Fó shuō Gānlù jīng tuóluóní zhòu 佛說甘露經陀羅尼呪
Sweet-Dew Sūtra Dhāraṇī Spell, Spoken by the Buddha
About the work
A very short anonymous Esoteric dhāraṇī-text — roughly twenty Chinese characters of mantra plus three lines of ritual instruction — preserving a single transcribed amṛta-dhāraṇī of the Surūpa-kāya / amṛta type. The text is a free-standing extraction of the amṛta-segment of the longer Burning-Mouth complex (cf. KR6j0546 T1315 step 4). CANWWW reconstructs the title’s Sanskrit referent as Paramitaguṇānuśaṃsadhāraṇī and lists 面然餓鬼經 (“Burning-Face Hungry-Ghost Sūtra”) as an alternative title — confirming the text’s place within the Yán-kǒu / Miàn-rán dhāraṇī cluster.
Abstract
The whole text reads (in the master Korean recension preserved in the Taishō):
namaḥ surūpāya tathāgatāya tadyathā oṃ suru suru prasuru prasuru svāhā (transcribed in Chinese characters)
followed by a one-sentence application: “Take a handful of water, recite the mantra over it seven times, and scatter it into the air. Each drop of that water becomes ten droṇa of amṛta sweet-dew. All hungry ghosts everywhere are able to drink it, with no shortage, all of them satisfied to fullness.”
The mantra is the Tathāgata Surūpa-kāya 妙色身 amṛta-dhāraṇī — the same that figures as step 4 (méng gān-lù fǎ-wèi zhēn-yán 蒙甘露法味真言) in the Bù-kōng ritual manual KR6j0546 (T1315), as the Sweet-Dew bestowal segment of the Yúqié yàn-kǒu yoga rite KR6j0549 (T1318), and as the amṛta-bīja of the closely related anonymous KR6j0548 (T1317).
The text is anonymous and undated. The catalog meta records no translator, no dynasty, and no author. The dating bracket here is broad — late Suí through mid-Táng — to capture the period during which the Yán-kǒu / Miàn-rán cycle entered Chinese circulation (cf. the parallel renderings T1313 by Bù-kōng and T1314 by Śikṣānanda) and during which short amṛta-extracts of the same family were copied and used independently. The text’s combination with KR6j0548 (an anonymous companion amṛta-dhāraṇī sometimes attributed to Śikṣānanda) suggests the early-/mid-Tang as the most probable horizon, but no internal evidence permits a closer fix.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located. For the broader Burning-Mouth cycle of which this text is an extracted fragment, see Orzech, “Saving the Burning-Mouth Hungry Ghost” (1996) and Lye, Feeding Ghosts (2003), cited under KR6j0544.