The Middle Path According to the Kāśyapaparivarta-sūtra
From Bodhicitta
< Articles
Articles/The Middle Path According to the Kāśyapaparivarta-sūtra| 🤓 Admin Zone 🛠️ hidden to non-admins | |
The Middle Path According to the Kāśyapaparivarta-sūtra
Chapter in a Book
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
It is a Buddhist view that the highest level of attainment (pratipatti) that one can gain by practicing the dharma in a proper way is the middle path (madhyamapratipad). It is known as the middle path because, in accomplishing it, one goes beyond all extreme views (anta). This paper will attempt to elucidate this central concern of Buddhism in the light of the discussion on the middle path found in the Kāśyapaparivarta-sūtra, a Mahāyāna-sūtra of the Ratnakūṭa class. (Kawamura, introductory remarks, 221)
Citation
Kawamura, Leslie. "The Middle Path According to the Kāśyapaparivarta-sūtra." In Buddhist Studies: The Legacy of Gadjin M. Nagao; Wisdom, Compassion, and The Search for Understanding, edited by Jonathan A. Silk, 221–32. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2008.
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.)
