Reopening the Maitreya-files – Two almost identical early Maitreya sūtra translations in the Chinese Canon: Wrong attributions and text-historical entanglements
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| patha] / shi bushan pin 十不善品). The text has no Pāli equivalent
in the Nikāyas. The extant Ekotta rika-āgama translation is tradi- tionally attributed to Gautama Saṃ gha deva / Qutan Sengqietipo 瞿 曇僧伽提婆 and is said to have been produced in the year 397 AD. These twin scriptures were fi rst noticed a century ago by Matsu- moto Bunzaburō 松本文三郎. 7 The two texts are similar to such an extent that the possibility of two diff erent translations can be ruled out. The setting and the content of the two sūtras are the same. Whereas most of the Maitreya sūtras begin with an account on Śāripu tra / Shelifu 舍利弗, or at least have him as the Bud dha’s inter locutor, the twin texts start like an Āgama sūtra with the famous formula: “Thus have I heard …” The narration is located at Śrāvastī in the Jeta vana Anāthapiṇḍikārāma / Shewei guo Qishu Jigudu yuan 舍衛國祇樹給孤獨園 and Ānanda / A’nan 阿難, the Buddha’s main inter locu tor, inquires about the future Buddha Maitreya. The vocabu lary of the two texts shows only minor varia- tions and these are such that can be accounted for by copyist errors. 6 T2, no. 125, 787c2–789c28. The Ekottarika-āgama is a collection that has 51 scrolls and contains 476 sūtras arranged in numerical order according to the sets of concepts or persons appearing in their subject matter. It is nominally equiva lent to the Pāli Aṅguttara-Nikāya but part- ly diff ers in terms of substance and content. In 1984 Thich Huyên-Vi started a serial translation of the Chinese Ekottarika-āgama. The trans- lated sū tras were published in 34 parts in the Buddhist Studies Review, from its very fi rst issue onwards till vol. XXI, part 2. The translations appeared in sequence. The fi rst six and half scrolls were published in French between 1984 and 1993 and the later fi ve and half scrolls in Eng- lish between 1993 and 2004. Huyên-Vi passed away in 2005. By then out of the total 51 scrolls of the Ekottarika-āgama the translation of the fi rst twelve had been pub lished. The English translations were made by Bhikkhu Pāsādika in collaboration with Sara Boin-Webb. 7 Cf. Matsumoto’s monograph on Maitreya’s pure land: Miroku-jōdo- ron (彌勒淨土論): Matsumoto 1911. His work was revised by N. Péri in the Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, cf. Péri 1911. 254 Elsa I. Legittimo If the attribution to Dharmarakṣa was correct, we would easily have concluded that the sūtra in question was included into the Chinese Ekottarika-āgama version either by its trans lator or by a Chinese compiler shortly after the translation. This would explain why a sūtra that is generally not considered to belong to the oldest strata of Buddhist literature is nevertheless found in an Āgama collection. But the attribution to Dharmarakṣa is not beyond doubt. On the contrary, all evidence points to someone else being the trans lator: the vo cabulary, as we will see, is certainly the most con vincing factor. Furthermore the old catalogues support hereto-related fi nd- ings: the Kaiyuan shijiao lu (開元釋教録), 8 a cata logue from the Tang period, states that no. 453 was extracted from the Ekottarika- āgama, a fact that was already noticed by Matsumoto. In Appendix IV of the present paper, I will provide a brief summary of fur- ther relevant fi ndings from the catalogues. Moreover, already in the thirteenth century, Sugi 守其, the Korean editor-in-chief of the Koryŏ II canon noted that the attribu tion to Dharmarakṣa was dubious. He added a postscript to no. 453 expressing his reserva- tions regarding the attribution, arguing that the language is not characteristic of Dhar ma rakṣa’s time. He also com pared the dif- ferent canons available to him. Since the present Tai shō edition is based on the canon edited under Sugi’s supervision, its Maitreya sūtra no. 453 (still) con tains this note. Unfortunately Sugi’s obser- vations are not conclu sive which might possibly be due to the fact that he had overlooked the Maitreya text in the Ekottarika-āgama. 9 The translation of the twin Maitreya texts, in sum, appears to have been produced as part of the Ekottarika-āgama’s translation, and I will thus try to tackle this problem from diff erent perspec- tives, start ing with the Ekottarika-āgama’s translation issue. 8 Cf. T55, no. 2154, 656a9–17. This catalogue was composed by Zhisheng 智昇 in the year 730 AD. 9 Appendix III contains a translation of the postscript as well as an abstract of Robert E. Buswell’s fi ndings on Sugi’s activities. |