Sur les apocryphes bouddhiques chinois

Abstract

Kuo Liying On Chinese Buddhist apocrypha "Buddhist apocrypha" is conventionally used by western scholars to translate the words "fake and dubious sutras" used by Chinese bibliographers, i.e. Buddhist texts, mainly sutras, directly written in Chinese in contrast to genuine Buddhist texts, which are necessarily translated from an Indian or Centralasiatic original. Some texts that were at first condemned as fake were nevertheless considered genuine afterwards and were widely read and used by Chinese, Japanese and Korean Buddhists. Other apocrypha, being rejected from the official Canon, usually soon disappeared. Some are nevertheless preserved because of exceptional circumstances: many known apocrypha were discovered from Dunhuang or Nanatsudera in Japan. This paper is concerned with the reasons Chinese bibliographers gave for classing some texts as fake and to be excluded from the Canon and with the use of apocrypha in controversies between Buddhists and Taoists. Trying to improve upon studies of dated Dunhuang apocrypha copies by Fujieda Akira, it deals with the evolution in their contents and appearance between the 5th and 10th centuries and contains a quantitative study of their output. Special consideration is then given to three kinds of apocrypha, mainly (sometimes only) known from the Dunhuang find, viz. surras whose reading and copying should avoid calamities or procure benefits such as health, merits to be transferred to defuncts etc.; sutra-offerings, i.e. sutras specially copied for being used and offered during religious ceremonies for getting the same benefits as above; and - quite different in their goal and use - esoteric handbooks, tantras and dhāranī-sutras, some of which are specific to Dunhuang.

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