Liudu Ji Jing
The Sūtra of the Collected Six Perfections《六度集經》
Ninety-one stories of the Buddha's countless past lives as a bodhisattva, translated into Chinese by Kang Senghui in the 3rd century — organized not by length or narrator, as the Pāli Jātaka collection is, but by which of the six perfections each story illustrates: giving, precepts, patience, diligence, meditation, and wisdom.
- Chinese
- 《六度集經》, also known as 六度無極經 or 雜無極經 — "the sūtra of the collected six perfections."
- Translator
- Kang Senghui (康僧會, d. 280 CE), a monk of Sogdian ancestry raised in Jiaozhi, who traveled to the Kingdom of Wu and became one of the first Buddhist teachers active south of the Yangtze.
- Date
- Translated sometime between 251 and 280 CE, at Jianye (modern Nanjing).
- Structure
- Eight fascicles, ninety-one stories, arranged under the six perfections (六度): giving (fascicles 1–3, 26 stories), precepts (fascicle 4, 15 stories), patience (fascicle 5, 13 stories), diligence (fascicle 6, 19 stories), meditation (fascicle 7, 9 stories), and wisdom (fascicle 8, 9 stories).
- Relation to Pāli Jātaka
- A separate Chinese narrative tradition, not a translation of the Pāli collection — sharing its basic premise and a handful of specific episodes with the Jātaka partially translated elsewhere on this site, while differing from it in most content and telling.
Why This Collection
Where most of the sūtras and treatises on this site argue a doctrine, the Liudu Ji Jing tells stories — ninety-one of them, each a self-contained episode from one of the Buddha's countless past lives as a bodhisattva, working toward buddhahood one act of virtue at a time. A king cuts his own flesh to ransom a dove from a hawk. An ascetic offers his own head to a starving tigress so her cubs will live. A merchant prince begins bailing an entire ocean out by hand rather than surrender a pearl he has rightfully earned. The doctrine is present, but it arrives through narrative rather than argument — and the six perfections that structure the whole collection give each story a specific, stated purpose within a larger architecture.
Kang Senghui's own life makes an unusually vivid frame for this collection. Born to a merchant family that had settled in Jiaozhi, in what is now northern Vietnam, he was of Sogdian ancestry — his family's origins lay along the Silk Road, in Central Asia — and after his parents died, he left home to become a monk. He traveled north into the Kingdom of Wu, one of the Three Kingdoms into which China had fractured, and became one of the very first Buddhist teachers active in that region, working to establish the Dharma in a court and society that had barely encountered it. This collection was among his major works, gathering and translating a body of past-life narrative to give his new audience a concrete, story-driven entry into Buddhist teaching — parables rather than treatises, for a court still deciding whether this foreign religion had anything to offer it.
A note on scope
This was a large undertaking — ninety-one stories across eight fascicles, all six perfections — and it is now complete in full, from the flesh-for-a-dove king that opens the giving chapter to the Buddha's own closing account of the seven years of compassion that set his path in motion.
The Fascicles
Resources
- T152 · CBETA XML source — the digital edition of the Taishō text this translation was made from.
- 六度集經 · Wikisource — a further public-domain digital edition of the same text.
- Kang Senghui (康僧會, d. 280 CE) — the translator; see also his role as one of the earliest teachers of Buddhism in the Kingdom of Wu.
Chinese source: Kang Senghui's 3rd-century translation (Taishō T152), public domain. English translation and reading guide written for Ru-Yi Meditation Center. See also this site's note on translation method.