Sutra in Forty-two Chapters
四十二章經 (Sishi'er Zhang Jing)
Buddhist practice can be distilled into a short series of plain maxims on desire, impermanence, and the monastic life, presented in language borrowed from Chinese moral vocabulary, that a Chinese reader with no prior Buddhist training can absorb directly.
- traditional origin legend of the first Buddhist translation into China
- modern scholarship favors a later composite digest
- aphoristic maxims on desire and impermanence
- founding text associated with White Horse Temple
Traditionally celebrated as the first Buddhist text translated into Chinese, supposedly brought back by two Central Asian monks, Kasyapa Matanga and Dharmaratna, whom Emperor Ming of Han is said to have summoned to Luoyang after a dream, founding White Horse Temple to house them in AD 67. Modern textual scholarship is skeptical of this tidy origin story, noting the text reads less like a single translated sutra than a later digest of Buddhist maxims assembled in China, in places matching phrasing from other, more securely dated translations, and probably reaching its current form gradually between the 2nd and 4th centuries AD. Whatever its real origin, its short, aphoristic chapters on desire, impermanence, and monastic discipline made it a durable, accessible entry point to Buddhist teaching for centuries of Chinese readers.
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