Introduction

i.1Entry into the Gloomy Forest is an account of the extraordinary life of the brahmin Pradarśa, his conversion to Buddhism, and his founding of a monastic community in the Gloomy Forest, a place, located in present-day Punjab, which we can identify as the Tamasāvana Monastery. The text describes the exceptional circumstances surrounding Pradarśa’s birth and going forth as a monk, the miraculous founding of the Gloomy Forest monastic settlement, and the Buddha’s account of Pradarśa’s deeds and prayers in his previous lives that led to his present circumstances. Although the sūtra does not explicitly identify itself as a “past life account” (Skt. avadāna), it shares many of the narrative tropes typical of this genre. Most notably, it illustrates how past existences shape present ones through the power of former deeds and aspirations. At the sūtra’s conclusion, the Buddha teaches that the results of actions are unfailing and that one should therefore strive to exclusively perform deeds that are wholesome. The main objective of the scripture, however, appears to be to provide an account of the founding of a particular Buddhist community. The theme of religious conversion to Buddhism runs through this text, starting with the conversions of Pradarśa and his fellow brahmins and culminating with the conversions of myriad gods and other nonhuman beings.

i.2The origins of this sūtra and its Tibetan translation are rather opaque. The sūtra is not listed, at least in its current form, among the texts of the two imperial inventories of Tibetan translations from the early ninth century, though Butön Rinchen Drup (Tib. bu ston rin chen grub, 1290–1364) includes it in his index of Tibetan translations, which he compiled in the early fourteenth century. The Tibetan text’s lack of a translator’s colophon is noted in several later indices, but we have yet to come across any textual hints as to who the translator(s) may have been. As for the sūtra itself, it clearly belongs to the avadāna genre, and there may well be parallel texts somewhere in this vast body of literature (a significant portion of which remains unpublished). Further research may determine such links.

i.3There are notable differences between the sūtra’s colophons in the Stok Palace and Degé Kangyurs, and both furnish some clues about the history of the text. The Stok Palace colophon reads, “I have edited the text as best I can, comparing it with multiple manuscripts. May the Śākya teachings flourish!” This comment suggests that the editor may have refrained from naming a translator because he was basing his finalized version on multiple Tibetan translations (perhaps themselves based on different Indic witnesses) by different translators.

i.4The Degé colophon, by contrast, offers more information about the sūtra’s contents and origin. The colophon can be translated, somewhat tentatively, as follows: “From the ten-thousand-lined Sūtra of the Garland of the Northern Range, this is a description of Mount Uśīra, which is the northern border mountain of the Jālandhara region.” We are presently unable to match the larger sūtra referred to here with any surviving text. It seems reasonable, however, to assume that if such a text existed, it may well have been a collection of narrative literature related to Buddhist communities in the northern regions of India. While the sūtra translated here also identifies the Gloomy Forest with Mount Uśīra, it is only the colophon that states that the forest is in the region of Jālandhara (modern-day Jalandhar of the Punjab region). The sūtra’s connection with India’s northwest is further solidified by the text’s statement that the monk Pradarśa was born in the country (Skt. janapada) of Trigarta (Tib. ngam grog gsum po), a region well attested throughout Indian Buddhist literature as well as epic, puranic, and even grammatical literature.

i.5Taking the available evidence into account, we can confidently identify the Gloomy Forest as the Tamasāvana. The Tamasāvana finds mention in the Chapter on Medicines (Bhaiṣajyavastu) of the Mūla­sarvāstivāda Vinaya, in which the Buddha, accompanied by Vajrapāṇi, flies through the sky to visit the northwest region. He first arrives at Mount Uśīra, which he predicts will become the Tamasāvana, a great center for the Buddhist Dharma, some one hundred years after his passing into nirvāṇa. The forest is also briefly mentioned in the Aśokāvadāna when King Aśoka invites monks from every corner of India to a quinquennial festival (Skt. pañcavārṣika). Furthermore, the forest is likely alluded to in Kṣemendra’s poetic telling of the Gopālāvadāna, in which the Buddha visits a forest once inhabited by many buddhas and worthy ones of the past and then bestows his hair and fingernails on a hunter who makes a shrine (Skt. caitya) to house them.

i.6Apart from the sūtra presented here, the most detailed account of the Tamasāvana is found in the travelogues of the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (602–64), who describes it as a hill monastery with some three hundred monks located one hundred li southeast of Jālandhara. He further identifies it as a seat of the Sarvāstivāda school and the place where Kātyāyanīputra composed an important Abhidharma treatise three hundred years after the Buddha’s nirvāṇa. He adds that the region was also blessed by buddhas and worthy ones of the past and featured many caves. Xuanzang’s description is generally consonant with the characteristics of the Tamasāvana found in the present sūtra.

i.7Our translation of the sūtra follows the text as transmitted in the Tibetan Kangyurs since, to the best of our knowledge, no other source for this text is presently available. In producing this English translation, we have based our work on the Degé xylograph while consulting the Comparative Edition (Tib. dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace manuscript for variant renderings in the case of problematic readings.