Introduction

i.1The Prophecy of Kṣemavatī begins with the Buddha and his disciple, the bodhisattva Maitreya, walking through the city of Rājagṛha on their morning alms round. As they near King Bimbisāra’s palace, they are met by Queen Kṣemavatī, who is adorned with a dazzling display of royal jewelry. The Buddha asks the queen, in a seemingly playful way, for the name of the tree that produced the magnificent fruit that she is wearing. Kṣemavatī continues the analogy by describing her jewelry and her current station in life as the “fruit” borne by the “tree” of her past good deeds accumulated over lifetimes.

i.2This exchange emphasizes one of the main themes of the text: one’s current situation is the result of previous actions, so if we desire a good future we should persevere in meritorious behavior. This applies not just to ordinary happiness but to spiritual pursuits as well. While Kṣemavatī’s “fruit” might at first seem worldly, she firmly sets the “tree” of her own past and present actions within the framework of the bodhisattva path, with her aspiration to awakening and her practice of the six perfections. The fruit and tree analogy continues throughout the sūtra, with the Buddha describing his own station, that of complete awakening and all its excellent qualities, as also being the result of his past good deeds. His account of his own path reflects that of Kṣemavatī, similar to his even if much less advanced in time.

i.3The text concludes with Kṣemavatī declaring that she will dedicate all her future good deeds toward reaching buddhahood and thereby be of benefit to all beings. The Buddha responds to this prayer by prophesying the queen’s eventual awakening to buddhahood.

i.4Kṣemavatī is mentioned in at least one other sūtra in the Kangyur as one of Bimbisāra’s queens. She may well represent the same person as the Khemā who appears in the Pali literature as Bimbisāra’s consort, at first infatuated by her own beauty but later, on meeting the Buddha, becoming an arhat and bhikṣuṇī. Here, however, she is described as a bodhisattva who has already embarked on accumulating merit on the initial stage of her “natural career” (prakṛti­caryā) and has vowed to attain awakening on the subsequent stage of her “resolution” (praṇidhāna­caryā), as implied in 1.­10. In the present narrative she reinforces her previous vow and receives her “prophecy” (vyākaraṇa) of future buddhahood from the Buddha himself.

i.5Twice in this sūtra, Queen Kṣemavatī aspires to be reborn as a man so that she may continue to progress on her path to awakening. It may be jarring to modern readers to hear the queen lamenting her womanhood, but such attitudes are not uncommon in Mahāyāna sūtras, in some of which it seems to be assumed without question that not only buddhas but bodhisattvas, too, are male. This sūtra, in which the focus is on a bodhisattva who is a woman, can therefore be seen as belonging to a distinct but quite large genre of texts that counter such assumptions. The genre includes other Kangyur sūtras featuring women bodhisattvas who are also queens or princesses and who, like Kṣemavatī, receive their predictions of future awakening, such as The Sūtra of Aśokadattā’s Prophecy (Toh 76), The Questions of Vimalaprabhā (Toh 168), The Questions of the Girl Vimalaśraddhā (Toh 84), The Questions of Vimaladattā (Toh 77), and The Lion’s Roar of Śrīmālādevī (Toh 92), as well as those in which nonroyal laywomen are the main interlocutors, like The Questions of the Girl Sumati (Toh 74), The Questions of Gaṅgottara (Toh 75), The Questions of an Old Lady (Toh 171), The Miraculous Play of Mañjuśrī (Toh 96), The Sūtra of the Girl Candrottarā’s Prophecy (Toh 191), and, notably, The Prophecy Concerning Strīvivarta (Toh 190). In some of these sūtras gender is dismissed as irrelevant or merely notional, yet all these accounts‍—even those of Strīvivarta and Vimalaprabhā, the most advanced bodhisattvas in their abilities to manifest in different forms‍—culminate in the prediction that the female protagonist will ultimately become male, at least for the final stages of the path to buddhahood. So while this sūtra, like the others mentioned, imposes the traditional stance of male primacy, it is perhaps in countering texts that make no mention of women bodhisattvas at all that it is framed as an inspiration to women, and ends with many thousands of women developing the intent to reach buddhahood.

i.6While the text does not include a colophon that identifies its translators, The Prophecy of Kṣemavatī is listed in the earliest Tibetan textual catalog, the Denkarma, so we can say with certainty that it appeared in Tibet at some point during or before the early ninth century ᴄᴇ. Despite being among the main body of sūtras translated in the early period, The Prophecy of Kṣemavatī does not seem to have been the subject of any scholarly attention in Tibet. It was translated into Chinese (Taishō 573, Chamopo di shouji jing, 差摩婆帝授記經) in the year 525 ᴄᴇ by the Indian monk Bodhiruci, who translated some thirty-nine Buddhist texts in the early sixth century. The Prophecy of Kṣemavatī was translated into Mongolian and Korean and is included in the Buddhist canons in those languages. It was translated into French in 1866 by Henri Léon Feer as part of his collection of Kangyur excerpts, and an English translation by Peter Skilling was published in 2021.

i.7The English translation presented here was prepared based on the Degé Kangyur version of the text in consultation with the Stok Palace manuscript and the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma).