Yújiā jíyào yànkǒu shīshí yí 瑜伽集要焰口施食儀
Liturgy of the Yoga Compendium Burning-Mouth Food-Bestowal
About the work
A one-fascicle anonymous Esoteric ritual manual — the fully-developed standard liturgical form of the Yúqié yànkǒu (瑜伽焰口) ghost-feeding rite as it crystallised in the late-medieval Sino-Tibetan synthesis. The text is the proximate ancestor of every extant Chinese Burning-Mouth liturgy of the Míng, Qīng, and modern periods, and is still chanted (in mildly modernised form) as the principal Chinese ghost-feeding rite throughout East and Southeast Asia. The catalog meta records no translator, no author, and no dynasty; the dating bracket adopted here (1280 – 1500) is the conventional one for the Yuán → Míng transition during which the Tángmì yánkǒu core was overlaid with Tibetan-Mongol Sa-skya/dGe-lugs esoteric forms imported under the Yuán court — yielding a hybrid liturgy that is recognisably neither pure Tángmì nor pure Tibetan tantra but their confluence on Chinese soil. The dating uncertainty is real and should be flagged to the reader: the earliest manuscript witness is Yuán, but precursor recensions in 不空 Bùkōng’s lineage are demonstrably late Táng (cf. KR6j0549 T1318).
Abstract
The text begins not with the Avalokiteśvara → Ānanda narrative of T1313/T1318/T1319 — that prologue having migrated to KR6j0549 and KR6j0550 — but directly with the ācārya’s opening Triple Refuge in the guru and the Three Jewels (歸依上師 歸依佛 歸依法 歸依僧). The single most striking feature of T1320 over its predecessors is precisely this opening guru-vandana: the formula guīyī shàngshī 歸依上師 (“I take refuge in the supreme teacher”) is the literal Chinese rendering of the Tibetan bla-ma la skyabs su mchi’o — proof of direct Tibetan-tantric provenance and a feature otherwise absent from Táng Esoteric literature, which characteristically opens with the threefold refuge alone.
The body of the rite then unfolds in the conventional Tibetan-Tángmì sequence — bodhicitta-utpāda; purification of the hands with the ālambana mantra (the Amoghapāśa-sūtra purification truth-speech); recitation of the Mahā-cakra Vidyārāja mantra of Amṛta-kuṇḍalin (大輪明王呪 namo’staśityai-kanaśe sarva-tathāgatānāṃ oṃ virage virage mahā-cakra-vajri sata sata sārate sārate trāye trāye vidhamani saṃbhañjani trāmaṇi siddhāgriya tvaṃ svāhā); the wide-vow bodhicitta; the summoning of the ten-direction Three Jewels and the vajra-nāyaka dharma-protectors; the establishment of the maṇḍala through the Cinta-cakra mudrā; the enumeration of the 35 Buddhas of the Confessional; the recitation of the Heart Sūtra (般若心經); and the seven-branch (saptāṅga) preparatory liturgy.
The rite proper then follows the same backbone as T1318, with the addition of large quantities of Sanskrit-Tibetan transcribed mantras (in the orthographically distinctive Yuán-Míng Sino-Tibetan transcription system using 斡 / 二合 / 三合 compounds, e.g. 斡資哩二合 = vajre) and a more elaborate apparatus of mudrās and visualisations: breaking-the-hells, summoning, throat-opening, amṛta-bestowal, seven-Tathāgata invocation (Ratnaprabha 寶光佛 / Ratnaprabhāva 寶勝 / Abhayaṃkara 離怖畏 / Amitābha 阿彌陀 / etc.), Triple Refuge for the ghosts, bodhicitta for the ghosts, samaya-precept conferral, Lokottara-tejas-prabhā empowerment of the food, universal-offering mudrā, dispatching mudrā. The final section adds a substantial Pure-Land merit dedication that has no parallel in T1318 and that fits the Yuán-Míng devotional climate.
T1320 is the principal source of the modern Chinese Burning-Mouth liturgy. The Míng-period Xiūshè yújiā jíyào shīshí tányí 修設瑜伽集要施食壇儀 (KR6j0754) of 祩宏 Zhūhóng (preserved in the Xùzàng) is a direct expansion of T1320; the Qīng-period 華山 / 寶華山 versions of the rite, performed in nearly all major Chinese monasteries today, descend through Zhūhóng’s recension. T1320 thus stands as the single most consequential ritual document in modern Chinese funerary Buddhism, ahead of even the KR6k0198 Cíbēi dàochǎng chànfǎ 慈悲道場懺法 (the “Liáng-huáng bǎochàn”) in terms of frequency of performance.
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, Hun Yeow. Feeding Ghosts: A Study of the Yuqie Yankou Rite. PhD dissertation, University of Virginia, 2003. (The single most thorough study; explicitly identifies T1320 as the Yuan/Ming standard form behind the modern Zhu-hong recension.)
- Stevenson, Daniel B. “Text, Image, and Transformation in the History of the Shuilu fahui, the Buddhist Rite for Deliverance of Creatures of Water and Land.” In Cultural Intersections in Later Chinese Buddhism, ed. Marsha Weidner, 30–70. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. (For the related Water-Land rite which shares ritual machinery with T1320.)
Other points of interest
The text is the principal historical evidence for the Tibetan-tantric / Tángmì confluence in the Yuán court, and is one of the few canonical witnesses to the Yuán-period Chinese-Tibetan ritual synthesis at all. The opening formula guīyī shàngshī 歸依上師 (Tib. bla-ma la skyabs su mchi’o) is the diagnostic feature.