Verses for Prasenajit

Verses for Prasenajit is a text that belongs to the General Sūtra section of the Kangyur. Its title refers to King Prasenajit, who is said to have ruled over the country of Kośala during the time of the Buddha. At the outset of the text, King Prasenajit asks the Buddha Śākyamuni, in verse, how it is that people can secure happiness in future lifetimes by making offerings to awakened beings after they have passed away. The Buddha responds in verse on the benefits of constructing, beautifying, maintaining, and worshiping at the stūpas and images of such beings.1 Near the end of the sūtra, the Buddha also devotes three stanzas to the benefits of donating to the saṅgha, noting that those who give bedding as well as fine food and drink to renunciants will one day enjoy such finery in kind.

Verses for Prasenajit primarily highlights the mundane rewards a person can expect to receive as a result of venerating the stūpas and images of awakened beings. Prominent examples include great physical beauty and strength, political power, esteem, and abundant resources, like elegant garments and ornate, comfortable homes. In fact, reading Verses for Prasenajit, one is struck by just how many of the benefits of stūpa and image worship relate to physical attractiveness and corporeal ease. Although several lines do speak to the attainment of virtue or liberation, most pertain to material gains.2

This is not to say that Verses for Prasenajit advocates a focus on securing beauty and comfort above all else, however. Rather, it seems to underscore the idea that stūpa and image worship can benefit everyone, regardless of an individual’s current situation or ultimate goals. We see this idea conveyed especially in stanzas that treat the attainment of mundane rewards and progress along the spiritual path as outcomes of the same act of veneration. For example, if people put on a crown (or bind a turban) at a stūpa, they will obtain fortune and liberation. Similarly, someone who sweeps up around a stūpa can expect to become beautiful and free from the flaws of craving. In short, deeds that result in auspicious rebirths might simultaneously lead one farther down the path to awakening. Or, as Vincent Tournier puts it, worldly boons can serve as “markers of one’s progress toward Awakening.”3

As its stanzas progress, Verses for Prasenajit casts a wide net over its imagined audience. Although the Buddha is ostensibly addressing Prasenajit, a king who might be inclined to sponsor the wholesale construction of a stūpa, his words conjure up a world in which many people, not just wealthy monarchs, interact with sacred sites and images. Certain people might not be able to fund a stūpa’s construction entirely, but perhaps they could support the construction of the spire, for example. Still others might not have the resources to offer things like bells and parasols, but they could help keep a stūpa and its grounds clean. At one point, the Buddha tells Prasenajit that those who offer “whatever special offerings they have and can afford…will attain unsurpassable awakening,” encapsulating the idea that stūpa veneration can be realized in many ways by people of various inclinations and means.

Verses for Prasenajit lacks a colophon, and thus the translator remains unknown. The inclusion of the text’s title in the Denkarma (ldan dkar ma)4 and Phangthangma (’phang thang ma) catalogs of Tibetan translations of the imperial era, however, suggests that it was translated sometime during the late eighth or early ninth century.

Thematically, Verses for Prasenajit is of a piece with sūtras like The Avalokinī Sūtra (Toh 195), Describing the Benefits of Producing Representations of the Thus-Gone One (Toh 320), The Verses on Circumambulating Shrines (Toh 321), and The Sūtra on Commissioning Images to Be Made of the Tathāgata (Tathāgata­bimbakārāpaṇa­sūtra),5 a fragment of which is preserved among the Gilgit manuscripts.

In terms of historical significance, recent evidence suggests that a version of Verses for Prasenajit was a source for donative inscriptions at Ajaṇṭā, the complex of Buddhist vihāras and cave monuments constructed in central India from the second century ʙᴄᴇ through to the sixth century ᴄᴇ. Echoed in Ajaṇṭā’s tenth and twenty-second caves is a stanza6 that appears seventh within the Tibetan Verses for Prasenajit, namely:

Together with Āryaśūra’s Jātakamālā, then, Verses for Prasenajit seems to be one of only two known works that serve as a source for the Ajaṇṭā inscriptions.7

Non-Tibetan sources for Verses for Prasenajit include two Sanskrit fragments from Gilgit and two complete Sanskrit manuscripts, one housed in the Potala and the other held at the Cambridge University Library. The Potala manuscript, which bears the title Prasenajit­paripṛcchā­sūtra (The Sūtra of Prasenajit’s Question) rather than Prasenajidgāthā (Verses for Prasenajit), has been edited and collated with the Gilgit fragments by Bhikṣuṇī Vinītā (Vinita Tseng) within A Unique Collection of Twenty Sūtras in a Sanskrit Manuscript from the Potala (2010).8 Ven. Vinītā notes that the collection as a whole lacks a colophon, perhaps because only the first forty-four leaves are preserved, and she states that there is insufficient evidence to date it, save to say that because it quotes The Sūtra on the Descent into Laṅkā (Laṅkāvatāra­sūtra, Toh 107), the collection appears to be later than that text.9 However, Jonathan Silk, in a review of Ven. Vinītā’s work, speculates that the manuscript could be from the thirteenth century.10

By comparison, the Cambridge manuscript has so far received less scholarly attention since the time of its acquisition.11 Like the Potala manuscript, however, it is also a collection of texts of which two are complete in the extant fragment: this text, which bears the title The Question of Prasenajit (Prasenajit­paripṛcchā), and also a complete version of The Verses on Circumambulation (Pradakṣiṇā­gāthā). For a further discussion of the latter, see the translation of Toh 321. The Potala’s Sanskrit manuscript version of the text includes thirty-three stanzas, whereas the Cambridge manuscript version has thirty-five. The latter includes all of those stanzas found in the former and has them in almost the same order, albeit with some variations of terminology and phrasing, plus two additional stanzas. One of these additional stanzas is also found in one of the Gilgit manuscripts, but neither of them seems to be in the Tibetan translation. The Tibetan version, by contrast, has a total of fifty-nine stanzas.12 The Tibetan further differs from the Potala and Cambridge Sanskrit manuscripts in that it exhibits a greater variation in the sequencing of the stanzas it has in common with those manuscripts. Therefore, it seems likely that the basis for the Tibetan translation stemmed from a different version of the work.

Ven. Vinītā’s A Unique Collection contains the first and only edition and English translation of a Sanskrit version of the text. In tandem with her edition and translation of the Potala manuscript, she includes a transcription and edition of the Gilgit fragments and of the Tibetan translation based on five witnesses, including the Degé, Gondhla, Peking, and Stok Palace versions. Ven. Gyalten Lekden published an online English translation of the Tibetan in 2019.13 Otherwise, no other complete translations of Verses for Prasenajit have been published in any European language.

This translation is based primarily on the Degé Kangyur, the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma), and the Stok Palace Kangyur. Other Kangyurs were also consulted, as were Ven. Vinītā’s Sanskrit and Tibetan editions as well as the Sanskrit manuscript held at the Cambridge University Library. The most significant findings from this comparative work are cited in the notes.