Dà fāngbiàn Fó bào’ēn jīngbiàn jīngwén jìsòng 大方便佛報恩經變經文偈頌
Verses for the Transformation Tableau of the Sūtra of the Buddha’s Repayment of Kindness through Great Skillful Means anonymous Chinese composition; critical edition by 陳明光 (整理)
About the work
A long Buddhist biànwén 變文 (transformation-text) accompanying the great Dà fāngbiàn Fó bào’ēn jīngbiàn 大方便佛報恩經變 niche at the Dàfówān 大佛灣, Bǎodǐngshān 寶頂山, Dàzú — the largest individual kān 龕 (niche) in the entire Chinese cave-temple corpus, in high relief, depicting six-and-six paired scenes of the Buddha’s previous-life and present-life xíngxiào 行孝 (filial-piety) and bào’ēn 報恩 (kindness-repayment) acts. The accompanying jìsòng 偈頌 propagandise the nánshě néngshě, nánwéi néngwéi 難捨能捨，難為能為 (“renouncing the unrenounceable, doing the impossible”) jātaka-style self-sacrifice ethics that animate the whole Bào’ēn jīng literary tradition.
Abstract
See KR6v0045 for the broader context. The combined biànxiàng + biànwén niche-format at this site is, like the Fùmǔ ēn zhòng niche (KR6v0047), one of the very few extant Chinese cases. The opening verse — “Even were a wheel of red-hot iron / to spin upon my head, / never on this account would I / lose my bodhicitta*”* (假使熱鐵輪，於我頂上旋，終不以此苦，退失菩提心) — is itself a famous bodhisattva-vow that recurs across Sòng popular Buddhism.
Translations and research
- See KR6v0045.
- Cole, Alan, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
- Howard, Angela F., Summit of Treasures (2001) — the standard treatment of the niche’s iconography.