The Rebirth Treatise — Translation Notes
These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of Vasubandhu’s Rebirth Treatise (無量壽經優波提舍願生偈, formally Wuliangshou Jing Youpotishe), Taishō T1524, translated into Chinese by Bodhiruci in the early 6th century. They exist so that vocabulary stays consistent across all seven 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 place in the canon
Unlike the Awakening of Faith or the Sūtra of Kṣitigarbha’s Fundamental Vows, whose authorship and Indic origins are genuinely debated on this site’s other pages, this treatise’s authorship carries no serious modern dispute — Vasubandhu’s authorship and Bodhiruci’s translation are both well attested. Its significance instead lies in its canonical role: it is the “one treatise” (一論) that completes the traditional “five sūtras and one treatise” (五經一論) of the Pure Land canon, alongside the Amitābha Sūtra, the Immeasurable Life Sūtra, the Contemplation Sūtra, and the two texts Yinguang later added — Mahāsthāmaprāpta’s Chapter and the Vows of Samantabhadra — all five of which are already translated on this site.
The base text runs to 3,110 Chinese characters: a twenty-four-stanza verse (願生偈), followed by a prose commentary written by Vasubandhu himself to explain it, translated across seven parts split at the text’s own structural seams — the verse as Part 1, then the prose commentary’s own ten-part outline condensed into six further parts around its natural groupings.
Reading-note sourcing
Per this site’s commentator-vetting convention, reading notes are grounded in a named commentator rather than presented as unattributed analysis. Tanluan (曇鸞, 476–542?) was a monk of the Northern Wei whose two-fascicle commentary, the Wangsheng Lun Zhu (往生論註, “Commentary on the Rebirth Treatise,” T1819), is the founding work of systematic Chinese Pure Land doctrine — it is Tanluan who first develops, from a citation of Nāgārjuna’s Daśabhūmika-vibhāṣā at the very head of his commentary, the “hard path” / “easy path” and “self-power” / “other-power” framework already met on this site’s Ten Doubts pages. The particular manuscript this translation draws on was personally annotated by Shinran, founder of Japan’s Jōdo Shinshū school, in 1256, at eighty-four years old — see Part 1 for the full account.
Structure
| Part | Base text covers | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | The verse of aspiration (願生偈), all 24 stanzas | ~900 characters |
| 2 | The five gates of mindfulness, named (五念門) | ~300 characters |
| 3 | The land’s seventeen adornments (國土十七種莊嚴) | ~950 characters |
| 4 | The Buddha’s eight adornments (佛八種莊嚴) | ~230 characters |
| 5 | The bodhisattvas’ four adornments (菩薩四種莊嚴) | ~280 characters |
| 6 | The one Dharma-phrase; the three obstructions and three accordances with bodhi (一法句・障∕順菩提門) | ~450 characters |
| 7 | The five approach-gates; closing claim of swiftness (五種門・速得成就) | ~350 characters |
Total: 3,110 characters, verified character-for-character against the base text with no omission or duplication. This split follows the treatise’s own two-part division (a “general statement,” the verse, and an “explanation of meaning,” the prose) and, within the prose, Tanluan’s own ten-part outline — condensed into six pages around natural groupings rather than reproducing all ten of Tanluan’s own divisions as separate pages, since several of his ten sections (such as “the correspondence of name and meaning”) are only a sentence or two of base text each.
Core terminology
| Chinese | English | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 優婆提舍 | upadeśa | Kept transliterated in the formal title, per Tanluan’s own explicit reasoning: this Sanskrit genre-term (a scriptural commentary a disciple composes in accord with the Buddha’s own teaching) has no precise Chinese equivalent, and “loosely translating it as ‘treatise’ captures only one corner of it.” |
| 無礙光如來 | the Tathāgata of Unobstructed Light | One of Amitābha’s own names, used in the verse itself; kept literal (rather than substituted with “Amitābha”) to preserve the treatise’s own opening image of a light nothing can block. |
| 五念門 | the five gates of mindfulness | Worship, praise, aspiration, contemplation, and dedication — kept as a fixed, numbered set throughout, matching this site’s convention for enumerated practice-lists (cf. the sixteen contemplations on the Contemplation Sūtra page). |
| 莊嚴 | adornment | Kept literal rather than translated as “glory,” “splendor,” or “magnificence” — the treatise’s own analysis treats each of the twenty-nine adornments (十七 + 八 + 四) as a specific, causally produced feature traceable to its own line of verse, not a vague honorific. |
| 自力 / 他力 | self-power / other-power | Kept as a literal pairing, matching the rendering already established on this site’s Ten Doubts pages — Tanluan’s own use of this pair, in the very first lines of his commentary, predates and likely shaped the Ten Doubts treatise’s own use of the same terms. |
| 清淨句 / 真實智慧無為法身 | the phrase of purity / true and real wisdom, the uncreated Dharma-body | Kept as a fixed technical phrase throughout Part 6 — the treatise’s own single-sentence definition into which all twenty-nine adornments are said to fold. |
| 往相 / 還相 | the going aspect / the returning aspect | Tanluan’s own division of the fifth gate, dedication, introduced in Part 2’s reading note — kept as a matched pair, since later Japanese Pure Land doctrine (Shinran’s in particular) builds directly on treating these as two aspects of one act rather than two separate acts. |
| 遊戲 | play / playful ease | Kept literal for 園林遊戲地門 (“the gate of the garden grove, the ground of playful ease”) rather than softened to “activity” or “engagement” — Tanluan glosses the term in two specific senses (effortlessness, and the ultimate emptiness of any real subject or object being saved), both of which depend on the reader recognizing the word’s ordinary, non-technical meaning first. |
A note on this treatise’s relationship to Ten Doubts
Readers who have worked through this site’s Ten Doubts About the Pure Land collection will recognize several arguments here as their likely source or close parallel, composed roughly a century to a century and a half earlier: Tanluan’s own hard-path/easy-path framework (Part 1), his defense of śrāvakas being present in the Pure Land without the land itself producing their “seed” (Part 3, closely paralleling Ten Doubts’ ninth doubt), and — most directly — the three obstructions to and three accordances with the gate of bodhi (Part 6), which Ten Doubts quotes from this very treatise nearly verbatim in its own tenth and final doubt. Where an argument in this collection’s reading notes closely tracks one already published on the Ten Doubts pages, the relevant note says so explicitly rather than presenting the parallel as a fresh discovery.
A note for future Pure Land and Tanluan-related texts
Several renderings coined here — “the phrase of purity” for 清淨句, “the going aspect / the returning aspect” for 往相/還相, and “adornment” kept literal throughout for 莊嚴 — have no prior site precedent and were decided with an eye toward reuse should this site later take up further material from Tanluan’s own corpus (his Lüelun Anle Jingtu Yi, 略論安樂淨土義, remains untranslated here) or the broader circle of texts Hōnen and Shinran drew on in Japan. Future translators working on such texts should check this glossary before coining fresh renderings for the same terms.