Introduction

i.1King Udayana of Vatsa’s Questions is a cautionary discourse on the dangers of sense desires and the consequences of acting on them. In this work, King Udayana is driven into a murderous rage when his jealous wife, Queen Anupamā, deceives him with lies about Queen Śyāmāvatī engaging in infidelities with the Buddha and his monastic community. Queen Śyāmāvatī is a female lay disciple of the Buddha, however, and when the king attempts to kill her, she pays homage to the Buddha and cultivates loving kindness, and the king’s arrows are miraculously repelled. This miraculous display, along with Queen Śyāmāvatī’s own words of faith in the Buddha, convinces the king to seek him out and ask for his guidance. King Udayana asks the Buddha to explain the faults of women, such that they could lead him to commit murder, but the Buddha responds that he must first understand his own faults. The rest of the work consists of the Buddha explaining the four faults of men who indulge in sense pleasures, causing them to fall under the sway of women, and the hellish fates that await them as a result.

i.2The four faults concern ignorant attachment to objects of desire: reckless indulgence in sense pleasures; shameful neglect of one’s parents, especially in their old age; immoral actions due to a failure to heed the teachings of the wise; and miserly failure to give donations to those who deserve them, such as renunciants, the Buddhist monastic community, and the poor. Throughout the work, women are given as the primary example of objects of sensual desire. The work goes into highly colorful descriptions, both in prose and poetic verse, of the impure nature of the human body and of the female body in particular, seemingly as a way of instilling a sense of aversion and disgust for sensual pleasures like sexual activity. The Buddha also analyzes the delusive nature of desire and the mental conditions under which people become addicted to sensual pleasures. He gives extensive descriptions of the terrible deeds men are driven to commit under the influence of their desire for women, as well as the terrible fates that await the men who commit such deeds. Their behaviors are condemned in no uncertain terms. The text gives vivid descriptions of the punishments one will undergo in many of the specific hell realms into which one may be reborn, providing the names of many of them.

i.3This text has received attention throughout the centuries for its descriptions of the dangers of sexual desire toward women and of the impure nature of the human body. Several passages from King Udayana of Vatsa’s Questions, comprising about two to three pages in all, are quoted in Śāntideva’s eighth-century work, the Śikṣāsamuccaya. Śāntideva uses this work, among others, as a scriptural basis for a discussion of the harms of desire. King Udayana of Vatsa’s Questions is also quoted extensively by the yogi Shabkar (zhabs dkar tshogs drug rang grol, 1781–1851) in his work The Wondrous Emanated Scriptures (rmad byung sprul pa’i glegs bam). In this case, as well, King Udayana of Vatsa’s Questions is used as scriptural evidence for the dangers of desiring women. The sections quoted by Shabkar appear to match those in the Degé Kangyur. In modern scholarship, Diana Paul has translated a version of this work from Chinese and discussed it in her book Women in Buddhism.

i.4The narrative framework of the Buddha’s discourse in this work builds on the old story of Mākandika (Māgaṇḍiya in Pali), who offers his beautiful daughter, Anupamā, to the Buddha. That a version of the Buddha’s dialogue with Māgaṇḍiya is found in the Suttanipāta of the Pali Canon suggests that the story is among the oldest in Buddhist literature, and the Pali commentary on that text, which is also part of the Pali Canon, provides one version of the backstory for the dialogue. Another version of this tale, found in the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya (and also in the closely related Divyāvadāna ), starts earlier than the episode related in the present text and ends later. Earlier, we learn, Mākandika had given his daughter to King Udayana after the Buddha had refused her. And later, whereas King Udayana of Vatsa’s Questions concludes when King Udayana becomes a lay disciple of the Buddha, the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya version goes on to describe how Queen Anupamā, undeterred in her murderous intent, subsequently conspires with her father, Mākandika, who had become King Udayana’s chief minister, to set fire to the queens’ quarters; that ultimately results in the deaths of the morally pure Śyāmāvatī and the rest of King Udayana’s five hundred wives, all of whom willingly cast themselves into the flames.

i.5King Udayana seems to be portrayed in these stories as a powerful but impulsive, passionate, and sometimes belligerent person who is led by the Buddha to reflect and change. Another text in the Kangyur featuring King Udayana of Vatsa that follows this pattern is Advice to a King (2) (Toh 215). In its brief framing story, the king is about to set out on a military campaign of conquest when he meets the Buddha. At first angry about being intercepted, he shoots an arrow at the Buddha, but the arrow is miraculously prevented from meeting its target‍—just as, in the present text, the arrow he shoots at Queen Śyāmāvatī is stalled and turned back. This startling event arouses his respect and he becomes receptive to the advice the Buddha then gives him on combating the great enemy of belief in a self.

i.6King Udayana of Vatsa’s Questions is included in all extant versions of the Kangyur as the 29th member of the Ratnakūṭa, or Heap of Jewels, section. All versions agree that it was translated from Sanskrit into Tibetan by the Indian scholars Jinamitra and Surendrabodhi along with the Tibetan translator-editor Yeshé Dé, all of whom were prolific in their translation activity. Given this translation team, along with the fact that it is included in both the Phangthangma and Denkarma imperial catalogs, we can be confident that this work was translated into Tibetan between the late eighth and early ninth centuries. The work was also translated into Chinese on three different occasions: between 290–306 ᴄᴇ by Faju, in 706 ᴄᴇ by Bodhiruci, and in 984 ᴄᴇ by Fatian. The present translation is based on the Degé Kangyur with reference to variant readings recorded in the Pedurma comparative edition and Stok Palace edition, as well as the Sanskrit excerpts in the Śikṣāsamuccaya.