The Application of Mindfulness of the Sacred Dharma
Introduction

The epic discourse of The Application of Mindfulness of the Sacred Dharma (AMSD) unfolds as a single, sustained reply to a short question that is put to the Buddha Śākyamuni as the sūtra opens. A group of newly ordained monks have been challenged by the members of another religious group, who suggest that the Buddha’s teachings are indistinguishable from those of their own teacher. Not knowing how to reply, the monks request that the Buddha explain how the path of the sacred Dharma is unlike any other. As the Buddha responds to the monks, he describes the path from the perspective of an adept meditating monk, who applies the Dharma teachings correctly and so discovers the truths of the Dharma. In an account that spans the full spectrum of life in saṃsāra, from the horrifying misery and intense pain of the lower realms to the enrapturing beauty and bliss in the heavens, the Buddha explains how different kinds of physical, verbal, and mental behavior of humans lead to rebirth in such realms of existence.

The generic and unnamed monk, from whose perspective the Buddha explains the subject matter, witnesses the myriad realms of existence from the Hell of Ultimate Torment to the Heaven Free from Strife, sometimes by means of the divine eye that is accomplished through meditation, and at other times through the eye of insight that is acquired through hearing the teachings. In this way, the monk comes to directly recognize the matrix of causes and effects that keeps the wheel of cyclic existence turning, and he realizes with full clarity how, throughout all this, life and beings’ experiences are utterly impermanent and always determined by their own past actions. A very substantial part of the sūtra describes the ravishing sceneries and amazing events that take place in the heavens. In the midst of these breathtaking descriptions, the sūtra frequently presents pithy teachings of the Dharma, typically given in verses that may be spoken by gods, such as Śakra, or by divine birds, such as the king of swans or the peacock king.1

The account of the heavens and the actions that lead to rebirth there comes to an abrupt end in the midst of the descriptions of the Heaven Free from Strife. Instead follows, for the remainder of the scripture, a teaching on mindfulness of the body. This latter teaching, which functions mostly as an independent part of the sūtra, presents mindfulness of the body within the framework of the “internal” human body and the “external” body of the outer world. This latter section includes an elaborate description of the human realm according to Buddhist cosmology.2 Given the sūtra’s sudden stop in the middle of the presentation of the Heaven Free from Strife, it seems quite likely that an earlier version of the sūtra might have been significantly longer than the present version and that only a partial version was available to the Tibetan translators. If so, the missing material must, however, have been lost at a very early point in the text’s history, since the Chinese translation,3 which was produced earlier, during the early sixth century,4 features the same disjointed topical transition. In spite of this awkward end to the sūtra’s description of the heavenly realms, the discourse of the AMSD as it remains today is a vast treasury of Dharma, a rich presentation of the realms of saṃsāra, and a splendid piece of world literature that stands out as one of the greatest literary works of classical India.

With its 2158 Tibetan pages, the AMSD is the largest scripture within the general sūtra section of the Degé Kangyur,5 where the text is placed as the first scripture within the collection of Hīnayāna scriptures. This placement among the Hīnayāna sūtras has been a topic of some debate among Tibetans, since one finds frequent occurrences of the term “Mahāyāna” within the sūtra’s later sections. Notably, however, the term is only found in the Tibetan translation of the sūtra, not in the Chinese translation.6 Moreover, the Tibetan translator of the sūtra, Patshap Tsultrim Gyaltsen (eleventh–twelfth c.), himself classified the text as a Mahāyāna scripture in his colophon to the sūtra. Still, the editor of the Degé Kangyur, Situ Paṇchen Chökyi Jungné (1700–1774) classified the sūtra as belonging to the Hīnayāna, basing himself on the earlier classification of Butön Rinchen Drup (1290–1364), the famous compiler of the Kangyur. Butön in turn seems to have relied on the Denkarma inventory (compiled in 812), which likewise classifies the sūtra as a Hīnayāna scripture.7

According to its lengthy and very informative colophon, the Tibetan translation of the sūtra that is preserved in the Degé Kangyur was produced during the reign of the Indian king Rāmapāla (ca. 1077–1120). In his colophon, the Tibetan translator Tsultrim Gyaltsen mentions that the translation is based on several earlier incomplete draft translations. At least some of these had been produced already, during the earlier Tibetan translation efforts of the eighth and ninth centuries, as attested by the text’s inclusion in the Denkarma inventory. Tsultrim Gyaltsen further mentions that he worked on the translation together with a large team of Indian paṇḍitas, among whom he makes specific mention of Śāntākaragupta, Abhayākaragupta, Śakyarakṣita, Vīryākaraśānti, Subhūticandra, and Aḍitacandra. He also says that he was further assisted by two other Tibetan scholars, Shang Buchikpa and Sherap Ö. In spite of his prominent role in producing this translation of the AMSD, Patshap Tsultrim Gyaltsen does not appear to have translated any other texts contained in the Kangyur. We do, however, find a Tsultrim Gyaltsen, who may very likely be the same person, listed as the translator of a number of tantric practice manuals contained in the Tengyur, at times working with the paṇḍita named Abhayākaragupta (who we just saw was involved in the translation of the AMSD). Apart from such brief listings of his name, however, we sadly have no other information available about this important figure in the history of Tibetan Buddhism.

The single extant Sanskrit manuscript of the AMSD is supposedly kept today at the Norbulingka in Lhasa, although no official information is available about this and physical access to the manuscript appears to be highly restricted. Photographs of the manuscript have recently been shared among a small group of scholars in the West, but these photos are also not freely accessible at present. According to Daniel Stuart, the date of composition of the sūtra in India can be established to be somewhere between 150 and 400 ᴄᴇ, whereas the dating of the only extant Sanskrit manuscript in Tibet has been suggested, by Stuart, to a much later period: circa the eleventh to thirteenth centuries ᴄᴇ.8 The extant Sanskrit manuscript largely parallels the Degé Tibetan edition up to the discussion of the Heaven Free from Strife (near the end of the second Tibetan volume), at which point the text ends. The Sanskrit manuscript is a partial copy that only covers approximately half of the text as contained in the Chinese and Tibetan translations. Notably, as Stuart has shown, the surviving Sanskrit manuscript and the Chinese and Tibetan translations all transmit the same recension.9

A critical edition and English translation of the Sanskrit text pertaining to the first part of chapter 2 (according to the Tibetan chapter structure) has been published by Stuart.10 Critical editions of chapter 1 and the section on the hell realms in the latter part of chapter 2 are currently being prepared by Vesna Wallace and Mitsuyo Demoto, respectively.11 As we prepared this English translation we consulted Stuart’s critical Sanskrit edition and English translation of that section of the text, which proved to be very beneficial for our translation. Wallace and Demoto also both kindly shared their draft Sanskrit editions with us, which likewise was very helpful for our work. For a detailed discussion of the sūtra’s textual history and the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan manuscripts, we refer the interested reader to Stuart’s doctoral thesis on the AMSD (2012) and his later published version of his thesis (2015a).

Short references to the AMSD, its teaching on impermanence, and its calls to renunciation are quite frequent in the Tibetan scholarly tradition. Most notably, Karmapa III, Rangjung Dorjé (1284–1339), produced a large compendium to the sūtra.12 Modern scholarship on the AMSD was first undertaken by Lin and Demiéville (1949) but has recently been greatly advanced through the publications of Stuart (2012, 2015a, 2015b, 2017a). Stuart’s recent work provides a wealth of information regarding the available textual witnesses and analysis of some of the heterogeneous doctrinal developments that find expression in the AMSD. In addition to her forthcoming critical Sanskrit edition of chapter 3, Demoto (2009) has also published a study of the names of the various hell realms that occur in this chapter. Robert Kritzer is currently preparing a Tibetan critical edition and English translation of the final (autonomous) section of the AMSD, which concerns mindfulness of the body (chapter 7 according to the Chinese chapter division). Kritzer also kindly shared his unpublished paper (forthcoming) on the AMSD’s complex presentation of “worms” that are described in the sūtra as inhabiting the human body.13 Recently, in his book on sexuality in Indian Buddhism, José Cabezón has also discussed the lengthy presentation of the hells that we find in the AMSD, where several hells are described as the ripened results of various forms of sexual misconduct.14

In producing this English translation, we have based our work on the Degé xylograph while consulting the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma), as well as the Stok Palace manuscript. It goes without saying that we do not see our translation as definitive, or final, in any way. As the publications of Stuart, Kritzer, and Demoto have clearly demonstrated, there is a dizzying amount of philological detail to consider in the Sanskrit, Chinese, and Tibetan witnesses of the AMSD. As our aim has been to produce a complete English translation of the more than 2100 pages contained in the Tibetan text, we have unfortunately not been able to study these textual details of the sūtra to the degree that learned scholars would otherwise expect. We therefore sincerely apologize for any errors and shortcomings this English translation may contain. We nevertheless hope that, in spite of its imperfections, this publication may prove useful for scholars, as well as members of the general public, who wish to explore and study this amazing discourse. As further studies on this sūtra are published in the future, the present translation surely also stands to benefit. With its poetic beauty, philosophical profundity, and gripping presentation of the world as perceived by Buddhists in early medieval India, the AMSD certainly deserves the attention of the contemporary world.