What is the Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish?
«Hiền» means the wise, «ngu» the foolish: the sūtra gathers stories showing where the good and bad deeds of both kinds of people lead over many lives. Many chapters open with «Thus have I heard» and are told by Ānanda in the first person: something happens in Śrāvastī or Rājagṛha, Ānanda or the monks ask how it came about, the Buddha tells a story from an earlier life, and then says who each person of old is today.
According to standard Buddhist reference works, the collection was compiled in Chinese in the fifth century from stories that Chinese monks heard preached in Khotan, in Central Asia. Discourse 129 of the Pāli Middle-Length Discourses is also rendered in Vietnamese as Kinh Hiền Ngu, but it is a different and much shorter Pāli text.
How the 13 scrolls are arranged
The chapter headings are numbered 1 to 69. Scroll 1 holds chapters 1–7 and scroll 2 chapters 8–14; from scroll 3 the order is not always continuous: scroll 3 has chapters 15, 32, 35, 36, 37 and then 16, scroll 9 has only chapter 46, and scroll 10 holds chapters 40–45. There are no headings for chapter 17 or chapters 47–51 in this version.
Scrolls 1 and 2 are the longest, about 17,500 and 20,000 words. Scrolls 11–13 (chapters 52–69) are text recognised from a printed edition (OCR): proper names are spelled differently from the earlier scrolls, sentences are broken into short lines and many misspellings remain, but they can still be read.
Some stories from the first scrolls
Chapter 1, Brahmā requests the teaching: newly awakened, the Buddha sees that beings are deluded and hard to teach, and thinks of entering final nirvāṇa. The Brahmā king comes down to ask him to stay and teach, recalling earlier lives in which he was a king, a prince or a hermit who gave up even his life to hear the Dharma and for the sake of beings. The Buddha agrees and goes to the Deer Park at Vārāṇasī to teach Kauṇḍinya and his four companions.
Chapter 2: an old woman's two sons, caught stealing, are being led to execution; the Buddha sends Ānanda to ask the king to spare the mother and sons, and they ask to be ordained. The Buddha tells how, long ago, Prince Ma Ha Tát Đỏa (Mahāsattva) met a starving tigress with two cubs and gave her his own body; the tigress is now the old woman, the cubs her two sons. Chapter 3: two devas come to hear the Dharma and attain stream-entry; the Buddha explains that after the time of the Buddha Kāśyapa they were two brahmins who kept the eight precepts.
Later scrolls hold well-known chapters such as chapter 22, the old woman who sold her poverty, in which the Venerable Kātyāyana shows a poor servant woman how to sell off her poverty by offering a bowl of water, and chapter 43, Tu Đạt builds the monastery, where Sudatta, a minister of Śrāvastī known as Anāthapiṇḍada, covers Prince Jeta's garden with gold to build a monastery for the Buddha.
Reading it at home
Each scroll is a long reading page, some over an hour, so the easiest way is one chapter per sitting; every chapter can be read on its own. To read aloud, press «Chant» so the screen stays on and the text scrolls by itself. The library holds the Vietnamese translation; the page gives the Chinese title 賢愚經 but there is no Chinese text, PDF or recording yet.
