Fó shuō zhòu mù jīng 佛說呪目經
Sūtra of the Spell for the Eyes, Spoken by the Buddha
About the work
The shortest text in this group: a one-paragraph anonymous healing-sūtra of the early-medieval zhòujīng (呪經) cluster, preserved alongside KR6j0557 T1326 (plague), KR6j0558 T1327 (toothache), and the related T1329 (infant illness). The four texts share a stylistic profile that places them in the Eastern-Jìn to Liú-Sòng period — the same milieu in which the prolific Eastern-Jìn translator 曇無蘭 (Tánwúlán; fl. 381–395) was active. The eye-disease, toothache, and plague triad is one of the most consistent groupings in the canonical zhòujīng tradition; the Kāiyuán shìjiào lù and other early Táng catalogs treat the three as a single cluster of “small” anonymous translations of the Eastern-Jìn period.
Abstract
The text consists, in its entirety, of one transcribed dhāraṇī of nine pādas and a one-line application:
tuíkòufū bānkòufū / èzhā bānkòufū / jiūlífū / jiūlíbǐfū / jiūluójiūpǐbǐfū / shālísuōpǐbōtífū / yīlífū / yīluóyífū / yīlàbiēfū
“If the eyes are painful, recite the spell seven times and they will be cured.”
The dhāraṇī syllables resist confident Sanskrit reconstruction; their phonological profile (high incidence of fū finals, the jiū-lí / yī-lí alternation) is consistent with a Prakrit or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit source mediated through a Central-Asian transcription convention. There is no narrative frame, no evaṃ mayā śrutam, no merit-catalogue, no offering instruction. The text is essentially a magical recipe-card, the Eastern-Jin equivalent of an apotropaic charm.
The text is anonymous in the catalog tradition. The placement here under the Eastern-Jìn (東晉) dynasty follows the conventional grouping of the Taishō with the demonstrably Eastern-Jìn KR6j0558 T1327 (曇無蘭) and the parallel anonymous T1326 and T1329; it is plausible but not certain that all three (perhaps four) anonymous zhòujīng are likewise products of Tánwúlán’s Yángzhōu atelier or of the same milieu. The dating bracket given here (350–500) is appropriately broad.
The text is one of the simplest and most archaic of the Chinese Buddhist eye-disease healing-dhāraṇī, preceding by some four centuries the elaborate Táng Esoteric eye-disease sūtra KR6j0555 (T1324) translated by 不空 Bùkōng. The juxtaposition of the two texts in the same Taishō volume neatly exemplifies the double tradition of Chinese Buddhist healing-magic: the early-medieval zhòujīng of native-Chinese amulet-and-charm style on the one hand, and the late-Táng Esoteric vidyā-rāja dhāraṇī with full Sanskrit-Indic apparatus on the other.
Translations and research
- Strickmann, Michel. Chinese Magical Medicine. Edited by Bernard Faure. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. (Principal study; cites the zhòujīng cluster as foundational evidence for “therapeutic Buddhism”.)
- Salguero, C. Pierce. Translating Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.