Practice · DānaVolume TwoPart II · Āgama ViewPaper 7 of 31

The Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅga Sutta

中文主題：施分別經

Author: Shi Huijing 釋慧鏡

Date: Spring 2026

Version: 1.0

ID: DANA-P07

Abstract

MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, through a triple-layered composite structure of fourteen kinds of personal gift, seven kinds of sangha-bound gift, and the four-fold purity of the offering, establishes early Buddhism's recipient-category axis — that is, the axis along which "who the gift is given to" determines differential fruit. The sūtra's thesis pivot (its emphatic declaration that even the Buddha, standing as the apex of personal giving, does not surpass the base position of sangha giving) is not a doctrinal paradox but a category-switch between two mutually incommensurable calculi of fruit: a personal-attainment calculus for gifts to individuals and a brahmacārī-community calculus for gifts to the sangha. The temporal re-framing in T0026 《瞿曇彌經》Gautamī Sūtra (which frames the seven sangha-gifts along a temporal axis — during the Buddha's lifetime / after his parinirvāṇa / in ages to come) and the spatial preservation in T0084 《分別布施經》Fenbie bushi jing (which keeps cātuddisa saṅgha, the sangha of the four quarters, through the sense-rendering 遊方行化 youfang xinghua, "wandering in itinerant practice") are two independent crystallizations of the Chinese transmission — divergent at the surface frame, convergent at the deep calculus — and thereby demonstrate that the brahmacārī-community category is not parasitic on its expressive framework. Taking up the recipient-rank axis from P05 and the temporal axis of fruit from P06, this paper opens the recipient-category axis; together the three papers form the three-axis skeleton of Part II's opening stretch and, with P04's motivation axis, complete Part II's structural layout of the early Buddhist treatment of giving, handing off to P08 Three Bases of Meritorious Activity.

I. Problem Consciousness

From the mid-2010s onward, Effective Altruism (EA) has made the two-tier structure of charitable decision explicit: first the selection of cause-area, then the selection of intervention. GiveWell, in its list of top charities, ranks individual interventions by marginal effect; 80,000 Hours, in its career guide, lists candidate cause-areas — climate change, global poverty, AI safety, animal welfare, pandemic preparedness — and advises donors to choose "neglected and tractable" categories; Peter Singer, in The Most Good You Can Do (2015), uses this two-tier framework as the narrative skeleton of the entire book. For a contemporary Western reader, "which class of recipients is worth your donation" has become a learnable, debatable, quantitatively comparable serious question.

P05 Velāmasutta has already treated one face of this question — efficacy-advancement along the recipient ladder, the ascent from material giving to the apex of vipassanā; this paper, working from MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, treats another — the category-switch between the fourteen kinds of personal gift (pāṭipuggalikā dāna) and the seven kinds of sangha-bound gift (saṅghagata dāna). This is not a second pass of the ladder, but a more fundamental problem that P05's ladder does not address: when the judgment of fruit across two classes of recipient cannot be commensurated on a single scale, how does early Buddhism respond?

Take the closing passages of MN 142. The Buddha declares explicitly: even when, in ages to come, the bhikkhu-sangha has fallen (apāye saṅgha), a gift offered to it still yields immeasurable fruit (asaṅkheyya appameyyā); and no gift to any individual surpasses the gift to the sangha — not even when the individual recipient is the Buddha himself. This is not a doctrinal paradox that exalts the sangha above the Buddha — the Buddha himself stands as the fourteenth and highest of the personal-gift fields — but an internal categorical tension within the sūtra itself: personal giving computes by a personal-attainment calculus (each worthy recipient is reckoned on the basis of his own path-attainment), while sangha giving computes by a brahmacārī-community calculus (the sangha as a whole is taken as a category that remains efficacious across time and through moral decline). The two calculi are incommensurable.

This tension is structurally insoluble in the grammar of Effective Altruism. The movement's two-tier architecture — first cause-area, then intervention — still takes welfare metrics (QALYs, DALYs, lives saved) as the common scale across cause-areas; even granted that cause-area selection and intervention selection are judgments at different levels, both tiers reduce to the common denominator "welfare gained per unit cost." MN 142's reply is: not all classes of recipient can be placed on a single scale. Certain classes — the sangha-body, for instance — operate by a categorical logic of their own, and cannot be inserted into an arithmetic progression of "aggregated personal attainments." This is a structural interrogation, from early Buddhism, of the contemporary charitable tradition — not "you have chosen the wrong area," but "you presuppose that all areas admit a common scale; what if there exist categories that do not?"

The argument unfolds in four layers. §II, taking MN 142 as the pivot, establishes the sūtra's triple-layered composite structure — fourteen fields, seven sanghas, four-fold purity — together with the twin witnesses in the Chinese transmission: juan 47 of Madhyamāgama sūtra 180, the Gautamī Sūtra, and T0084 Fenbie bushi jing. §III unfolds the category-switch in four layers: a group-wise analysis of the fourteen fields (§III 3.1), MN 142's internal tension as thesis pivot (§III 3.2), the twin Chinese crystallizations as evidence that the category is not parasitic on its expressive frame (§III 3.3), and the three-axis reading across P05 / P06 / P07 (§III 3.4). §IV takes up EA's cause-area selection as a structural interlocutor. §V addresses three typical misreadings: the linear-ladder reading, the reading of recipient-differentiation as elitist snobbery, and the reading of Chinese-translation divergence as lineage defect. §VI hands off to P08 Three Bases of Meritorious Activity — how giving, virtue, and meditation, as the three containers, integrate the four axes (motivation, rank, time, category) laid down across P04–P07.

Taking up P05's recipient-rank axis and P06's temporal axis of fruit, this paper erects the recipient-category axis. The three axes, read together, form the complete structural skeleton of Part II's early-Buddhist analysis of giving.

II. Canonical Foundations

This section's citations run along two axes. Axis A (sūtras) is organized into four groups: the Pāli prototype of MN 142 (Group 1), the tightest Chinese parallel in T0026 juan 47 Gautamī Sūtra (Group 2), the second independent witness in T0084 Fenbie bushi jing (Group 3), and a cross-orthogonal note from It 98 together with an honest-absence declaration (Group 4). Axis B (treatises) takes MN 142's own internal triple-layer structure as a functional substitute for the commentarial register. Per NIAN-A dual-track discipline, Pāli material is cited by PTS numbering, Chinese material by Taishō volume and sūtra number.

2.1 A · Sūtras

Group 1: MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, the Pāli prototype

MN 142¹ is placed in the Majjhima Nikāya, Vibhaṅgavagga (Division Chapter). The scene is the Banyan-Tree Park (Nigrodhārāma) at Kapilavatthu in the Sakyan country. Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī arrives before the Buddha carrying a pair of newly woven robes, offering them for his acceptance. The Buddha thrice declines and directs her: "Gotamī, give it to the sangha. When you give to the sangha, both I and the sangha will be honored" (translation mine). This opening narrative serves as prelude to the body of the sūtra, which unfolds in three axes: the fourteen kinds of personal gift (pāṭipuggalikā dāna), the seven kinds of sangha-bound gift (saṅghagata dāna), and the four-fold purity of the offering (dakkhiṇā-visuddhi).

The fourteen personal gifts are listed one by one according to the recipient's path-attainment, and can be gathered into four groups: a worldling-animal group (animal, unvirtuous worldling, virtuous worldling, lust-free outside ascetic); a stream-enterer group (the path and the fruit of stream-entry); a once-returner-to-arahant group (the path and fruit each of once-returner, non-returner, and arahant); and a paccekabuddha-apex group (paccekabuddha and the Tathāgata arahant fully self-enlightened one). Within the worldling-animal group, the fruit is presented in quantitative progression: giving to an animal yields a hundredfold; to an unvirtuous worldling, a thousandfold; to a virtuous worldling, a hundred-thousandfold; to a lust-free outsider, a billion-fold. From the path of stream-entry upward, the list shifts to a shared apex — "immeasurable, uncountable" (asaṅkheyya appameyyā) — with the formula "how much more so…" (ko pana vādo) stepping up rung by rung all the way to the Buddha.

The seven sangha-bound gifts are listed as follows: (i) a gift, while the Buddha is alive, to the dual sangha with the Buddha at its head; (ii) a gift, after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, to the dual sangha; (iii) a gift to the bhikkhu-sangha; (iv) a gift to the bhikkhunī-sangha; (v) a gift to an appointed number of the dual sangha; (vi) a gift to an appointed number of the bhikkhu-sangha; (vii) a gift to an appointed number of the bhikkhunī-sangha. The closing passage extends to the sangha of the four quarters (cātuddisa saṅgha) as apex, declaring: "In a time to come, though there be bhikkhus who wear the outer robe but whose conduct has fallen (apāye saṅgha), if one gives to them for the sake of the sangha, I say that gift too is immeasurable, uncountable" (translation mine). Immediately following this comes the sūtra's thesis pivot — "Ānanda, I do not in any way say that a personal gift is of greater fruit than a gift given to the sangha" (na tvevāhaṁ, ānanda, kenaci pariyāyena saṅghagatāya dakkhiṇāya pāṭipuggalikaṁ dānaṁ mahapphalataraṁ vadāmi; translation mine). This single sentence decisively severs the two classes of recipient's calculi of fruit; §III 3.2 treats it in detail.

The four-fold purity of the offering (dakkhiṇā-visuddhi) is a dialectical analysis of the purity of the giver and the purity of the recipient: (i) giver pure, recipient impure; (ii) recipient pure, giver impure; (iii) both impure; (iv) both pure. The verse section takes as its zenith "a pure gift made with a pure mind by one free of passion to another free of passion" — "the foremost of material gifts" (aggaṁ āmisadānānaṁ; translation mine). The four-fold purity stands orthogonal to the recipient-category axis of the fourteen fields and seven sanghas: the recipient axis asks "given to which class?"; the purity axis asks "how is the purity of the gift established?" — and neither axis reduces to the other.

Group 2: T0026 juan 47 sūtra 180 Gautamī Sūtra, the tightest Chinese parallel

The Gautamī Sūtra of the Madhyamāgama, juan 47 sūtra 180, translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva of the Eastern Jin², occupies Taishō vol. 1 No. 26, pages T01.0721c–0723a, and is the tightest Chinese parallel to MN 142. The scene is the same Banyan-Tree Park at Kapilavatthu; "摩訶簸邏闍鉢提瞿曇彌" (Mahāsivalicchadīpatī Gotamī, a Chinese transcription of Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī) arrives before the Buddha bearing a newly woven golden-threaded yellow robe for his acceptance, the Buddha thrice declines, and Ānanda intervenes to ask on her behalf. After Ānanda's request the Chinese version unfolds the body with a pair of listings: "the seven sangha-assemblies" (七施眾) and "the fourteen private gifts" (十四私施).

The Chinese list of fourteen private gifts runs: the Tathāgata, the paccekabuddha (緣一覺, yuanyijue), the arahant (阿羅訶, aluohe), one practicing toward arahantship, the non-returner, one practicing toward non-return, the once-returner, one practicing toward once-return, the stream-enterer, one practicing toward stream-entry, the lust-free outside ascetic, the diligent person, the non-diligent person, the animal. The order of this list is the reverse of the Pāli MN 142 — the Pāli runs upward from animal to Tathāgata; the Chinese runs downward from Tathāgata to animal — but the fourteen categories and the path/fruit partition are structurally identical. The quantification of fruit corresponds precisely: "A gift to an animal yields merit a hundredfold; a gift to a non-diligent person, a thousandfold; a gift to a diligent person, a hundred-thousandfold; a gift to a lust-free outsider, a billion-fold; a gift to one practicing toward stream-entry is immeasurable, to a stream-enterer immeasurable, … to a paccekabuddha immeasurable — how much more so to a Tathāgata, worthy of offerings, perfectly self-enlightened?" (translation mine).

The Chinese list of seven sangha-assemblies is the most noteworthy feature. This version does not use the term "sangha of the four quarters"; instead it unfolds sangha giving along a three-fold temporal partition: a gift, during the Buddha's lifetime, to the bhikkhu-sangha with the Buddha at its head (the first assembly); gifts, after his parinirvāṇa, to the dual sangha (the second through fifth assemblies, subdivided); and gifts, in ages to come, to the bhikkhus (the sixth and seventh assemblies). In the Taishō edition the text of the sixth assembly is missing, jumping directly from the fifth to the seventh². The Chinese version thus substitutes, at the level of expression, a temporal order for a spatial one — "during the Buddha's lifetime / after parinirvāṇa / in ages to come" as its skeleton — where the Pāli had "the four quarters" as the spatial skeleton. This divergence is the core observation for the twin-Chinese-crystallization analysis in §III 3.3.

The three-fold purity rendering in the Chinese is given as "four kinds of giving, three purities of gift": "there is giving pure by way of the giver but not of the recipient; giving pure by way of the recipient but not of the giver; giving pure neither by the giver nor the recipient; giving pure both by the giver and the recipient"². The Chinese translates visuddhi as 淨 jing (purity), and dāyaka / paṭiggāhaka as 施主 shizhu (giver) and 受者 shouzhe (recipient), in precise correspondence to MN 142.

Group 3: T0084 Fenbie bushi jing, the second independent witness in the Chinese transmission

Fenbie bushi jing, translated in the Song by Dānapāla (施護)³, is a single-fascicle text, Taishō vol. 1 No. 84, pages T01.0903c–0904b. Rendered in the early Northern Song (roughly late tenth century), it stands about six hundred years after the Eastern Jin translation of T0026 and represents the second independent crystallization of MN 142 in the Chinese transmission. Its structure corresponds precisely to MN 142: fourteen kinds of personal gift (listed as "fourteen kinds of comparative giving"), seven kinds of sangha giving ("seven assemblies"), and four kinds of pure giving.

The crucial difference is that this version preserves the rendering "sangha of the four quarters". Its seven assemblies are listed as: a gift to the bhikkhus present before the Buddha; a gift, after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, to the bhikkhus; a gift, after his parinirvāṇa, to the bhikkhunīs; a gift, after his parinirvāṇa, to both bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs; a gift, after his parinirvāṇa, to the bhikkhus wandering in itinerant practice (遊方行化 youfang xinghua); a gift, after his parinirvāṇa, to the bhikkhunīs wandering in itinerant practice; a gift, after his parinirvāṇa, to both bhikkhus and bhikkhunīs wandering in itinerant practice. "遊方行化" youfang xinghua is precisely the rendering by sense of Pāli cātuddisa (the four quarters). This rendering stands in sharp contrast to T0026's "in ages to come" along the temporal axis: given the same Pāli source, two independent Chinese sites, separated by six hundred years, crystallize along different skeletons — one spatial (the four quarters), one temporal (the three time-periods).

The order of T0084's fourteen personal gifts also differs from T0026 — this version lists upward from below (the one afflicted by illness, the one who violates precepts, the one who keeps precepts, the one free of defilements, one practicing toward stream-entry, the fruit of stream-entry, one practicing toward once-return, the fruit of once-return, one practicing toward non-return, the fruit of non-return, one practicing toward arahantship, the fruit of arahantship, paccekabuddhas, the Tathāgata worthy of offerings perfectly self-enlightened one) — matching the direction of the Pāli MN 142. The unfolding of the four-fold purity adds at the end of each of the four items a two-way reflexive move — "when the gift-giver is pure, there is no recipient; when the gift given is pure, there is no recipient; when the receiver is pure, there is no giver; when what is received is pure, there is no giver"³ — a distinctive Chinese commentarial move on the internal structure of the four-fold purity, echoing later emptiness teachings through the "there is no…" phrasing while holding strictly within the four-fold partition of MN 142.

Group 4: It 98 as cross-orthogonal note; honest-absence declaration

It 98 Dhammadāna⁴ posits two gifts: the material gift (āmisadāna) and the Dharma gift (dhammadāna), stating directly that "of these two gifts, the Dharma gift is foremost" (etadaggaṁ imesaṁ dvinnaṁ dānānaṁ yadidaṁ dhammadānaṁ; translation mine). The axis this sūtra treats is the content axis of giving (what is given) — orthogonally complementary to the recipient axis of MN 142 (to whom it is given). The main argument of this paper does not unfold the content axis — the full debate between Dharma-gift and material-gift has its primary home in P24 Samantabhadra's Extensive Cultivation of Offerings — and here the sūtra serves only as a brief §VI pointer, not as a load-bearing §II citation.

Honest-absence declaration: Four points must be stated to the reader outside the main text. First, AN 4.78 Dakkhiṇā-visuddhi-sutta does not exist as a standalone sūtra in the Pāli canon — the four-fold purity is an internal structure of MN 142, not a borrowed independent sūtra. Second, AN 6.37 Velukaṇḍakī, which records the six-fold causation of giving (three causes in the giver plus three in the recipient), is not present in the vault at the time of this review; this paper neither supplements from memory nor builds an argument on a process-axis — the recipient axis and the purity axis together are sufficient in structure. Third, T1451 Mūla-sarvāstivāda-vinaya Vastukṣudrakavastu in its forty fascicles contains no narrative of Mahāpajāpatī's offering of the robe — this is an absence on the vinaya side, to be positively addressed by P09 Sangha as Field of Giving through vinaya-institutional material (cātuddisa saṅghika lābha, property of the sangha of the four quarters); this paper does not pretend that the narrative is preserved on the vinaya side. Fourth, T0083 Foshuo bushi jing (佛說布施經, translated by Dharmarakṣa of the Western Jin), verified against CBETA, is a karma-vipāka discourse — four kinds of action and their fruits in this life and the next — and has no lineage relation to MN 142's triple structure of fourteen fields, seven sanghas, four-fold purity; this paper does not cite it as a third Chinese witness.

2.2 B · Treatises

The treatise layer is kept brief. Buddhaghosa's Papañcasūdanī (the MN commentary) treats MN 142 through scattered, phrase-level glosses — the weave of Mahāpajāpatī's robe, the arithmetic of the hundredfold-thousandfold-hundred-thousandfold progression, the doctrinal case for the efficacy of giving to an apāye saṅgha — and offers limited structural contribution to this paper's thesis of "recipient-category switch." The paper takes the internal three-layer structure of MN 142 together with T0026 and T0084 (fourteen fields / seven sanghas / four-fold purity) as its own treatise-functional substitute, the three versions serving as commentaries to one another: the sūtra itself already discloses the structural thesis in full. The fuller dual-voice commentarial dialogue (Buddhaghosa on the main line, the Yogācāra tradition on the countermelody), following the convention of Part I, resumes at Part IV with the Mahāyāna dāna-pāramitā.

III. Core Argument: The Four-Layered Structure of the Category-Switch

3.1 The Group Analysis of the Fourteen Fields and the Quantification Break

MN 142 lists the fourteen personal-gift recipients one by one, according to path-attainment; the list is itself a structural declaration about "recipient differentiation": not all recipients are reckoned on one and the same scale. The four-group reading given in §II deserves a closer look.

The worldling-animal group (animal, unvirtuous worldling, virtuous worldling, lust-free outsider) — the four run in quantitative progression: a hundredfold for an animal, a thousandfold for an unvirtuous worldling, a hundred-thousandfold for a virtuous worldling, a billion-fold for a lust-free outsider. What the four have in common is this: the recipient stands outside the Buddhist path-attainments (a lust-free outsider, bāhirakā, is a non-Buddhist ascetic even if passion-free), yet the calculus of fruit turns on "whether precepts are kept" and "whether lust is forsaken" as its measuring criteria. The hidden premise of the arithmetic progression is that comparison operates along a single scale. Within the worldling-animal group this premise holds — the span from hundredfold to billion-fold is a continuous quantitative spectrum.

But from the stream-enterer group onward, this scale breaks. At the tenth recipient (one practicing toward stream-entry) MN 142 declares: "A gift to one practicing toward stream-entry yields fruit immeasurable and uncountable" (asaṅkheyya appameyyā); thereafter each rung ascends by the formula "how much more so" (ko pana vādo) — how much more so to the fruit of stream-entry? how much more so to one practicing toward once-return? how much more so to the fruit of once-return? — all the way up to the Tathāgata arahant fully self-enlightened one. This "how much more so" is not the reinforced version of an arithmetic increase but a qualitative acknowledgment after the quantitative scale has failed. "Immeasurable" means "already beyond the scale of comparison"; once one has entered the immeasurable, all ten positions from stream-entry to Buddha belong together in a shared class of the immeasurable, and the relative differences among them are no longer expressed in multiples.

The structure already implies that the fourteen fields are not a single linear ladder but a two-layer structure: the worldling-animal group as a quantifiable layer, the stream-enterer-to-Buddha group as an unquantifiable layer. The break between the two is MN 142's acknowledgment that "quantification cannot be extended to certain classes of recipient." This prepares the way for the thesis pivot in §III 3.2 — once all the immeasurable ones (stream-enterer through Buddha) already belong together in a single layer, the rupture between the apex of personal giving (the Buddha) and the base of sangha giving can no longer be patched up by "the Buddha could still be further quantified."

The paccekabuddha-apex group stands at the end of the "how much more so" formula as the peak: the Buddha is the highest recipient among the fourteen fields. The standing of this apex will be challenged directly, in §III 3.2, from the side of the sangha-gift axis.

3.2 The Thesis Pivot: The Internal Tension Between Paragraph 212 and Paragraph 214

At the close of the seven sangha-bound gifts, MN 142 sets two linked declarations whose juxtaposition forms the thesis pivot of the whole sūtra.

First declaration (paragraph 212). Even in a future age, when the bhikkhus wear the outer robe but their conduct has fallen (apāye saṅgha, fallen sangha), if one gives to them for the sake of the sangha — even where the actual recipient is a bhikkhu whose conduct is already broken — the fruit of that gift is still immeasurable and uncountable.

Second declaration (paragraph 214). "Ānanda, I do not in any way say that a personal gift is of greater fruit than a gift given to the sangha" (na tvevāhaṁ, ānanda, kenaci pariyāyena saṅghagatāya dakkhiṇāya pāṭipuggalikaṁ dānaṁ mahapphalataraṁ vadāmi; translation mine).

Juxtaposed, these two declarations produce an internal tension that the reader must face directly. The apex of personal giving is the Buddha (the fourteenth of the fourteen fields); the base of sangha giving is an ordinary sangha assembly (even one containing morally fallen bhikkhus). By the second declaration, when the Buddha is the recipient of a personal gift, that fruit still does not surpass that of a gift given to an ordinary sangha. If one reads this structure as a linear ladder — continuing the fourteen fields upward with the seven sangha gifts as positions fifteen through twenty-one — then the emphatic force of the second declaration becomes unintelligible: if the Buddha is already the apex of the fourteen fields, how can the Buddha "in no way" surpass the lowest rung of sangha giving?

The tension admits no resolution on the ladder of quantity. To patch it up by quantifying "the base position of the sangha" to fit into the ladder would require a value greater than the Buddha's personal-gift fruit; but that fruit is already at the ceiling of the immeasurable — above the immeasurable, no further quantitative addition is possible. The linear-ladder reading fails here outright.

The path of resolution is not a ladder of quantity but a switch of category. This is the paper's core thesis.

Personal giving (pāṭipuggalikā dāna) computes its fruit by a personal-attainment calculus — each recipient is reckoned on the basis of his own path-attainment. The Buddha is the apex of personal giving because the Buddha is the terminus of the path of attainment (arahaṁ sammāsambuddho). The unit of this calculus is "the individual" — one Buddha, one paccekabuddha, one arahant, and so on; each reckoning is bound to the path-state of a concrete individual.

Sangha giving (saṅghagata dāna) computes its fruit by a brahmacārī-community calculus — the unit of reckoning is no longer the individual but the ongoing existence of the sangha as a class of brahmacārī community (sāmaggī). The efficacy of this community does not rest on the path-state of any particular member within it: even where an individual's conduct has fallen, so long as the giver's gift is directed to "the sangha as sangha," the gift is bound to a category that remains efficacious across time and through moral decline. The members of a fallen sangha are impure, but the sangha as a category remains the brahmacārī lineage-institution the Buddha founded; a gift directed to this institution is bound to the continuity and lineage of the institution itself, not to the path-state of the particular member receiving at this moment.

The two calculi are incommensurable. The unit of personal attainment is "the individual's path-state"; the unit of the community-calculus is "categorical continuance." Neither reduces to the other (an individual's path does not reduce to the community's continuance, nor the reverse), and neither can be further reduced to a more basic common measure. The emphatic force of MN 142's second declaration arises from this incommensurability: the Buddha's personal-gift fruit does not surpass the sangha-gift fruit, not because the Buddha is smaller than the sangha, but because the two fruits are structurally uncomparable in magnitude — they belong to different categories of reckoning. This is the category-switch: the move from the personal-attainment axis to the community-attainment axis is a switch of category, not an ascent of quantity.

3.3 The Twin-Crystallization of the Chinese Transmission: The Category Is Not Parasitic on Its Expressive Frame

Groups 2 and 3 of §II have recorded the two distinct handlings of the seven sangha-gifts in T0026 and T0084: T0084 preserves "遊方行化" youfang xinghua as the sense-rendering of cātuddisa saṅgha (the sangha of the four quarters), with a spatial axis as its skeleton; T0026 uses "the Buddha's lifetime / after parinirvāṇa / in ages to come" as its skeleton, a temporal axis. The two translations are separated by some six hundred years, and constitute two independent crystallizations of the Chinese transmission.

This divergence is neither translation drift nor T0026's defacement of the Indian original. T0026's translator Gautama Saṅghadeva was not unfamiliar with the concept of "the four quarters" (the concept was already widely employed in Chinese translations of his era); T0084's translator Dānapāla did not aim at archaism (the early-Song translation bureau followed its own institutional conventions). Both are self-aware translation-bureau choices — two different modes of understanding the sangha-category, each generating its own rendering of cātuddisa saṅgha.

The twin crystallization itself is a further demonstration of MN 142's central thesis: the category (the sangha as brahmacārī community) is not parasitic on its expressive frame. T0084's spatial axis (the four quarters) and T0026's temporal axis (the three time-periods) are each a framing choice for the same category. When two frames can both carry the same category, the structural reality of that category is independent of the frame. If the sangha were only a spatial category ("bounded by the four quarters in front of one"), then temporal re-framing (T0026) would distort it; if the sangha were only a temporal category ("extended across the three time-periods"), then spatial re-framing (T0084) would distort it. That both translations preserve MN 142's calculus of fruit in full (all seven sangha gifts yield the immeasurable) shows that the essence of the sangha-category is neither spatial nor temporal but the very class "brahmacārī community" — its spatial or temporal framing may crystallize differently in different cultural contexts, but the structural character of its incommensurability does not shift.

This observation supports the category-switch argument of §III 3.2: precisely because the calculus of sangha giving rests on "community-reckoning" as its category, and not on any one particular expressive frame (spatial-four-quarters / temporal-three-ages), the incommensurability of MN 142's second declaration is preserved across languages and translation bureaus. If the calculus of the category shifted with the frame, then T0026's temporalization would deform the structure of the sangha-gift fruit; in fact it does not — sangha giving remains at the apex of the immeasurable — which shows that the categorial structure MN 142 establishes is indeed independent of its linguistic expression.

3.4 The P05 / P06 / P07 Three-Axis Reading: Completing the Skeleton of Part II's Opening Stretch

Read together with P05 and P06, this paper forms the three-axis skeleton of Part II's early-stretch structural analysis of recipient and fruit — three axes that do not reduce to one another and each carry a distinct structural function.

P05's axis is the axis of the giver's interior advance. The Velāma ladder, from material giving up to the apex of vipassanā, displays the giver's path-deepening: within the ladder there is quantitative progression (from eighty-four thousand great-gifts to the finger-snap perception of impermanence), and at the apex there is a categorical break (vipassanā does not sit inside the welfare scale). This axis asks: how does the giver advance in attainment?

P06's axis is the temporal axis of fruit. The Sīha Sutta's four sandiṭṭhika (visible in this very life) plus one samparāyika (belonging to the life to come) displays the epistemic partition of the fruit of giving: the first four are verified through experience before death; the fifth is received on faith after death. This axis asks: when can the fruit of giving be verified?

P07's axis is the recipient-category axis. MN 142's fourteen personal gifts (pāṭipuggalikā dāna) and seven sangha gifts (saṅghagata dāna) display the categorical partition of recipients: the two categories operate by different calculi of fruit and are mutually incommensurable. This axis asks: to which class of recipient is the gift given?

The mutual irreducibility of the three axes is what secures the structural completeness of Part II's skeleton. The giver-axis does not reduce to the fruit-axis — the apex of the Velāma ladder does not depend on "when is its fruit verified" (which is P06's question). The fruit-axis does not reduce to the recipient-axis — Sīha's four sandiṭṭhika do not depend on "to which class the gift is given" (Sīha's self-attestation confirms the four present-life fruits through experience, orthogonally to recipient-category). The recipient-axis does not reduce to the giver-axis — this paper's category-switch does not depend on "the giver's path-attainment" (the switch concerns a structural difference in recipient-category, not anything about the giver).

Read together, the three axes present early Buddhism's structural analysis of giving as a three-dimensional coordinate system: a giver at some rank (P05) performs a gift whose fruit can or cannot be verified at some point along a temporal axis (P06), a gift directed to some class of recipient and reckoned according to that class's calculus of fruit (P07). Part II's opening stretch (P04–P07) lays down these axes — P04 handling the motivation axis and quality axis as the interior premises of giving, P05, P06, P07 handling rank, time, and category respectively. Part II's later stretch (P08 Puñña-kiriya-vatthu) will integrate the analysis, treating the concrete operation of this three-dimensional structure within the three containers of giving, virtue, and meditation.

IV. Cross-Disciplinary Engagement: Effective Altruism's Cause-Area Selection and the Category-Switch

§I has already marked the two-tier structure of contemporary charitable decision — first cause-area, then intervention — and P05 §IV has engaged, through the positions of Singer and MacAskill, the cost-effectiveness ranking of the latter tier. This section turns to engage the former tier.

Effective Altruism, at the cause-area tier, does acknowledge the qualitative differences among areas — climate change, global poverty, animal welfare, AI safety, pandemic preparedness, each with its distinct character — but its evaluative framework (for instance, ITN: Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness) ultimately takes "marginal welfare-gain per unit invested in that area" as its common criterion. In The Most Good You Can Do, Singer uses the two-tier judgment as the narrative spine of the whole book; the choice among areas, though seemingly qualitatively plural, is argued out finally on the scale of commensurability — "lives saved per unit invested," "QALY/DALY losses averted." Cause-area and intervention, though at different tiers, both rest on welfare-utilitarian commensurability underneath — the presupposition that all areas admit a common measurement space.

MN 142's structural reply is this: the incommensurability of recipient-category is itself a category outside that measurement space. The thesis pivot of §III 3.2 — that the Buddha's personal-gift fruit does not surpass the fruit of a gift to an ordinary sangha — is insoluble in this grammar: if read through the welfare-commensurable lens, it must generate a prediction directly opposite to MN 142's plain declaration. The structural significance of this counter-reply lies not in contesting any specific ranking conclusion but in exposing the hidden premise that all classes of recipient admit a common scale — a premise MN 142 directly rejects.

⚠️ This is a heuristic dialogue, not a theoretical equivalence. MN 142 is neither an ancient version of Effective Altruism nor a critical alternative to it; the two address different levels of question — the former makes optimizing judgments within a welfare-commensurable space, while the latter questions the range of that commensurable space itself. The structural contribution of early Buddhism to contemporary charitable discourse lies in this reminder: if certain categories (such as the brahmacārī community) operate by a categorical logic of their own and do not rest on any quantitative scale, then the contemporary framework must acknowledge that outside its scale lie categories that are incommensurable. This supplement does not ask contemporary charity to discard its quantitative tools, only to acknowledge the categorial boundary of those tools. The form of this analysis continues the grammar of P04 §IV (motivation axis), P05 §IV (the cost-effectiveness axis of the recipient ladder), and P06 §IV (the epistemic axis of the giver's well-being). Part II's early stretch closes, at this point, the four contemporary handles and builds out a four-axis dialogue between early Buddhist dāna and contemporary charitable discourse: motivation, cost-effectiveness, the giver's well-being, and the category of cause.

V. Middle-Way Corrections

This section addresses three common misreadings.

❌ Misreading 1 · The linear-ladder reading: treating the fourteen fields and the seven sangha gifts together as a twenty-one-rung linear ladder.

This misreading takes MN 142's fourteen personal gifts and seven sangha gifts as a continuous sequence — the fourteen personal recipients arranged up to the Buddha at the apex by path-attainment, the seven sangha gifts appended as positions fifteen through twenty-one, forming a single ladder of recipients up and down which comparison is possible. Under the thesis pivot of §III 3.2 (the fallen-sangha gift in paragraph 212 still yielding immeasurable fruit; the no-personal-gift-surpasses-sangha declaration of paragraph 214) the reading becomes structurally insoluble: the Buddha's personal-gift fruit already stands at the ceiling of the immeasurable, and above the immeasurable there is no further quantitative addition possible; if sangha-giving is to rank above the Buddha, how could its fruit be quantified? The tension admits resolution only through category-switch — personal giving reckoned by personal-attainment calculus, sangha giving reckoned by brahmacārī-community calculus, two calculi of fruit structurally incommensurable; the Buddha's personal-gift fruit does not surpass the sangha-gift fruit, not because the Buddha is smaller than the sangha, but because the two fruits cannot be compared in magnitude under a common calculus. The ladder-of-quantity reading fails at this point.

❌ Misreading 2 · Reading recipient-differentiation as Buddhist elitism.

Contemporary Western egalitarian readers readily read MN 142's "who the gift is given to differs in fruit" as a Buddhist snob-pick: since a gift to the Buddha yields immeasurable fruit while a gift to an animal yields only a hundredfold, the text insinuates that the recipient's identity determines the worth of the gift — an ancient version of elitism. The reading neglects the four-fold purity (dakkhiṇā-visuddhi) axis already built into the sūtra. Group 1 of §II has already shown that, of the four items of purity, "giver pure, recipient impure" is likewise a valid giving — in this item the giver gives with a pure mind (free of stinginess, free of expectation of return, free of arrogance), and even if the recipient is impure (conduct broken, path-attainment low), the gift's purity is still established on the giver's side. The four-fold purity axis stands orthogonal to the recipient-category axis: the recipient axis asks "given to which class?"; the purity axis asks "how is the gift's purity established?". MN 142's structure displays both axes side by side, not single-axis determinism; the elitism reading structurally drops the second axis. The giver's pure mind is an axis of autonomous self-governance, an interior avenue early Buddhism preserves for the equality of giving — a giver of any station can fully participate, through this avenue, in the fruit of giving, and the avenue does not hang on the recipient's identity.

❌ Misreading 3 · Reading the Chinese-translation divergence as a lineage defect.

To read T0026's temporal re-framing ("in ages to come") against T0084's preservation of "遊方行化" youfang xinghua (the sense-rendering of cātuddisa) as drift in the Chinese transmission — that since the two translations of one Pāli source yield different skeletons, at least one must have been unfaithful to the Indian original — misses the point already made in §III 3.3. Neither translation is unfaithful; each is a self-aware translation-bureau choice. T0084's spatial axis and T0026's temporal axis carry the same brahmacārī-community category through different frames; and the structural reality of that category (the calculus of fruit by which all seven sangha gifts yield the immeasurable) is preserved in full in both. The two diverge at the surface axis (space / time) and converge at the deep calculus; the divergence-convergence picture is itself textual evidence, within the transmission, that "the category's structure is independent of its expressive frame." To read the twin crystallization as drift is to conflate frame with category; once the category's structural character is distinguished clearly from its expressive framing, the drift-reading loses its footing.

VI. Conclusion

Thesis restated. MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, through its triple-layered composite structure of fourteen personal gifts, seven sangha gifts, and four-fold purity of giving, establishes early Buddhism's structural analysis of giving along the recipient-category axis. The quantification break in the fourteen fields (the worldling-animal group running from a hundredfold to a billion-fold as quantifiable, the stream-enterer group and above jointly "immeasurable"), taken together with the thesis pivot of §III 3.2 (the juxtaposition of paragraphs 212 and 214), co-witnesses that the two classes of recipient are reckoned by fundamentally different calculi: personal giving by personal-attainment, sangha giving by brahmacārī-community, two units of reckoning structurally incommensurable. The twin-crystallization of the Chinese transmission — T0026's temporalization and T0084's preservation of the spatial axis (§III 3.3) — diverges at the surface axis and converges at the deep calculus of fruit, demonstrating that the brahmacārī-community category does not hang on its expressive framework. Together with P05's recipient-rank axis and P06's temporal axis of fruit, this paper forms the three-axis skeleton of Part II's opening stretch; the four-fold purity axis, as the giver's interior axis, stands independent of the recipient-category axis and preserves the giver's avenue of equality.

Practical orientation. For the contemporary reader, the practical force of category-switch lies in a structural restraint upon judgment. Facing a choice of "whom to give to," a practitioner may ask: does the class of recipient I am weighing just now presuppose that all classes can be placed inside a single measurement space for comparison? If so, does that presupposition hold within early Buddhism? If the recipient is a particular individual (whatever his path-attainment), the calculus of fruit rests on the individual's personal state; if the recipient is a brahmacārī community (even one containing members whose conduct has fallen), the calculus of fruit rests on the categorial continuance of the community, and does not fail because of any particular member's state. This restraint does not ask the practitioner to give up quantitative comparison — in daily giving, quantitative judgment retains its place — it asks only that, before judging, one pauses to ask oneself: do the two being compared belong to the same category? If not, quantitative comparison fails here, and one switches to categorial discernment. The four-fold purity axis is the giver's interior axis: the giver's pure mind (free of stinginess, free of expectation of return, free of arrogance) is a dimension of autonomous self-governance, unbound by the recipient's category and state. This is the independent avenue early Buddhism preserves for the giver's own liberation.

Hand-off to P08. P04 laid down giving's motivation axis and quality axis; P05 laid down the recipient-rank axis; P06 laid down the temporal axis of fruit; this paper lays down the recipient-category axis — Part II's opening stretch (P04–P07) completes, by this point, a four-axis mapping. The next paper, P08 Three Bases of Meritorious Activity (dāna / sīla / bhāvanā — the three bases of meritorious activity, puñña-kiriya-vatthu), will take up the three-container integration of how these four axes operate: giving as the first of the three bases — how do its motivation, rank, time, and category axes operate within the matching containers of virtue and meditation? The interface of giving and virtue (how the giver's own conduct shapes the purity of giving), and the interface of giving and meditation (cāgānussati as a meditative object — the primary treatment is at the NIAN series Part I P03), will serve as P08's structural portals. The axial analysis of Part II's opening stretch gathers, at P08, into a three-container integration of meritorious activity; Part II's later stretch opens from there.

References

I. Primary Buddhist Sources

Pāli Canon

Majjhima Nikāya. Pali Text Society edition.
Itivuttaka. Pali Text Society edition.

Chinese Canonical Translations

Madhyamāgama （《中阿含經》）， translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva of the Eastern Jin, Taishō vol. 1, No. 26.
Fenbie bushi jing （《分別布施經》）， translated by Dānapāla of the Song, Taishō vol. 1, No. 84.

II. Commentarial Literature

This paper takes the internal three-layer structure of MN 142 together with T0026 and T0084 (fourteen fields / seven sanghas / four-fold purity) as a treatise-functional substitute for the commentarial register. Buddhaghosa's Papañcasūdanī (the MN commentary) treats MN 142 only through scattered phrase-level glosses (the weave of the robe, the arithmetic of the fruit-progression, the doctrinal case for the efficacy of giving to an apāye saṅgha), offering limited structural contribution to this paper's thesis of "recipient-category switch," and is therefore not cited as a load-bearing reference. The fuller dual-voice commentarial dialogue (Buddhaghosa's Papañcasūdanī on the main line, the Yogācāra tradition on the countermelody), following the convention of Part I, resumes at Part IV with the Mahāyāna dāna-pāramitā.

III. Modern Scholarship

Bodhi, Bhikkhu, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikāya. 2nd ed. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2001.
GiveWell. Top Charities. San Francisco, 2025. https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities.
Ireland, John D., trans. The Itivuttaka: The Buddha's Sayings. Kandy: Buddhist Publication Society, 1991.
MacAskill, William. Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference. New York: Gotham Books, 2015.
Ñāṇamoli, Bhikkhu, trans. The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha. Rev. Bhikkhu Bodhi. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995.
Open Philanthropy. Focus Areas. San Francisco, 2025. https://www.openphilanthropy.org/focus.
Singer, Peter. The Most Good You Can Do: How Effective Altruism Is Changing Ideas about Living Ethically. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.
Sujato, Bhikkhu, trans. Majjhima Nikāya, Itivuttaka. SuttaCentral CC0 editions.
80,000 Hours. Career Guide. Oxford: Centre for Effective Altruism, 2025. https://80000hours.org/career-guide.

IV. Sūtra & Śāstra Index

Short form	Full name	Taishō / PTS reference	Translator / Author
MN	Majjhima Nikāya	PTS edition	—
It	Itivuttaka	PTS edition	—
Madhyamāgama	《中阿含經》	T 01 No. 0026	Gautama Saṅghadeva (Eastern Jin)
Fenbie bushi jing	《分別布施經》 (Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅga-sūtra, Chinese single-fascicle recension)	T 01 No. 0084	Dānapāla (Song)

Cross-References to Other Papers in the Series

This volume, P01 The Semantics of the Three Terms. The semantic ground of the pāṭipuggalikā dāna / saṅghagata dāna pair cited in §II Group 1 carries forward the semantic differentiation of dāna / cāga / yāga laid out in P01; this paper handles the recipient-category axis on its own and does not re-unfold the three-term distinction.
This volume, P02 Cāga as a Limb of Stream-Entry. The giver's pure mind (free of stinginess, free of expectation of return, free of arrogance) as an axis of autonomous self-governance, discussed in §V Misreading 2, is structurally linked with the cāga-as-limb-of-stream-entry established in P02 — the operation of the cāga-limb is the giver's interior avenue, which can be activated under any recipient-category, and supplies the structural ground within stream-entry-limb theory for the "giver pure, recipient impure" item of the four-fold purity axis.
This volume, P03 Cāga as an Object of Recollection. §III 3.2's account of personal-giving reckoned by personal-attainment brushes, in passing, the interior-mechanism background of cāgānussati, but does not re-unfold the cāgānussati-object established in P03; P03 handles the giver's recollective operation on his own prior giving, while this paper handles the objective structure of recipient-category — the two papers are axially complementary.
This volume, P04 The Eight Bases of Giving. §IV's cause-area selection is complementary to P04's spectrum of eight motivations (AN 8.31) — P04 handles "why one gives" on the motivation axis, and this paper handles "to whom one gives" on the recipient-category axis, the two together laying out a dual motivation-and-category mapping for Part II; a closing brush of motivational inversion in §V Misreading 1 may draw on P04 §III 3.1 as background, without re-unfolding it here.
This volume, P05 Velāmasutta. Explicitly carried forward in §I and §III 3.4 — P05 §IV engages, through Singer, MacAskill, and GiveWell, the within-cause cost-effectiveness ranking (the second of the contemporary three handles), and this paper's §IV engages cross-category cause-area selection (the fourth of Part II's contemporary handles); P05 lays down the ceiling of giving (the Velāma progression from eighty-four thousand down to the finger-snap perception of impermanence), and P07 lays down the recipient classification, together unfolding in Part II's opening stretch the complete recipient axis (recipient ladder plus recipient category).
This volume, P06 Sīha Sutta. Explicitly carried forward in §I and §III 3.4 — P06 handles the temporal axis of fruit through AN 5.34's four sandiṭṭhika plus one samparāyika ("when does the fruit come?"), while this paper handles the recipient-category axis through MN 142 ("to whom does the fruit come?"); together with P05's recipient-rank axis they co-constitute the three-axis skeleton of Part II's opening stretch. §IV's giver-well-being axis of Dunn-Norton prosocial spending (P06's principal site) is the third of the contemporary handles, completing, together with this paper's cause-area selection axis (the fourth), Part II's four-contemporary-handles configuration for its opening stretch.
This volume, P08 Three Bases of Meritorious Activity. Explicitly signaled in §VI — P04's motivation axis, P05's recipient-rank axis, P06's temporal axis of fruit, and P07's recipient-category axis will be integrated within the three containers of P08's puñña-kiriya-vatthu (dāna / sīla / bhāvanā); the interface of giving and virtue (how the giver's own conduct shapes the purity of giving) and the interface of giving and meditation (cāgānussati as meditative object — the primary treatment being at NIAN Part I P03) will serve as P08's structural portals.
This volume, P09 Sangha as Field of Giving. The third point of the honest-absence declaration closing §II Group 2 — the absence of any Mahāpajāpatī robe-offering narrative in T1451 Mūla-sarvāstivāda-vinaya Vastukṣudrakavastu — is left to P09 to address positively, through vinaya-institutional material (cātuddisa saṅghika lābha, property of the sangha of the four quarters); this paper does not re-unfold the institutional dimension of the sangha.
This volume, P24 Samantabhadra's Extensive Cultivation of Offerings. The juxtaposition of material-gift and Dharma-gift cited from It 98 Dhammadāna in §II Group 4 serves only as an orthogonal note between the content axis and the recipient axis; the full debate between Dharma-gift and material-gift has its primary home at P24, which treats in depth the Samantabhadra Bhadracaryā chapter's declaration that "of all offerings, the offering of Dharma is foremost"; this paper does not re-unfold the content axis.
NIAN volume, Part I P03 The Six Recollections System. Cāgānussati stands as the fifth node among the six recollections, taking the giver's own prior giving as its object; this paper's §III 3.2 brushes that cāga background when discussing personal-attainment reckoning, and the two works are structurally linked along the giver-recollection axis — the two volumes mutually reinforce each other along the cāga axis.

IV. Sutra & Śāstra Index

Abbrev.	Full Name	Author/Translator	Taisho
瞿曇彌經	瞿曇彌經	unknown	T0084

Paper: DANA-P07 · The Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅga Sutta · DĀNA · Part II · The Āgama View Author: 釋慧鏡 (Shi Huijing) · Project: 指月 / Pointing-at-the-Moon · Series: The Six Practice Gates （六行門） License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 CBETA collation: Citations from Madhyamāgama juan 47 sūtra 180 verified against CBETA Electronic Tripiṭaka 2024 edition. Pāli citations (MN 142, It 98) follow SuttaCentral Mahāsaṅgīti Tipiṭaka Buddhavasse 2500 with PTS numbering. Repository: https://github.com/pointing-at-the-moon/six-practice-gates

Footnotes

MN 142 Dakkhiṇāvibhaṅgasutta, Majjhima Nikāya. PTS MN iii.253–257; SuttaCentral Sujato reference MN 142. The closing sūtra of the Vibhaṅgavagga (Division Chapter) of the Majjhima Nikāya. The scene is the Banyan-Tree Park (Nigrodhārāma) at Kapilavatthu in the Sakyan country; Mahāpajāpatī Gotamī arrives bearing a pair of newly woven robes to offer to the Buddha, who thrice declines and directs her to give them to the sangha instead. After Ānanda intervenes on her behalf, the Buddha unfolds the body of the sūtra in three layers: the fourteen kinds of personal gift (pāṭipuggalikā dāna, listed one by one by the recipient's path-attainment — the worldling-animal group in quantitative progression, the stream-enterer group and above sharing the apex of "immeasurable and uncountable" asaṅkheyya appameyyā and ascending through the formula ko pana vādo "how much more so" to the Buddha); the seven kinds of sangha-bound gift (saṅghagata dāna, the closing passage extending to the sangha of the four quarters cātuddisa saṅgha as apex); and the four-fold purity of the offering (dakkhiṇā-visuddhi, the four items of giver-and-recipient purity combinations). The pivot source of this paper — discussed in §I, §II Group 1, and §III 3.1 / 3.2 / 3.3 / 3.4. English renderings cross-checked against Bhikkhu Sujato and Bhikkhu Bodhi; the edition is the Mahāsaṅgīti Tipiṭaka Buddhavasse 2500. ↩
Madhyamāgama juan 47, 〈Chapter of Fundamental Division〉 (根本分別品) 12, sūtra 180, Gautamī Sūtra (瞿曇彌經), translated by Gautama Saṅghadeva of the Eastern Jin, Taishō vol. 1 No. 26, T01.0721c–0723a. The tightest Chinese parallel to MN 142. The scene is likewise the Banyan-Tree Park at Kapilavatthu; "摩訶簸邏闍鉢提瞿曇彌" (Mahāsivalicchadīpatī Gotamī) arrives bearing a newly woven golden-threaded yellow robe for the Buddha's acceptance, the Buddha thrice declines, and Ānanda intervenes on her behalf, after which the Buddha unfolds the body with a pair of listings — "the seven sangha-assemblies" and "the fourteen private gifts." The Chinese fourteen private gifts list from above downward (Tathāgata, paccekabuddha, arahant, … down to animal), reversing the direction of the Pāli MN 142 but with the same structure, and with precise quantitative correspondences (a hundredfold for an animal, up through a billion-fold for a lust-free outsider, and immeasurable from one practicing toward stream-entry upward). The seven sangha-assemblies unfold along a three-fold temporal partition (Buddha's lifetime / after parinirvāṇa / in ages to come) without using the rendering "sangha of the four quarters"; the Taishō edition's text of the sixth assembly is missing, jumping from the fifth to the seventh (taken here as a Taishō critical-edition marker, not as load-bearing argumentative material). The three-fold purity (corresponding to dakkhiṇā-visuddhi) renders visuddhi as 淨 jing and dāyaka / paṭiggāhaka as 施主 shizhu / 受者 shouzhe, corresponding precisely to MN 142. Cited in §II Group 2 and §III 3.3. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Fenbie bushi jing (分別布施經), translated by Dānapāla of the Song (施護), single fascicle, Taishō vol. 1 No. 84, T01.0903c–0904b. Rendered in the early Northern Song (roughly late tenth century), approximately six hundred years after the Eastern Jin translation of T0026, and constituting the second independent crystallization of MN 142 in the Chinese transmission. The structure corresponds precisely to MN 142: fourteen kinds of personal gift (listed as "fourteen kinds of comparative giving"), seven kinds of sangha giving ("seven assemblies"), and four kinds of pure giving. The key feature is the preservation of the sense-rendering of "sangha of the four quarters" — the seven assemblies employ "遊方行化" youfang xinghua as the rendering of cātuddisa (the fifth, sixth, and seventh items reading "a gift, after the Buddha's parinirvāṇa, to the bhikkhus / bhikkhunīs / both wandering in itinerant practice"), standing in sharp contrast to T0026's temporal "in ages to come." The fourteen personal gifts are listed upward from below (the one afflicted by illness, the one who violates precepts, the one who keeps precepts, the one free of defilements, one practicing toward stream-entry, the fruit of stream-entry, … the Tathāgata worthy of offerings perfectly self-enlightened one), in the same direction as MN 142. The unfolding of the four kinds of pure giving closes each of the four items with a two-way reflexive move ("when the gift-giver is pure, there is no recipient; when the gift given is pure, there is no recipient; when the receiver is pure, there is no giver; when what is received is pure, there is no giver"), echoing later emptiness teachings while holding strictly within MN 142's four-fold structure. Cited in §II Group 3 and §III 3.3; set beside T0026 it displays the two independent crystallizations of the Chinese transmission. ↩ ↩²
It 98 Dhammadāna, Itivuttaka. PTS It 98; SuttaCentral Sujato reference It 98. Among the closing sections of the Itivuttaka. The sūtra states, in the Buddha's first person, the juxtaposition of two gifts: "Bhikkhus, there are these two gifts: the material gift and the Dharma gift. Of these two gifts, bhikkhus, the foremost is the Dharma gift" (Dvemāni, bhikkhave, dānāni: āmisadānañca dhammadānañca. Etadaggaṁ, bhikkhave, imesaṁ dvinnaṁ dānānaṁ yadidaṁ dhammadānaṁ; translation mine). The verse section restates the foremost status of the Dharma gift along the two axes of sharing (saṁvibhāga) and support (anuggaha). The axis of this sūtra is the content axis of giving (what is given), orthogonally complementary to the recipient axis of MN 142 (to whom it is given). Cited as the textual basis for the orthogonality of the content axis and the recipient axis in §II Group 4; the full debate between Dharma-gift and material-gift is not unfolded here (its primary home is P24 Samantabhadra's Extensive Cultivation of Offerings, treating the passage "of all offerings, the offering of Dharma is foremost" from the Samantabhadra Bhadracaryā chapter in depth). English renderings cross-checked against Bhikkhu Sujato and John D. Ireland. ↩

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