The Kāśyapaparivarta ('Od-srung-gi le'u)—Prolegomena
From Bodhicitta
< Articles
Articles/The Kāśyapaparivarta ('Od-srung-gi le'u)—Prolegomena| 🤓 Admin Zone 🛠️ hidden to non-admins | |
The Kāśyapaparivarta ('Od-srung-gi le'u)—Prolegomena
Journal Article
Please note that many items in our library are simply pages that represent a detailed library catalog entry and citation of someone else's work, presentation, or performance. Read our General Disclaimer for more information.
Description
This article serves as prolegomena to Bhikkhu Pāsādika's English translation of the Kāśyapaparivarta (Tib. 'Od-srung-gi le'u), an early Mahāyāna sūtra preserved in the Ratnakūṭa class. After surveying prior scholarship—including von Staël-Holstein's 1926 Sanskrit edition, Weller's Tibetan index, and translations and studies by Edgerton, de Jong, Conze, and Bendall/Rouse—Pāsādika situates the text's antiquity relative to the Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā, arguing on linguistic and textual grounds (following de Jong, Lin Li-Kouang, and others) that the KP's prose likely dates to around the first century B.C., with its verses composed later in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. The article traces citations of the KP in later Mahāyāna and Madhyamaka literature (Candrakīrti, the Sūtrasamuccaya, the Śikṣāsamuccaya) and situates the text as a "New Wisdom School" root text for later Mādhyamika treatises.
The core of the article is a section-by-section synopsis of the KP's contents based on von Staël-Holstein's Sanskrit edition, covering its structure from the introductory setting on Vulture Peak through 166 sections addressing bodhisattva ethics, emptiness, the qualities of true versus false ascetics, and the concluding praise of the discourse's merit. A final section on "Some Doctrinal Points" reconsiders von Staël-Holstein's characterization of the text as harshly denunciatory of Śrāvakas, arguing instead that KP's criticism targets specific failings (escapist quietism, narrow-mindedness) rather than the śrāvakayāna as such, and that the text exemplifies a "peaceful coexistence" of śrāvaka, pratyekabuddha, and bodhisattva ideals consistent with later Tibetan monastic practice.
Citation
Pāsādika, Bhikkhu. "The Kāśyapaparivarta ('Od-srung-gi le'u)—Prolegomena." Tibet Journal 5, no. 4 (1980): 48–58.
Interconnections
1 Scholarship on
Kāśyapaparivarta. (T. 'Od srung gi le'u; C. Yiri monibao jing; J. Yuinichi manihōkyō; K. Yuil manibo kyǒng 遺日摩尼寶經). In Sanskrit, "The Kāśyapa Chapter"; a sūtra from one of the earliest strata of Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism, probably dating from sometime in the first Century CE. The sūtra offers an overview of practices emblematic of bodhisattvas, which are arranged in several groups of four practices apiece. The text cites a "bodhisattva canon" (bodhisattvapiṭaka) as the source for the teaching on the six perfections (pāramitā) and offers one of the earliest mentions of the "thought of enlightenment" (bodhicitta) in its Mahāyāna interpretation as the aspiration to achieve buddhahood. A bodhisattva who generates this thought even for the first time is said to be superior to the solitary buddhas (pratyekabuddha) and disciples (śrāvaka). Disciples are also censured as not being true sons of the Buddha, an early expression of the later Mahāyāna school's more explicit denunciations of the so-called hīnayāna. The sūtra also refers to bodhisattva precepts (see bodhisattvaśīla), which will subsequently be elaborated upon in such texts as Maitreya/Asaṅga's Bodhisattvabhūmi and in such Chinese apocrypha as the Fanwang jing. The Kāśyapaparivarta was one of the first sūtras translated into Chinese, by the Indo-Scythian monk *Lokakṣema (c. 178-198 CE) in 179 CE; a later recension is also included in the massive Ratnakūṭa collection of sūtras. The Kāśyapaparivarta is one of a substantial number of scriptures in the Ratnakūṭa collection for which Sanskrit recensions have been rediscovered and edited. Its Sanskrit manuscript was first discovered in Khotan in the 1890s and was more than one thousand years old; other Sanskrit fragments have subsequently been recovered. (Source: "Kāśyapaparivarta." In The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, 426. Princeton University Press, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46n41q.27.)
