The Preface, the Homage, and Stopping Evil
Sengzhao's Preface — Discarding Sin and Merit百論序・捨罪福品第一
The Hundred Treatise opens twice over. First Sengzhao, writing at Chang'an, tells us how the book came to exist and how it came to China — and in the process tells us, almost in passing, that half of it is missing. Then Āryadeva opens it himself, with two verses of homage, and is immediately interrupted: which World-Honored One do you mean? The answer takes us straight into the debate hall, where four rival Indian schools are already reciting their own definitions of a good dharma. Āryadeva's reply is four Chinese characters long.
Translation Method
The Chinese source is Kumārajīva's translation, revised at Chang'an in 404 CE — five years before the same workshop produced this site's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Twelve Gate Treatise. With those two, this treatise makes the set of three on which the Sanlun school was founded, and terminology here is matched to the pages already standing for them, so that a reader moving among the three meets the same English for the same Chinese.
Classical text is set in the left-hand column below, our English in the right. Reading notes follow each passage. See also this site's note on translation method.
- Two voices, not one (提婆造頌・婆藪開士釋)
- Like the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and unlike the Twelve Gate Treatise, this text is not a self-commentary. Āryadeva wrote the root lines; a later figure named Vasu wrote the exposition around them. Both are translated here as primary text, exactly as we have done with Piṅgala's commentary on the root treatise.
- The (修妬路) marker, and why there are no verse blocks
- 修妬路 transliterates sūtra, and marks the end of a root line of Āryadeva's. What is surprising is the form these take. Kumārajīva did not render Āryadeva's hundred verses as verse: they come through as terse prose aphorisms sitting inside Vasu's commentary, each closed by the marker. So this translation cannot use the gold verse blocks that carry Nāgārjuna's verses elsewhere on this site. Instead the root line is marked inline, like thissūtra, wherever it falls. Where the text really is in verse — the opening homage here, and one quoted stanza in Part 3 — the usual verse treatment is used.
- 外曰／內曰 — the Outsider and the Insider
- This treatise does not use 問曰／答曰, "question" and "answer." It uses 外 and 內: the outsider and the insider, from 外道 and 內道 — those outside the Buddha's way and those within it. That is not a stylistic variation. It tells you what kind of book this is: not a teacher explaining his own thought to a pupil, but a manual for public debate against schools that are named, quoted, and answered on their own ground. We render the labels literally and tint them, Outsider and Insider, so the two voices stay separable across pages where they alternate more than thirty times.
The Text
1. Sengzhao's Preface 百論序
Sengzhao (僧肇, 384–414) was the most philosophically gifted of Kumārajīva's Chinese disciples, and this preface is the single most important witness to how the Hundred Treatise reached China. Nearly everything the tradition knows about the text's transmission — that Āryadeva wrote it eight centuries after the Buddha, that a man named Vasu supplied the commentary, that Kumārajīva translated it once badly and once well, that a lay official convened the revision in 404 — comes from these few hundred characters. So does the fact that half the book never arrived at all.
《百論》者，蓋是通聖心之津塗、開真諦之要論也。佛泥曰後八百餘年，有出家大士厥名提婆，玄心獨悟俊氣高朗，道映當時神超世表，故能闢三藏之重關、坦十二之幽路，擅步迦夷、為法城塹。
The Hundred Treatise is the ford and the road by which one gets through to the sage's mind, the essential treatise that opens up the truth of what is really so. Something over eight hundred years after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa there appeared a great being gone forth from the household, whose name was Āryadeva. Dark of mind and awakened alone, of a bearing lofty and clear, his way outshone his own age and his spirit passed clean beyond the world. And so he was able to throw open the double barrier-gate of the Three Baskets and level out the shadowed road of the Twelve; to stride unchallenged through Kapilavastu, and to stand as rampart and moat for the Dharma.
于時外道紛然、異端競起，邪辯逼真、殆亂正道；乃仰慨聖教之陵遲、俯悼群迷之縱惑，將遠拯沈淪故作斯論，所以防正閑邪大明於宗極者矣。是以正化以之而隆、邪道以之而替，非夫領括眾妙孰能若斯！
In that time the outsiders swarmed and heterodox positions rose up in competition; false argument pressed hard upon the true and came near to throwing the right way into confusion. Looking up, he grieved at the sage's teaching in its decline; looking down, he mourned the multitude of the deluded in their unchecked confusion. Meaning to rescue the drowning from far off, he composed this treatise — a work that guards what is right and bars out what is false, and casts a great light upon the ultimate ancestor. By it the true transformation was raised up, and by it the false ways were displaced. Who, if not a man who had gathered every subtlety into his grasp, could have done such a thing?
論有百偈，故以百為名。理致淵玄，統群籍之要；文旨婉約，窮制作之美。然至趣幽簡，尠得其門。
The treatise has a hundred verses, and is therefore named for the hundred. Its reasoning runs deep and dark, gathering up what is essential in the whole body of texts; its language is supple and spare, exhausting the beauty of composition. Yet its furthest import is shadowed and terse, and few have found its gate.
有婆藪開士者，明慧內融、妙思奇拔，遠契玄蹤為之訓釋，使沈隱之義彰於徽翰，風味宣流被於來葉，文藻煥然、宗塗易曉。其為論也，言而無當、破而無執，儻然靡據而事不失真、蕭焉無寄而理自玄會，返本之道著乎茲矣。
There was one Vasu, an Illumining Being, whose clear wisdom was fused within and whose subtle thought was strikingly original. Matching from far off the dark tracks of the work, he made an exposition of it, so that meanings which had lain sunk and hidden were brought out plainly in fine writing, its savor spread abroad and passed down to the leaves of later ages, its literary figure bright, and the road to its governing sense easy to make out. And as a treatise it is this: it speaks, yet settles on nothing; it refutes, yet grasps at nothing. Free and unattached, it leans on no position, and yet in the matter at hand it does not lose what is true; still and bare, it lodges nowhere, and yet its principle converges of itself in the dark. The way of returning to the root stands revealed here.
有天竺沙門鳩摩羅什，器量淵弘、俊神超邈，鑽仰累年轉不可測，常味詠斯論以為心要。先雖親譯而方言未融，至令思尋者躊躇於謬文，摽位者乖迕於歸致。
There was an Indian śramaṇa, Kumārajīva, of deep and ample capacity, whose fine spirit reached far beyond. He bored into this work and looked up to it for years on end, and the more he did so the less it could be sounded; he was forever savoring and chanting this treatise, and took it for the essential of his own mind. Though he had earlier translated it himself, the local language had not yet been brought into fusion with it — with the result that those who searched out its sense hesitated over faulty wording, and those who marked out its divisions ran crosswise to where it was heading.
大秦司隷校尉安成侯姚嵩，風韻清舒沖心簡勝，博涉內外理思兼通，少好大道長而彌篤，雖復形羈時務而法言不輟，每撫茲文，所慨良多。以弘始六年歲次壽星，集理味沙門與什考挍正本，陶練覆疏務存論旨，使質而不野、簡而必詣，宗致盡爾無間然矣。
Yao Song, Colonel-Director of Retainers of the Great Qin and Marquis of Ancheng — a man of clear and unhurried bearing, his mind emptied and choosing always the finer thing, widely read in the inner and the outer learning and comprehending both in his reasoning, who had loved the great Way from his youth and held to it more firmly as he grew older, and who, though his person was harnessed to the business of the age, never let the words of the Dharma fall silent — took up this text again and again, and was much moved by what he found in it. In the sixth year of Hongshi, the year standing in Shouxing [404 CE], he convened śramaṇas who savor the principle and, together with Kumārajīva, collated it against a correct copy, refining and reworking the exposition, taking care throughout to preserve the treatise's own intent, so that it should be plain without being rustic, and spare while always arriving. Its governing sense is now wholly present, and there is nothing left in it to fault.
論凡二十品，品各五偈。後十品，其人以為無益此土，故闕而不傳。冀明識君子詳而攬焉。
The treatise has twenty chapters in all, five verses to each chapter. The last ten chapters he judged to be of no benefit to this land, and so they are wanting and were not transmitted. It is to be hoped that gentlemen of clear discernment will examine it closely and take it in.
The last four sentences are the most consequential in the preface, and they are dropped without ceremony, in the tone of a bibliographical footnote. Twenty chapters, five verses each: one hundred verses, which is where the title comes from. But only the first ten chapters were brought over. The last ten chapters he judged to be of no benefit to this land — so the Hundred Treatise, as it exists in Chinese and therefore as it exists at all, holds roughly fifty of its hundred verses. There is no Sanskrit and no Tibetan witness to tell us what was in the other half. The book is named for a number it no longer contains.
Who is "he"? The Chinese is 其人, "that person," with no antecedent supplied. It cannot easily be Āryadeva, who wrote all twenty; it is almost certainly Kumārajīva, the only figure in the preface in a position to decide what China needed. Sengzhao does not say so, and we have not made him say so.
Two smaller cruxes worth flagging rather than smoothing. 坦十二之幽路, "level the shadowed road of the Twelve": in parallel with the Three Baskets just before it, "the Twelve" most likely means the twelve divisions of the canon (十二部經), though some readers take it as the twelve links of dependent arising. And 迦夷 is read by some as Kapilavastu and by others as a general name for India; we have taken the narrower sense.
The description of the treatise's method in the fourth paragraph is worth pausing on, because it is a precise statement of what Madhyamaka argument is and is not. 言而無當、破而無執 — it speaks, yet settles on nothing; it refutes, yet grasps at nothing. 無當 is the harder half: 當 is to match, to fit, to hit the target. A speech that has 無當 is one that lands on no fixed position of its own.
Sengzhao is describing, in the vocabulary available to him, exactly the move that Chapter Ten will make in so many words when the Outsider finally shouts that a man who destroys everything must be destroying his own case too. The answer there — that there is nothing to catch, because no thesis about self-natured things was ever advanced — is already stated here in the preface, sixteen chapters early. Whoever reads the preface attentively has been told the ending.
2. The Homage 頂禮
The treatise proper opens, as Indian treatises do, with an act of homage — and this one is doing quiet argumentative work from the first line. Two verses: the first to the Buddha, the second to the Dharma and the Saṅgha. The whole of the debate that follows is generated by four words in the second verse.
頂禮佛足哀世尊， 於無量劫荷眾苦，
煩惱已盡習亦除， 梵釋龍神咸恭敬。
I bow my head to the Buddha's feet — the World-Honored One who pities us,
who through measureless kalpas shouldered the sufferings of the many;
whose afflictions are exhausted and whose habit-traces too are gone,
whom Brahmā and Śakra, the nāgas and the spirits, all revere.
亦禮無上照世法， 能淨瑕穢止戲論，
諸佛世尊之所說， 并及八輩應真僧。
And I bow to the unsurpassed Dharma that lights up the world,
able to cleanse away flaw and filth and to still conceptual elaboration,
the Dharma that all the buddhas, the World-Honored Ones, have spoken;
and to the Saṅgha of the eight ranks, worthy and true.
These eight lines and one stanza quoted in Part 3 are the only verse in the whole surviving treatise. Everything else that Āryadeva wrote comes to us through Kumārajīva as prose. Whatever meter the hundred verses had in Sanskrit is gone, and the marker (修妬路) is all that remains to tell us where one ended.
習 in the third line is 習氣, vāsanā — the residue an affliction leaves behind after the affliction itself has been uprooted, the groove worn by long habit. The distinction matters for the claim being made: an arhat has ended the afflictions, but only a buddha is said to have worn away the traces as well. The line is not decorative praise. It is the first move in an argument about who is uniquely qualified to speak, and the Outsider is about to demand that it be justified.
八輩應真僧: the eight ranks are the four fruits of the path together with the four approaches to them — stream-enterer and the one approaching stream-entry, and so on up to the arhat. 應真, "worthy and true," is an older Chinese rendering of arhat, from the same era of translation practice that gave us 泥曰 for nirvāṇa in Sengzhao's first paragraph.
3. Which One Is the World-Honored One?
The Outsider does not object to the homage. He objects to its reference. "World-Honored One" — 世尊, bhagavat — was not a Buddhist trademark in fifth-century India; it was a respectful title in general circulation, applied to gods and to the founding seers of rival schools. The question is a fair one, and the treatise treats it as fair.
外曰：偈言世尊之所說，何等是世尊？
內曰：汝何故生如是疑？
外曰：種種說世尊相故生疑。有人言：葦紐天(秦言遍勝天)名世尊。又言：摩醯首羅天(秦言大自在天)名世尊。又言：迦毘羅、優樓迦、勒沙婆等仙人皆名世尊。汝何以獨言佛為世尊？是故生疑。
Outsider: The verse says "the Dharma that the World-Honored Ones have spoken." What is a World-Honored One?
Insider: Why should such a doubt arise in you?
Outsider: The doubt arises because the marks of a World-Honored One are described in all sorts of ways. Some say that the god Viṣṇu — in Qin speech, the God Who Prevails Over All — is called the World-Honored One. Others say that the god Maheśvara — in Qin speech, the Great Sovereign God — is called the World-Honored One. Others again say that the seers Kapila, Ulūka, Ṛṣabha and the rest are all called World-Honored Ones. Why do you say that the Buddha alone is the World-Honored One? That is why the doubt arises.
內曰：佛知諸法實相明了無礙，又能說深淨法，是故獨稱佛為世尊。
Insider: The Buddha knows the true character of all things, clearly and without obstruction, and he is able besides to teach a Dharma deep and pure. That is why the Buddha alone is named the World-Honored One.
The parenthetical glosses are Kumārajīva's own, inserted for readers who would not know the Sanskrit names — 秦言, "in Qin speech," meaning the language of the Later Qin state he was working in. They are not later editorial additions; they are the translator speaking in his own voice inside the text, and we have kept them rather than converting them into footnotes.
Notice how narrow the Insider's answer is. He does not claim the Buddha is more powerful, or that he created the world, or that he is worshipped by more people. He claims two things only: that the Buddha knows how things actually are, and that he can say so. Everything in the ten chapters ahead is an attempt to make good on the first claim by dismantling every rival account of how things actually are — and the second claim is what makes the first testable, since a knowledge that could not be stated could not be argued for either.
4. Four Schools, Reciting
The Outsider takes the two criteria and shows that his own side meets them. What follows is a compressed roll-call of the Indian philosophical landscape as a Buddhist debater of the period would have had to know it — each school named by its founder, its text, and its definition of a good dharma. It is worth reading slowly, because these are the opponents who will occupy the next nine chapters.
外曰：諸餘導師亦能明了諸法相，亦能說深淨法。如迦毘羅弟子誦僧佉經，說諸善法總相別相，於二十五諦中，淨覺分是名善法。優樓迦弟子誦衛世師經，言於六諦，求那諦中日三洗再供養，火等和合生神分善法。勒沙婆弟子誦尼乾子經，言五熱炙身、拔髮等受苦法，是名善法。又有諸師，行自餓法、投淵赴火、自墜高巖、寂默常立、持牛戒等，是名善法。如是等皆是深淨法，何以言獨佛能說耶？
Outsider: The other guides too can make clear the characteristics of things, and they too can teach a Dharma deep and pure. Kapila's disciples, for instance, recite the Sāṃkhya text, which sets out the general and the particular characteristics of all good dharmas: among the twenty-five principles, the portion that is pure awareness is what is called a good dharma. Ulūka's disciples recite the Vaiśeṣika text, which speaks of six categories, and says that within the category of quality, bathing three times a day and making offerings twice over, and the conjunction of fire and the rest, produce that portion of good dharmas which belongs to the self. Ṛṣabha's disciples recite the Nirgrantha text, which says that scorching the body with the five heats, tearing out the hair, and other such practices of undergoing pain, are what is called a good dharma. And there are still other teachers who practice starving themselves, who throw themselves into deep water or into fire, who hurl themselves from high crags, who keep unbroken silence, who stand and never sit, who hold the cow-vow and so forth — and these are called good dharmas. All of these are deep and pure dharmas. Why do you say the Buddha alone can teach them?
內曰：是皆邪見，覆正見故，不能說深淨法。是事後當廣說。
Insider: These are all wrong views. Because they cover over right view, they cannot teach a Dharma deep and pure. This matter will be dealt with at length further on.
Three schools, and then a fourth group left unnamed. It is worth having them straight, because the treatise assumes them from here to the end and rarely stops to reintroduce anyone.
| Founder | Text | What makes a dharma good |
|---|---|---|
| Kapila 迦毘羅 | Sāṃkhya 僧佉經 | Among the twenty-five principles, the portion that is pure awareness. Sāṃkhya's twenty-five run from primordial nature through the evolutes to puruṣa, the knower — which this treatise calls 神, the self, and demolishes in Chapter Two. |
| Ulūka 優樓迦 | Vaiśeṣika 衛世師經 | Ritual acts falling under the category of quality: bathing thrice daily, offering twice, tending the fire. Vaiśeṣika's six categories — substance, quality, motion, universal, particular, inherence — supply this treatise with its recurring pair 陀羅驃 (dravya, substance) and 求那 (guṇa, quality), which Chapters Two through Four use against it relentlessly. |
| Ṛṣabha 勒沙婆 | Nirgrantha 尼乾子經 | Ascetic pain deliberately undergone: the five heats, the plucking out of hair. This is the Jain tradition, named after the "unbound ones." |
| Unnamed others | — | Self-starvation, drowning, fire, leaping from cliffs, permanent silence, never sitting down, the cow-vow. |
The cow-vow — 持牛戒, govrata — deserves a word, since it sounds absurd and is not. It was the practice of imitating a cow in every particular, eating grass, going on all fours, in the belief that one would thereby be reborn in a heaven. The Buddha is recorded as being asked about it directly, and answering that the man who keeps the cow-vow perfectly will be reborn among cows.
And notice where the Outsider's Vaiśeṣika summary lands: the ritual acts produce good dharmas 生神分善法 — belonging to the self. That word 神 has now been said out loud in the first exchange of the book. It is the thing the entire second chapter exists to destroy, and it has walked in as an unexamined assumption inside somebody's list of pious observances. That is how this treatise works: it lets the opponent state his position fully, in his own terms, and then takes apart the term he was leaning on without noticing.
5. Evil Stopped, and Good Practiced
Having heard four rival definitions of a good dharma, the Outsider asks for the Buddhist one. The reply is the first root line of the treatise, and it is four characters long: 惡止善行法. Vasu then unfolds it into a complete and quite conventional account of Buddhist ethics — deliberately conventional, because the whole strategy of this chapter is to establish an unremarkable moral starting point and then, twenty exchanges later, ask the reader to let go of it.
外曰：佛說何等善法相？
內曰：惡止善行法(修妬路)。佛略說善法二種：止相、行相。息一切惡，是名止相；修一切善，是名行相。
Outsider: What characteristic of good dharmas did the Buddha teach?
Insider: Evil stopped, and good practiced.sūtra The Buddha taught good dharmas briefly as being of two kinds: the characteristic of stopping and the characteristic of practicing. To bring every evil to rest is what is called the characteristic of stopping; to cultivate every good is what is called the characteristic of practicing.
何等為惡？身邪行、口邪行、意邪行。身：殺、盜、婬。口：妄言、兩舌、惡口、綺語。意：貪、瞋惱、邪見。復有十不善道所不攝鞭杖繫閉等，及十不善道前後種種罪，是名為惡。
What is evil? Wrong conduct of body, wrong conduct of speech, wrong conduct of mind. Of the body: killing, stealing, sexual misconduct. Of speech: false speech, divisive speech, harsh speech, frivolous speech. Of mind: greed, anger and vexation, wrong view. There are besides things not gathered up under the ten unwholesome courses of action — beating with whip and staff, binding and shutting up, and the like — together with the various offenses that come before and after the ten unwholesome courses. This is what is called evil.
何等為止？息惡不作。若心生、若口語、若受戒，從今日終不復作，是名為止。
What is stopping? To bring evil to rest and not to do it. Whether it arises in the mind, or is spoken aloud, or is taken on as a precept — "from this day forward I will never do it again" — this is what is called stopping.
何等為善？身正行、口正行、意正行。身迎送、合掌、禮敬等。口實語、和合語、柔軟語、利益語。意慈悲、正見等。如是種種清淨法，是名善法。何等為行？於是善法中信受修習，是名為行。
What is good? Right conduct of body, right conduct of speech, right conduct of mind. Of the body: going out to meet a guest and seeing him off, joining the palms, paying respect, and the like. Of speech: truthful speech, speech that reconciles, gentle speech, beneficial speech. Of mind: loving-kindness and compassion, right view, and the like. Pure dharmas of these various kinds are what is called good dharmas. And what is practicing? To receive these good dharmas in faith and to cultivate them — this is what is called practicing.
Set the four definitions side by side and the contrast is the argument. Sāṃkhya locates the good in a portion of a metaphysical inventory. Vaiśeṣika locates it in correctly performed ritual. The Nirgranthas and the unnamed ascetics locate it in quantity of pain absorbed. The Buddhist answer names no metaphysical item, no ritual, and no ordeal. It is a description of what a person does and refrains from doing, and it is startlingly ordinary: don't kill, don't lie, don't be cruel; greet people, put your palms together, speak so as to reconcile rather than divide.
Two details in the list repay attention. First, the account of evil is deliberately made larger than the standard ten unwholesome courses — Vasu adds beating and imprisonment, and then "the various offenses that come before and after," which is a way of saying that the list is not a fence with everything outside it permitted. Second, stopping is defined three ways over: it can be a movement of mind, a spoken resolution, or a formally undertaken precept. Nothing is said about which is superior. What is required is that it actually stop.
Hold on to how unremarkable all of this is, because the chapter's title has already given away where it is going. 捨罪福品 — the chapter on discarding sin and merit. The good dharmas so carefully enumerated here are, by the end of Part 3, going to be described as a poisoned meal, sweet while eating and bitter when it digests, and the reader will be told to put them down. Not because they are false. Because they are two-natured, and therefore impermanent, and therefore not a place to stand.
Part One Complete
This closes Part One: Sengzhao's preface, with its report of a hundred verses of which half were never carried across; Āryadeva's two verses of homage; the challenge over who deserves the title World-Honored One; the roll-call of Sāṃkhya, Vaiśeṣika, Nirgrantha and the ascetics, each with its own definition of a good dharma; and the Buddhist definition, in four characters, unfolded into an ethics anyone could recognize.
Part Two begins with an objection so apparently trivial that it is easy to miss what it opens. The Outsider complains about the treatise's first sentence: a book, he says, must begin with something auspicious, and this one begins with the word "evil." Out of that complaint comes a chain of arguments about salt, about a lamp that is supposed to light itself, about spells cast at a distance and stars that portend disaster, and about an elephant named for its trunk — and by the end of it the Outsider has lost far more than an argument about etiquette.