Two Precious Scroll Narratives of Guanyin and Her ... - Khamkoo

Introduction 11
surviving printed version, however, dates only from 1773. This edition
is representative of the more elaborate version of the text and
has as its formal title Sutra of the Original Life of the Bodhisattva
Guanshiyin (Guanshiyin pusa benxing jing). 37 The editions of the
text that date from the second half of the nineteenth century on
usually offer a somewhat shorter version of the text and carry the
title Abbreviated Collection of the Sutra of the Original Life of the
Bodhisattva Guanshiyin (Guanshiyin pusa benxing jing jianji). 38
Both the elaborate version and the abbreviated version of the
text come with a preface that credits the authorship of the text to
the monk Puming of the Upper Tianzhu Monastery near Hangzhou,
who, it is said, composed the text after having had a vision of the
bodhisattva Guanyin on the night of the fifteenth of the eighth
month of the second year of the Chongning reign-period, which corresponds
to the year 1103. This would mean that Puming had been
inspired to write a prosimetric version of the legend of Miaoshan
only a few weeks after Jiang Zhiqi’s first visit to Upper Tianzhu
Monastery! This coincidence is almost too good to be true. However,
research has shown that a monk by the name of Puming was
living at the Uppper Tianzhu Monastery at the time and that
he later rose to the position of abbot there, which suggests that he
must have been a man of at least some learning. 39 However, he is
not a well-known name in the history of Chinese Buddhism, and it
is difficult to imagine that a later author or publisher would have
tried to enhance the attractiveness of this precious scroll by associating
it with such an obscure monk.
Another argument for a relatively early date for The Precious
Scroll of Incense Mountain is that, despite its popular title, there is
no reference to itself as a precious scroll within the text itself. The
term ‘‘precious scroll’’ (baojuan; also translated as ‘‘precious volumes’’)
would appear to have become the general designation of
Buddhist prosimetric narratives (and of the prosimetric canonical
texts of the many new religions of the Ming and Qing dynasties)
only from the fifteenth century onward. 40 On the three occasions
when The Precious Scroll of Incense Mountain refers to itself, however,
it calls itself a ‘‘[tale of] cause and conditions’’ (yinyuan) ora
‘‘long [tale of] cause and conditions’’ (da yinyuan). As we know
from the manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang, so-called yinyuan
(nidāna) texts represent a well-established genre in the Buddhist
prosimetric literature of the ninth and tenth centuries. These Dun-