| Identifier | [None] |
| Title | "Five Evils" section [Nōnin 2011] |
| Date | [None] |
| Translator 譯 | Buddhabhadra, 佛陀跋陀羅, 覺賢 [Gómez 1996] |
| Preferred? | Source | Pertains to | Argument | Details |
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[Nōnin 2011] Nōnin Masaaki 能仁正顕. "Goaku dan wa Chūgoku senjutsu ka 五悪段は中国撰述か." IBK 60, no. 1 (2011): 1-11[R]. |
Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Nōnin 2011] Nōnin Masaaki 能仁正顕. "Goaku dan wa Chūgoku senjutsu ka 五悪段は中国撰述か." IBK 60, no. 1 (2011): 1-11[R]. |
The "Five Evils" section 五惡段 is found only in the larger Sukhāvatīvyūha ascribed to Zhi Qian 支謙 T362 [which Harrison has argued is actually by *Lokakṣema---MR]; the larger Sukhāvatīvyūha ascribed *Lokakṣema 支婁迦讖 T361 [which Harrison has argued is actually by Zhi Qian---MR]; and the smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha ascribed to 康僧鎧 T360 [which most modern scholars think is by Buddhabhadra and Baoyun---MR]. Thus, it is absent from the Tang (無量壽如來會 T310(5)) and Song versions (大乘無量壽莊嚴經 T363, 大阿彌陀經 T364), as well as from Tibetan and Sanskrit. Nōnin gives a convenient overview of prior scholarship on the passage, dividing scholars into supporters of the theory that the "Five Evils" section was composed in China (Ogiwara 荻原 1938, Mochizuki 望月 1946, Fujita 藤田 1970) and supporters of the theory that it was a genuine translation from an Indic original (Ikemoto 池本 1958, Sonoda 園田 1960, Shikii 色井 1968). The main reasons adduced by proponents of Chinese composition were the presence of Chinese-sounding ethical theories and concepts, and phraseology. Proponents of Indic origin argued that the section was indispensible to the thought and structure of the text as a whole. The preponderant tendency, according to Nōnin, has been to support Chinese composition. Sueki 末木, in 1980, concluded that there was insufficient evidence to decide the issue either way. Oyama (?} 尾山 suggested in 1983 the passage was a response to the incursions of foreign powers into India, and similar to the kāliyuga thought of the Mahābhārata. Hayashi 林 (1986) sought the roots of the passage in Zoroastrianism. Okayama 岡山 (1991) returned to the idea that the passage was to be explained by tendencies in the Chinese thought of the time. Fujita (2007) argued that there is no necessary basis in Indian literature for the passage; it is missing from manuscripts found in Afghanistan, though immediately preceding passages are present. Nōnin (2011): argues that the "Five Evils" section was written in China by a process of free exposition by a translator, probably Zhi Qian; but that it had a valid basis in shorter passages in an Indic text. The Sanskrit Sukhāvatīvyūha does contain elsewhere a passage on five "harshnesses" or "blemishes" (kaṣāya) characterising the Sahā world, namely, the depredations visited upon sentient beings by (other) sentient beings, wrong views, passions/defilements, (short) lifespan, and the epoch in which they live (sattvakaṣāya, dṛṣṭikaṣāya, kleśakaṣāya, āyuṣkaṣāya, kalpakaṣāya). The gist of the passage is to praise Śākyamuni for achieving the difficult task of preaching the Dharma in a world with these shortcomings, which make it difficult for sentient beings to receive the message of his teaching. Nōnin argues that the Skt sentence in question strongly resembles a key sentence in the Chinese "Five Evils" section. The resemblance between the rubric of the five kaṣāyas and the "five evils", however, has in part been obscured by an assumption that the five evils correspond point-by-point to the five precepts, which are defences against them; this understanding is so widespread it is even a commonplace in reference works. Nōnin, rather, carefully shows analogies to particular parts of the detailed exposition of each of the "five evils" in passages in Indic works expounding the five kaṣāyas, especially the Bodhisattvabhūmi. Nōnin therefore suggests that the "five evils" passage has a sound basis in a shorter passage in an Indic text, upon the basis of which someone in China who was familiar with broader Indian ideas about the five kaṣāyas has freely expounded in greater detail in a Chinese style, drawing upon analogous Chinese concepts, to argue that these "evils" should be countered by the antidote of the five precepts. Nōnin suggests that Zhi Qian would be the most likely candidate to have added this passage, given that he demonstrably knew the rubric of the five kaṣāya (Nōnin cites passages in his Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa and Taizi ruiying benqi jing, 4). Nōnin then has to account for the fact that the passage is missing (from the relevant locus) in the Sanskrit Sukhāvatīvyūha. He argues that the passage "disappeared" 消えた from the text in the course of its transmission, and that its original presence in the earlier text is evidenced by the presence of the "Five Evils" section in the three earliest Chinese translations. He identifies another passage featuring the five kaṣāyas in Skt, which *is* found in the Tang and Song texts, but not in Zhi Qian and *Lokakṣema (a complementary distribution to the "Five Evils" section). This passage is part of a vow that all will be reborn into the Pure Land, *except* bodhisattvas who themselves have vowed to be continually reborn into worlds characterised by the five kaṣāyas. Nōnin proposes that this reflects a shift in the bodhisattva ideal behind the text. In the early period, the default model of the bodhisattva was Śākyamuni, who is born into this Sahā world (a world of the five kaṣāyas) to save other sentient beings. Precisely through the success of the Pure Land ideal, Nōnin argues, the default shifted to the idea of the avaivartika (non-regressing) bodhisattvas, who are also ekajātipratibaddha, or destined to only one further rebirth (in the Pure Land) before final liberation. For this reason, Nōnin supposes, the earlier passage extolling the merits of Śākyamuni, upon which the "Five Evils" section was based, no longer fit the overall worldview of the text, and the passage fell out of later versions. Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Nakamura 1987] Nakamura, Hajime. Indian Buddhism: A Survey with Bibliographical Notes. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987. — 206 |
Nakamura notes that some scholars have argued that “Five Evils” passage was added in China, but other scholars have argued that the same passage is an authentic Indian text. He refers to studies by [Ogiwara] Unrai and Ikemoto Jūshin. Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Gómez 1996] Gómez, Luis O., trans. The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light: Sanskrit and Chinese Versions of the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sutras. Honolulu: University of Hawaiˋi Press, 1996. — 129, 205-215, 252 n. 74, 253 n. 82, n. 80, Glossary 297 |
In T360, the "Five Evils" section falls at Gómez's §§160-205 [= T360:12.275c17-277c25]. It is part of what Gómez identifies as a somewhat longer interpolation, §§138-205 (i.e. beginning at 274b18). Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Mochizuki 1946] Mochizuki Shinkō 望月信亨. Bukkyō kyōten seiritsu shi ron 仏教経典成立史論. Hōzōkan, 1946. — 393-400 |
Mochizuki writes that 四天王經 T590 is ascribed to Zhiyan 智嚴 and Baoyun 寶雲 in the Taishō. CSZJJ only records three similar titles, all of them treated as anonymous. The text is an (abridged?) excerpt 抄出 from the Trayastriṃśā Heaven chapter 忉利天品 of the Dīrghāgama (DĀ 8 T1 [I] 131a3 ff). It also contains elements derived from Daoist thought: One’s lifespan in this life is determined by moral actions; a similar thought can already be found in the Bao pu zi 包僕子. The text also states that the four Heavenly Kings inspect the moral conduct of worldlings and then report to Indra, in order to determine how lifespan will be so meted out; but in the relevant portions of DĀ, and also in a sūtra cited in MPPU (T1509) juan 13, the theory is rather that the good discovered by such inspections increases the throng of devas, and the evil the throng of asuras. Mochizuki relates the content of T590 to ideas found in the San pin dizi jing 三品弟子經 T767 ascribe to Zhi Qian (but only from LDSBJ onwards), and to ideas found in the “Five Evils” section of the Sukhāvatīvyūha-sūtra. In these texts, as in T590, the practice of the five precepts is supposed to help devotees avoid the “five evils” (五惡, 五濁, *pañcakaṣāya) characteristic of the time of decline; all three texts also propose that the gods protect those who do good. Another idea shared by T590 and T767 is that the taking of life will lead a person to be plunged directly into hell. The tentative explanation suggested by Mochizuki for this shared pattern of materials is that the “Five Evils” section was already inserted into the Sukhāvatīvyuha in the Three Kingdoms period, and when Baoyun was translating “his” version of the text he kept it more or less unchanged from that earlier version; given that T767 is also ascribed to Zhi Qian, perhaps this suggests that these ideas were characteristic of Zhi Qian himself, though “there is a view that the period would be slightly early” (for unspecified reasons). So far as I could see, Mochizuki comes to no firm conclusions about the implications of this pattern for T590. Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Gómez 1996] Gómez, Luis O., trans. The Land of Bliss: The Paradise of the Buddha of Measureless Light: Sanskrit and Chinese Versions of the Sukhāvatīvyūha Sutras. Honolulu: University of Hawaiˋi Press, 1996. — 126, 129 |
Gómez notes that "modern scholarship has now questioned that attribution. It now seems more likely that the so-called Saṃghavarman translation is at least a reworking by members of the translation workshop of the famous Indian translator Buddhabhadra (359-429 CE)." It is "in some places archaic, showing traces of several stages of revision", "lengthy and cumbersome", and characterised by "mythic and doctrinal complexity", suggesting that it is a product of a late stage of textual development. The "Five Evils" section spans §§160-205 in Gómez's numbering [=T360:12.275c17-277c25]. It is part of what Gómez identifies as a somewhat longer interpolation, §§138-205 (i.e. beginning at 274b18). "The passage on the 'Five Great Evils'...may be a Chinese statement regarding morals and the consequences of sin. It has very close correspondences in the texts of Zhi Qian and Zhi Loujiachen" (129). §§5-22 [= T360:12.265c23-266b26] also have no parallel in Skt, and is otherwise only found in Bodhiruci outside T360. "These passages are probably 'interpolations', but we have no way of knowing for certain today where and when they were added to the text" (129). In addition, "[T360] differs from its Sanskrit counterpart in a number of ways: the order of the narrative and the argument deviate, sometimes only on minor points, sometimes in major ways; differences in content occur throughout, and range from regrouping and rearrangement of important themes (in the content and structure of the verse portions, for instance), to significant omissions and additions. The parallels, however, are more and stronger than the divergences." Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Fujita 1967] Fujita Kōtatsu 藤田宏達. "Muryōju kyō no yakusha wa dare ka 無量寿経の訳者は誰か." IBK 15, no. 2 (1967): 22-31. |
Fujita argues for Buddhabhadra and Baoyun as translators of the "new" Sukhāvatīvyūha T360. His main target in doing so is the argument of Nogami (1950) that this ascription is rendered impossible by the Dunhuang manuscript of the text held at Ōtani University, which bears a date of Shenrui 神瑞 2 = 415. A second possible problem for the ascription to BhBh-BY is the claim advanced by some scholars that works of Zhi Dun 支遁 and Xi Chao 郄超 show traces of wording due to T360. These arguments have led some scholars to prefer an attribution to Dharmarakṣa. Fujita argues that the dated colophon to the Dunhuang manuscript is suspicious, on several grounds: paleographers are not certain that the hand is the same as that of the text itself; the layout of the page (23 lines of 17 characters each) is atypical for such an early date, and otherwise earliest attested in the Saṃyuktābhidharmahṛdaya manuscript of 479; there exists a similar manuscript of the *Buddhāvataṃsaka, for which the colophon is dated 413, which would also be anachronistic (the text was translated 418-420), which leads to the conclusion that the colophon, in that case, is fake; and first-hand examination of physical details of the T360 Ōtani manuscript show other inconsistencies. On various paleographic grounds, he suggests that the body of the manuscript is more likely to date from the late fifth or early sixth century. He then appeals to Sengyou's (CSZJJ) list of contrasting terms in "archaic" and "recent" (post-Kumārajīva) style, the so-called Qianhou chu jing yi ji 前後出經異記 (T2145:55.5a13 ff.), to argue that the style of T360 is also atypical of Dharmarakṣa’s period and work; and he suggests that it matches the style of Baoyun's Buddhacarita 佛本行經 T193 and Buddhabhadra's *Buddhāvataṃsaka 大方廣佛華嚴經 T278. In an aside, he argues that the "five evils" section was added in China, and contains traces of Confucian and Daoist ideology and phrasing (he promises to follow up on this point in other work); and he notes that similar material is also found in the 四天王經 T590 (he does not go into detail). Finally, he briefly refutes the idea that Zhi Dun and Xi Chao show phrasing indebted to T360, and in fact, we also do not see any traces in the generation of Kumārajīva and Huiyuan; the first place we do see clear evidence of such wording is in Xie Lingyun 謝靈運. This would then mean that the text appeared sometime between the death of Huiyuan in 417 and Xie's execution in 433, which fits perfectly with the date reported for the Buddhabhadra and Baoyun's translation. Entry author: Michael Radich |
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[Fujita 1981] Fujita Kōtatsu 藤田宏達. "Muryōju kyō no yakusha mondai hosetsu 『無量寿経』の訳者問題補説." In Daijō Bukkyō kara mikkyō e: Katsumata Shinkyō hakase kokikinenronshū 大乗仏教から密教へ：勝又俊教博士古稀記念論集, edited by the Katsumata Shinkyō hakase kokikinenronshū kankōkai 勝又俊教博士古稀記念論文集刊行会, 691-700[R]. Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 1981. |
Fujita argues against Gotō (1978), who proposed on the basis of computational philology and translation terms and style that T360 was translated by Dharmarakṣa. Fujita reaffirms the attribution to Buddhabhadra & Baoyun. According to Fujita, Gotō's study was based upon three main sets of evidence, which he refutes respectively as follows. 1. Gotō calculated the relative frequency of 42 common characters in a sample of 26 works by 13 early translators, and upon that basis, determined that the stylistic signature of T360 is closest to Dharmarakṣa. Fujita objects that in his short study, Gotō does not explain how these 42 characters were selected; that they make no allowance for transcription terms; and that we have no reason to be sure that this test can accurately identify translators. He also notes that Gotō uses, as his benchmark for Buddhabhadra-Baoyun, only "Faxian's" MPNMS T376 and the Mahāsāṃghika-vinaya T1425. Fujita notes that a much larger number of texts is ascribed to both Buddhabhadra and Baoyun, and argues that these two texts are not sufficient to establish a translation style for them. He also notes that the "five evils" section of T360 should be excluded from such tests, because of the possibility that it is of a different provenance [may have been added in China, etc.]. 2. According to Fujita, Gotō takes it almost as a consensus view that the translation terms of T360 are very similar to those of Dharmarakṣa's Lalitavistara 普曜經 T186, though Fujita himself had argued in earlier work that there are in fact large differences in this respect between T360 and Dharmarakṣa's Saddharmapuṇḍarīka. Fujita shows that the ten epithets of the Tathāgata vary significantly between T186 and a set of translation terms common to Buddhabhadra-Baoyun's *Buddhāvataṃsaka, MPNMS, and Tathāgatagarbha-sūtra. He also shows that in other texts in the Buddhabhadra-Baoyun corpus (出生無量門持經 T1012, the Śrīmālādevī T353, and the “Ocean Samādhi” T643 [but for T643, cf. Yamabe's arguments that the text might not be a straight translation---MR]) the ten epithets vary, and on the basis of this [single!] example, argues that it is dangerous to make arguments about attribution on the basis of translation terms. 3. Finally, according to Fujita, Gotō argued that a line in "Sengzhao's" 僧肇 commentary on the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa 注維摩詰經 T1775 shows that Sengzhao must have been aware of the content of T360, and this makes the ascription of T360 to Buddhabhadra-Baoyun chronologically impossible. Against this, Fujita argues that in fact, T1775 collects the comments of four commentators, including Daosheng 道生, who died in 434, after Buddhabhadra-Baoyun's reported translation in 421. In addition, Fujita cites Usuda (1977) who has shown that T1775 contains a reference to the *Dharmakṣema version of MPNMS (T374, or perhaps T375, its "Southern" revision; however, the wording of this reference is loose, and according to the Taishō apparatus, this citation is missing from the Heian manuscript of the text with the siglum 甲). Fujita follows the traditional dating of *Dharmakṣema's activity, and therefore dates T374 as completed in 421 [but cf. Chen (2004)---MR]. Entry author: Michael Radich |
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