Introduction

i.1The Questions of the Girl Vimalaśraddhā is included among of the forty-nine sūtras in The Heap of Jewels (Skt. Ratnakūṭa) collection of the Degé Kangyur. It presents the qualities that bodhisattvas should cultivate in their practice and the benefits that come from such cultivation.

i.2The sūtra begins with the princess Vimalaśraddhā, daughter of King Prasenajit, coming to see the Buddha in Jetavana, Anātha­piṇḍada’s Park, together with a retinue of five hundred women. In some expressive verses, she pays homage to the Buddha and asks him to explain the conduct of bodhisattvas. The Buddha responds by presenting twelve sets of eight qualities that bodhisattvas should cultivate. Vimalaśraddhā then asks the Buddha how a woman may avoid female rebirth, to which the Buddha replies by presenting two further sets of eight qualities that ensure rebirth as a man. Finally, Vimalaśraddhā and her five hundred companions, having developed the mind set on awakening, join the ranks of the bodhisattvas, and the Buddha prophesies her future attainment of awakening.

i.3The Buddha’s explanations of how bodhisattvas should act, set out in short prose sections followed by sets of verses, are, of course, the main content of the sūtra. But it is noteworthy that the narrative in which this content is framed shares its theme‍—the Buddha being addressed by a daughter of King Prasenajit‍—with two other sūtras from the Heap of Jewels collection. Prasenajit himself, ruling over the kingdom of Kośala from its capital, Śrāvastī, is a well known figure in the canonical texts. Kośala was a powerful kingdom that, under his father Arāḍa Brahmadatta, held political control over the smaller, neighboring Śākya kingdom to the east in which the Buddha was born, and Prasenajit is said to have been born as prince in Śrāvasti at the same time as the Buddha took birth as prince in the Śākya capital, Kapilavastu. It was within the first two years after the Buddha’s awakening that Prasenajit became his disciple and patron, although the Buddha only started residing near Śrāvastī for his rains retreats much later, when the wealthy merchant Anātha­piṇḍada purchased land there to build him a vihāra. Prasenajit, by his several wives, is recorded as having had at least two sons and a number of daughters. The name of one of his sons, Prince Jeta, is immortalized in the name, the Jetavana, given to the grove and vihāra on the land that Jeta sold to Anātha­piṇḍada. Another son was Virūḍhaka (by a different mother, a Śākyan). Several daughters of Prasenajit are mentioned in the canonical literature. One, Vimala­dattā‍—younger in her story than Vimalaśraddhā in this one‍—is featured in The Questions of Vimala­dattā (Vimala­dattā­paripṛcchā, Toh 77). Prasenajit’s best known daughter is perhaps Śrīmālā­devī, who became queen of Ayodhyā and is the principal protagonist of the The Lion’s Roar of Śrīmala­devī (Śrīmālā­devī­siṃhanāda, Toh 92). Her mother was probably the queen Mallikā, the foremost of Prasenajit’s queens who is said to have had only one child, a daughter, although other sources name instead another of Prasenajit’s daughters, Vajira, who married King Ajātaśatru of Magadha, as Mallikā’s only daughter. While some of these members of Prasenajit’s family are mentioned in different Sanskrit and Pali texts, both Vimalaśraddhā and Vimala­dattā seem to figure only in their respective sūtras.

i.4If the protagonists of The Questions of the Girl Vimalaśraddhā, The Questions of Vimala­dattā, and The Lion’s Roar of Śrīmala­devī are all daughters of Prasenajit, they are not the only princesses who are also bodhisattvas in the canonical texts. One daughter of King Ajātaśatru, Aśoka­dattā, receives her prediction of future awakening in the Aśoka­dattā­vyākaraṇa (Toh 76, also in the Heap of Jewels), and another, Vimala­prabhā, in the Vimala­prabhā­paripṛcchā (Toh 168, in the General Sūtra section). King Bimbisāra’s queen, Kṣemavatī, questions the Buddha about his qualities and receives her prediction in the Kṣemavatī­vyākaraṇa (Toh 192). Less privileged female bodhisattvas include laywomen, the main interlocutors in the Gaṅgottarā­paripṛcchā (Toh 75), the Strīvivarta­vyākaraṇa (Toh 190), and the Mahallikā­paripṛcchā (Toh 171); a courtesan called Suvarṇottama­prabhāśrī in the Mañjuśrī­vikrīḍita (Toh 96); and Vimalakīrti’s daughter Candrottarā in the Candrottarā­dārikā­vyākaraṇa (Toh 191). While some of the women in these sūtras aspire to be reborn as males as they progress toward awakening, others question what place notions of gender may have with regard to awakening; some debate matters concerning gender with the śrāvaka disciples; some (notably Strīvivarta) make use of being a woman to benefit beings; some appear to be able to change their sex miraculously at will; and Vimalaprabhā vows to remain a woman in at least some of her future lives in order to undertake specific tasks. Nevertheless, these accounts all seem to culminate in the prediction that the female protagonist will ultimately become an apparently male buddha.

i.5The version of the sūtra in the Degé and some other Kangyurs has no colophon, but a colophon is to be found in the Stok Palace, Narthang, and Lhasa Kangyurs, among others, and explicitly states that the Tibetan translation was produced from the Chinese, noting that the text was “translated, edited, and finalized based on the Chinese text by the translator Gö Chödrup.” A work that can almost certainly be identified with this sūtra, but with the slighly different Tibetan title bu mo dad ldan gyis zhus pa, is listed in both the Denkarma and Phangthangma imperial inventories, allowing us to date its Tibetan translation to the late eighth or early ninth century.

i.6In producing this translation, we have based our work on the Degé xylograph, while consulting the Comparative Edition (Tib. dpe bsdur ma) and Stok Palace manuscript. Since the Tibetan version of this sūtra was translated from Chinese rather than Sanskrit, we have also made careful use of Bodhiruci’s fifth- or sixth-century Chinese translation, noting important variants throughout.