Thirteen Late-Translated Sūtras

Overview

A group of Theravāda sūtras translated into Tibetan in the 14th century (Toh 31-43).

These thirteen sūtras are to be found in most Kangyurs of the Tshalpa tradition grouped at the end of the final, “miscellaneous sūtra” volume of the Perfection of Wisdom division (despite being unrelated to the prajñāpāramitā literature). In other Kangyurs, they are placed in the General Sūtra section‍—at the end in the Narthang and Lhasa Kangyurs, and in the penultimate volume in most Kangyurs of the Thempangma tradition.

They are called “newly translated” (gsar du ’gyur ba) in the catalog of the Degé Kangyur, and the same epithet was used by Butön in the 14th century, as well as by Terdak Lingpa and the Lithang Kangyur editors in the 17th century. The Lhasa Kangyur catalog also calls them “the group of thirteen sūtras” (mdo tshan bcu sum po).

They are, in fact, the last group of sūtras ever to enter the sūtra section of the Kangyur,¹ and are not present in some of the peripheral Kangyurs that may represent earlier compilations, such as the Phuktrak and Newark Batang Kangyurs.

As their shared colophon records,² they were translated in the first decade of the 14th century at the monastery of Tharpa Ling (not far from Zhalu in Central Tibet), by a translator from Sri Lanka, Ānandaśrī, and the Tibetan translator Tharpa Lotsawa Nyima Gyaltsen Palzangpo.

Tharpa Lotsawa was one of Butön’s teachers, and apart from these thirteen sūtras also translated several other texts preserved in the tantra section of the Kangyur, working mainly with Indian and Nepalese paṇḍitas. Ānandaśrī is described in the colophon of one version of the Maitrīsūtra (see below) as a prominent paṇḍita from Sri Lanka, but little is known about how or why he came to be in fourteenth century Tibet or how long he stayed there.

Twelve of the thirteen sūtras all have closely matching equivalents in the Pāli Canon, and—although they have at times been thought to be translations of Sarvastivādin texts in Sanskrit, as are many other Śrāvakayāna works in the Kangyur—it is almost certain that they were translated from Pāli, and are Theravāda texts, i.e. from the literature of the Theravāda school. Together with a translation of the third chapter of the Vimuttimagga that, despite being an extract of a treatise, is included for unknown reasons in the General Sūtra section (Toh 306), these are the only Pāli Theravāda works represented in the Kangyur (along with another translation by Ānandaśrī working this time with Künga Gyaltsen Thupten Palsangpo, a version of the Maitrīsūtra closely related to Toh 35 but found only in the Berlin, Lhasa, Narthang, and Peking Kangyurs).

By far the longest of the thirteen texts is the Jātakanidāna (Toh 32), not in fact a sūtra in a strict sense; the Pāli original is a biography of the Buddha compiled from a variety of early commentarial sources and presented as the prologue to the collected narrative accounts of his previous lives.

Among the thirteen texts, the only one that is not entirely paralleled in the Pāli Canon is The Benefits of the Five Precepts (Toh 37). While the first part of the sūtra is almost identical in content to the Pāli Samajīvīsutta, it is followed by a second section that has no direct parallel in any other Buddhist canonical language and may either be based on a lost, perhaps paracanonical original, or represent an augmented or commentarial section added by Ānandaśrī.

Two of the thirteen texts, the Āṭānāṭiyasūtra (Toh 33) and Mahāsamayasūtra (Toh 34), are the Theravāda equivalents of two of the ten Mūlasarvāstivādin Mahāsūtras, Toh 656/1061 and Toh 653/1062 respectively.

The thirteen works are sometimes referred to as Paritta texts, i.e. texts read aloud for protection, a status they hold in the Theravāda tradition; their association with auspiciousness may also partly explain why they were placed at the conclusion of the Perfection of Wisdom section.

For further details and analysis, see Skilling, Peter (1993), “Theravādin Literature in Tibetan Translation,” Journal of the Pāli Text Society, vol. 19, pp 69-201.