The Mahāsūtras

The Mahāsūtras, or “Great Discourses,” collectively comprise a corpus of texts extracted from the Āgama literature of the Sarvāstivādin and Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya, defined not so much by their subject matter, which is diverse, as by the way they were used‍—that is, they were recited for the protection conferred by the resounding of the Buddha’s words, perhaps representing the whole Āgama canon in a short anthology.

More generally, they constitute a set of works from a foundational layer of Buddhist literature and have many parallels across a wide range of canonical corpora in Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, and other languages.

The epithet mahā (“great”) applied to them as a group and in their titles seems to denote their power, importance, and efficacity rather than their length; some are relatively short texts.

In all Kangyurs, there are ten sūtras whose titles identify them as belonging to the corpus of Mahāsūtras:

Of these ten texts, eight titles are listed in the Tibetan translation of the Vinayavibhaṅga (The Detailed Explanations of Monastic Discipline, ’dul ba rnam ’byed, Toh 3) as texts to be recited for protection. Since one of the eight titles in that list is the title of two different sūtras (5 and 6 above), the list in practice covers the nine texts (1–9). The same nine texts are listed as Mahāsūtras in the ninth-century Denkarma inventory, and all ten texts are known to have been translated into Tibetan in the early, imperial translation period.

The tenth, a slight outlier in the corpus, is not included in any lists but has affiliations with the others in terms of both its sources and its uses.2

In most Kangyurs, seven of the texts (1–7) are found grouped together in the General Sūtra (mdo sde) section. Two (8 and 9) are found in the Action Tantra (bya ba’i rgyud) section, and one (10) is duplicated in both the General Sūtra and Action Tantra sections.

Further copies of 8, 9, and 10 are also found in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs (gzungs ’dus) section in those Kangyurs that include such a compendium.

Much of our current understanding of the Mahāsūtras comes from the work of Peter Skilling, who has published a two-volume study of this important early Buddhist corpus, including critical editions of the ten Tibetan texts along with their available Pali and Sanskrit counterparts.3

As Skilling notes, the Mahāsūtras are broadly defined, first of all, as a small, selected set of texts from the Āgamas. The Āgamas (and their Pali counterparts) are four (or five) collections of works considered to have been among those teachings of the Buddha that were recited at the First Council.4

The Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya traditions each had their own selection of texts that they termed Mahāsūtras. Each tradition listed them in texts that prescribed their recitation under particular circumstances (set out below). The Sarvāstivāda lists eighteen texts in this way,5 while the Mūlasarvāstivāda lists six or eight.6 These lists mention only the titles, and we do not know what differences there may have been in the actual content of the texts in the two lists. Indeed, more generally, we do not know with certainty if there were differences between the Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Āgamas, since the Āgama collection of neither school has survived in full; the Chinese translations are of mixed or unknown origins.

References in Sanskrit to the Mahāsūtras, whether in the vinaya literature of the Sarvāstivādins or that of the Mūlasarvāstivādins, are lost. However, fragments of the Sarvāstivādin recensions of the Mahāsūtras have been found among a number of Sanskrit manuscript collections recovered in Central Asia.7

For the Sarvāstivādin Vinaya:

For the Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya:

The Mahāsūtras were not translated into Chinese as a known corpus of texts, but a number of the texts are preserved in Chinese translation as independent works belonging to the various Āgamas.8

The eight titles mentioned in the Tibetan translation of the Vinayavibhaṅga match those of the nine Tibetan Mahāsūtra texts in the Kangyur (two of the nine, numbers 5 and 6 in the list above, have the same Sanskrit title, although rendered slightly differently in Tibetan). The six mentioned in the Chinese Vinayavibhaṅga match seven of the nine Tibetan Mahāsūtra texts (again because two of the latter have the same title); the two titles that appear in the Tibetan list but not in the Chinese are the Mahāsamāja and the Āṭānāṭīya.9

Based on the lists of Mahāsūtras in the Chinese and Tibetan translations of the Vinayavibhaṅga, the Tibetan affiliation with the Mūlasarvāstivādin pratimokṣa lineage to which this work belongs, and the integral role that the Kashmiri scholar Jinamitra played in transmitting the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya to Tibet, Skilling has pointed out that the Mahāsūtra collection that Jinamitra, Prajñāvarman, and the Tibetan translator Yeshé Dé translated into Tibetan in the early ninth century probably represents a short corpus of discourses that were important to the Kashmiri Mūlasarvāstivādin textual community.

The Denkarma10 and Phangthangma11 royal Tibetan catalogs indicate that the set of nine Mahāsūtras was originally considered an independent corpus. The same set of nine is also mentioned in Chomden Rikpai Raldri’s thirteenth-century inventory of translated texts under the heading mdo chen po, but a tenth text with the title mdo chen po stong nyid brten cing ’brel par ’byung ba is added to the list; it is difficult to identify this title with any extant work.12 The tradition of classifying all the Mahāsūtras as discourses belonging to the “Lesser Vehicle” or Hīnayāna is in accordance with their Mūlasarvāstivādin provenance and is seen in Chomden Rikpai Raldri’s inventory as well as in the Tibetan scholar Butön’s (1290–1364) History of Indian Buddhism (rgya gar chos ’byung, ca. 1322–23).13 Nevertheless only a decade or two later, in the mid-fourteenth-century Tshalpa Kangyur, two of the Mahāsūtras began to be classified as Action (kriyā) tantras.

That the status of the Mahāsūtras as a set of important works was maintained during the centuries of canon formation in Tibet is reflected in their grouping‍—at least of the first seven‍—in a prominent position among the first works in the Hīnayāna subdivision of the General Sūtra section, following only the massive and important Application of Mindfulness of the Sacred Dharma (Saddharmasmṛtyupasthāna, dam pa’i chos dran pa nye bar gzhag pa, Toh 287).

It is Skilling who suggests including in the corpus the tenth text, The Mahāsūtra on Entering the City of Vaiśālī (Vaiśālīpraveśamahāsūtra, yangs pa’i grong khyer du ’jug pa’i mdo chen po, Toh 312/698/1093), although it is a slight outlier. It is not mentioned in the list of nine Mahāsūtras given in the Tibetan royal catalogs, but its title (like those of the other nine) includes the appellation mahāsūtra / mdo chen po. It also has a clear affiliation with the Mūlasarvāstivādin school and has uses similar to the other nine.

Many of the sūtras in the group are versions of texts widely recited in a range of Buddhist traditions for their efficacy in warding off evil circumstances and protecting what is good and positive (Skt. rakṣa or parītta, Pali paritta).

The likelihood that this specific corpus was put to similar protective use by monastic and lay communities affiliated with the Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda traditions is supported by the contexts in which the lists of Mahāsūtras occur in their vinaya literature.

In the Sarvāstivādin Vinaya the list of Mahāsūtras occurs in the section on the rules governing the rains retreat vow that address various circumstances under which, for a period that is not to exceed seven days, a monk is allowed to break his vow to remain in the same dwelling for three lunar months. The passage lists the various discourses that are classified as Mahāsūtras by the Sarvāstivādins and then notes that a monk is permitted to break the rains retreat vow for up to seven nights if a learned layperson has requested him to teach or recite the Mahāsūtras.14

The Mūlasarvāstivādin Vinaya list of Mahāsūtras appears in a quite different context. In the section on the rains retreat equivalent to the Sarvāstivāda passage just described, there is a reference to the four Āgamas, but not to the Mahāsūtras. However, in a section of the Vinayavibhaṅga on the third of the serious offenses that a monk may commit entailing “defeat” (Skt. pārājika, Tib. pham pa), that of “taking a life,” one topic is a discussion of what happens when a monk reanimates a corpse as a zombie (Skt. vetāḍa, Tib. ro langs) and instructs it to kill a victim‍—an event somewhat esoteric to a modern audience but by no means unfamiliar in popular culture. Here the Vinayavibhaṅga lists the Mahāsūtras, almost incidentally, among a number of protective circumstances and measures that may have been taken by a potential victim that will cause the zombie’s murderous attack to fail:

The Mūlasarvāstivādin Bhikṣunīvinayavibhaṅga in its Tibetan translation does make brief mention of zombies in the summary for the equivalent section16 but does not contain a passage matching the citation above. The eighth-century Chinese translations of both Vinayavibhaṅga texts (for bhikṣus and bhikṣunīs) by Yijing, however, both include almost identical passages that closely match the Tibetan of the (bhikṣus’) Vinayavibhaṅga and mention the Mahāsūtras.

The Mūlasarvāstivādin parallel to the Sarvāstivādin passage mentioning the Mahāsūtras in the context of the rules for the rains retreat does not explicitly mention the Mahāsūtras.

Extrapolating from the way the Mahāsūtras are mentioned in two different contexts in these two related vinaya traditions, Skilling concludes that they were used as protective texts (rakṣā),17 probably in a wide variety of situations and contexts other than the occasions mentioned in these passages. Some of the Mahāsūtras (notably nos. 5, 6, 9, and 10 in the list above) have an explicit protective function, but others do not. It is likely that the use of the group as protection was one among other, wider applications of their function as a “practical canon” that represented in shortened form the entirety of the four Āgamas,18 which in turn represent the entirety of the Buddha’s words‍—the resounding of which would have fulfilled many applications including transmission, instruction, recollection, and protection.

Representing as they do an ancient layer of Buddhist tradition and practices used widely across Asia, the individual Mahāsūtras all have numerous parallels. There are texts related to almost all of them in the Pali Theravādin tradition, as well as works in the Chinese Sarvāstivādin corpus and in some cases Sarvāstivādin texts (or fragments of them) that have survived in Sanskrit. Skilling’s Mahāsūtras volume II19 provides full lists for each text.

As a collection recited for protection, the Mahāsūtras are comparable in their uses (as well as, in part, in their content) to the book known in Sri Lanka as the Maha Pirit Pota (“Great Book of Protection”) or the Catubhāṇavārapāli (“Text of the Four Recitals”).20

Within the Kangyur are two other collections that have similar uses, one more explicitly formalized as a group than the other, and content that is comparable to varying degrees:

To these one could add the entirety of the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs; although of course its numerous texts have a considerably wider range of applications than the Mahāsūtras, it also represents a set of works compiled specifically for their practical and protective functions.