Wénshū púsà xiàn fó tuóluóní míng Wūsūzhā 文殊菩薩獻佛陀羅尼名烏蘇吒
Dhāraṇī Offered by Mañjuśrī Bodhisattva to the Buddha, Named “Uṣūṭa” by anonymous translator (失譯)
About the work
A short one-fascicle dhāraṇī text in which Mañjuśrī offers to the Buddha a vidyā called Wū-sū-zhā 烏蘇吒, glossed in the title’s interlinear annotation as cǐ yún miè yín-yù què wǒ-màn 此云滅婬慾却我慢 (“said to mean: extinguishes lust and dispels self-conceit”). The translator is anonymous (失譯, shīyì).
Abstract
The text opens with the Buddha addressing Ānanda about the suffering of beings caught in kāma-saṃsāra; Mañjuśrī then steps forward to recite a verse declaring that he alone among all beings can rescue them by severing the root of birth-and-death, and proclaims the dhāraṇī Uṣūṭa. The dhāraṇī itself is a long incantation in transcribed Sanskrit (jù-lì jù-lì dì-nà yōu-zhuō yōu-zhuō dì-nà…) whose efficacy is to suppress the two cardinal afflictions of lust (yín-yù) and arrogance (wǒ-màn).
The text belongs to the lust-suppression sub-genre of dhāraṇī literature (compare T1408 Vidyādhāraṇī for Severing Sexual Desire and the lust-extinguishing chapters of the Mahā-māyūrī); but its specific framing of Mañjuśrī as the deity who offers a dhāraṇī to the Buddha is unusual and inverts the more typical Buddha-to-disciple direction. The bracket 600–800 reflects the absence of a securely attributed translator: the text is catalogued by Zhìshēng (智昇) in the Kāi-yuán shìjiào lù 開元釋教錄 (730) under the anonymous-translation rubric, so it must have been current in China by the early eighth century, and its phonology is consistent with a Tang-era rendering.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.