded in any Chinese Buddhist catalogue and excluded from all canonical editions. Composition is plausibly Suí–Táng, contemporaneous with the broader guānfó sānmèi devotional movement and the diffusion of the canonical Guānfó sānmèihǎi jīng (T15n0643). The manuscript-tradition is squarely Táng-to-Five-Dynasties Dūnhuáng.
Translations and research
- Yamabe Nobuyoshi 山部能宜, “The Sūtra on the Ocean-Like Samādhi of the Visualization of the Buddha: The Interfusion of the Chinese and Indian Cultures in Central Asia as Reflected in a Fifth-Century Apocryphal Sūtra” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1999) — the standard study of the host Guān-fó sānmèi-hǎi jīng and its derivatives.
- Yamabe Nobuyoshi 山部能宜, Kanbutsu zanmai kai-kyō no kenkyū 観佛三昧海経の研究 (Tōkyō: Daitō shuppansha, 2014) — fuller treatment.
- Soper, Alexander Coburn, Literary Evidence for Early Buddhist Art in China (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1959) — on the xiānghǎo / lakṣaṇa tradition in China.
- Huáng Xiá 黃霞, “Fó shuō xiānghǎo jīng zǒng xù 整理本前言,” in Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn vol. 3 (Beijing: Zōngjiào wénhuà, 1996).
Other points of interest
The five-recension structure is one of the cleanest extant cases of Chinese popular-Buddhist textual proliferation around a single liturgical core, comparable to the Tiāngōng jīng tradition (KR6v0015–KR6v0017) and the Fómǔ jīng tradition (KR6v0018–KR6v0021).