The Sūtra on the Difficulty of Repaying Parents' Kindness
What a Hundred Years of Care Still Cannot Discharge《佛說父母恩難報經》
One of the very earliest Buddhist texts ever rendered into Chinese — under four hundred and fifty characters — makes an extreme claim and then answers it: no amount of physical care can repay a parent's kindness, and only one thing can.
- Title
- "The Sūtra on the Difficulty of Repaying Parents' Kindness" — the title states its own thesis
- Chinese
- 《佛說父母恩難報經》, translated by An Shigao (安世高), a Parthian monk working in the Later Han capital, mid-2nd century CE — among the very first Buddhist texts translated into Chinese at all
- Tradition
- Early discourse literature (the āgama/nikāya stratum shared, in different recensions, by every Buddhist school) — not a Mahāyāna sūtra in the doctrinal sense, though catalogued among the sūtras in the Chinese canon
- Speaker
- The Buddha, addressing the assembled monks directly — there is no questioner or occasion given
- Length
- ~440 Chinese characters — the shortest text on this site
- Difficulty
- ★☆☆☆☆ — a single continuous statement, readable in under two minutes, with an argument precise enough to reread
A Very Short Text, Answering a Very Old Objection
This is the shortest text on this site, and one of the oldest Buddhist texts to exist in Chinese at all. An Shigao, a Parthian prince turned monk, worked in Luoyang in the mid-second century CE — decades before Chinese Buddhism had settled on standard terms for even basic concepts. Some of that unsettled vocabulary is visible in the text itself: it opens by transliterating the Buddha's title as 婆伽婆 (a rendering of Bhagavā, "the Blessed One"), then a few lines later switches to 世尊, the translated form that would become standard. Two names for the same figure, sitting side by side, from an era when the translation choices had not yet hardened into convention.
The text itself is a single, tightly built argument. It states a claim so extreme it is almost uncomfortable to read, and then answers it with a turn that would go on to matter more in China than almost any other passage in early Buddhist literature.
The teaching in one sentence
However much physical care you give your parents — even a lifetime of literally carrying them — you have not yet repaid them; only leading them toward faith, ethical conduct, generosity, and wisdom actually does.
No Surviving Commentary — And a Reason to Read It Anyway
Unlike most texts on this site, this sūtra has no classical commentary attached to it. Searching the standard collections of Chinese Buddhist exegesis turns up nothing dedicated to this text — not surprising, given its brevity and its early, unadorned style. The reading notes below are Ru-Yi's own, and are presented as such rather than attributed to any classical teacher.
What the notes can lean on instead is something arguably more valuable for a short discourse like this one: a close parallel already on this site, in a completely different transmission lineage.
The Nearly Identical Twin in the Pali Canon
The Pali Aṅguttara Nikāya — the Numerical Discourses, preserved independently by the Theravāda tradition — contains a discourse, AN 2.33, that states nearly the same argument in nearly the same shape: carrying one's mother on one shoulder and father on the other for a hundred years, tending to their every need, even installing them as rulers of the whole earth — none of it discharges the debt. What does is leading an unfaithful parent to faith, an unethical parent to ethical conduct, a stingy parent to generosity, an unwise parent to wisdom.
Reading the two side by side is genuinely useful, not just a scholarly curiosity. Two communities, transmitting the Buddha's teaching independently for well over a thousand years before either was fixed in writing, preserved essentially the same argument about parents — the same extreme image of physical devotion, the same list of four things, in nearly the same order. That kind of agreement across independent transmission lines is about as close as early Buddhist literature comes to a second witness confirming the first.
Two Kinds of Sons
The text closes with a small, easy-to-miss piece of wordplay: it distinguishes "the son one gave birth to" (所生子) from "the son one raised" (所養子), and then names the second as the standard worth learning from — specifically, the one whose "mouth brings forth the flavor of the teaching." A son who merely inherited his parents' care is only half the picture; the son worth becoming is the one who feeds something back. The wordplay is easy to miss in translation, since English has no equally compact way to hold "the child who was born" and "the child who was raised" apart in two words — but the sūtra's whole final turn depends on the distinction.
Why This Mattered So Much in China
The oldest and most persistent charge Chinese society brought against Buddhism, from the Han dynasty onward, was that it was fundamentally unfilial: it took sons out of the household, ended family lines, and had them shave off hair and beard that were understood as gifts from one's parents. This text — like its Pali counterpart — is one of the tradition's earliest and strongest answers. It does not soften the charge or minimize the debt; if anything, it makes the debt sound impossible to discharge by ordinary means. What it does is relocate where repayment actually happens: not in the body's care for the body, but in leading a parent toward the four things — faith, ethics, generosity, wisdom — that a monastic life, of all lives, is best positioned to offer. On this reading, leaving the household to practice the path is not an abandonment of filial duty. It is filial duty pursued at its only effective address.
How to Read This Text
Given its length, this sūtra rewards being read twice in one sitting: once for the claim (nothing physical repays this debt), and once for the turn (four specific things do). The gap between those two readings is the entire teaching.
Key Terms
The Translation
The Chinese below is An Shigao's translation (安世高, Later Han dynasty, mid-2nd century CE; Taishō T684), one of the earliest surviving Chinese Buddhist texts and in the public domain. The English is Ru-Yi's own translation, kept close to the Chinese and set out passage by passage — the complete sūtra, without abridgment. No classical commentary on this text survives; the reading notes below are Ru-Yi's own, informed chiefly by the sūtra's close Pali parallel, AN 2.33, already translated on this site.
1. The Setting
聞如是：一時婆伽婆在舍衛城祇樹給孤獨園。
Thus have I heard: at one time the Blessed One was staying at Śrāvastī, in the Jeta Grove, the garden of Anāthapiṇḍada.
The same setting opens a great many sūtras on this site — Śrāvastī and the Jeta Grove were evidently among the Buddha's most frequent residences, and a great proportion of the surviving discourse literature is set here. What is worth noticing in this particular opening is the word 婆伽婆 for the Buddha, left as a transliteration of Bhagavā rather than translated. Later Chinese translators would settle on 世尊, "World-Honored One" — the very word this same sūtra switches to just a few lines further on. Catching a translator mid-decision, in effect, within a single short text.
2. A Debt Care Alone Cannot Discharge
爾時世尊告諸比丘：「父母於子，有大增益，乳餔長養，隨時將育，四大得成。右肩負父、左肩負母，經歷千年，正使便利背上，然無有怨心於父母，此子猶不足報父母恩。
Then the World-Honored One told the monks, "Parents are of great benefit to their children — nursing, feeding, and raising them, tending to them through every season, until the four great elements that compose the body are fully formed. Even a son who carried his father on his right shoulder and his mother on his left for a thousand years, and even were they to relieve themselves right there on his back, and even if he bore it all without a single resentful thought toward them — that son would still not have done enough to repay his parents' kindness.
The image is deliberately extreme, and deliberately undignified — not a thousand years of comfortable devotion, but a thousand years of literally carrying one's parents' full weight, including the indignity of their bodily needs, without a trace of complaint. The sūtra pushes the image to its limit precisely so that the conclusion — still not enough — cannot be read as a complaint about half-hearted filial care. Even care this complete falls short. The near-identical image in the Pali parallel, AN 2.33 — a hundred years rather than a thousand, but otherwise close enough to suggest a shared source stratum — makes the same move for the same reason: to rule out, in advance, any argument that better or longer physical care would have been sufficient.
"The four great elements" (四大) — earth, water, fire, and wind — is the standard early Buddhist analysis of what a physical body is composed of; naming them here is a way of saying parents are responsible for the child's body at the most basic physical level, which is exactly why bodily repayment, however extensive, cannot be commensurate with the debt.
3. What Does Discharge It
若父母無信，教令信，獲安隱處；無戒與戒，教授獲安隱處；不聞使聞，教授獲安隱處；慳貪教令好施，勸樂教授，獲安隱處；無智慧教令黠慧，勸樂教授，獲安隱處。
If a parent lacks faith, and is taught and led to faith, this brings them to a place of peace. If a parent lacks ethical conduct, and is given it through instruction, this brings them to a place of peace. If a parent has not heard the teaching, and is led to hear it, this brings them to a place of peace. If a parent is stingy, and is taught and encouraged toward generosity, this brings them to a place of peace. If a parent lacks wisdom, and is taught and encouraged toward clear understanding, this brings them to a place of peace.
This is the sūtra's turn, stated as plainly as possible: five clauses, each with the identical shape — a lack named, a remedy taught, the same phrase "brings them to a place of peace" repeated five times like a refrain. The fivefold list slightly expands the four things named in the Pali parallel (faith, ethical conduct, generosity, wisdom) by separating "leading a parent to hear the teaching" out as its own clause between ethical conduct and generosity — a difference of emphasis rather than substance, since hearing the teaching is naturally what makes the other four possible in the first place.
What repeats five times is not a reward for the parent alone; "a place of peace" (安隱處) names a settled condition that is also, implicitly, the payment the child has finally managed to make. The debt is discharged not by what the child gives up, but by what the child gives the parent access to.
4. Faith in the Buddha and the Dharma
如是，信如來、至真、等正覺、明行成為、善逝、世間解、無上士、道法御、天人師、號佛、世尊，教信法，教授獲安隱處。諸法甚深，現身獲果，義味甚深。如是，智者明通此行，教令信聖眾。
Faith of this kind means faith in the Realized One, the Truly Worthy One, the Perfectly and Fully Awakened One, the One Perfected in Knowledge and Conduct, the Well-Gone One, the Knower of the World, the Unsurpassed One, the Guide who Tames Beings, the Teacher of Gods and Humans, called Buddha, the World-Honored One — and being taught faith in the Dharma likewise brings one to a place of peace. The teachings are profound; their fruit is realized in this very life; their meaning and flavor run deep. Just so, the wise fully understand this path, and lead others to place their faith in the noble sangha as well.
The list of titles here is the standard set of nine (sometimes counted as ten) epithets of a Buddha, recited in the same fixed sequence across an enormous range of early discourse literature in both the Chinese and Pali traditions — a formula so stable that its appearance, essentially unchanged, in a text this early and this short is itself a kind of evidence for how quickly such formulas fixed. Rather than translate each epithet freely, this rendering keeps them as a visible list, since the sūtra itself presents them as a list to be recognized, not read as ordinary prose.
The clause "their fruit is realized in this very life" (現身獲果) is a small but important claim: faith in the Dharma is not framed as a matter for some future rebirth alone, but as something that bears results within the faithful person's present existence — which is part of why leading a parent to it, now, while they are alive, counts as genuine repayment rather than a deferred promise.
5. Faith in the Sangha
如來聖眾甚清淨，行直不曲，常和合，法法成就，戒成就、三昧成就、智慧成就、解脫成就、解脫見慧成就。所謂聖眾——四雙八輩——是謂如來聖眾，最尊最貴，當尊奉敬仰，是世間無上福田。
The Realized One's noble assembly is utterly pure, its conduct upright and without deviation, ever harmonious, accomplished in every quality — accomplished in ethical conduct, accomplished in stillness of mind, accomplished in wisdom, accomplished in liberation, accomplished in the vision and understanding of that liberation. This is called the noble assembly: the four pairs, the eight kinds of individuals. This is the Realized One's noble assembly, most honored and most worthy, deserving of veneration and reverence — the unsurpassed field of merit in the world.
The "five accomplishments" named here — ethical conduct, stillness of mind, wisdom, liberation, and the vision and understanding of liberation — form another standard early Buddhist formula, describing the completed path from the outside in: conduct disciplining the body, concentration steadying the mind, wisdom seeing clearly, liberation as the result, and a final, reflective certainty that the liberation has actually occurred. "The four pairs, eight kinds of individuals" (四雙八輩) is the classical count of the noble sangha across the four stages of awakening — stream-enterer, once-returner, non-returner, and arahant — each stage counted twice, once for the person practicing toward it and once for the person who has fully attained it.
Calling this assembly "the unsurpassed field of merit in the world" completes the sūtra's three objects of faith — Buddha, Dharma, Sangha — in order, which is itself a small structural signal that the text is nearing its close.
6. Two Kinds of Sons
如是諸子當教父母行慈。諸比丘！有二子：所生子，所養子。是謂，比丘！有二子。是故，諸比丘當學所生子，口出法味。如是，諸比丘當作是學。」
In this way, every child should lead their parents to practice loving-kindness. Monks, there are two kinds of sons: the son one gave birth to, and the son one raised. These, monks, are the two kinds of sons. Therefore, monks, you should learn to be the son whose mouth brings forth the flavor of the teaching. This is how you should train."
The distinction between "the son one gave birth to" and "the son one raised" is easy to read past, but it is doing real work: being born to parents, and being fed and raised by them, describes something a child receives passively. The sūtra's final instruction is to become the other kind of son — one whose "mouth brings forth the flavor of the teaching," offering something back rather than only having been given to. The phrase "flavor of the teaching" (法味, a term that recurs throughout early Buddhist literature) treats the Dharma as something to be tasted and then shared, the way food is shared at a table — an apt image to close a sūtra that opened by describing a parent's literal feeding of a child.
7. Closing
爾時諸比丘聞佛所說，歡喜奉行。
At that time the monks, hearing what the Buddha had taught, rejoiced and carried it into practice.
The standard closing formula, identical in shape to the one that ends countless early discourses across both the Chinese and Pali collections — a small, final reminder of how tightly bound this short text is to the wider body of shared early Buddhist literature it belongs to, in every tradition that preserved it.
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Further Reading
- An Shigao's Chinese text · Taishō T684 — the source text of this page, at CBETA (Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association).
- AN 2.32–41 · The Peaceful Mind — this site's translation of the Pali chapter containing AN 2.33, the close parallel to this sūtra, translated by Bhikkhu Sujato (CC0, SuttaCentral).
- The Ullambana Sūtra — this site's other short filial-piety text, on the specific case of a parent already reborn in suffering.
Chinese sūtra source: An Shigao's translation (Taishō T684), public domain. English translation and reading guide written for Ru-Yi Meditation Center. See also this site's note on translation method.