Shī zhū èguǐ yǐnshí jí shuǐ fǎ 施諸餓鬼飲食及水法
Method of Bestowing Food and Water on All Hungry Ghosts by 不空 (Bùkōng, Amoghavajra, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Esoteric ritual manual translated by Amoghavajra (不空) under imperial commission. The text takes the dhāraṇī-and-four-Tathāgatas core of KR6j0544 (T1313) and elaborates it into a step-by-step liturgical procedure (法) complete with mudrās (印) — as flagged in its full Taishō title 施諸餓鬼飲食及水法(并手印). It is the first integrated ritual document of the Burning-Mouth cycle and the technical bridge between the bare sūtra (T1313/1314) and the fully-developed Yúqié yàn-kǒu yoga rite (KR6j0549 T1318, KR6j0551 T1320). Two seventeenth-/eighteenth-century Japanese colophons preserved at the foot of the text record successive collations by 淨嚴 Jōgon (Jōkyō 4 = 1687, at age 49), 尊教 Sonkyō (Genroku 16 = 1703), and 性寂 Shōjaku (Hōei 5 = 1708) — testifying to the work’s continued ritual use in early-modern Shingon.
Abstract
The text opens by specifying the offering apparatus: a clean copper, white-porcelain, or lacquered vessel filled with food mixed with pure water; the practitioner faces east, standing or seated. He recites a vow-verse in which “bhikṣu / bhikṣuṇī So-and-So” makes a single vessel of pure food into a universal offering “周遍法界” — feeding all pretas throughout the dust-mote realms of the ten directions, including ancestors, mountain- and river-spirits, and wild bhūta-deities — with the wish that they shall in turn cause all sentient beings to attain Buddhahood and never retrogress.
The manual then prescribes a graded sequence of eight dhāraṇī + mudrā pairings, each with a name in Chinese and a transcribed Sanskrit mantra:
- Universal-summoning (普集印 / 開喉印): right-hand thumb-and-middle-finger pinch — namaḥ pubhuriyakaritā tathāgatāya — summons all pretas.
- Hell-gate-opening and throat-opening (破地獄門及開咽喉印): same mudrā with a snap — oṃ pubhujetri kataritā tathāgatāya — recited with each finger-snap, opens the gates of all hells and the needle-thin throats of the pretas.
- Power-blessing the food (加持飲食陀羅尼) — the core dhāraṇī of T1313, transferred verbatim — namaḥ sarvatathāgatāvalokite oṃ saṃbhara saṃbhara hūṃ — produces seven-times-seven droṇa of food before every ghost.
- Sweet-Dew bestowal (蒙甘露法味真言 / 施無畏印) — namaḥ surūpāya tathāgatāya tadyathā oṃ suru suru prasuru prasuru svāhā — turns water into amṛta-milk, opens the preta-throats.
- Vairocana single-syllable water-wheel contemplation (毘盧遮那一字心水輪觀真言印): visualisation of the syllable vaṃ (鑁) on the right palm flowing as eight-virtue ocean — namaḥ samanta-buddhānāṃ vaṃ — universalising the food.
- Five-Tathāgata invocation (五如來名號): Ratna-prabhāva 寶勝如來 (destroys miserliness), Surūpa-kāya 妙色身如來 (restores form), Amṛta-rāja 甘露王如來 (anoints the Dharma-body), Vipula-kāya 廣博身如來 (widens the throat), Abhayaṃkara 離怖畏如來 (removes terror). Note the substitution of Amṛta-rāja for the Prabhūta-ratna of T1313 and the addition of a fifth Tathāgata.
- Bodhisattva-Samaya-precept dhāraṇī (受菩薩三昧耶戒陀羅尼) — oṃ samaya-sattvaṃ — confers the bodhisattva-samaya precept on the assembled ghosts.
- Dispatching dhāraṇī (發遣解脫真言) — oṃ vajra-mokṣa muḥ — formally releases the ghosts at the rite’s conclusion. Without this, the food cannot be carried away.
The text closes with two notes of significance: an editorial cross-reference identifying the parallel scripture as 別有救面然餓鬼陀羅尼經唐實叉難陀譯 (“There is also separately a Sūtra of Saving the Burning-Face Hungry-Ghost translated by Śikṣānanda of the Tang”), explicitly acknowledging KR6j0545 (T1314) as a sister-translation; and a colophon-stack recording its early-modern Japanese collation history.
The dating bracket follows Bù-kōng’s principal translation period (746–774). The shift from the four-Tathāgata sequence of T1313 to a five-Tathāgata sequence with Amṛta-rāja (甘露王如來, Amṛta-rāja) added is the historical seed for the Sweet-Dew (甘露) cluster represented by KR6j0547 (T1316), KR6j0548 (T1317), and KR6j0552 (T1321) — these texts foreground precisely the amṛta-water aspect of the rite that the present manual systematises.
Translations and research
- Orzech, Charles D. “Saving the Burning-Mouth Hungry Ghost.” In Religions of China in Practice, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr., 278–283. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996.
- Orzech, Charles D. “Fang Yankou and Pudu: Translation, Metaphor, and Religious Identity.” In Daoist Identity: History, Lineage, and Ritual, ed. Livia Kohn and Harold Roth, 213–234. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.
- Lye Hsiao-Lan. Feeding Ghosts: A Study of the Yuqie Yankou Rite. PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2003.