The Questions of the Nāga King Sāgara (3)

In the Tibetan canon there are three sūtras entitled The Questions of the Nāga King Sāgara (Sāgara­nāga­rāja­paripṛcchā): a long version (Toh 153),1 one of middle length (Toh 154),2 and a short sūtra (Toh 155).3 They have quite different contents and are all to be found in a group of sūtras in the Kangyur entitled “The Questions of…” (…paripṛcchā), including The Questions of Brahmā, The Questions of Mañjuśrī, The Questions of an Old Lady, and several others. There is also another nāga king whose questions were the occasion for a sūtra in this group, entitled The Questions of the Nāga King Anavatapta (Anavatapta­nāga­rāja­paripṛcchā), Toh 156.4

The text translated here is the shortest of the three Sāgara­nāga­rāja­paripṛcchā sūtras. The Buddha’s teaching of this very brief sūtra to an assembly of monks is presumed‍—from the title‍—to be in response to a question or questions put to him by a king of the supernatural beings known as nāgas, serpents who guard the Dharma, although in this sūtra the questions themselves are not explicitly stated. The Buddha explains that recitation of the four aphorisms of the Dharma is equivalent to recitation of all of the 84,000 articles of the Dharma, and that they constitute the inexhaustible doctrine of the bodhisattvas. The four are:

These four aphorisms, or tenets‍—also called the four seals‍—are central to Buddhist philosophy and characterize the Buddhist view of the nature of reality. The Buddha stated that any doctrine characterized by these four seals is genuinely in accord with the philosophical view of Buddhism, just as a document purportedly written by a king that has the proper seals is known as genuine. Because the concepts of anitya(tva), duḥkha, anātman, and nirvāṇa are central to the Buddhist philosophical view, over the centuries, countless commentaries and elaborations on these concepts have been written by scholars from every Buddhist tradition.5 Various sūtras and commentaries focus on one, two, three, or all four of the concepts.6

Indian texts speak of the four aphorisms of the Dharma as well as of the four seals. The Sanskrit of the four aphorisms can be extracted from Vasubandhu’s commentary to verse XVIII.80 of the Mahā­yāna­sūtrālaṃkāra of Asaṅga (fifth century ᴄᴇ):

The same four aphorisms are listed and described in chapter 17 of Asaṅga’s Bodhi­sattva­bhūmi.8 The only minor difference in these formulations of them, compared to the four aphorisms as set out in the present sūtra, is that here the second aphorism does not speak of “all contaminated phenomena,” but simply “all compounded phenomena.”9

Although this sūtra’s Sanskrit original is no longer extant, the colophon to the Tibetan translation of the sūtra tells us that it was translated from Sanskrit to Tibetan by the Indian preceptor Surendrabodhi and the Tibetan editor-translator Yeshé Dé (ye shes sde). We can thus infer that this sūtra was translated from Sanskrit to Tibetan sometime during the late eighth to early ninth century.

This sūtra is also included in the Chinese Buddhist canon (Taishō 599).10 Both the Tibetan and Chinese versions of the sūtra are very similar in their brevity, meaning, and story line, although there are a few minor differences between them.11 A twelfth-century fragment containing this sūtra in the Tangut, or Xixia,12 language was discovered, among other pieces of the Tangut canon, at Khara-khoto along the ancient Silk Road by the British explorer Sir Aurel Stein during his 1913–16 journey.13 Now in the British Museum, the Tangut version is very close to the Chinese version, indicating that it was likely translated from the Chinese.14

There are two other notable English translations from the Tibetan: one by Geshe Lhakdor in 2010 for a workshop presented at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi under the auspices of the Foundation for Universal Responsibility,15 and the most recent translation by Peter Skilling, along with helpful notes, in his 2021 anthology Questioning the Buddha: A Selection of Twenty-Five Sutras.16

The present translation from Tibetan is based on the version in the Degé (sde dge) Kangyur, with reference to the differences between this and various other versions noted in the Pedurma (dpe bsdur ma) comparative edition of the Degé Kangyur.