འཕགས་པ་གསམ་ལ་སྐྱབས་ས་འགྲ་བ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro: 84000's introduction
Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels intro
- Language
- English
84000's introduction
intro.1
In Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels, the venerable Śāriputra wonders how much merit accrues to someone who takes refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. He therefore seeks out the Buddha Śākyamuni and requests a teaching on this topic. The Buddha proceeds to describe how even vast offerings, performed in miraculous ways, would not constitute a fraction of the merit gained by someone who takes refuge in the Three Jewels.
intro.2
Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels ¹ unfolds in the Jeta’s Grove at Śrāvastī, where the Buddha Śākyamuni is residing with a large gathering of monks. The sūtra begins as the venerable Śāriputra, who is practicing meditation alone in the forest, wonders how much merit is obtained by those who take refuge in the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Saṅgha. After finishing his meditation practice, Śāriputra goes before the Buddha Śākyamuni and requests the Buddha to teach on that topic. In his answer, the Buddha presents an analogy that is meant to describe the enormous merit that such devotees obtain. Even if someone could magically erect a stūpa the size of the entire world and make vast, miraculous offerings to it for eons on end, the merit gained thereby would not constitute even a fraction of the merit gained by those who take refuge in the Three Jewels. After the Buddha has delivered this teaching, the earth quakes, lightning strikes, and the gods in the heavens play divine music to celebrate the teaching. Finally, the Buddha instructs Ānanda to remember the teaching so that he can pass it on to others.
intro.3
Very little is known about the history of this text in India. The Sanskrit version of this sūtra is no longer extant, and it seems to have never been translated into Chinese. Hence, the only witness of this sūtra available today is the Tibetan translation included in the Kangyur. The colophon of the Tibetan translation states that it was produced by the Indian paṇḍita Sarvajñādeva and the Tibetan translator-editor Paltsek, thus locating its translation in the late eighth or early ninth century. This dating is also confirmed by the text’s inclusion in the Denkarma (lhan/ldan dkar ma) catalog of the early ninth century ce.² The text has previously been translated into English by Kenneth Liberman with the assistance of Jampa Losel in 1988, and most recently, there is another English translation by Peter Skilling, along with some helpful notes, found in his 2021 anthology Questioning the Buddha: A Selection of Twenty-Five Sutras.³ The translation presented here was made primarily based on the Degé edition, in consultation with the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace manuscript edition.