Introduction

i.1As a discourse in which the Buddha narrates one of his past lives, The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa can be placed in the same class of teachings as jātakas, “birth stories,” and avadānas , “exemplary tales.” In this type of teaching, the Buddha explains his present awakened state or the present conditions of others, whether fortunate or unfortunate, by narrating the past-life actions that led to these conditions, thus showing the workings of karma and the inevitable results of meritorious or unmeritorious deeds. Usually, texts of this kind begin with an extensive narrative section that is set in the present. This describes the situation or the individual’s circumstance that the text will then explain by means of a past-life story. However, this is not the case for The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa, which, as will be seen, consists almost entirely of a past-life story of the Buddha, narrated without preamble. Therefore, it was classified as a pūrvayoga, an account of a “past endeavor,” at least according to the title as given in the Tibetan translation. There are no other standalone texts designated as pūrvayoga in the Kangyur, but the genre is represented in individual chapters of Mahāyāna sūtras such as the Saddharma­puṇḍarīka Sūtra and the Samādhi­rāja Sūtra.

i.2The setting of this particular discourse is Jetavana, the grove outside Śrāvastī that had been gifted to the Buddha and the monastic saṅgha by a wealthy lay devotee called Anāthapiṇḍada. There, in the presence of an assembly of 1,250 monks, the Buddha begins his teaching by making a twofold statement on the virtue of generosity. First, he states that if beings were to know what he knows of the karmic results of generosity, they would always share whatever they have, even if, as it is tellingly put, it is their last bit of food. However, as the Buddha then points out, beings are often ignorant of the merit that comes from an act of generosity and tend to be guided by selfishness. This twofold proclamation by the Buddha is also found as a separate discourse, preserved in Pali as the Dānasaṃ­vibhāga Sutta and in Sanskrit as the Dāna Sūtra. In the present text, the Buddha further illustrates these statements with a story of one of his past lives, thus demonstrating his first-hand knowledge of the immense power of generosity.

i.3The story is that of a king named Kanakavarṇa, who, we are told, lived in a remote past when people still had life spans of eighty-four thousand years. This king is described as possessing all possible worldly attainments: he had a “golden-colored” (the literal meaning of his name) bodily complexion, abundant riches, and a vast and thriving empire stretching across the whole of Jambudvīpa. More impressive, however, was his righteous and generous nature. The Buddha states that he governed his people unselfishly, engaging in all possible forms of charity. The king’s generosity was such that one day‍—and it was from this that the events narrated begin to unfold‍—he decided to abolish all taxes and levies for the people of Jambudvīpa.

i.4However, King Kanakavarṇa did not foresee that, after many years of prosperity and just governance for his people, the astrological conditions would become unfavorable. When the brahmins at the court noticed this adverse shift in the constellations and celestial bodies, they informed the king that there would be no rain for the next twelve years. Aware of the impending disaster this portended for his people, especially for the poor who were without the means to survive a drought of such length, the king immediately went into action. He issued the order that all available foodstuffs were to be collected and placed in a single storehouse, and from there they were to be distributed equally among the people of Jambudvīpa. For eleven years, this strategy was successful and famine was averted, but then in the twelfth year the food started to run out and people began to die of starvation. The situation became ever more dire in the course of the following eleven months, to the point that there was only a single portion of food left in the storehouse, which had been reserved for King Kanakavarṇa himself.

i.5The narrative here shifts to the key protagonist in the momentous event that is about to take place. The Buddha describes how in that particular period there was a bodhisattva‍—left unnamed‍—who had been on the bodhisattva path for forty eons, but who, after witnessing a particularly heinous act, had abandoned his aim of reaching perfect buddhahood for the sake of all sentient beings. Applying himself instead to his own liberation from saṃsāra, this person, within a short span of time, had gained complete insight into the impermanent nature of phenomena and thereby attained the awakening of a pratyekabuddha, a “solitary awakened one.” In Buddhist traditions, a pratyekabuddha is someone who has attained complete liberation from saṃsāra without the guidance of a teacher. However, such liberation is distinguished from that of a perfectly awakened buddha like the Buddha Śākyamuni, since they are not able to verbally teach the path to liberation to others. This typology of buddhas who reach individual awakening arose early on in Buddhist tradition and was particularly associated with an early text known as the Rhinoceros Sūtra (Pali: Khaggavisāṇa Sutta) in which the practitioner is exhorted to “move alone like a rhinoceros.” At some point during the early period, the individual verses that make up the Rhinoceros Sūtra came to be credited as the utterances of pratyekabuddhas of past times. The verse proclaimed by the pratyekabuddha upon his awakening in The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa (at folio 53.a) is an example of such a verse, which has direct parallels with the second verse of both the Pali Rhinoceros Sūtra as well as the recently discovered Gāndhārī Sanskrit version. In this extant Sanskrit of the story of King Kanakavarṇa, the verse reads as follows:

i.8In the Pali version of The Rhinoceros Sutta it reads:

i.11And in the Gāndhārī version of The Rhinoceros Sūtra, it reads:

i.14The background story to this verse, however, as transmitted in the later Pali commentary to The Rhinoceros Sutta, is entirely different and unrelated to the story of the pratyekabuddha in The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa. It appears, therefore, that over the centuries these verses from The Rhinoceros Sutta became associated with different background stories connected to pratyekabuddhas.

i.15While the verses in The Rhinoceros Sutta urge a solitary way of life in view of the dangers of being in close company with others, they also emphasize the need to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion. This quality is also given expression in the freshly awakened pratyekabuddha in The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa. The Buddha describes how, after attaining “individual awakening,” the pratyekabuddha compassionately thought of benefitting other beings by receiving alms from them, thereby giving them the opportunity to gather merit. Being the only awakened being in the world at that time, albeit lower in rank to a perfectly awakened buddha, the pratyekabuddha would have been the most “worthy of offerings” and the most fruitful “field of merit,” as it is traditionally put, in terms of yielding karmic benefit. As the pratyekabuddha scanned the whole world through his newly acquired supernormal abilities, he discovered that there was only one portion of food left‍—the one reserved for the king. Therefore, he decided to extend his compassion to King Kanakavarṇa by seeking alms from him.

i.16It is this alms round and its miraculous outcome that forms the centerpiece of the story. This crucial moment‍—when the pratyekabuddha becomes the recipient of King Kanakavarṇa’s ultimate act of generosity‍—brings to the fore the prime qualities of the two central actors: the bodhisattva king who accompanies his act of self-sacrifice with the deep wish that it bring an end to the destitution and suffering of his people, and the solitary buddha who teaches the Dharma “bodily, not verbally,” as he silently leaves in the same miraculous way as he had come, after having provided the king with the opportunity to generate immense merit. The “root of virtue” that King Kanakavarṇa has planted through this relinquishment of self-interest is such that, right after the pratyekabuddha has received his meal and departed, it immediately ripens into the fulfillment of the king’s wish, as narrated in the wondrous culmination of the story. Moreover, and more importantly still, when the Buddha reveals at the end of the story that he himself was King Kanakavarṇa at that time, it is implied that the merit of this “past endeavor” occasioned by the compassionate pratyekabuddha would eventually come to full ripening in the attainment of perfect and full awakening by the Buddha Śākyamuni in his present lifetime. Having thus illustrated the karmic potency of such an act of generosity, the Buddha concludes by repeating the twofold statement on the virtue of generosity that he had pronounced at the beginning of the discourse, followed by a verse on the imperishability of good karma.

i.17This story about King Kanakavarṇa’s feat has been preserved in several different versions and retellings. The earliest of these is found in a collection of the Buddha’s past life stories that was translated into Chinese in the fourth or early fifth century ᴄᴇ, entitled Pu sa ben xing jing (菩薩本行經), “The Sūtra about the Past Conduct of the Bodhisattva.” In this version, the story does not have a prelude containing a twofold statement on generosity. Instead, it is narrated by the Buddha upon the passing away of a miserly wealthy man from Śrāvastī named Mahānāman. When King Prasenajit comes to the Buddha to ask him where Mahānāman has been reborn, the Buddha tells him that the miserly Mahānāman has fallen into hell. Here he will be subject to great suffering for thousands of years, after which he will also have to endure rebirth as a hungry ghost for a long duration. In response to King Prasenajit’s distress upon hearing this, the Buddha states that a wise person should abandon miserliness and engage in generosity. It is by virtue of this that one obtains good fortune in the present life and merit for future lives, and the Buddha then narrates his past life as King Kanakavarṇa as an illustration. While in general the story told is the same as that found in The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa, there are several differences, the most notable being that the person who becomes the pratyekabuddha is not first described as being a bodhisattva, nor is there the verse from The Rhinoceros Sūtra that he exclaims upon his awakening.

i.18The first version in which all the elements found in The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa appear is a Chinese translation made at least over a century later, in the middle of the sixth century ᴄᴇ. In this separately transmitted text, which bears the title Jin se wang jing (金色王經), “The Sūtra about King Kanakavarṇa,” we find all the elements that are also present in the Tibetan and Sanskrit versions of The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa, with the exception of some phrases and passages that seem to have been abridged or paraphrased during translation by its Indian translator, Gautama Prajñāruci, a monk from Vārāṇasī who was active in China at the time. According to the original colophon at the end of the Chinese text, this translation was made by Gautama Prajñāruci in the year 542 ᴄᴇ.

i.19The Tibetan translation that has been preserved in the Kangyur mostly agrees with this Chinese version, to the extent that one can assume the underlying Sanskrit text must have been very similar. We do not know when exactly the Tibetan translation was made, since the Kangyur text lacks the usual colophon that records the names of the translators and editors involved in the translation. However, the Tibetan title of the text, gser mdog gi sngon gyi sbyor ba, is listed in both the Denkarma and Phangthangma inventories of Tibetan imperial translations, which means that the unattributed Tibetan translation of The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa must have been made at some point in the eighth or early ninth century ᴄᴇ, during the early spread of the Buddhadharma to Tibet.

i.20The Sanskrit text that has come down to us is part of the Divyāvadāna, a collection of thirty-eight avadānas that has proved to be popular in the Kathmandu Valley over the centuries. Under the title Kanaka­varṇāvadāna, this Sanskrit version is practically the same as the Tibetan and the sixth-century Chinese version, leaving aside a number of additions and omissions that are the result of centuries of scribal transmission. There are a few places, however, in which the Sanskrit and the Chinese are more closely aligned with each other than with the Tibetan, as with the extra last verse included at the end. This suggests that the extant Sanskrit version found in the Divyāvadāna represents a somewhat different line of textual transmission than the Tibetan translation and its underlying Sanskrit text.

i.21Apart from these three closely related versions preserved in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese, King Kanakavarṇa’s story is also found in the Avadāna­kalpalatā, an anthology of avadānas composed in succinct and poetic Sanskrit verse by the Kashmiri poet Kṣemendra in the middle of the eleventh century. In this concise form, the story also gained popularity in Tibet when the Avadāna­kalpalatā was translated into Tibetan in the thirteenth century and became the subject of a rich tradition of woodcut depictions and thangka paintings. Another later retelling of the story, also in versified Sanskrit, occurs in the Ratna­mālāvadāna (alternatively titled Ratnāvadāna­mālā), one of several collections of versified avadānas that were composed and compiled in the Kathmandu Valley from the fourteenth century onwards, for which the Divyāvadāna served as one of the main sources.

i.22The English translation of The Past Endeavor of Kanakavarṇa offered here is based primarily on the Tibetan translation contained in the Kangyur. In this, the text in the Degé Kangyur has been taken as the base text, but we have also consulted the Stok Palace Kangyur and the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) for variant readings. In several cases, this has provided readings that are evidently in better alignment with the Sanskrit text, as recorded in the endnotes. Despite these improved readings, there are several places in the Tibetan text where the textual transmission has proved to be faulty due to omissions or erroneous additions. In those instances, we have taken recourse to the extant Sanskrit text, in consultation with the Chinese translation. However, we have been careful not to uncritically adopt all readings found in the extant Sanskrit, since, as stated above, it appears to belong to a different lineage of textual recension than the Tibetan translation and its underlying Sanskrit text. There are, moreover, several places where the extant Sanskrit has problematic readings that need to be emended in light of the Tibetan translation. We have recorded all such discrepancies between the Sanskrit and the Tibetan in the endnotes, in which we have also included the most significant divergences found in the Chinese translation.

i.23In closing, we would like to refer the reader to two very similar past life stories of the Buddha, both of which are likewise narrated to illustrate the twofold statement on generosity as found in the Dāna Sūtra, from which they also very graphically draw upon the words apaścimakaḥ kavaḍaḥ, “last mouthful.” First, there is the Kavaḍāvadāna in the Avadānaśataka (Toh 343), in which the Buddha recounts his past life as King Brahmadatta in Vārāṇasī, a righteous and compassionate ruler whose generosity was such that during a devastating famine he was able to give up his own daily ration of food, his two “mouthfuls,” to a brahmin left out in the count and to Indra who, disguised as a brahmin, requested the second portion. The other related story is found in the Karmaśataka (Toh 340), in which the narration is about a bodhisattva king named Candraprabha, who also reigned from the city of Vārāṇasī, and who, faced with a severe drought and famine that would last for twelve years, is tested by Indra, again disguised as a brahmin, in giving away both his “mouthfuls” of food‍—all of which the bodhisattva happily does in his complete dedication to attaining perfect and full awakening for the benefit of all.