Fó shuō Běidǒu qīxīng yánmìng jīng 佛說北斗七星延命經
Sūtra of the Life-Extending Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper, Spoken by the Buddha Anonymous (Chinese apocryphon)
About the work
A short, illustrated, Chinese-composed apocryphal sūtra (僞經 wěi-jīng) — the most famous and widely-disseminated of the Sino-Buddhist Big-Dipper ritual texts. The opening superscription reads 婆羅門僧將到此經唐朝受持 (“This sūtra was brought by a brāhmaṇa monk and received and observed in the Tang dynasty”) — itself a classic apocryphal-marker formula claiming foreign provenance to license a Chinese composition. The text is structurally and doctrinally Daoist (mapping each of the twelve earthly-branch birth-years to a particular Dipper star and prescribing star-specific dietary, talismanic, and devotional observances), but is packaged in Buddhist canonical form with the Buddha as speaker. It is the classic example of Tang-Song Buddhist-Daoist apocryphal syncretism.
Abstract
The text matches each of the twelve earthly-branch zodiacal birth-years to one of the seven Dipper stars (with five double-counted), prescribes the appropriate fortune-grain (祿食) for each constellation (millet 黍 for those born under Tānláng, glutinous millet 粟 for Jùmén, etc.), and instructs the believer to “make offering to this sūtra and wear the talismanic-symbol of the natal star” (供養此經及帶本星符) for the avoidance of calamity and life-extension.
The text continues in the canonical apocryphon-mode, citing Yánluówáng 閻羅王 (Yama, the King of Hell) as having appointed the Big-Dipper stars to govern the registers of life and death — language directly imported from the Daoist Běidǒu jīng 北斗經 (DZ 622, Tàishàng xuánlíng Běidǒu běnmìng yánshēng zhēnjīng). The textual relationship between the Buddhist T1307 and the Daoist Běidǒu běnmìng yánshēng zhēnjīng is the most extensively studied case of mutual scriptural borrowing in the medieval Chinese astral cult; Christine Mollier (2008) has shown that the Buddhist apocryphon T1307 likely precedes the Daoist DZ 622 by a generation or two, with the Daoist scripture absorbing the structure and supplying it with cosmological backing of its own.
The text is well-attested at Dūnhuáng: at least 18 manuscript witnesses survive (Stein, Pelliot, and Beijing collections), with the earliest datable copies of the late-Tang and Five Dynasties (Mollier 2008: 137–144). This permits a dating bracket of c. 750 (earliest plausible date for the text’s circulation in the Tang Esoteric milieu) to c. 950 (latest Dūnhuáng manuscripts, after which it became thoroughly canonical). The text was carried to Japan in the Heian period and is the principal Buddhist source for the Heian Hokuto enmei-hō 北斗延命法 imperial life-extension rite still performed in Tendai and Shingon liturgy.
The Taishō text retains image-placeholders (preserved in the source as <img:>) for the seven star-talismans (本星符) and the iconographic medallions of the seven Dipper deities — this is one of very few Taishō texts that originally circulated as a fully illustrated scripture, and the woodblock-print copies of the Sòng and Yuán typically reproduce the talismans graphically.
Translations and research
- Mollier, Christine. Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008 — chapter 4 (“Visualizing the Dipper”) is the definitive study of T1307, including its relationship to the Daoist Běi-dǒu jīng; identifies the Buddhist scripture as the proximate source of the Daoist parallel.
- Mollier, Christine. “La méthode de l’empereur du nord du Mont Fengdu.” Cahiers d’Extrême-Asie 9 (1996/1997): 329–385 — earlier study of the same syncretic complex.
- Sørensen, Henrik H. “The Worship of the Great Dipper in Korean Buddhism.” In Religions in Traditional Korea, edited by Henrik H. Sørensen, 71–105. Copenhagen: Seminar for Buddhist Studies, 1995.
- Yano Michio. Mikkyō senseijutsu 密教占星術. Rev. ed., Tōyō shoin, 2013.
- Kotyk, Jeffrey. “Buddhist Astrology and Astral Magic in the Tang Dynasty.” DPhil, Leiden, 2017.
- Franke, Herbert. “The Taoist Elements in the Buddhist Great Bear Sūtra (Pei-tou ching).” Asia Major, 3rd ser., 3.1 (1990): 75–111 — earliest detailed Western study of the apocryphon.
Other points of interest
T1307 is doctrinally and stylistically the most overtly apocryphal of the four Big-Dipper texts in Taishō vol. 21 (T1305–T1307, T1310). Its structure — a star-by-star table of birth-years and ritual instructions — has no parallel in Indian Tantric literature and is purely Sinitic. Its preservation in the Taishō (taken from the 甲本 jiǎ recension and the 原本 yuán witness) reflects its enduring liturgical importance in late imperial East Asian Buddhism, despite its non-canonical status in the strict bibliographic sense.
Links
- CBETA T21n1307
- Kanseki DB
- Daoist parallel DZ 622 Tàishàng xuánlíng Běidǒu běnmìng yánshēng zhēnjīng — see KR5d0001 / Daozang index for the canonical Daoist counterpart.