The Sutra of King of the Inconceivable

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The Sutra of King of the Inconceivable (Skt: Acintyarājasutra; Tib. བསམ་གྱིས་མི་ཁྱབ་པའི་རྒྱལ་པོའི་མདོ།, Wyl. bsam gyis mi khyab pa’i rgyal po’i mdo) takes place in the kingdom of Magadha where Shakyamuni Buddha is dwelling amid an incalculable assembly of bodhisattvas. Among the bodhisattvas is the titular King of the Inconceivable, who offers a discourse on the relativity of time between buddha fields. He enumerates eleven buddha fields, with an eon in the first being equivalent to a day in the following buddha field, where an eon is, in turn, the equivalent of a day in the next, and so forth. The sutra thus presents a hierarchy of buddha fields that begins with our world and culminates with the paramount buddha field, Padmashri. This language of incredibly vast scales of time has the effect of testing the limits of human conception, thereby demonstrating that the qualities of the Buddhas and their buddha fields are beyond quantification or conceptualization. King of the Inconceivable concludes his discourse by emphasizing its rarity, stating that the names of the buddhas he enumerated can only be heard by bodhisattvas with certain unique qualities. Upon completion of the discourse, the gathering of bodhisattvas and the entire world praise the teaching, which is said to have been taught by both the Blessed One and King of the Inconceivable.

The Sutra of King of the Inconceivable is nearly identical to The Chapter on the Scale of Life, the thirty-seventh chapter of the Ornaments of the Buddhas (Toh 44) and Expounding the Qualities of the Thus-Gone Ones’ Buddhafields (Toh 104). Of the three texts, The Sutra of King of the Inconceivable is more elaborate than The Chapter on the Scale of Life in that it includes an opening narrative and a conclusion. However, whereas The Chapter on the Scale of Life and Expounding the Qualities of the Thus-Gone Ones’ Buddhafields explicitly reference the names of the buddha fields and their buddhas, The Sutra of King of the Inconceivable gives only the names of the buddhas in most instances. .[1]

Text

The Tibetan translation of this text can be found in the General Sutra Section section of the Tibetan Dergé Kangyur, Toh 268.

  • English translation:

The Sutra of King of the Inconceivable

References

  1. 84000 Translating the Words of the Buddha.