Blurb:

With the present paper I study and translate a discourse in the Ekottarikaāgama
preserved in Chinese of which no parallel in other discourse collections
is known. This situation relates to the wider issue of what significance
to accord to the absence of parallels from the viewpoint of the early Buddhist
oral transmission. The main topic of the discourse itself is perception of impermanence,
which is of central importance in the early Buddhist scheme of
the path for cultivating liberating insight. A description of the results of such
practice in this Ekottarika-āgama discourse has a somewhat ambivalent formulation
that suggests a possible relation to the notion of rebirth in the Pure
Abodes, suddhāvāsa. This notion, attested in a Pāli discourse, in turn might
have provided a precedent for the aspiration, prominent in later Buddhist
traditions, to be reborn in the Pure Land.