Introduction

i.1The sūtra Pure Sustenance of Food begins with Maudgalyāyana asking the Buddha about some unusual beings he saw while on an alms round. After describing their bizarre features, such as their enormous stomachs and needle-thin throats, the Buddha informs Maudgalyāyana that these beings are, in fact, starving spirits. The Buddha gives a discourse explaining how these starving spirits were once humans but attained this dismal state by committing misdeeds related to food. He uses their example as an opportunity to describe the misdeeds and meritorious actions related to food, along with their results. The first half of the discourse concerns the saṅgha and monastic rules surrounding food‍—eating only a single meal a day, how to participate in meals, how to treat leftovers, and the way to receive offerings‍—that are fundamental to the Vinaya, the Buddhist monastic code. The second half of the discourse concerns food hygiene and is specifically directed to the laypeople who handle the saṅgha’s food. To illustrate these strictures around food for both the monastic and lay audiences, the Buddha describes the workings of karma with vivid, sometimes graphic, imagery. These descriptions include positive results, such as being blessed and protected by the entire pantheon of gods, as well as negative results, such as being reborn as starving spirits who consume the contents of toilets.

i.2The provenance of Pure Sustenance of Food is far from certain. While the notions of purity and pollution presented in the sūtra would appear to be rooted in an Indic worldview, and the narrative connection between Maudgalyāyana and starving spirits is common in Indic Buddhist literature, the sūtra is bereft of the expected Sanskrit title and lacks the traditional colophon naming its Indian and Tibetan translators. Thus, there is the possibility that this sūtra is a “gray text,” one that is neither purely Indic in origin nor fully Tibetan apocrypha. Rather than a translation in the strict sense of the term, it may have been derived from Indic material in a Tibetan setting. The sūtra is not listed in the Denkarma (Tib. ldan/lhan dkar ma) or the Phangthangma (Tib. ’phang thang ma) catalogs, the two surviving indexes from the Imperial Period (629–841 ᴄᴇ). This dearth of information makes it impossible to date the translation of Pure Sustenance of Food or otherwise determine its status in the Tibetan canon. There is no known Sanskrit witness of the sūtra, nor does there appear to be a Chinese translation.

i.3This English translation was produced based on the edition preserved in the Degé Kangyur, which was informed by references to the Comparative Edition Kangyur (Tib. dpe bsdur ma) and the version of the translation in the Stok Palace Kangyur. Pure Sustenance of Food has not previously been translated into any Western languages, nor has it received any scholarly treatment.