Introduction

i.1The Sūtra on the Limits of Life contains content and themes that predate the advent of Mahāyāna Buddhism, and it has therefore been regarded by Tibetan tradition as a sūtra of the “Lesser Vehicle” (Hīnayāna). This can also be gleaned from the opening verses of its Tibetan translation, which pay homage to the Three Jewels instead of all buddhas and bodhisattvas, as well as from the introductory scene of the sūtra, in which the Buddha is not, as is usual in the sūtras of the Mahāyāna, surrounded by a large number of bodhisattvas. In this sūtra, the Buddha, who is staying in Prince Jeta’s grove in Śrāvastī, addresses the monks directly and teaches in detail about the lifespans of the beings inhabiting the different realms of existence of the Buddhist cosmos.

i.2According to ancient Indian cosmology, since beginningless time the world has been inhabited not only by humans and animals but by a vast array of different kinds of beings. Moreover, according to the Abhidharma, the Buddhist cosmos is composed of three different realms that form three hierarchical cosmological levels: the desire realm, the form realm, and the formless realm. Each of these three realms contains several sublevels inhabited by particular classes of beings. When conceptualized as manifestations of different states of consciousness, the three realms may be called spheres.

i.3In the Buddhist understanding of karmic cause and effect, rebirth in one of the different realms is the karmic result of one’s former actions. Thus the ten unwholesome courses of action lead to rebirth in the three unfortunate rebirth-destinies: the realms of animals, pretas, and hell beings. Their opposites, the ten wholesome courses of action, lead to rebirth in the fortunate rebirth-destinies: the human realm and the six heavens of the desire realm.

i.4Mastery of the stages of meditative absorption leads to rebirth on the different levels of the form realm and the formless realm. In this regard, the karmic result of mastering the first meditative absorption is rebirth in one of the three Brahmā realms. The karmic result of mastering the second meditative absorption is rebirth in the realms of the devas whose names contain the word Radiance. The karmic result of mastering the third meditative absorption is rebirth in the realms of the devas whose names contain the word Virtue. Mastering the fourth meditative absorption leads to rebirth among the devas of the Pure Abodes.

i.5The Pure Abodes are subdivided into two levels, and this is where the accounts of different early Buddhist schools seem to differ most. According to Theravāda sources, there are the levels of the Pure Abodes proper, with the addition of the Heaven of the Insentient Beings and the Heaven of Great Reward, respectively. These last two have their own karmic cause, namely, the attainment of a meditative absorption called the attainment of the meditative state without consciousness , an ordinary attainment of the fourth meditative absorption that can be realized by meditators who are not noble ones. In the Pure Abodes proper, on the other hand, only non-returners can be born, and from there they attain nirvāṇa. The account of the (Mūla-)Sarvāstivāda school seems to have two additional heavens beyond the Heaven of Perfect Virtue, which are absent from the Theravāda sources, namely, the Cloudless Heaven and the Heaven Born from Merit. According to the Mahāvyutpatti, the Cloudless Heaven and the Heaven Born from Merit are the karmic result of attaining the fourth meditative absorption. According to the Theravāda account, however, the fourth meditative absorption (ordinary and non-ordinary) is associated only with the sublevels above the Heaven of Great Reward. The Sūtra on the Limits of Life mentions these two additional heavens but does not specify whether they are the karmic result of accomplishing the third or the fourth stage of meditative absorption.

i.6In Buddhist cosmology, the axis mundi of the terrestrial world, which is thought to be flat, is Mount Meru. It is surrounded by the four continents and is also the axis around which rotate the sun, moon, and stars. The order of the realms of existence is vertical, with the higher realms located above Mount Meru and the hells beneath the earth. The Sūtra on the Limits of Life mentions the four continents as the places where humans live. Moreover, the world system just outlined, which is experienced differently by the different sentient beings, is not the only world. In fact, the universe consists of numerous similar worlds or world systems just like our own. It is, however, possible for any being‍—except for the beings in the unfortunate destinies, who have invariably painful sense experiences‍—to mentally experience all the states of the fortunate and unfortunate rebirth-destinies. The mental states of the devas may be experienced by humans during advanced states of meditative absorption. Moreover, rebirth-destinies are not static or permanent. Every living being has the potential to perform wholesome actions and thus accrue merit that eventually leads to rebirth in a higher realm. Although the lifespans in some of the hells seem so long as to be virtually never-ending, Buddhism does not have the notion of eternal damnation.

i.7The Sūtra on the Limits of Life does not provide us with a detailed account of the structure and the functioning of the universe. It rather presupposes the reader’s familiarity with such knowledge. The text’s main point, as its title indicates, is to present its audience with detailed information about the duration of life of the different forms of existence in the Buddhist universe. The Sūtra on the Limits of Life thus lists the five rebirth-destinies (those of the hell beings, pretas, animals, humans, and devas) together with their subcategories (the four continents inhabited by humans, the eight hot and the eight cold hells, and the different heavens of the form realm and the formless realm) and carves out in a systematic way the relationship between the lifespans in the heavens and the hells.

i.8Although the presentation of the subject matter appears very scholastic, the sūtra’s message is renunciation. Actions of body, speech, and mind bind beings to saṃsāra and lead to fortunate or unfortunate rebirth-destinies for unimaginably long periods of time. Only liberation and the veneration of objects that are worthy of veneration, e.g., the Buddha and his Saṅgha, can end this continuous cycle of death and rebirth. In the concluding section of the sūtra, the Buddha says, “I do not speak with even the slightest praise of the manifestation of existence, however small it may be, however short in duration. Why is that? Because the manifestation of existence is suffering.” Existence here refers to the five destinies, that is, all the possible kinds and places of rebirth that the sūtra portrays, from the hell Incessant Torture to the Sphere of Neither Perception nor Non-perception, which is the peak‍—the highest possible form‍—of existence.

i.9For the convenience of the reader, we present in the appendix a list of the different states of existence in the order in which they appear in the sūtra, together with their lifespans and their arithmetic relationship to the human lifespan (see Appendix).

i.10In the 1989 supplement (no. 2) of the Sanskrit-Wörterbuch der buddhistischen Texte aus den Turfan-Funden (“Sanskrit Dictionary of the Buddhist Texts from the Turfan Expeditions”), the Japanese scholar Hisashi Matsumura presented an edition of the Sanskrit text of the Āyuḥparyanta­sūtra together with a critical edition of the Tibetan translation based on five editions (the Narthang, Degé, Choné, Lhasa, and Kangxi Kangyurs). Matsumura prepared his Sanskrit edition on the basis of Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra’s (1959–74) facsimile edition of a manuscript from Gilgit in present-day northern Pakistan. Gilgit was an important transit zone for traveling Buddhist monks from India, Iran, and China and an important connector between South Asia and the Central Asian Silk Roads. During the reign of the Palola Ṣāhis (c. 585–720 ᴄᴇ), who were patrons of Buddhism, Gilgit was a flourishing Buddhist kingdom, and there is evidence that Buddhism was alive in Gilgit until at least the tenth century, an estimate that sits well with the date of the single Chinese translation. The Jiaoliang shouming jing 較量壽命經 was translated in 984 ᴄᴇ by Tianxi Zai, a Kashmiri Buddhist monk who was active as a translator in China from 980–1000 ᴄᴇ; however, Matsumara states that the Chinese translation appears to be based on a different version of the sūtra. It is still possible that Tianxi Zai brought a version of the sūtra with him to China. In any case, the editors of the Gilgit manuscript had given it the mistaken title Kālasūtra, which is the name of one of the hells mentioned in the sūtra itself. Concerning its style, the sūtra’s syntax is very repetitive, except for the fifty-two verses that make up a considerable part of the text. Some of these verses are also found in the celebrated Buddhist verse collections, the Udānavarga and the Dharmapada.

i.11Oskar von Hinüber, based on an earlier observation by Gregory Schopen, was able to identify this text with the Tibetan translation of The Sūtra on the Limits of Life. While the order of the folios in Vira and Chandra’s edition of the Gilgit manuscripts were in disarray, Matsumura restored the order of the folios and the missing or destroyed parts of the Sanskrit text with the help of its Tibetan and Chinese translations, finding the Sanskrit to be more than ninety percent complete. Matsumura furthermore found there to be “the highest degree of congruency” between the Sanskrit text and the Tibetan translation. However, in the process of translating the work from both the Sanskrit and the Tibetan, we found occasional discrepancies between the Tibetan translation and the edited Sanskrit text to be more significant than Matsumura suggests.

i.12As for the Tibetan translation, the translators for this particular text are listed in the Tibetan colophon as the Indian preceptor Viśuddhasiṃha and the Tibetan monk Gewé Pal. Their translation was subsequently revised and finalized by the Indian preceptor Vidyākarasiṃha and the chief editor-translator, Bandé Paltsek. All these contributors flourished during the late eighth and early ninth centuries, and so the Tibetan translation, which we have rendered into English here, would have been completed during the early translation period, a dating also attested by the text’s inclusion in the early-ninth-century Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) inventory of translations into Tibetan. We are aware of only one Tibetan commentary on The Sūtra on the Limits of Life, a rather late Tibetan commentary by Choné Lama Drakpa Shedrup (co ne bla ma grags pa bshad sgrub, 1675–1748).

i.13The English translation presented here is based on the Tibetan text of the Degé Kangyur. In several cases, however, we have followed the Sanskrit instead of the Tibetan, recording these choices and their rationale in the notes. For example, we adopted the Sanskrit readings of the numerals of the lifespans of the different classes of beings where they seemed to represent the more correct numbers and were furthermore corroborated by other sources. Also, where the Sanskrit text differed significantly from the Tibetan, we have recorded the Sanskrit reading in the notes.