Introduction

i.1Questions Regarding Death and Transmigration is a short sūtra set in Kapilavastu that explains Buddhist views on death via a dialogue between the Buddha and his father, King Śuddhodana. King Śuddhodana observes the brahmanical funeral rites for a fellow member of the Śākya clan called Nandaja. Wondering what benefit will be derived from the various rituals and offerings that are being performed for the deceased by the family, King Śuddhodana asks the Buddha a number of pertinent questions: (1) Are beings consistently reborn as their own kind, with humans being reborn as humans, and so on? (2) Do beings become utterly nonexistent after death? (3) Do beings, after their death, accompany their dead ancestors and relatives in a “world of Death”? (4) Is wealth and poverty consistent from life to life, with the wealthy continuing to be wealthy and the poor to be poor? (5) Is enjoyment of clothes, mounts, and so on consistent from life to life, with people continuing to have the same clothes, horses, and so forth? (6) Can one dedicate food and other offerings to the deceased and thus assure their perpetual welfare and nourishment? (7) Do the dead show themselves to their relatives just as they were when alive?

i.2To each of these seven questions, the Buddha’s answer is always “no.” Several beliefs that must have been current in India at the time are thus taken up and criticized, beginning with simple skepticism that anything can survive after death at all. The main position being examined, however, seems to be that the deceased survive in an afterlife which is essentially a continuation of the present one, in the company of the same friends, relatives, ancestors, and possessions. The deceased are sustained by the offerings dedicated to them by their living relatives; they remain forever in the “world of Death,” not taking rebirth in future incarnations.

i.3This is a broadly Vedic eschatology, a conception of death and the afterlife that goes well back to the first millennium ʙᴄᴇ, in the Ṛgveda, especially in the Atharvaveda, as well as in the Brāhmaṇas. When the sūtra says that the deceased are “befriended by their ancestors” after death, this is no doubt a reference to the Vedic idea that the dead transition to the realm of their ancestors, or their “fathers” (Skt. pitṛ). The dead person also comes to be in the presence of a lineage of ancestors all the way back to an “original ancestor” (Tib. mes po dang po), which seems to be an allusion to the idea of the pitṛ as including first ancestors, the founders of the human race.

i.4The brahmanical conception is that the family should present piṇḍa‍—balls of cooked rice typically mixed with sesame seeds, milk, butter, and honey‍—and other offerings to assure the transition of the newly dead spirit (preta) from a type of limbo to the more secure status of an ancestor in heaven, i.e., in Yamaloka, the world presided over by Death, the god Yama. The brahmanical rites for Nandaja, the deceased person mentioned at the start of the sūtra, seem to be śrāddha-rites, the ancestral offering rituals incumbent upon householders. One of those śrāddha-rites, the sapiṇḍīkaraṇa, is performed by the deceased’s son and is the postcremation offering of piṇḍa to complete his transition to the afterworld. More generally, in the Vedic conceptions of death and the afterlife, rebirth as well as the closely related theories of karma and liberation (mokṣa) generally play no (or at most obscure) roles; significantly, the sūtra states that rebirth does not figure at all in the afterlife as it is imagined by the mourners of Nandaja.

i.5The sūtra’s stance on the rites is complex, however, as offerings to the dead are not just dismissed categorically as pointless. We find, for example, the following passage allowing a nuanced acceptance:

The Great King then asked, “Blessed One, if that is the case, then is it useless to offer deceased individuals the food, drink, mounts, clothes, and ornaments that were beneficial to them in the present world?”

The Blessed One replied, “O Great King, take the case where a deceased person is being reborn in one of various different states of being because actions he had done are ripening. And suppose people help that person by dedicating to him all sorts of virtuous actions that will constitute a collection of merit without any nonvirtue. In that case, the person will be reborn in higher states, or attain liberation. On the other hand, when someone has already taken rebirth, then if one aids him through the dedication of a virtuous action that constitutes merit, that will aid the already reborn person to gain wealth, have good crops, more and more of the pleasures he wishes, as well as honor and respect from all his other fellow beings. However, it is not so that the deceased individual stays on in the ‘world of Death,’ without rebirth, and taking on food and drink, mounts, clothing, and ornaments.” (1.­30)

i.6This seems to be a recognizable Buddhist position, one also found in some Pāli texts. Indeed, as Sayers shows, there are passages in texts like the Aṅguttara­nikāya that do acknowledge brahmanical śrāddha-rites as having some efficacy. The approach of texts in the Pāli Canon is typically to rationalize offerings and ancestor worship as a form of gifting. The present sūtra also seems to follow this broad approach in many respects: gifting leads to merit, which can then be dedicated to the deceased and, in the capacity of dedicated karmic merit, serve to benefit them. What is being targeted, then, does not seem to be the efficacy of householders’ rites to benefit the dead in any way, but rather the efficacy of the offerings to nourish the dead eternally in an everlasting realm of ancestors. It is especially that conception of the afterlife that is being rejected.

i.7The argumentation against such a Vedic eschatology follows several strategies. Sometimes it invokes the fully developed theory of karma governing reincarnation, the worldview of moral causality and retribution accepted in most post-Vedic Indian thought. For example, wealth, poverty, and the like do not remain constant throughout one’s subsequent lives, as they are karmic results that vary because of the ethical nature of actions in those lives. At other times simple human common sense and observation is invoked: for example, if beings, after their death, supposedly continued on with their relatives and ancestors in a “world of Death,” they would be unable to recognize one another, for their usual physical form is obviously destroyed in cremation or in the grave. At still other times the argument depends upon the supernatural. For example, dreams and apparitions of the deceased turn out to be due to a very special type of spirit that mimics the appearance of the deceased in order to trick the living into making offerings that the spirits can then appropriate.

i.8The sūtra itself hardly attempts to provide a positive proof for rebirth. It is almost exclusively devoted to refuting what Buddhists take to be wrong conceptions of death and the afterlife. After the Buddha’s extensive refutation of the Vedic views, the renegade Devadatta challenges the Buddha to prove the reliability and superiority of his own understanding‍—he is asked to identify the different sorts of wood from which various ashes come. The Buddha’s success in this and another test leads his interlocutors to conclude that he has suprasensible knowledge enabling him to directly understand all things, including the process of death and rebirth in all its details. The closest thing to a positive argument for a Buddhist eschatology is thus that its truth is assured by the Buddha’s omniscience. A fortiori, one finds no trace of the main Buddhist metaphysical argument for reincarnation, the so-called para­loka­sādhana, or “proof of other lives,” that turns on the nature of mind and was so important in the second chapter of the Pramāṇa­vārttika of Dharmakīrti (sixth–seventh century) and the Jātakamālā of Āryaśūra (fourth century).

i.9The last part of the sūtra takes up the non-Buddhist idea that a permanent entity survives and transmigrates. A series of eight analogies are then presented in detail to show, among other things, that reincarnation needs no such permanent entity. As pointed out in Skilling (1997), these eight analogies also figure in verse 5 of the Verses on the Essence of Dependent Origination (Pratītya­samutpāda­hṛdaya­kārikā ), a text credibly attributed to Nāgārjuna.

It is by means of [the analogies of] a recitation, a lamp, a stamp, a mirror, [echoing] sound, a magnifying glass, a seed, and a sour taste that the wise should understand that aggregates take rebirth but without transmigration (asaṃkrama) [of anything].

i.10Indeed, it may well be, as Skilling opines, that Nāgārjuna’s own verse was based on this sūtra: the eight analogies in the Pratītya­samutpāda­hṛdaya­kārikā are the same (and practically in the same order) as those in the sūtra. Skilling’s historical point would be important, because it would tell against interpreting Nāgārjuna’s own term asaṃkrama as somehow indicating an unqualified rejection of transmigration. The sūtra, in its extensive explanations of the eight analogies (1.­50–1.­71), makes it clear that “no transmigration” does not mean that there is no transmigration or rebirth, but rather that nothing actually transmigrates; there is no transmigration from one life to another of any entity whatsoever, be it permanent or extinguished.

i.11A brief word on the title. The key Tibetan term that figures in the title, and repeatedly in the body of the text, is tshe ’pho ba, which literally means “shifting lives.” Much like the English euphemism “passing on,” tshe ’pho ba too can have both the sense of “death” as well as “moving to another life” or “transmigration.” In the sūtra most occurrences of the term can be translated by “death” and “dying.” And elsewhere in Buddhist literature too the term is generally used to mean simply “to die,” as we see in Mahāvyutpatti 230 where the Sanskrit for tshe ’phos nas is given as cyuta. Nonetheless, in the final sections of the sūtra there are passages where the term ’pho ba must be understood as referring to transmigration to the next life or to the afterlife. Taking this dual usage into account we have hence translated the title as “Questions Regarding Death and Transmigration.” At the end of the text in all Kangyurs the title is given as ’chi ’pho ba ji ltar ’gyur ba bstan pa’i mdo, with ’chi ’pho ba (“death and transmigration”) replacing the tshe ’pho ba in the title given at the beginning of the text. Finally, it should be noted that the Sanskrit in the title, i.e., āyuṣpatti (or āyuḥpatti), is not well attested. Indeed the usual complete title Āyuṣpatti­yathākāra­paripṛcchā is dubious and probably a back translation from the Tibetan.

i.12The sūtra is not extant in Sanskrit, nor was it translated into Chinese, and nor is there a Pāli counterpart. According to the colophon it was translated into Tibetan during the earlier dissemination of the teachings. Unusually, the colophon also states that the translation was not modified with the “revised terminology” that we find in translations from the opening decades of the ninth century on; nevertheless, the language does not seem to be heavily reliant on so-called “ancient linguistic usage” either. No translator is mentioned. This translation was clearly done outside the ninth century institutional mainstream.

i.13Although the important theme of reincarnation is treated here with a sophisticated argumentation much more typical of the Tengyur (bstan ’gyur) than the Kangyur (bka’ ’gyur) literature, the sūtra does not seem to have attracted notable attention in India, apart from possibly figuring as Nāgārjuna’s source for the eight analogies, and not much in Tibet, either. A global search of the Tibetan text input on the site of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (www.tbrc.org) shows only relatively few references to this text in indigenous Tibetan scholarship. The Geluk scholastic writer Choné Drakpa Shedrup (co ne grags pa shes sgrub, 1675–1748) quotes a large section of this sūtra in his lho sgo’i cho ga’i rgyas ’grel gzhan phan nyi ’od, pp. 225–27 and pp. 243–44. We have on occasion cited variants found in his text.

i.14This sūtra is significant both philosophically as well as historically, being a reliable witness to relatively early Indian non-Buddhist views concerning death and the Buddhist polemics against them. However, with its often long, convoluted sentences and involved argumentation, the text was manifestly not an easy one for scribes, nor probably for its anonymous Tibetan translators. We have not attempted a critical edition, but have given the most significant variants that underlie our understanding of the text. The Tibetan of the Degé Kangyur was our base text, and its folio numbers appear in the translation. The versions in the Peking Kangxi, Peking Yongle, Lithang, Narthang, Choné, Urga, and Lhasa Zhol Kangyurs were also consulted via the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) of the Kangyur. The Stok Palace and Shelkar (“London”) manuscript Kangyurs, as representatives of the Thempangma (them spangs ma) line of Kangyur transmission, provide invaluable alternative readings, especially on the not infrequent occasions where the Comparative Edition has only implausible variants.