Gānlù tuóluóní zhòu 甘露陀羅尼呪
Sweet-Dew Dhāraṇī Spell by 實叉難陀 (Shíchānántuó, Śikṣānanda, 譯)
About the work
A single-paragraph anonymous-or-semi-anonymous Esoteric dhāraṇī-text traditionally attributed to Śikṣānanda (實叉難陀). The Taishō witness gives the head-line 于闐三藏實叉難陀佛授記寺譯 (“translated by the Khotanese tripiṭaka Śikṣānanda at the Fó-shòu-jì-sì 佛授記寺”), placing it among the short dhāraṇī produced by Śikṣānanda’s atelier alongside the great 80-fascicle Avataṃsaka and his Burning-Face translation KR6j0545 (T1314). The text’s tail-formula gives an alternate title 佛說甘露陀羅尼經 (“Sūtra of the Sweet-Dew Dhāraṇī, Spoken by the Buddha”).
Abstract
The whole text consists of a single transcribed Sanskrit dhāraṇī of about 22 pādas, delimited by the standard Chinese verse-numbering. The opening is the homage-formula:
namaḥ bhagavate amitābhāya tathāgatāya arhate samyak-saṃbuddhāya tadyathā oṃ amṛte amṛtodbhave amṛta-saṃbhave amṛta-garbhe amṛta-siddhe amṛta-teje amṛta-vikrānte amṛta-vikrānta-gāmine amṛta-gagana-kīrti-kare amṛta-dundubhi sarvārthe sarva-tathāgata-sādhanam sarva-karmā-kleśa-kṣayaṃ-kare svāhā
— that is, the Amṛta-rāja-Amitābha sweet-dew dhāraṇī, the principal “long” amṛta-mantra (amṛta-bīja) of the Pure-Land–and–amṛta tradition. The same mantra is also embedded as the Wú-liàng-shòu rúlái gēn-běn tuó-luó-ní 無量壽如來根本陀羅尼 in numerous Tang-period ritual manuals.
There is no narrative frame, no offering instruction, and no merit-catalogue — the text is essentially a dhāraṇī-card. Its placement in Taishō vol. 21 immediately after KR6j0547 (the short Sweet-Dew Sūtra dhāraṇī of the Surūpa-kāya / amṛta-rāja family) attests to its function within the Burning-Mouth / amṛta cluster: where T1316 supplies the four-syllable Surūpa amṛta-mantra used to convert water into sweet-dew, T1317 supplies the long Amitābha-amṛta dhāraṇī used to consecrate the same offering. The text remained the standard liturgical form of the Amṛta-rāja dhāraṇī through the medieval and early-modern periods.
Date: although the catalog meta carries the Śikṣānanda attribution and dynasty 唐, the brevity of the text and the absence of any matching colophon make the attribution provisional. The bracket given here (695–704) follows Śikṣānanda’s main Cháng’ān period at the Fó-shòu-jì-sì. If the attribution is incorrect — as is possible for a free-standing dhāraṇī-card — the text may be earlier or somewhat later, but late-seventh-century circulation is independently established by the parallel dhāraṇī’s appearance in other early-Tang ritual texts.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located on T1317 in particular. For the Amitābha amṛta-rāja dhāraṇī tradition more broadly, see the standard treatments of the Pure-Land mantra-cult; the amṛta-segment of the Yán-kǒu cycle is treated in Orzech (1996) and Lye (2003) cited under KR6j0544.