Kṣitigarbha's Fundamental Vows.
A vow made by a daughter who followed her mother into hell, and found there a name that turned out to mean nothing more than a child's devotion to a parent. This sūtra is the primary scriptural source for Kṣitigarbha's identity as the bodhisattva of the hell-realms — the one who vowed to empty every hell before accepting buddhahood himself. Thirteen chapters, translated across six parts, with reading notes drawn throughout from Lingcheng's Kangxi-era commentary, the first sustained exegesis of this text in roughly a thousand years.
How to read this collection
This is a mid-length sūtra — roughly 17,000 Chinese characters across thirteen chapters, ranging from a 556-character chapter on an earth-spirit's testimony to a 2,319-character chapter cataloguing what seeing and hearing Kṣitigarbha are worth to ordinary people in ordinary trouble — read across six pages, split at the same six-fascicle boundary Lingcheng's own commentary uses, because chapter length in this sūtra varies too widely to divide it any more evenly. No Sanskrit or Tibetan original of this text has ever surfaced, and its authorship remains debated among modern scholars much as the Awakening of Faith's does — a question that has never once dimmed its influence on how Kṣitigarbha is understood and venerated.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text, matched against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Lingcheng's own commentary — the first sustained exegesis this sūtra received in roughly a thousand years, composed, by his own account, while he was ill, and carried afterward to Nagasaki for its first printing. Where a passage ties into texts already translated elsewhere on this site — the tathāgatagarbha corpus, the site's Yogācāra pages, its Pure Land collection — the reading notes draw that connection out explicitly.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified against the base text for full coverage.
- Reading notes — "after Lingcheng" throughout, drawn from his six-fascicle commentary on this sūtra.
- Honest flags where the sūtra's own eighth-century assumptions about gender show through its otherwise universal promise of liberation, rather than passed over in silence.
- Cross-references to this site's Pure Land, tathāgatagarbha, and Yogācāra collections wherever this sūtra's own doctrine directly overlaps with texts already translated here.
The Sūtra's Own Structure
Lingcheng divides the sūtra into an opening assembly, a main body organized around four themes, and a closing transmission section. Within the main body, he groups the middle chapters as: who is teaching (Kṣitigarbha's own countless emanations), who is being taught (the beings whose karma the sūtra spends three chapters cataloguing), what actually causes liberation (praise, funerary practice, and King Yama's own doubts), and what causes buddhahood itself (calling a name, and generosity rightly weighed).
Read by Part
All six parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Lingcheng.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all six parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site's Pure Land or tathāgatagarbha pages, we reuse it; where this sūtra's own vocabulary has no site precedent, we coin one here. See the full translation notes for the complete glossary, and also this site's note on translation method.