Jiālóuluó jí zhūtiān mìyán jīng 迦樓羅及諸天密言經
Sūtra of the Secret Speech of Garuḍa and the Various Devas by 般若力 (Bō-rě-lì, Prajñābala, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Esoteric dhāraṇī compendium translated by Prajñābala (般若力), a Kashmir-origin Tripiṭaka master who arrived in Cháng-ān in Qián-yuán 1 (758 CE). The text gathers the vidyās of Garuḍa 迦樓羅 (Skt. Garuḍa, “Golden-Winged Bird-King” 金翅鳥, here glossed by the translator’s preface as a Sanskrit word “rendered by intent rather than literal equivalent”) together with those of a series of devas. It is the only extant translation attributed to Prajñābala.
Abstract
The translator’s preface — unusually substantial for a short ritual manual — expounds the cosmological setting in which Garuḍa operates. There are four kinds of dragons (born from egg, womb, moisture, and transformation) and four kinds of Garuḍas matching them; the transformation-born (化生) Garuḍa subdues all the others, while the moisture-born dragon cannot match even the egg-born Garuḍa. The text frames Garuḍa as the master of the five great elements (earth, water, fire, wind, space) by virtue of his physiology and his vidyā-discipline, and explains that his rite is therefore especially efficacious against snake- and dragon-poisoning, including poisoning by sorcery (kākhorda).
The body of the manual then gives the Garuḍa-king dhāraṇī with its hand-mudrā, image, and rite, and proceeds through the deva vidyās (the Mahêśvara dhāraṇī, the Nārāyaṇa dhāraṇī, etc.) that complete the apotropaic toolkit. The text overlaps thematically with KR6j0507 (T1276) and KR6j0508 (T1277) but represents a distinct, independent late-eighth-century transmission — a small Cháng-ān redaction of the Garuḍa-and-devas cycle by a Kashmir master one generation after Amoghavajra.
The dating bracket reflects Prajñābala’s documented arrival at the Tang court in 758 (terminus post quem from the Sòng Gāosēng-zhuàn) and the conventional late-Tang latitude before transmission to Japan.
Translations and research
- Strickmann, Michel. Mantras et mandarins: le bouddhisme tantrique en Chine. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
- Slouber, Michael. Early Tantric Medicine: Snakebite, Mantras, and Healing in the Gāruḍa Tantras. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017 — for the Indian Gāruḍa-tantra background.
- Orzech, Charles D., Henrik H. Sørensen, and Richard K. Payne, eds. Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia. Leiden: Brill, 2011.