འཕགས་པ་གསམ་ལ་སྐྱབས་ས་འགྲ་བ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.3

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.