Sūtra of the Fundamental Vows of the Medicine Buddha — Translation Notes

These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Sūtra of the Fundamental Vows of Bhaiṣajyaguru, the Lapis-Lazuli-Radiance Tathāgata (藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經, Yaoshi Jing), Taishō T0450, translated into Chinese by Xuanzang (玄奘) in 650 CE. They exist so that vocabulary stays consistent across all five parts, and so that terminology without precedent elsewhere on this site is recorded for any later text to inherit rather than re-coin.

The text, and its translation history

This sūtra survives in Chinese in four extant translations, out of at least five made: Huijian’s translation of 457 CE (T0449, Sūtra of the Twelve Divine Generals’ Vows); a version folded into the larger Sūtra of the Seven Buddhas’ Fundamental Vows compiled by Dharmagupta in 615 CE (T0451); Xuanzang’s own translation of 650 CE, made at the Hongfu Monastery in Chang’an four years after his return from India (T0450, the base text of this collection); and Yijing’s later translation of 707 CE, which expands the text considerably by adding all seven buddhas named in the Dharmagupta compilation. An even earlier translation by Bo Shilizhu in the 4th century is recorded in catalogues but no longer survives. Xuanzang’s version is the shortest and plainest of the four extant translations, and it is this version — rather than Yijing’s longer, later expansion — that has been the version most widely chanted and studied in East Asia since the Tang dynasty.

The base text runs to roughly 6,000 Chinese characters — considerably shorter than early estimates suggested before this translation began, and closer in scale to the Heart Sūtra or the Amitābha Sūtra than to a mid-length work like the Sūtra of Kṣitigarbha’s Fundamental Vows. It is translated here across five parts, split by content rather than by even character count (see Structure below).

Reading-note sourcing

Per this site’s commentator-vetting convention, reading notes are grounded in a named commentator rather than presented as unattributed analysis. Taehyeon (太賢, fl. 8th century) was a monk of the Korean kingdom of Silla, traditionally credited with over fifty works spanning Yogācāra, Madhyamaka, Vinaya, and Pure Land literature, of which roughly a dozen survive — among the most prolific commentators East Asian Buddhism produced. His commentary on this sūtra, the Bonwon Yaksa-gyeong Gojeok (本願藥師經古迹, “Investigating the Traces of the Sūtra of the Fundamental Vows,” T1770), runs to two fascicles and is catalogued among the Taishō’s canonical commentarial literature (經疏部) rather than among works of doubtful authorship. It opens with a classical three-part exegesis — title, doctrinal classification, text — and proceeds clause by clause through Xuanzang’s sūtra, explicitly naming T0450 as the version it comments on.

Two other commentaries on this sūtra exist in the Taishō but were deliberately not used here: T2766 and T2767, both titled Yaoshi Jing Shu, are catalogued among works of doubtful or unrecorded authorship (疑似部) — T2766’s author field is blank in the canon itself — and so do not meet this site’s standard for a named, attributable commentator. A modern vernacular commentary, the Yaoshi Liuli Guang Rulai Benyuan Gongde Jing Jiangji (藥師琉璃光如來本願功德經講記, Xuzangjing Y0004), belonging to the Taixu-lineage tradition of modern lecture-transcripts, was consulted for background only; it is not the source of any reading note in this collection and is cited separately wherever referenced, since it belongs to a different genre — a modern spoken commentary — than Taehyeon’s classical exegesis.

Structure

Part	Base text covers	Content
1	Opening assembly through the twelve vows	The assembly at Vaiśālī, Mañjuśrī’s request, the naming of Bhaiṣajyaguru’s eastern pure land, and his twelve great vows
2	The pure land through the curse-workers	Pure Lapis Lazuli and its two attendant bodhisattvas, and four case studies: the miser, the precept-breaker, the envious slanderer, the curse-worker
3	The undecided vow through the worship instructions	A vow to Sukhāvatī not yet settled, Mañjuśrī’s own vow to spread this teaching, and the Buddha’s detailed instructions for worship
4	Ānanda’s doubt through the national-disaster rite	Ānanda’s doubt and the Buddha’s answer, the bodhisattva Salvation’s account of consciousness before King Yama, and the continuing-life lamp and banner
5	The nine untimely deaths through the close	The nine kinds of untimely death, the vow of the twelve yakṣa generals, and the sūtra’s own three names

This five-part split follows the sūtra’s own content turns rather than an even character count or Taehyeon’s own two-fascicle division (his fascicle break falls in the middle of this collection’s Part 3, between the four-assemblies passage and Mañjuśrī’s vow) — the text’s turns of subject matter did not line up evenly with either measure, and were not forced to.

Core terminology

Chinese	English	Notes
藥師琉璃光如來	Bhaiṣajyaguru, Vaiḍūryaprabha	Kept as the standard Sanskrit reconstruction, in two parts joined by Taehyeon’s own gloss: “able to draw out every suffering earns the title Medicine (藥師, Bhaiṣajyaguru); reaching everywhere without exception earns the title Lapis Lazuli Light (琉璃光, Vaiḍūryaprabha).” Given in full at first mention in each section, abbreviated to “that Tathāgata” or “the Buddha” in immediate context to avoid repetition the Chinese itself does not always require.
薄伽梵	Bhagavān	Transliterated rather than translated, matching Xuanzang’s own consistent choice throughout this sūtra to render Sanskrit Bhagavān as 薄伽梵 in narration, reserving 世尊 (“World-Honored One”) for vocative address — a distinction this translation preserves by using two different English terms rather than collapsing both into one, per Taehyeon’s own gloss of the term’s six meanings (sovereign, blazing, magnificent, renowned, auspicious, honored) in Part 1’s reading note.
世尊	World-Honored One	Standard rendering, kept distinct from Bhagavān above.
曼殊室利	Mañjuśrī	Kept as the standard Sanskritization rather than translated, matching this site’s convention for a bodhisattva’s proper name once a settled Sanskrit form exists.
廣嚴城	Vaiśālī	Standard identification per Taehyeon’s own gloss (“Vaiśālī, meaning fullness of every virtue”), matching this site’s other sūtra pages set at this city.
救脫	Salvation (bodhisattva)	Translated rather than transliterated, since this name is a descriptive epithet (“rescue and liberate”) rather than an attested proper Sanskrit name with an existing scholarly convention, unlike Mañjuśrī or Avalokiteśvara. Kept as a proper noun, capitalized, throughout Parts 4 and 5.
琰魔 / 琰魔法王	Yama / King Yama	Transliterated as the standard Sanskrit deity-name; “the dharma-king” used as an epithet per Taehyeon’s own gloss that this ghost-realm figure is nonetheless addressed with a king’s honorific, tied to his etymological gloss of 琰魔 as “quieting rest.”
俱生神	the spirit born together [with a being] / the co-arisen spirit	A literal rendering kept consistent with Taehyeon’s own citation of the Pure Land Samādhi Sūtra’s gloss — “shares one’s birth and one’s name, a single spirit born together” — describing an inseparable witness to a being’s own past conduct, distinct from any external judge.
藥叉	yakṣa	Kept as the standard Sanskrit loanword rather than translated, matching this site’s general convention for this class of being; “yakṣa general” (藥叉大將) used specifically for the twelve named generals of Part 5.
續命神幡	the continuing-life banner	A literal rendering, kept as a fixed term across Parts 3–5 wherever this specific ritual object recurs.
灌頂王	the anointed king	Refers to a kṣatriya ruler whose coronation involved consecration with water gathered from the four great seas, per Taehyeon’s own gloss in Part 4’s reading note; kept literal rather than glossed as simply “king” to preserve the specific ritual detail the term names.
像法轉時	the age of the semblance Dharma	Kept literal per this sūtra’s own threefold division of True, Semblance, and Final Dharma (正法 / 像法 / 末法), explained at length in Part 1’s reading note via the Mahāsaṃnipāta Sūtra’s six kinds of steadfastness.
九橫死	the nine kinds of untimely death	Kept as an enumerated set-phrase per the sūtra’s own numbered list in Part 5, rather than broken into nine separately-named categories in running prose.

A note on the twelve yakṣa generals’ names

The twelve generals named in Part 5 — Kumbhīra, Vajra, Mihira, Andira, Anila, Śaṇḍila, Indra, Pajra, Mahoraga, Cindāla, Catura, and Vikarāla — are given here in their conventional scholarly Sanskrit reconstructions. No independent Sanskrit source for this sūtra survives, so these forms are modern reconstructions from Xuanzang’s own Chinese transliteration rather than attested Sanskrit names in their own right; readers will find minor variant spellings in different secondary sources (particularly for the fourth, sixth, and tenth names). This collection follows one internally consistent set throughout rather than mixing conventions.

A note on this sūtra’s treatment of gender

The eighth of the twelve vows in Part 1, and the closing lines of the four-assemblies passage in Part 3, both offer transformation from a woman’s body into a man’s as a benefit devout women are presumed to want, and the vow’s own language — describing womanhood itself via “the hundred afflictions of being a woman” — treats female embodiment as a hardship this buddha’s power specifically relieves, rather than a neutral fact of rebirth. This collection’s reading notes do not editorialize on this point at length, following this site’s general convention of flagging such assumptions where they occur rather than passing over them in silence; a reader coming to this sūtra after the site’s Lotus Sūtra or Vimalakīrti pages, both of which stage direct challenges to exactly this assumption, may find the contrast instructive.

Several renderings coined here — “the co-arisen spirit” for 俱生神, “the continuing-life banner” for 續命神幡, and the translated (rather than transliterated) bodhisattva name “Salvation” for 救脫 — have no prior site precedent and were decided with an eye toward reuse should this site later take up Yijing’s longer Seven Buddhas translation (T0451) of this same textual tradition, or other Yama-court literature such as the Sūtra of the Ten Kings. Future translators working on such texts should check this glossary before coining fresh renderings for the same terms.