Ebook: Apocryphal Scriptures

This volume contains five scriptural texts that have been especially important and influential in the East Asian Buddhist tradition. The Bequeathed Teaching Sutra, purportedly the last teaching given by the Buddha to the monks, emphasizes the practice of monastic discipline through observance of the pratimoksa, rules of conduct. This text was influential to Chinese Buddhists of the Tang, Song, and Ming dynasties and considered a basic reference for the Chan (Zen) school in particular. In The Ullambana Sutra, the Buddha instructs the monk Mahâmaudgalyâyana on how to obtain liberation for his mother, who had been reborn into a lower realm, by making food offerings to the sangha on the fifteenth day of the seventh month. This practice is the basis of the Obon ceremony in honor of one’s ancestors that is still observed widely in Japan. The Sutra of Forty-two Sections is a compilation of brief passages drawn from many Buddhist sutras, includin! g Pâli and Chinese Buddhist sources, particularly the Âgamas (canonical texts). Each section presents an ethical teaching intended for practice by Buddhist followers, and because of its practical relevance to moral behavior, the text has remained a popular general text among Chinese Buddhists up to the present day. The Sutra of Perfect Enlightenment, especially important in the Chan and Huayan traditions in China, deals with teaching of intrinsic enlightenment—the potentiality for Buddhahood shared by all sentient beings—that became a fundamental axiom on which uniquely East Asian forms of Buddhist belief and practice developed. The Sutra on the Profundity of Filial Love, known as the Buddhist book of filial piety, reveals the synthesis of native Chinese Confucian ideals with Buddhist teachings. Believed to have been produced by Chinese Buddhist monks in imitation of the Confucian Classic of Filial Piety, the text shows that Buddhism also teaches the idea of fili! al piety, though it is to be based on the aspiration to attain enlightenment, and how best to repay one’s indebtedness to one’s parents.