འཕགས་པ་བགྲས་མས་ཞས་པ་ཞས་བྱ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro: 84000's introduction
The Questions of an Old Lady intro
- Language
- English
84000's introduction
intro.1
This sūtra contains teachings given by the Buddha to a 120-year-old woman in the city of Vaiśalī. Upon meeting the Buddha, she asks him questions concerning the four stages of life, the aggregates, the elements, and the faculties. In response, the Buddha gives her a profound teaching on emptiness, using beautifully crafted examples to illustrate his point.
intro.2
After hearing these teachings her doubts are dispelled and she is freed from clinging to the perception of a self. Ānanda asks the Buddha why he has given such profound teachings to this woman. The Buddha reveals that the woman has been his mother five hundred times in previous lifetimes and that he had generated the root of virtue for her to become enlightened. Because of her own strong aspirations, after dying, she would be born in the buddhafield of Sukhāvatī, and after sixty-eight thousand eons she would finally become the buddha Bodhyaṅgapuṣpakara.
intro.3
Considering the cultural norms of the time, the fact that the teaching contained in this sūtra was given entirely to a laywoman and, moreover, to a very old and impoverished laywoman, makes it stand apart.
intro.4
The setting of this text is Vaiśalī, the ancient capital of the Licchavis and of the Vṛji confederacy of which the Licchavi republic was a member. The old lady, whose name we are never told, asks the Buddha such profound questions that Ānanda realizes this is no ordinary woman but one whose wisdom comes from merit collected in past lifetimes. As it turns out, the Buddha reveals that she has been his mother for five hundred lifetimes.
intro.5
The main body of the text, which consists of the Buddha’s teachings in answer to the old lady’s questions, is an explanation of emptiness. To put it briefly, the Buddha says no phenomenon arises of its own accord. Neither does any phenomenon give rise to any other phenomenon. All phenomena arise owing to their dependence upon collections of causes and conditions. Hence, there is no independent phenomenon, though we may use terms to indicate various phenomena as if they were independent. After the Buddha’s teaching the old lady realizes this profound truth. The Buddha prophesies that she herself will one day become a buddha. In earlier lifetimes he had planted roots of virtue and made strong aspirations for her to do so.
intro.6
The following modern works should be mentioned. Frye (1979) provides us with an English translation from the Mongolian version of the sūtra. Research on the date and translator attributions of the Chinese versions is to be found in Nattier (2007). Durt (2005) discusses the theme of the mahallikā (“old lady”) and the three Chinese versions (Taishō 559, 560, 561) of the Mahallikāparipṛcchā. Most recently, Peter Skilling (2021) has included a translation of the sūtra and some helpful notes on it in his collection Questioning the Buddha: A Selection of Twenty-Five Sutras.
intro.7
There is no Sanskrit version extant. The primary Tibetan text used for the present translation was the version in the Degé (sde dge) Kangyur, versions in the other Kangyurs being also compared. The colophon of the sūtra states that it was translated under the guidance of the abbots Jinamitra and Dānaśīla by the Tibetan translator Yeshé Dé (ye shes sde), from which we can conclude that this text must have been translated from Sanskrit to Tibetan in the early ninth century ce during the first major phase of the translation of Buddhist texts into Tibetan.