Introduction

i.1The Great Rumble is a short Mahāyāna sūtra that details the benefits to be derived from the construction and worship of stūpas and statues of the buddhas. The sūtra begins in Śrāvastī where Ānanda is on an alms round and notices an immaculate palace. He wonders whether it would be more meritorious to offer such an enormous palace to the monastic community or to enshrine buddha relics within tiny stūpas and create miniature statues of the buddhas. He poses this question to the Buddha, who responds that the latter would be of greater merit due to the immeasurable qualities of the buddhas. The Buddha’s answer asserts the superiority of buddhas over stream enterers, once-returners, non-returners, and arhats‍—those who have attained the four results of the śrāvaka path. It also emphasizes the benefits to be gained generally from the creation and worship of stūpas.

i.2In his reply, the Buddha proposes scenarios in which greater and greater gifts to the saṅgha can be made, yet the answer remains the same‍—enshrining relics in stūpas or creating statues of the buddhas will always be more meritorious. The repetitiveness here is characteristic of the sūtra literature which has its origins in the oral tradition. When the sūtras were committed to writing, the South Asian scribes deliberately omitted repetitive material and marked elided sections with the phrase iti yāvad … iti peyālam, a scribal insertion indicating passages that have already been given in full previously in the text, and which are understood to be repeated in full each time the iti peyālam was inserted. This technique served as a means for conserving scribal resources such as palm leaves, ink, and other media. In the Tibetan translation, the elided section is marked with the first and last words of the passage, framed with the phrases ces/zhes bya nas … ces/zhes bya ba’i bar du, “from (phrase X) up to (phrase Y).” That convention has been followed in this English translation, where such passages have been marked with ellipses.

i.3The language of grand scales used throughout the sūtra serves to express the inexpressible qualities of the buddhas and to calculate the incalculable amount of merit gained from venerating them. This is made concrete when the Buddha tells the story of Ajātaśatru, who became the king of Magadha by murdering his father, the king Bimbisāra. He was also involved in creating a schism in the saṅgha and plotting to kill the Buddha with Devadatta, the Buddha’s cousin, who is depicted in Buddhist literature as envious of the Buddha and his teachings. Though Ajātaśatru later reformed to become a devout disciple of the Buddha, this sūtra notes that he was to be briefly reborn in the hells, since patricide is one of the five misdeeds of immediate retribution. Ajātaśatru would nevertheless be freed from this state, and he was prophesied by the Buddha to become a pratyekabuddha by the name of Vijayasena. Again, the sūtra implies that Ajātaśatru’s worshiping of the Buddha and his immeasurable qualities in the form of relics lightens his otherwise weighty negative karma.

i.4The title of the sūtra appears to be derived from a moment at the close of the discourse, when the ground shakes in six different ways as a testament to the power of the Buddha’s teaching. At that point Ānanda asks how the sūtra should be remembered, and the Buddha replies that it can be titled either The Drum of Amṛta or The Great Rumble, titles that seem to reflect the sound of the earth quaking.

i.5The Great Rumble survives only in Tibetan translation; there are no extant Sanskrit witnesses, nor was it translated into Chinese. The translation presented here is based on the version preserved in the Degé Kangyur, which was supplemented with reference to variant readings in the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and Stok Palace Kangyurs. The Great Rumble is listed in the Phangthangma and Denkarma catalogues, the two extant scriptural catalogs from the Imperial Period (629–841 ᴄᴇ). The Tibetan translation of the sūtra can thus be dated roughly to the early ninth century, the period when the Denkarma catalog was compiled. The colophon notes that the sūtra was initially translated by the Tibetan monk Gewa Pal (dge ba dpal), with the assistance of the Indian preceptor Viśuddhasiṃha, before then being finalized by the Indian preceptor Vidyākarasiṃha and the Tibetan monk and senior translator Devacandra. All four of these translators were active in the early ninth century.