This article addresses some philological and structural-narrative issues concerning the suttas on Mara the Bad in Agama literature. Included is a translation of the Mara Samyukta of the Bieyi za ahan jing, which includes such famous passages as the suicide without further rebirth of Godhika.

This article is part of a series on the Shorter Chinese Sa?yukta-?gama. Continuing the investigation from previous research on the provenance of the BZA, it is concluded that the attribution of the BZA to the K??yap?ya school is mistaken. A comparison of the BZA’s?akra-sa?yukta with the P?li Sakka-sa?yutta shows that, with minor exceptions, the narrative content of both sa?yuttas is identical though the number of suttas varies. Finally, the article completes the translation of the?akra-sa?yukta, the first part of which appeared (...) in BSR 25. (shrink)

This study provides an overview of what is known about the shorter Chinese Samyukta Agama and also an annotated translation of its first 22 suttas, which corresponds to the Pali Bhikkhu Samyutta. Recent research suggests that T.100 belongs to the corpus of Sarvastivada Literature. The annotations resolve some unique expressions, correct some mistakes found in the textus receptus, and point out significant differences between the versions of the suttas. The text base for Chinese is the CBETA/Taisho edition, for Pali the (...) Chatta Sangayana edition published by the Vipassana Research Institute, if not indicated otherwise. The paper is a first result of the Bieyi za ahan jing-Project 1 at the Chung-hwa Institute of Buddhist Studies, Taiwan, which aims at a digital edition and translation of the complete work. (shrink)

23 out of the 364 s?tras of the Shorter Chinese Sa?yukt?gama and many more of the Longer Chinese Sa?yukt?gama have no known direct counterpart in P?li, Sanskrit or Tibetan. These s?tras are especially suitable to introduce common problems regarding the relationship of early Indian s?tras and their Chinese translation. While usually the existence of an Indian parallel helps researchers to narrow down the range of likely forms of names and words, in the absence of Indian versions our understanding of translations (...) and transcriptions becomes all the more conjectural.?gama texts without a P?li counterpart must also be suspected to be later additions to the collection and we have to deduce from form and content of the s?tra as well as its position in the collection, when, where and why the text came into being. The article introduces these problems as they appear in two BZA sutras, both of which are translated below. (shrink)