Fó shuō liáo zhìbìng jīng 佛說療痔病經
Sūtra for the Treatment of Haemorrhoidal Disease, Spoken by the Buddha by 義淨 (Yìjìng, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle short healing-sūtra translated by Yìjìng (義淨; 635–713), the great Táng pilgrim-translator who had returned from his sea-voyage to India via Śrīvijaya in 695 and worked under imperial commission at the Fúxiānsì 福先寺 in Luòyáng. The Sanskrit reconstruction is Arśa-praśamana-sūtra (“Sūtra for the Quieting of Haemorrhoids”); CANWWW preserves the alternate Chinese title 痔瘺經 Zhìlòu jīng (“Sūtra of Haemorrhoidal Fistulae”). The text is uniquely well-attested for a Buddhist medical dhāraṇī: a Sanskrit recension survives in a Gilgit manuscript and a Tibetan parallel translation has been preserved (Gnyan-pa rab-tu zhi-bar byed-pa in the Tibetan canon).
Abstract
The frame is the standard evaṃ mayā śrutam: the Buddha is at the Veṇuvana near Rājagṛha with five hundred bhikṣus. Several bhikṣus are afflicted with haemorrhoidal disease (zhìbìng 痔病), their bodies emaciated and racked with pain day and night. Ānanda reports their distress to the Buddha, who teaches the present Liáo zhìbìng jīng. The Buddha enumerates fifteen types of zhì: wind-haemorrhoids, hot-haemorrhoids, phlegm-haemorrhoids, three-combined-haemorrhoids, blood-haemorrhoids, abdominal-haemorrhoids, nasal-haemorrhoids, dental-haemorrhoids, lingual-haemorrhoids, ocular-haemorrhoids, aural-haemorrhoids, vertical-(top-of-head)-haemorrhoids, hand-and-foot-haemorrhoids, spinal-haemorrhoids, faecal-haemorrhoids; with a closing “and all zhì-and-fistulae arising in any limb of the body”. This enumeration is not the modern proctological category but the Āyurvedic category of arśas — fleshy growth or fistula — applicable to any orifice or limb-junction. The text is therefore a treatment for fistular and ulcerative growths generally, not only anal haemorrhoids.
The Buddha gives the curative dhāraṇī:
tadyathā galame śrī śrī mā-gaśiti samāpate svāhā
with a parenthetical Dānzàng (丹藏) variant providing the same dhāraṇī in fuller transcription: tadyathā araṇḍe āraṇḍame śrīve śrīr-īśrīr māgalaḥ-citta saṃbha-bhātu svāhā.
The Buddha then gives a parable: in the great Snow-Mountain (Himavat) of the north there is a great śāla-tree-king called Nánshèng 難勝 (Durjaya); it bears three kinds of flowers — newly-born, full-blown, and withered. “Just as those flowers, when they wither and fall, are dried up — so let my haemorrhoidal disease likewise: let no blood flow, no pus flow, the pain be removed, and all be dried up.” Recitation of this sūtra grants in addition the jāti-anusmṛti-jñāna (knowledge of past lives) extending seven births back; and the rite is siddhi, svāhā. A second dhāraṇī is then given:
tadyathā cami cami śacami camnodi śacanade svāhā
The text closes in the standard way with the Buddha pronouncing the rite and Ānanda and the assembly receiving it with great joy.
The text is one of the most-discussed of the Táng Buddhist medical dhāraṇī because of its trilingual attestation in Sanskrit (Gilgit), Chinese (Yìjìng’s recension), and Tibetan. Yokochi 2008 establishes the chronology: a Sanskrit Arśapraśamana-sūtra recension is transmitted in a Gilgit manuscript whose orthography places it in the sixth–seventh century; Yìjìng’s Chinese rendering (700–712) is broadly faithful to that recension; the Tibetan version (likely ninth century) is later. The text is therefore a rare datapoint for the circulation of Buddhist medical knowledge between India and East Asia in the early-eighth century.
The dating bracket given here (700–712) follows Yìjìng’s principal translation period at the Fúxiānsì in Luòyáng, between his return from India (695, completion of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya corpus 700–710) and his death in 713.
Translations and research
- Yokochi, Yuko. “The Relation between the Tibetan Translation of the Arśapraśamana-sūtra and Its Sanskrit Original.” In Esoteric Buddhist Studies: Identity in Diversity, 47–58. Koyasan: Koyasan University, 2008. (The principal philological study; establishes the Gilgit-Sanskrit / Yìjìng-Chinese / Tibetan trilingual chain.)
- Strickmann, Michel. Chinese Magical Medicine. Edited by Bernard Faure. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.
- Salguero, C. Pierce. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. (Cites T1325 in the framework of medical translation.)
- Salguero, C. Pierce, ed. Buddhism and Medicine: An Anthology of Premodern Sources. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017. (Annotated English translation included.)