佛國雜經 Fifteen Thousand Scrolls
逐句解 Line by line
The Five Dragons Sutra — one work in 32 scrolls.
Dragons are everywhere in this novel and nowhere in the Buddhist canon under this title. The five may be the dragon kings of the four seas and the centre.
The Bodhisattva Precepts Sutra — one work in 116 scrolls.
Real. The bodhisattva precepts are the vows a Mahayana practitioner takes beyond the ordinary monastic rules, and there are genuine texts setting them out.
The Great Collection Sutra — one work in 130 scrolls.
Real, and large — a Chinese collection of some sixty scrolls gathering many separate sutras under one name.
The Magadha Sutra — one work in 350 scrolls.
Magadha was the kingdom in north-east India where the Buddha did most of his teaching; Vulture Peak, which the Great Immortal pointed out at his back door, is in it.
The Lotus Sutra — one work in 100 scrolls.
The Lotus Sutra, and after the Diamond Sutra the most influential single text in East Asian Buddhism — the source of the parable of the burning house. Seven scrolls in Chinese, not a hundred.
The Yoga Sutra — one work in 100 scrolls.
Yoga here is the esoteric Buddhist discipline, not the postures — the same word Monkey used of his own conversion in an earlier chapter, and read the same way.
The Sutra of the Constant Treasure — one work in 220 scrolls.
Invented, as far as anyone can trace.
The Treatise-Sutra of the Western Heaven — one work in 130 scrolls.
The Western Heaven is where the pilgrims are standing. A sutra named after the place they have come to is either very apt or a joke, and the book does not say which.
The Saṃgha Sutra — one work in 157 scrolls.
⚠ The name transcribes saṃgha, the Buddhist community, and the second character is the one this edition confuses with a near-identical graph. It writes this title one way here and the other way when the list is read out again later.
Miscellaneous Sutras of the Buddha-Land — one work in 1,950 scrolls.
The largest entry in the list at nineteen hundred and fifty scrolls, and its title means simply miscellaneous sutras — the shelf everything else goes on.
The Treatise-Sutra of the Awakening of Faith — one work in 1,000 scrolls.
The Awakening of Faith is a real and hugely influential Chinese treatise, and one of the shortest important texts in the tradition. Calling it a thousand scrolls is a considerable overstatement.
The Great Wisdom-Perfection Sutra — one work in 1,080 scrolls.
Real: a vast commentary on the perfection of wisdom, traditionally ascribed to Nāgārjuna. The third character is the crossing-over word, dù — the same idea the bottomless boat was enacting an hour ago.
The Sutra of Precious Majesty — one work in 1,280 scrolls.
Invented.
The Sutra of the Original Pavilion — one work in 850 scrolls.
Invented, and the second character means a pavilion — which is where the pilgrims are standing while they read the label.
The Sutra of the True Vinaya Text — one work in 200 scrolls.
The Vinaya is the real third basket, the monastic rule. A sutra of its text is a category error, since the rule is not a sutra, and the list does not notice.
The Great Peacock Sutra — one work in 220 scrolls.
Real, and one of the oldest protective spells in Buddhism: the Great Peacock incantation, chanted against snakebite and disease.
The Treatise-Sutra of Consciousness-Only — one work in 100 scrolls.
Consciousness-Only is a real and major school of Buddhist philosophy, and the first character here is a variant of the one usually written in that name.
The Abhidharmakośa Treatise-Sutra — one work in 200 scrolls.
⚠ The Abhidharmakośa — the Treasury of Higher Doctrine, one of the foundational works of Buddhist scholasticism. The middle character transcribes the Sanskrit for a treasury and takes shè, the same reading as in Śrāvastī.
The second half of the list finishes the thirty-five, and it is worth doing the arithmetic the Buddha invited. He said the whole canon came to fifteen thousand one hundred and forty-four scrolls. Add up the figures on these thirty-five lines and they come to fifteen thousand one hundred and five. The catalogue is thirty-nine scrolls short of its own total.
That is worth stating carefully, because the second catalogue — the one read out later in this chapter, of what actually goes east — adds up exactly. Its thirty-five figures come to five thousand and forty-eight, which is the number the text gives for it, to the scroll. So the promised inventory does not balance and the delivered one does.
There is one more thing hiding in the two lists. Read them side by side and two titles have changed shape: the Sutra of Radiance has become the Sutra of GREAT Radiance, and the Saṃgha Sutra is spelled with a different character the second time — two graphs that differ by a single stroke, and which this edition confuses freely. A catalogue that cannot hold its own titles still is a fair picture of how texts actually travel.