Sūtra on the Divination of the Effects of Good and Evil Karma — Translation Notes
These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Sūtra on the Divination of the Effects of Good and Evil Karma (占察善惡業報經, Zhancha Jing), Taishō T0839, translated into Chinese by Bodhidīpa (菩提燈) in the Sui dynasty. They exist so that vocabulary stays consistent across all six parts, and so that terminology without precedent anywhere else on this site is recorded for any later text to inherit rather than re-coin.
The text, and its two very different halves
No Sanskrit or Tibetan version of this sūtra has ever surfaced, and almost nothing is recorded of Bodhidīpa beyond his name. The base text runs to roughly 13,200 Chinese characters across two fascicles, and reads, in effect, as two different teachings joined by one continuous dialogue: the first fascicle (Parts 1–3 here) teaches a method of divination by three cast wooden wheels, paired with a full rite of repentance, aimed at beings too doubt-ridden and obstructed by hindrance to take up meditation directly; the second fascicle (Parts 4–6) sets divination aside and turns to the “one real realm” (一實境界) — an account of mind-nature, unborn and unceasing, that Ouyi Zhixu’s commentary treats as this sūtra’s actual center of gravity, with the wheel-marks serving as an entry ramp for beings not yet ready to approach it head-on. Both halves are read here in full; neither is treated as more authentically “the sūtra” than the other, following Zhixu’s own insistence that all six of its self-given closing names describe one continuous teaching (see Part 6’s reading note).
Reading-note sourcing
Per this site’s commentator-vetting convention, reading notes are grounded in a named commentator rather than presented as unattributed analysis. Ouyi Zhixu (蕅益智旭, 1599–1655), one of the four great masters of late-Ming Buddhism and the compiler of this site’s own Nanshan Vinaya for Laypeople, wrote three separate works on this sūtra — an unusual level of sustained attention from one commentator to one text on this site. The Zhancha Jing Xuanyi (占察善惡業報經玄義, X0370) is a doctrinal overview in Tiantai’s classical “five profound meanings” format (name, essence, core teaching, function, doctrinal classification); the Zhancha Jing Shu (占察善惡業報經疏, X0371) is a complete line-by-line commentary spanning both fascicles, despite a filename in some digital archives suggesting only the first fascicle survives; and the Zhancha Jing Xingfa (占察善惡業報經行法, X1485) is a ritual manual Zhixu compiled for actually performing the sūtra’s repentance rite, filling in the one procedural gap — an opening invitation to the Three Jewels — that the sūtra’s own text does not supply. By Zhixu’s own colophon to the Shu, he first heard the sūtra described by a lay friend in 1631, performed its repentance rite himself in 1633, lectured on it in 1635, and did not complete the commentary until 1650, three years before his death — fifteen years after first forming the wish to write it.
Structure
| Part | Base text covers | Chinese length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Firm and Pure Faith’s question; the Buddha’s charge to Kṣitigarbha; the first wheel of ten good and ten evil deeds | 2,404 characters |
| 2 | The second wheel (age and force of karma); the ten-part rite of repentance; the sign of purity; ordination without a teacher; degrees of sincerity | 2,545 characters |
| 3 | The third wheel of one hundred and eighty-nine readings across past, present, and future; the sūtra’s warning against fortune-telling for profit; the close of Fascicle 1 | 2,571 characters |
| 4 | The one real realm — mind-nature unborn and unceasing, the tathāgatagarbha | 1,724 characters |
| 5 | The Mind-Only and Suchness Contemplations; name-recitation; rebirth in a pure land; gradually becoming buddha; the ten signs of meditative progress | 2,234 characters |
| 6 | Kṣitigarbha’s reassurance of the fainthearted, the confused, and the presumptuous; the sūtra names itself and closes | 1,685 characters |
Total: roughly 13,163 characters. This six-part split follows the sūtra’s own natural movements rather than an even count, and lands, by coincidence of content rather than design, almost exactly on the fascicle boundary: Parts 1–3 cover Fascicle 1 in full, Parts 4–6 cover Fascicle 2 in full. Part 3, at 2,571 characters, is swollen by the sheer bulk of the third wheel’s 189-item catalog; Part 4, at 1,724, is the shortest, though also the doctrinally densest, and was kept as its own part rather than merged with Part 5 so that its reading notes could receive space proportionate to its importance rather than its length.
Core terminology
| Chinese | English | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 占察 | divination | Kept literal throughout, including in the collection’s own title, rather than softened to something like “discernment” — the sūtra itself uses this exact word while sharply distinguishing its method from worldly fortune-telling (世間卜筮), and softening the term would blur precisely the distinction the sūtra insists on. |
| 一實境界 | the one real realm | Zhixu’s Xuanyi identifies this directly with “the true mark of all dharmas” (諸法實相), the Lotus Sūtra tradition’s term for ultimate reality — but this sūtra develops the idea through its own distinct architecture (mind’s essence, mind’s two marks, the tathāgatagarbha as treasury), so the phrase is kept as its own term rather than collapsed into “true reality” or “suchness” generically. |
| 唯心識觀 | the Mind-Only Contemplation | Capitalized throughout as the proper name of one of this sūtra’s two named meditative disciplines, kept distinct from the general Yogācāra doctrine of “mind-only” (唯識) discussed on this site’s Yogācāra pages — here a specific, step-by-step practice with its own procedure and its own fruit (the samādhi of the stillness of form). |
| 真如實觀 | the Suchness Contemplation | Paired throughout with the Mind-Only Contemplation as this sūtra’s “two contemplative paths” (二種觀道); rendered as a fixed pair rather than varied for elegance, since the sūtra itself always names them together. |
| 至心 | utmost sincerity | The sūtra’s own repeated technical criterion for a valid wheel-cast and a valid repentance, explicitly graded into two degrees and then three further sub-degrees in Part 2’s closing dialogue; kept as one fixed phrase throughout rather than translated differently by context, so the grading stays visible across parts. |
| 如來藏 | the tathāgatagarbha | Kept as the standard scholarly Sanskritization, matching this site’s other tathāgatagarbha-tradition pages, including the Awakening of Faith and the Treatise on Buddha Nature. |
| 木輪相 | the wooden wheel-mark | “Wheel” (輪) throughout rather than “die” or “dice,” matching the sūtra’s own explanation in Part 1 of why the carved wooden piece is called a wheel — both for how it is cast (an upturned palm, so that it turns easily) and for what it does (breaking through the net of wrong view, turning a being toward the right path). |
| 善安慰說者 | the Skillful Reassurer / the One Who Skillfully Reassures and Explains | One of Kṣitigarbha’s titles within this sūtra specifically, distinguished from his titles in the Fundamental Vows; kept in full on first occurrence in each part, abbreviated to “the Skillful Reassurer” in running reading-note prose. |
Why this sūtra is not treated as worldly fortune-telling
The sūtra raises the question itself, in the very passage that introduces the wheel-marks in Part 1: it warns explicitly against abandoning this method for “the world’s fortune-telling and every kind of mark-reading for luck and misfortune” (世間卜筮、種種占相吉凶等事), and Part 3 closes with an equally explicit warning against practicing the method as a paid trade (如行師道). Zhixu’s Xuanyi goes further than the sūtra’s own text, laying out twenty grades of wisdom capable of using the wheels validly and placing ordinary “worldly wisdom” (世智) outside that list altogether — a mind still moving by “crooked calculation and false grasping” cannot divine at all, on his reading, because the wheels do not work by being touched; they work only for a mind already oriented, by faith and by rite, toward the one real realm the sūtra names directly in its own third wheel. This collection’s reading notes return to this distinction at each of the three wheels rather than asserting it once and moving on, since it is exactly the distinction a reader coming to this sūtra cold is most likely to doubt.
The one real realm’s most important consequence for practice
Zhixu’s closing note to Part 2 supplies the thread that connects the sūtra’s two fascicles most directly: even a validly clean wheel-cast, obtained through genuine repentance, “clears an existing debt; it does not, by itself, stop a person from accumulating a new one.” The divination and repentance of Parts 1–3 resolve a specific, existing obstruction; only the two contemplations of Part 5, built on the one real realm of Part 4, address the underlying mechanism that keeps generating new karma in the first place. Readers who take up only the wheel-marks and skip the sūtra’s second fascicle are, on this sūtra’s own account of itself, stopping at the entry ramp.
A note for any future third Kṣitigarbha text
This is the second Kṣitigarbha scripture on this site, alongside the Fundamental Vows (T0412). Should this site later take up the Daśacakra Sūtra (大乘大集地藏十輪經, T0411) — the third of the three canonical pillars of Kṣitigarbha devotion, and one both this sūtra’s translator’s-note tradition and Lingcheng’s Fundamental Vows commentary cite repeatedly as the clearly Indic counterpart to this sūtra’s more debated origins — a future translator should check this glossary before coining fresh renderings for shared terminology, particularly 一實境界, 如來藏, and the honorific vocabulary surrounding Kṣitigarbha’s own titles.