The Medicine Buddha's Fundamental Vows.
Twelve vows made by a bodhisattva long before he held the name Bhaiṣajyaguru at all — vows aimed not at abstract enlightenment but at exact, ordinary suffering: illness with no physician, poverty with no clothing, a body born incomplete, a mind bound by wrong view. This sūtra is the primary scriptural source for the Medicine Buddha's cult across East Asia, translated here in full across five parts, with reading notes drawn throughout from Taehyeon's 8th-century Silla commentary — one of the only two commentaries on this text the Taishō canon recognizes as authored by a named, attributable scholar.
How to read this collection
This is a short sūtra — roughly 6,000 Chinese characters in Xuanzang's 650 CE translation, the shortest and plainest of the four Chinese versions this text has received across its long history, and the one most widely chanted and studied in East Asia since the Tang dynasty. It reads across five parts, split at the sūtra's own turns of content — the naming of the buddha and his twelve vows, the pure land and its first case studies in what hearing his name accomplishes, a vow to Sukhāvatī left undecided and instructions for worship, Ānanda's doubt and a bodhisattva's account of consciousness before King Yama, and a closing vow from twelve yakṣa generals — rather than at even intervals.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text, matched against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Taehyeon's own commentary — one of only two commentaries on this sūtra the Taishō catalogues among works of confirmed, attributable authorship, rather than among the doubtful-authorship texts this site generally avoids. Where his own remarks run thin, as in the closing scene of the twelve generals, these notes say so plainly rather than manufacturing depth he did not supply.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, verified against the base text for full coverage.
- Reading notes — "after Taehyeon" throughout, drawn from his two-fascicle commentary on this sūtra.
- Honest flags where the sūtra's own vow — freedom from ever again taking a woman's body — treats female embodiment as a hardship rather than a neutral fact of rebirth.
- A note on the real textual variation this sūtra shows across its own Chinese translation history, including the differing numbers different versions give for the bodhisattva precepts.
The Sūtra's Own Structure
Taehyeon divides the sūtra into three parts: an opening assembly, a long central section of question and answer, and a closing scene of rejoicing. Within the central section, he tracks five further movements — Mañjuśrī's request answered, the twelve vows and their fruit, five case studies in what a mere name accomplishes, a second movement encouraging beings toward active worship, and the yakṣa generals' own vow of gratitude — which this collection's five parts follow closely, if not fascicle for fascicle.
Read by Part
All five parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Taehyeon.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all five parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site's Pure Land 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.