Buddhist Scriptures Read online

  BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES

  DONALD S. LOPEZ, JR. was born in Washington, DC, in 1952 and was educated at the University of Virginia, receiving a doctorate in Buddhist Studies in 1982. He is currently Carl W. Belser Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sūtra, Buddhism in Practice, Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West and Buddhism: An Introduction and Guide (Penguin 2001). He has also served as editor of the Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Buddhist Scriptures

  Edited by DONALD S. LOPEZ, JR.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

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  This collection first published 2004

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  Editorial material copyright © Donald S. Lopez, Jr., 2004

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 9781101488195

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Technical Note

  Introduction: Digesting the Dharma

  Further Reading

  THE BUDDHIST UNIVERSE

  1 The Realms of Rebirth

  2 A Call to Practise

  3 Karma Tales

  4 A Lesson from a Ghost

  5 A Scripture that Protects Kings

  6 One Buddha per Universe

  7 Two Buddhas Seated Side by Side

  8 Rebirth in the Land of Bliss

  9 Avoiding Hell, Gaining Heaven

  10 A Chinese Pilgrim in India

  11 A Sacred Peak

  12 Maitreya Describes the Future

  THE BUDDHA

  13 The Three Jewels

  14 The Noble Search

  15 A Life of the Buddha

  16 Māyā, Mother of the Buddha

  17 Why the Buddha Had Good Digestion

  18 A King Gives Away His Head

  19 Rūpyāvatī Gives Away Her Breasts

  20 How the Buddha Became a Bodhisattva

  21 Proving the Buddha

  22 Enshrining a Relic

  23 The Consecration of a Buddha Image

  24 A Hymn to the Buddha

  MONASTIC LIFE

  25 The Evolution of Ordination

  26 Making Men into Monks

  27 A Murderer Becomes a Monk

  28 The Ascetic Ideal

  29 Monks in the Mahāyāna

  30 Making New Monastic Rules

  31 Lives of Eminent Monks and Nuns

  32 The Nine Patriarchs of the East

  33 Taking the Vinaya Across the Sea

  34 Zen for National Defence

  35 How a Monk Freed his Mother from Hell

  36 Living in the Degenerate Age

  MEDITATION AND OTHER RITUALS

  37 The Direct Path to Enlightenment

  38 Wisdom and Compassion

  39 Serenity and Discernment

  40 On the Relation of Study and Meditation

  41 Both Sudden and Gradual Enlightenment

  42 Reciting the Name of the Buddha

  43 The Bodhisattva Vow

  44 Freeing Birds and Fish from Bondage

  45 Against Animal Sacrifice

  46 Feeding Hungry Ghosts

  47 A Sūtra for Long Life

  48 Transforming Death into Buddhahood

  ENLIGHTENMENT

  49 A Lay Master of Meditation

  50 Nuns Triumph over Evil

  51 The Perfection of Wisdom

  52 In Praise of Reality

  53 Songs of the Siddhas

  54 The Ultimate Couple

  55 Buddhahood in this Lifetime

  56 The Practice of No Thought

  57 Finding Enlightenment in the Final Age

  58 The Gift of Faith

  59 A Zen Master Interprets the Dharma

  60 Dedication of Merit

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  The translations in chapters 14, 27, 37, 49 and 50 are reprinted with the permission of Wisdom Publications. The translations in chapters 1, 6, 25, 28 and 36 are reprinted with the permission of the Pali Text Society. The translation in Chapter 2 is reprinted with the permission of Columbia University Press. The translation in Chapter 41 is reprinted with the permission of the University of Hawai’i Press. Full citations appear at the end of each chapter.

  I would like to thank Andrew Quintman for all of his assistance in the formatting of the translations. Above all, I am grateful to the translators of the works that appear here, both for their generosity in offering their excellent work to this volume and for their patience in awaiting its appearance.

  Technical Note

  Buddhist technical terms have been translated into English by the individual translators wherever possible, with the original Sanskrit sometimes provided in parentheses. The titles of texts have also been translated wherever possible, with the original language title following in parentheses. Material appearing in square brackets has been added by the translator in an effort to make the translation read more smoothly. Because of the range of meaning of much Buddhist terminology, and the multiple connotations of these terms across Buddhist cultures, the translation of this terminology has been left to the discretion of the individual translators and has not been standardized throughout the volume. The spelling, however, has been standardized, as has the use of italics for Sanskrit and other foreign words. Chinese terms appear in Pinyin. Tibetan terms are provided in Wylie transliteration. Certain common place names and selected terms that have entered into English usage appear without diacritical marks.

  A glossary of common Buddhist terms may be found at the end of the volume.

  Texts from the Chinese Buddhist canon are cited according to the standard numbers in the Taishō printed edition (abbreviated T): Taishō shinshū daizōkyō, edited by Takakusu Junjirō and Watanabe Kaikyoku. Tokyo: Daizōkyōkai, 1924–1935.

  Introduction Digesting the Dharma

  Buddhist scriptures. It is perhaps fitting to begin with a brief consideration of these two words, beginning with the second, and less difficult. Buddhism, like the other religions of ancient India, began as an oral tradition and developed without written texts for the first centuries after the death of the Buddha. The Buddha himself wrote nothing, and his words were preserved orally by his monks. These teachings were not committed to writing, and thus did not become ‘scriptures’ u
ntil the first century BCE and then not in India, but in Sri Lanka, where there was fear that war might bring the demise of the monks who recited the teachings, and hence the demise of the teachings themselves. Thus, when we think of Buddhist scriptures, it is important to keep in mind that the early ‘texts’ were not preserved physically, but were kept in the memories of monks.

  New texts, which claimed to be the words of the Buddha himself, began to appear, in writing, about four centuries after his death. The first Buddhist works with named authors did not appear until the second century CE. Buddhist teachings would be inscribed on palm leaves, on birch bark and, later, on paper; painted on scrolls and on the walls of temples; and carved – in relief and backwards – on wooden blocks that would then be inked and pages printed. After convening a council of Buddhist monks to determine the final form of the canon of scriptures, in 1871, King Mindon of Burma ordered that that canon be carved on 729 marble tablets, each four feet tall and enshrined in its own small temple, at a pagoda in Mandalay.

  Yet the majority of the world’s Buddhists would regard these 729 tablets as but a small fraction of the Buddhist scriptures, raising the question of what is meant by ‘Buddhist’. Most Buddhists over the course of history and across Asia, if asked, would be likely to say that a Buddhist is someone who seeks refuge from suffering in the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the saṅgha. But each of these terms, as the contents of this volume demonstrate, has a wide variety of meanings across the tradition. The first and last terms are perhaps the more stable. The Buddha usually refers to ‘the historical Buddha’, called Gautama or Śākyamuni, who lived in India around the fifth century BCE. But he himself claimed to be only the latest of many buddhas, with more to come in the future, and other scriptures would proclaim the presence of thousands of buddhas throughout the universe. The saṅgha, in common parlance, refers to the community of monks and nuns. It is the presence of this community – where adherence to a code of conduct has been more important than assertion of a particular doctrine – that has traditionally been taken as the sign of the presence of Buddhism in a particular land. The dharma, a notoriously untranslatable term, includes all of the teachings. And which teachings are authentic – that is, which are the word of the Buddha himself or spoken with his sanction – has been a source of controversy since the first centuries of the tradition. As Buddhism spread across India and then across Asia, more and more texts were composed that claimed to be authentic. As a result, there was no consensus across the various Buddhist traditions as to what constituted the canon, and the collections of texts became so large that they surpassed the comprehension of any single individual. Buddhism has therefore never had anything quite like the Bible or the Koran. It has had, instead, individual scriptures, and a wide variety of collections of scriptures. This volume is the latest collection of Buddhist scriptures, but certainly not the last.

  A Brief History of Buddhist Scriptures

  It seems that perhaps once each decade someone has the audacity to produce a new collection of Buddhist works in English. Those who do so place themselves in a long and venerable tradition of trying to encompass the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, within the covers of a book. The first such books, millennia ago, took the form of palm-leaf manuscripts in Sanskrit and Pali, and have since appeared in many Buddhist languages, languages like Tibetan, Chinese, Sogdian, Burmese and Kharoṣṭhī. Today, Buddhist texts appear from cyberspace in any number of languages and scripts. But regardless of the time, the place, or the medium, the problems facing the anthologizer have, in important ways, remained the same.

  Buddhism seems always to have suffered a surfeit of sūtras. Even in the centuries before the teachings of the Buddha were committed to writing, maintained only in the memory of monks, it appears that no one monk was expected to remember everything. The saṅgha, the community of monks and nuns, was organized towards the task of preservation, with different texts assigned to different groups to recite and remember; we find reference, for example, to the ‘reciters of the middle-length discourses’. The early canon was also organized in anthologies. The word sūtra literally means aphorism, and the aphorisms of the Buddha were organized into groups (called nikāyas), based on their length or based on whether the Buddha discussed topics in sets of three, four, five, and so on.

  With the explosion of sūtra composition that we refer to today as the rise of the Mahāyāna, beginning some four centuries after the Buddha passed into nirvāṇa, the problem of a surplus of sūtras seems, ironically, to have been momentarily solved, and then greatly compounded. It was solved in the sense that the Mahāyāna did not begin as a self-conscious or organized movement, but rather as a disparate collection of ‘cults of the book’, groups of monks, nuns and laypeople devoted to a single scripture – the White Lotus of the True Dharma or the Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines, for example – revering that text as the most perfect record of the Buddha’s message. For the devotees of one of these sūtras, all other sūtras could be superfluous.

  Yet the problem was also compounded because, as more and more of these ‘complete records’ began to be written, they came into contact, and then conflict, with one another, thus requiring attempts at systemization; the systems that resulted became the Mahāyāna philosophical schools. Once again it was assumed that no one individual could know, much less put into practice, such a vast literature of new sūtras, not to mention the old. A remedy was attempted in the form of the anthology. One of the first of these is attributed to the great Madhyamaka master of the second century CE, Nāgārjuna. It is entitled Compendium of Sūtras (Sūtrasamuccaya) and consists of passages from sixty-eight, mostly Mahāyāna, sūtras. Like any anthology, an insight into its purpose is gained by noting which texts are included and how the contents are organized. In the case of Nāgārjuna’s collection, the organization suggests that the work was designed to inspire practice of the path, with much of the work devoted to declaring the precious nature of the Mahāyāna as the authentic teaching of the Buddha. More famous than Nāgārjuna’s compendium is the eighth-century Compendium of Practice (Śikṣāsamuccaya) by Śāntideva, an anthology of sūtra passages setting forth the bodhisattva path – the path of one who has vowed to achieve buddhahood. These are just two of many Buddhist anthologies; during the Tang dynasty in China (618–907), Buddhist encyclopaedias were compiled with key terms explicated by quotations from relevant sūtras.

  The history of anthologies of Buddhist texts in the West is a long and fascinating one, deserving fuller study than can be provided here. George Turnour published in the Ceylon almanacs of 1833 and 1834 a work entitled Epitome of the History of Ceylon, and the Historical Inscriptions, which contained a translation of ‘the first twenty chapters of the Mahawanso and a prefatory essay on Pali Buddhistical literature’. In 1844, the great French scholar Eugène Burnouf published his Introduction à l’histoire du buddhisme Indien, which contained his translations of excerpts from dozens of Sanskrit Buddhist texts. In 1871 Samuel Beal, who described himself as ‘a Chaplain in Her Majesty’s Fleet’, published A Catena of Buddhist Scriptures from the Chinese, which included a wide variety of Buddhist texts – for the most part Indian works that had been translated into Chinese after the introduction of Buddhism to China in the first century CE. The book was divided into five sections, which provide an insight into Beal’s view of the history of Buddhism: (1) Legends and Myths, (2) Buddhism as a Religion (which contained a sampling of monastic rules called ‘The Daily Life of the Shaman’), (3) Scholastic Period, (4) Mystic Period and (5) Decline and Fall.

  A more substantial attempt at anthologizing appeared in the Sacred Books of the East series, published in 1894 and edited by the great Indologist of Oxford, Friedrich Max Müller. Ten of the forty-nine volumes of the series were devoted to Buddhist works. Reflecting the opinion of the day that Pali texts of the Theravāda tradition of Southeast Asia represented the most accurate record of what the Buddha taught (an opinion since rejected), seven of these v
olumes were given over to Pali works. Among other Indian works, Aśvaghoṣa’s famous life of the Buddha appears twice, translated in one volume from Sanskrit and in another from Chinese. The Lotus Sūtra is included in another volume. The final volume of the series is entitled Buddhist Mahāyāna Texts and contains such famous works as the Diamond Sūtra, the Heart Sūtra, and the three ‘Pure Land’ sūtras, all Indian works (or at least so regarded at the time) but included because of their importance for Japanese Buddhism (Müller collaborated closely with Nanjo Bunyū, a Japanese Buddhist priest).

  In America in 1895, the German immigrant Paul Carus published the fascinating Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records. This was arranged like the Bible, with numbered chapters and verses, and a table at the end that listed parallel passages from the New Testament. Carus was not a scholar of Buddhism but was one of its most ardent proponents in America in the late nineteenth century, seeing it as the tradition closest to what he called ‘The Religion of Science’. The Gospel of Buddha was intended to point up the many agreements between Buddhism and Christianity, thereby bringing out ‘that nobler Christianity which aspires to be the cosmic religion of universal truth’. Carus drew from the Buddhist sources that were available to him in English, French and German, making particular use of translations from the Pali by Thomas W. Rhys Davids, but also using translations of the life of the Buddha from Chinese and Tibetan. He was free in his manipulation of his sources, writing in the preface, ‘Many passages, and indeed the most important ones, are literally copied from the translations of the original texts. Some are rendered freely in order to make them intelligible to the present generation. Others have been rearranged; still others are abbreviated.’ In addition, he added several ‘purely original additions’ of his own creation, including the opening passage of The Gospel, ‘Rejoice at the glad tidings! Buddha, our Lord, has found the root of all evil. He has shown us the way of salvation.’