The Sheng tianwang banruo boluomi jing

The Sheng tianwang banruoboluomi jing belongs to the Prajnaparamita literature, one of the major branches of Mahayana sutras. Unfortunately, neither its Sanskrit original nor any Tibetan translation has come down to us but at least do we have access to two Chinese renditions one executed in the 6th century, the other about one hundred years later by no one less than the famous translator and traveller-monk Xuanzang.

Looking not so much like an original literary work in one piece, the Sheng tianwang banruoboluomi jing rather gives the impression of being of a somewhat composite nature. The idea for this year was to lead the students more into the details of the probable history of the text with which they dealt with for the first time last semester in a course introducing principles of critical text editions.

There are several theories related to the history of this Prajnaparamita scripture, most of them proposed by Japanese academicians. We took the ideas of Yinshun, the leading Chinese monk-scholar of this century, as point of departure for our discussions. He discovered a close affinity between several sutras and came to the conclusion that the Sheng tianwang banruoboluomi jing is nothing but cut-and-paste work based on the Ratnamegha sutra, Wushang yi jing, and Tathagatacintyaguhyanirdesa.

In order to get a better picture of the complex process involving the composition and/or compilation of Buddhist scriptures we talked about more general topics like the so-called Buddhist councils as well as concrete textual examples -the Dharmapada/Udanavarga group of texts, Taoist borrowing of Buddhist sutra material, the relationship between the Bodhisattvapitaka and the Aksayamatinirdesa, the different recensions of the Sukhavativyuha, the versions of the story of Nagasena's discussion with a king, canonical and apocryphal Jatakas, and recently discovered Indian texts which are now studied by the Project Group of Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schoyen Collection.

At the same time, I encouraged the students to look at theSheng tianwang banruoboluomi jing as one text, as a whole, and find a topic they would like to work on. Since the scripture itself is probably inaccessible to you I will provide an outline of Chapter Eleven (or Twelve in Xuanzang's translation), Manifesting Transformations, to give you a taste of what this sutra is like.

This page was last updated on January 2nd, 2000.

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