The contents of the text are summarized in Soper, Literary Evidence for Buddhist Art in China, Artibus Asiae supplementum 19 (1959): 184 ff.; Yamabe, 25–28.The text is extensively preoccupied with the visualization of the bodily marks of the Buddha, along with visualization of many other attributes of the Buddha. Some of these visualizations are unusual, including for example specific visualizations of the Buddhaʼs heart and of his hidden male organ. Yamabe considers the text somewhat disorganized. No Tibetan or Sanskrit version of the text is known, and we have only one Chinese version. A fragmentary Sogdian version is apparently a translation from the Chinese and therefore not an independent witness (Yamabe 30). Close correspondences between this text and the Contemplation Sutra 觀無量壽佛經 T 365 are summarized in a table by Yamabe (508–512).

Yamabe summarizes theories advanced by scholars preceding him, arguing variously for the origin of the text in Gandhāra, China, and Central Asia, or that the text was gradually compiled over a period of time through a combination of such circumstances. Important figures in this debate include Ono Genmyō, Alexander Soper, Tsukinowa Kenryū, Kasugai Shin'ya, Fujita Kōtatsu, Shikii Shūjō and Kuwayama Shōshin (Yamabe diss. 115–124).

The main evidence Yamabe adduces to show that the author(s) must also have been drawing upon Chinese sources are: terminological and stylistic peculiarities (186–215); strange lists of hells seemingly unknown in India sources, but with Chinese analogues; strange lists of marks found on the bodies of Buddhas (216–262); a questionable story about the 'Cave of the Buddhaʼs Shadow/Image'  佛影窟 in Gandhāra; and borrowings from other Chinese texts. Yamabe considers that the text was probably composed in Chinese, and not translated from any other language (213). The account of the “Buddha-Shadow Cave” has sometimes been used to argue a Gandhāran origin for the text, but Yamabe argues on the basis of comparison with other descriptions that it is incorrect in important details, suggesting that the authors of the text could not have been physically familiar with the actual site (263–298, esp. 280 ff.).

The main evidence Yamabe adduces for the claim that the text shows knowledge of the Indian tradition not available in the China of the day is: striking parallels in unusual content (images etc.) with visualization meditations described in the Sanskrit Yogalehrbuch found at Qizil and Shorchuq (300–352); parallels between the unusual description of the Buddhaʼs cosmically magnificent penis and Śaivite liṇga-worship motifs (377–426), and other materials also resonant of Śaivism, such as the motifs of extremely prolonged copulation and of a corpse sticking to the body; parallels between the content of some of the meditations described in the text and cave art at Toyok near Turfan (427–497); and the fact that knowledge of the 'Buddha-Shadow Cave' is too detailed for it to have been based on what was known in China at the time.

References

Fujita, Kōtatsu. 1990. “The Textual Origins of the Kuan Wu-liang-shou ching: A Canonical Scripture of Pure Land Buddhism.”  In Robert E. Buswell, Jr., ed. Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha. Honolulu:  University of Hawai`i Press. 149–173.

Yamabe, Nobuyoshi. 1999. “The Sutra on the Ocean-Like Samādhi of the Visualization of the Buddha: The Interfusion of the Chinese and Indian Cultures in Central Asia as Reflected in a Fifth Century Apocryphal Sūtra.” New Haven. Yale University.