Introduction

i.1The Prophecy of the Girl Candrottarā takes place in the city of Vaiśālī, and its main protagonist is the young daughter of the wealthy Licchavī couple Vimalakīrti and his wife Vimalā. Although this appears to refer to the same Vimalakīrti who is the main protagonist of the well-known Great Vehicle scripture The Teaching of Vimalakīrti, no mention is made of Vimalakīrti at this time being a follower of the Buddha.

i.2As soon as the couple’s daughter is born, she appears to be about eight years old, and speaks eloquently in verse about her former lives. She is so magnificently beautiful and radiant that her light “far surpassed the radiance of the moon,” earning her the name Candrottarā (“Exceeding the Moon”). Men of all social statuses from around the city are besotted by the girl and obsessed with marrying her, and they pursue her father for favor. Some follow him around and lavish gifts on him, while others threaten him and plot her abduction. Her father is distraught, but the girl remains undaunted and promises to go out into the city after seven days in retreat to make her choice. On the sixth day, she takes the eight-branched purification vows, whereupon an extraordinary jeweled lotus with an emanation of a thus-gone one seated upon it miraculously appears in her hand. She speaks to this apparition, which informs her that he has been sent by the Buddha, the Lion of the Śākyas. She questions the emanation about this Buddha, and resolves to meet him. On the seventh day, she leaves the house as planned, and is mobbed by a crowd of lustful would-be suitors. She evades this boisterous crowd by rising into the air to the height of a palm tree, and from there, still holding the lotus with the thus-gone one seated upon it, she delivers a teaching on the futility of lust and desire. When the crowd has been pacified by this, she asks them to join her in going to meet the Buddha at Kūṭāgāraśālā in the Great Forest near Vaiśālī where he is staying.

i.3On the way there, they meet a group of elders who are walking to the city to collect alms. Śāriputra questions the girl, and the elders are impressed by the profundity of her answers and the confident eloquence with which she speaks, so they decide to accompany her back to Kūṭāgāraśālā. When she arrives in the presence of the Buddha himself, numerous bodhisattvas ask her further questions. Śāriputra then resumes his questioning, at which the girl extols the superiority of the complete awakening of a bodhisattva over the limited awakening of a hearer like him.

i.4The Buddha praises her answers, whereupon the thus-gone one seated on the girl’s lotus rises and dissolves into the Buddha’s navel. At this, the Buddha manifests a miraculous display in which innumerable similar jeweled lotuses, each with a thus-gone one seated upon it, spring from every pore of his body and fill the great trichiliocosm with the light of the Dharma. The girl is delighted by this, and throws her lotus toward the Blessed One as an offering with the aspiration that she too may become a teacher of the Dharma. Mid-air, the flower transforms into a huge pavilion of flowers that hovers over the Buddha’s head. Another lotus then appears in her hand, and she throws this too, with a further aspiration to teach the Dharma for the benefit of beings. It too transforms into a pavilion of flowers that hovers above the first. In the same way, further lotuses keep appearing in her hand, she keeps throwing them with further aspirations to teach the Dharma, and they keep transforming into pavilions of flowers that hover above the last, until the tenth flower, when she makes the aspiration to reach complete awakening. At this point, the stacked pavilions of flowers reach all the way up the brahmā heavens above, and great myriads of gods gather to bear witness.

i.5Just then, the Buddha gives one of his cosmically radiant smiles. When Ānanda asks what the smile means, the Buddha prophesies Candrottarā’s future lives and eventual complete awakening as a buddha. When she hears this prophecy, Candrottarā is overjoyed, and rises into the sky to the height of seven palm trees. There, she transforms her female form into that of a boy, who, when he descends, touches the Buddha’s feet and requests to go forth as a renunciant in the Buddha’s dispensation. After the child’s parents give their consent for this, the sūtra concludes with the boy’s verses of praise for the Blessed One.

i.6The Prophecy of the Girl Candrottarā is among a group of Great Vehicle sūtras in which daughters of powerful or wealthy laymen are presented as highly realized and eloquent beings who receive prophecies of future awakening from the Buddha. Several of these sūtras feature the daughters of kings. Both Aśokadattā’s Prophecy (Toh 76) and The Questions of Vimalaprabhā (Toh 168) center on daughters of King Ajātaśatru. The daughters of King Prasenajit are the main protagonists in The Questions of the Girl Vimalaśraddhā (Toh 84), The Questions of Vimaladattā (Toh 77), and The Lion’s Roar of Śrīmālādevī (Toh 92). A point made in many of these discourses, including this one, is that there is no distinction of gender in emptiness. Nevertheless, reflecting the monastic milieu of these Great Vehicle texts, the predictions in each case include the female protagonist transforming into a male form at some stage on the journey to complete awakening.

i.7There is no extant Sanskrit for the entirety of The Prophecy of the Girl Candrottarā, though a fragment of a Sanskrit manuscript dating from circa 500 ᴄᴇ does survive and is preserved as part of the Schøyen Collection. A verse from the text is also cited by Śāntideva (fl. eighth century ᴄᴇ) in his discourse on the folly of lust in the Śikṣāsamuccaya, which is extant in both Sanskrit and in Tibetan translation (Toh 3940). Śāntideva refers to the text as Candrottarā­dārikā­pari­pṛcchā (“The Girl Candrottarā’s Questions”), which appears to be an alternative title of the same text. The Sanskrit excerpts from both of these sources have been introduced, translated, and carefully compared with the Tibetan and Chinese in Braarvig and Harrison (2002). Based on the similarity in some respects between this sūtra and The Girl Sumati’s Questions (Toh 74), which was translated into Chinese as early as the third century ᴄᴇ, and also on the linguistic evidence of the Sanskrit fragments that are in regular classical Sanskrit rather than the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit of the earliest Great Vehicle sūtras, Braarvig and Harrison have tentatively suggested that the Candrottarā­dārikā­pari­pṛcchā in its present form reflects Great Vehicle Buddhism in its middle period, and belongs to a cluster of sūtras that appeared around the first half of the third century.

i.8The Chinese translation of the Candrottarā­dārikāvyākaraṇa/Candrottarā­dārikā­pari­pṛcchā was made in 591 ᴄᴇ by Jñānagupta (Ch. Shenajueduo), a prominent translator during the Sui dynasty, with the title Yueshangnü jing (Taishō 480). It is closely parallel to the later Tibetan translation, though there are divergences in detail and in the idioms of expression. The sūtra was translated into Korean as Wol sang nyeo gyeong (K415). Sections of the Chinese version have been translated into English by Diana Paul in her work Women in Buddhism (1985), and a full English translation from the Chinese has been published by Rolf Giebel (2018).

i.9The colophon to the Tibetan translation, as found in the various Kangyur recensions, does not explicitly name a translator but says that it was edited and finalized by Jinamitra and Yeshe Dé, perhaps indicating that these translators revised an earlier translation. It is listed in both the Phangthangma and Denkarma imperial-era catalogs of translated texts compiled in the early ninth century. Butön Rinchen Drup, in his fourteenth century History of Buddhism, attributes the translation directly to Yeshé Dé.

i.10This English translation is based on the Tibetan as found in the Degé Kangyur, in consultation with the variant readings listed in the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace Kangyur. Where variant readings other than the Degé have been preferred, this has been recorded in the notes. To our knowledge, this is the first full English translation of the sūtra from Tibetan.