Fó shuō zhòu shíqìbìng jīng 佛說呪時氣病經
Sūtra of the Spell for Seasonal-Pestilence Sickness, Spoken by the Buddha
About the work
A very short anonymous healing-sūtra of the early-medieval zhòujīng (呪經) cluster — the small group of one-paragraph dhāraṇī-and-instruction texts (T1326, T1327, T1328, T1329) preserved together in Taishō vol. 21 covering, respectively, plague-and-fever, toothache, eye-trouble, and infant illness. The four texts share a stylistic profile: native-style Chinese verse-frame, transcribed mantra-syllable strings without parallel-Sanskrit reconstruction, ritual instructions involving cord-knotting (jié lǚ 結縷) and paper-amulet inscription, and absence of evaṃ mayā śrutam narrative frame — strong markers of a third-to-fifth-century Eastern-Jìn / Liú-Sòng translation milieu, the same milieu in which KR6j0558 (T1327, traditionally 曇無蘭) was produced. CANWWW assigns the alternate Chinese title 法螺經 Fǎluó jīng and a (highly speculative) Sanskrit reconstruction Mañjuśrī-paripṛcchā-sūtra — but this should be treated with caution; the Mañjuśrī-paripṛcchā identification rests on the dhāraṇī-cluster’s appearance in Mañjuśrī-ritual literature and is not corroborated by any narrative content in the text itself.
Abstract
The text consists, in its entirety, of a triśaraṇa opening, a transcribed dhāraṇī, a second triśaraṇa extending also to past-and-future Buddhas and to lineage-disciples (諸師 / 諸師弟子), and a brief ritual instruction:
“Homage to the Buddha! Homage to the Dharma! Homage to the Bhikṣu-Saṃgha! Homage to the past Seven Buddhas; homage to the present Buddhas; homage to the future Buddhas; homage to the disciples of all Buddhas. Make my recitation come to fruition as wished.
a-kha-ni ni-kha-ni a-kha-ya ni-kha-ni a-bhi-ra-mān-tā-ri pa-chí-ní pa-tí-lí
Homage to the Buddha … (refrain repeated) … Homage to the masters; homage to the masters’ disciples. Make my recitation come to fruition as wished. If a person is afflicted with seasonal-pestilence sickness, knot a cord seven times reciting [the mantra] over it, and write the names of the spirits above on it; or write them on paper or huái 槐-bark and tie them to the head of the cord. When you recite the mantra, fast and observe purity, bathe and rinse, burn incense, and recite it with a centred mind.”
The “seasonal-pestilence sickness” (shíqìbìng 時氣病) is the standard Hàn-Táng medical term for epidemic infectious disease of the febrile-pestilential type — covering what later medicine would distinguish as Tàiyángbìng febrile illnesses, wēnbìng warm-disease, and miasmic plague. The cord-knotting rite is one of the oldest documented forms of Sino-Indian apotropaic medicine and has parallels in indigenous Chinese fújué 符訣 talismanic practice; Strickmann (2002) treats this whole text-cluster as a key witness to the Buddhist appropriation of Chinese popular healing-rite forms in the Six-Dynasties period.
The text is anonymous. The catalog meta records no translator. The dating bracket adopted here (350–500) covers the Eastern-Jìn to Liú-Sòng range during which the parallel anonymous zhòujīng texts were translated/composed, and is consistent with the placement of KR6j0558 (T1327) under the Eastern-Jìn translator 曇無蘭 (Tánwúlán, fl. 381–395) — a likely candidate for the present text as well, though the absence of attribution in the catalog tradition forbids confident assignment.
Translations and research
- Strickmann, Michel. Chinese Magical Medicine. Edited by Bernard Faure. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. (The principal English-language treatment; T1326 is one of the locus classicus texts for Strickmann’s “therapeutic Buddhism” thesis.)
- Salguero, C. Pierce. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.