Qiānguāngyǎn Guānzìzài púsà mìmì fǎ jīng 千光眼觀自在菩薩祕密法經
Sūtra of the Secret Method of the Thousand-Light-Eye Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara by 三昧蘇嚩羅 (Sānmèi sūfúluó, Samaya-svara, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Esoteric mìmì fǎ 祕密法 manual on the Sahasra-Pradīpa-Avalokiteśvara (“Thousand-Light-Eye Avalokiteśvara”), an iconographic variant of the Sahasrabhuja with a thousand luminous eyes (千光眼) emphasising the bodhisattva’s ālokana-jñāna (illumining gnosis). The colophon names the translator as the shèngxíng shāmén 聖行沙門 Sānmèi sūfúluó (三昧蘇嚩羅, Skt. Samaya-svara) — an obscure Tang figure not mentioned in the standard gāosēng literature. The honorific shèngxíng (sage-conduct) and the absence of any imperial-court titles suggest a non-court Tantric monk, possibly active in the late Tang.
Abstract
The text expounds twenty-five yìnfǎ 印法 (mudrā / spell-pairs) keyed to the iconography of the Thousand-Light-Eye Avalokiteśvara — each of the bodhisattva’s individual hand-emblems (lotus, cakra, vajra, sword, etc.) is correlated with a specific luminous-eye visualisation, mantra, and ritual application. The work is closely related to the larger Sahasrabhuja-corpus (KR6j0260, KR6j0269) but emphasises the ālokana (eye / light) aspect of the deity rather than the mahā-karuṇā (compassion) aspect that dominates the parallel literature. The Sanskrit underlying Qiānguāngyǎn (千光眼) is best identified as Sahasra-pradīpa-locana; comparable iconographic forms are documented in Tibetan sources as spyan-stong gtong-ba (“Eye-Thousand-Emitter”). The translator’s near-anonymity — combined with the work’s idiosyncratic iconographic vocabulary — makes the text a curiosity within the otherwise tightly-organised Tang Sahasrabhuja corpus.
Translations and research
- Yü, Chün-fang. Kuan-yin: The Chinese Transformation of Avalokiteśvara. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.
- Chandra, Lokesh. The Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara. New Delhi: IGNCA, 1988.
Links
- CBETA T20n1065
- Kanseki DB
- 三昧蘇嚩羅 DILA
- Dazangthings date evidence (750) — T = CBETA [Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association]. Taishō shinshū daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經. Edited by Takakusu Junjirō 高楠順次郎 and Watanabe Kaigyoku 渡邊海旭. Tokyo: Taishō shinshū daizōkyō kankōkai/Daizō shuppan, 1924-1932. CBReader v 5.0, 2014.