Jíxìng zìshuō 即興自說
Udāna — Spontaneous Utterances of the Buddha Pali source-text translated by 鄧殿臣 (譯)
About the work
A modern Chinese translation of the Udāna, the third text of the Pali Khuddaka-nikāya (小部). The work consists of 80 short suttas in eight vagga (chapters of ten suttas each, here Chinese pǐn 品). Each sutta combines a brief prose narrative (Pali vatthu) with a verse “udāna” — a spontaneous gnomic utterance (“inspired exclamation”) that the Buddha pronounces upon witnessing some episode. The combination of folk narrative and metric verse makes the Udāna one of the most accessible — and most important — texts in the Pali canon.
Abstract
The Sanskrit-tradition cognate is the Udānavarga of the Mūlasarvāstivāda and (less directly) the Chinese Fǎ-jù pǐ-yù jīng 法句譬喻經 / Chū-yào jīng 出曜經 (T04n0212). The Pali term “Udāna” has been variously rendered in Chinese: Wú-wèn zì-shuō 無問自說 (“uncalled-for utterance,” in the xiǎopǐn 12-aṅga genre-list of older translations), and simply Zì-shuō (“self-utterance”). Dèng Diànchén renders it Jíxìng zì-shuō 即興自說 (“spontaneous self-utterance”) to capture the udāna’s sense of inspired, occasion-prompted speech.
The Pali Udāna is generally considered an early-stratum text within the canon, its prose perhaps slightly later than its verses, with both substantially complete by the time of the Dīpavaṃsa-period closure of the canon. The composition window is conservatively given here as 4th–3rd c. BCE for the verse core, though some prose framings may be later (down to ca. 1st c. BCE). The translation is from the Sri Lankan Ministry of Buddhist Affairs Sinhala-printed Pali edition.
Translations and research
- Ireland, John D., The Udāna: Inspired Utterances of the Buddha (Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1990) — standard English translation.
- Anālayo, The Genesis of the Bodhisattva Ideal (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2010) — context.
- Norman, K. R., Pāli Literature (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1983) — text-history.
- Dèng Diànchén 鄧殿臣, Jíxìng zì-shuō yìzhě xù in Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn vol. 5 (1998).
Other points of interest
The Pali Udāna is one of nine (or twelve, in the Mahāyāna list) classical aṅga (Skt.) / aṅga-paryāya (Pali) genres of Buddhist oral literature; the udāna form is also widespread in the early Sanskrit-tradition Mahāyāna sūtras. Dèng’s Chinese translation thus opens an important comparative window for Chinese-language readers of the canonical Pali source against its long-translated Sanskrit-tradition Chinese counterparts (T04n0212 Chū-yào jīng, etc.).