Unearthing the Cosmos: Possible Scenarios Behind the Lost Lokasthāna-sūtra

Despite its historical relevance, comprehensive discourses of the Buddhist cosmos, or cosmologies, have received insufficient scholarly attention. In China, several Buddhist cosmologies were circulating by the fourth century-well before the appearance of the Abhidharmakośa-bhāśya, commonly considered the locus classicus for Buddhist cosmology. The titles of these earliest Buddhist cosmologies used the term lokasthāna (loutan 樓炭), meaning "establishing the cosmos." Today, only one of these Lokasthāna-sūtras is extant. However, manuscript witnesses from Dunhuang preserve a text called The Abridged Lokasthāna-sūtra (Loutan jing lüe 樓炭經略), which purports to be a condensed extract of a Lokasthāna-sūtra. In this essay, I demonstrate that this text summarizes a lost cosmology by providing evidence that The Abridged Lokasthāna-sūtra is not a digest of the extant Larger Lokasthāna-sūtra (Da loutan jing 大樓炭經). I speculate about other possible scenarios behind the unknown root text and suggest that the most likely source for The Abridged Lokasthāna-sūtra may in fact be Dharmarakṣa's lost cosmology of 303.

關鍵字

Lokasthāna-sūtra ； cosmology ； Dunhuang ； medieval China ； manuscripts

並列摘要

儘管有著歷史上的重要性，關於佛教宇宙觀或宇宙論的全面論述一直未受到足夠的學術關注。中國在4世紀時就已出現了好幾種的佛教宇宙論，其時間甚至比被視為佛教宇宙論權威性作品的《阿毘達磨俱舍論》更早。這些早期的佛教宇宙論使用「樓炭」作為標題，意思是「建立宇宙」。這些「樓炭」經典中至今僅有一部保存下來。然而，在敦煌文獻中卻保存了一份名為《樓炭經略》的文本，據信是《樓炭經》的精簡提要。本文藉由提供《樓炭經略》並不是現存《大樓炭經》提要的證據，來說明該文本所概述的是一種已經失傳的宇宙論。關於這部未知的的文本，我考量了一些可能的情形，認為《樓炭經略》的來源很可能是實際上竺法護於303年所翻譯而現已失傳的一部宇宙論。