Fóshuō duànwēn jīng 佛說斷溫經
Sūtra Spoken by the Buddha for the Cutting Off of Plague-Pestilence anonymous
About the work
A very short, single-fascicle apocryphal Chinese Buddhist sūtra (X01 no. 019) of unattributed authorship, addressed to the practical problem of plague-pestilence (wēnqì zhàngliè 溫氣瘴烈) — the seasonal infectious-disease outbreaks that devastated Chinese populations through the entire imperial period. In the standard Mahāyāna Rājagṛha setting, the Buddha is asked by Ānanda how the people of Jambudvīpa may be saved from the wēnbìng 溫病 (warm-pathogen disease, in traditional Chinese medical terminology); the Buddha responds with an account of seven plague-causing demons (qī guǐshén 七鬼神) and a dhāraṇī for averting them, framed by triple-jewel and Avalokiteśvara invocations.
Abstract
The text is anonymous and has no canonical attribution; the catalog meta lists no author or dynasty. It belongs to the broad category of medieval-and-later Chinese Buddhist jíjí jiěnàn 急疾解難 (“urgent disease-relief”) apocrypha — a substantial sub-genre of practical-devotional dhāraṇī-texts modelled on Mahāyāna scriptural form but composed in China for specific therapeutic and apotropaic purposes. The seven plague-demons named in the text — and the formulaic structure of dhāraṇī + triple-jewel + Avalokiteśvara invocation — show clear continuities with the Chángshòu jīng (KR6i0581) and with the broader popular-Buddhist textual literature of the Suí-Táng-and-after period. The composition window is set conservatively at 600–1300 (covering the broad medieval window in which such apocrypha proliferated); a tighter dating cannot be established from internal evidence alone.
The work survives in the Wànzì xùzàngjīng recension and was almost certainly drawn from late-medieval or early-modern Japanese woodblock-print sources. No Dūnhuáng witness has been securely identified for this specific text, though several Dūnhuáng fragments of related plague-aversion dhāraṇī-texts exist.
Translations and research
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮. Gigi-kyō kenkyū 疑經研究. Kyoto: Kyōto Daigaku Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūjo, 1976. — Foundational study of the apocryphal-sūtra genre to which this text belongs.
- Salguero, C. Pierce. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. — Treats Buddhist disease-aversion literature as a category.
Other points of interest
The seven plague-demons (qī guǐshén) of the text show direct continuities with the older Chinese demon-onomastic medical and religious traditions; the conjunction of dhāraṇī-form Buddhism with Chinese demonological pathology is one of the most distinctive features of the medieval-Chinese Buddhist medical tradition.