Bǎojì dàwáng púsà běnyuán 寶髻大王菩薩本緣
The Story of the Bodhisattva King Maṇicūḍa (Bǎojì), Long Recension translated from the Sanskrit by 任遠 (Rén Yuǎn)
About the work
A modern Chinese rendering of the Maṇicūḍāvadāna in its longest preserved Sanskrit recension — chapter 49 (in some places cited as chapter 47, an internal inconsistency in the source) of the Mahājjātakamālā (大本生蔓), a Nepalese collection of jātaka and avadāna tales of unknown date edited by the German Indologist Michael Hahn. The text was rendered from Hahn’s Sanskrit edition by Rén Yuǎn and published as item No. 074 in Zàngwài fójiào wénxiàn 藏外佛教文獻 vol. 9 (Beijing: Zōngjiào wénhuà, 2003), the supplementary canon-series edited by 方廣錩. The full Sanskrit title given in the translator’s prefatory note is Śrī-jagadviśva-bhairava-Maṇicūḍa-avadāna (rendered by Rén as Jíxiáng shèngxióng Bǎojì dàwáng púsà běnyuán 吉祥聖雄寶髻大王菩薩本緣).
Abstract
The Maṇicūḍa story-cycle — the tale of the bodhisattva-king Maṇicūḍa (“Jewel-crested”), who in the parami-perfecting career of the Buddha gave away his crown-jewel, his eyes, and finally his head as the supreme act of dāna — is one of the most popular gift-of-the-body legends of Indian Buddhist narrative literature. It is preserved in Sanskrit in many recensions, of which the Mahājjātakamālā witness rendered here is by far the longest and most elaborate (1080 ślokas). The translator’s tíjiě 題解 surveys the modern Western philological tradition on the cycle (Brajendra Nath De, La Vallée Poussin, Ratna Handurukende, Michael Hahn, Siegfried Lienhard, Phyllis Granoff) and locates the Sanskrit text within it. Three observations frame the translator’s reading: (1) the Mahājjātakamālā manuscript has a substantial lacuna of c. 20 leaves between verses 549 and 550; (2) the language is “fairly standard classical Sanskrit, with almost no Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit features,” distinguishing it from the older avadāna corpus; (3) the Maṇicūḍa in this recension differs in narrative detail from every other surviving version, which the translator takes as evidence of independent textual elaboration rather than direct dependence on a single archetype. The text is paired in the supplementary canon with the much shorter parallel rendering of Kṣemendra’s version at KR6v0102, for direct comparison.
Translations and research
- Hahn, Michael, Haribhaṭṭa and Gopadatta: Two Authors in the Succession of Āryaśūra. On the Rediscovery of Parts of Their Jātakamālās (Studia Philologica Buddhica, Occasional Paper Series 1; Tokyo: Reiyukai Library, 1977; rev. ed. 1992) — the textual context for the Mahājjātakamālā corpus.
- Handurukande, Ratna, *Maṇicūḍāvadāna, being a translation and edition; and Lokānanda, a translation; with an analysis of the Maṇicūḍa story and a study of the Maṇicūḍāvadāna and the *Maṇicūḍa-Jātaka in the Avadānaśataka (Sacred Books of the Buddhists 24; London: Pali Text Society, 1967) — the principal English study and translation of the parallel recensions.
- Lienhard, Siegfried, Maṇicūḍāvadānoddhṛta: A Buddhist Re-Birth Story in the Nevārī Language (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1963) — the Newari rendering.
- Granoff, Phyllis, “The Buddhist King’s Heroic Sacrifice: Notes on the Maṇicūḍāvadāna,” in Bauddhasāhityastabakāvalī (Marburg: Indica et Tibetica, 2008), pp. 193–209.
Other points of interest
The Mahājjātakamālā itself is a large composite avadāna-anthology preserved only in Nepalese manuscript transmission; chapters 10–42 closely parallel the Mahāyāna Karuṇāpuṇḍarīka (悲華經), and chapters 43–48 form an independent unit drawing on materials from Āryaśūra, Haribhaṭṭa, and Gopadatta. The Maṇicūḍa-narrative thus sits within the most carefully studied portion of the collection.