The Sūtra on Gravity of Retribution for Transgression of Precepts: A Short Text on the Hellish Torment Awaiting Monks and Nuns Who Break the Rules

Shayne Clarke, McMaster University

Zoom Participation: 385 016 0977, https://harvard.zoom.us/j/3850160977

Speaker Bio

Shayne Clarke is an associate professor in McMaster University’s Department of Religious Studies. He is a specialist in the study of Indian Buddhist monastic law (Vinaya), working primarily on legal texts—both canonical and commentarial—preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese. The author of Family Matters in Indian Buddhist Monasticisms, he aims to recover, among other things, lost voices and views from premodern sources, including those related to pregnant nuns and monastic mothers: Buddhist monasticism, but not as we have generally imagined it.

Abstract

Buddhist monastic law codes (Vinayas) have much to say about the punishment of monks and nuns who transgress ecclesiastical rules. They have little to say, however, concerning how many thousands of years those who break the monastic regulations will spend in any one of the multitude of Buddhist hells. It is precisely this gap that the Sūtra on Gravity of Retribution for Transgression of Precepts (犯戒罪報輕重經), known to date primarily only from Chinese (and to a much lesser degree Sogdian), appears to have been designed to fill. As it turns out, a Tibetan translation (’Phags pa tshul khrims nyams pa’i rnam par smin pa lci yang bstan pa’i mdo) also exists, albeit only in limited manuscript collections outside of the Tshal pa transmission lineage. 

In this talk I will discuss the various recensions of the Chinese and the Tibetan, particularly with regard to the concluding verses, along with a quotation of the entire text by the Eighth Karmapa, Mi bskyod rdo rje (1507–1554). Curiously, the verses quoted by the Karmapa match only an eighth-century Chinese manuscript preserved in the Shōgozō (聖語蔵) Collection in Nara, Japan.