Luówáná shuō jiùliáo xiǎo’ér jíbìng jīng 囉嚩拏說救療小兒疾病經
Sūtra in which Rāvaṇa Teaches the Cure of Children’s Diseases by 法賢 (Fǎxián, 譯)
About the work
A one-fascicle Northern-Sòng dhāraṇī-treatise on paediatric demonology, set in the mouth of the Lankan king Rāvaṇa 囉嚩拏 (an unusual frame for a Buddhist text but not without parallel in the late tantric corpus). Translated at the Sòng Institute for the Translation of Sūtras (譯經院) by 法賢 Fǎxián (Tiānxīzāi 天息災 before 987; arrived in Kāifēng 980, died 1000) — his honorific titles in the colophon (“西天譯經三藏朝散大夫試光祿卿明教大師臣法賢奉詔譯”) fix the translation to the years between his elevation as 明教大師 in 982 and his death.
Abstract
The work catalogues twelve “planet-mother demons” (shí’èr yàomǔ guǐ 十二曜母鬼) — Mātṛnandā, Sunandā, Revatī, Mukhamaṇikā, Vinārī, Śakunī, Pūtanā, Śuṣkā, Āryakā, Jambukā, Pilipiccikā, Skanda — held to afflict children from birth to age twelve, identifies the symptomatology proper to each (alternating chills and fever, emaciation, convulsion, refusing food, etc.), and prescribes for each a ritual of maṇḍala-construction, food-offerings, fumigation, dhāraṇī-recitation and apotropaic bath. The transcribed mantras for each yàomǔ are full sādhana spells in late Indic Vajrayāna style, with copious double-syllable phonetic markers (èrhé 二合) characteristic of the Sòng Institute’s transcription convention.
The text belongs to the broader Bālagrahā-cikitsā (paediatric demonology) literature attested in Indic medical and tantric sources from the Suśruta-saṃhitā onward, and reflects the eleventh-century Sòng project to systematise tantric ritual in Chinese translation. Its attribution to Rāvaṇa places it in the Rāvaṇa-kumāra-tantra genre, of which a Sanskrit text (the Rāvaṇa-kumāra-cikitsā) has been edited; the Chinese version is a substantially independent recension. The work was assigned the Nanjio number N0882 and is recorded in the Zhìyuán fǎbǎo kāntóng zǒnglù 至元法寶勘同總錄.
Translations and research
- Filliozat, Jean. Étude de démonologie indienne: le Kumāratantra de Rāvaṇa et les textes parallèles indiens, tibétains, chinois, cambodgien et arabe. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1937. (The principal comparative study; includes a French rendering of the Chinese text and the parallel Sanskrit Rāvaṇa-kumāra-tantra.)
- Demiéville, Paul. “Byō 病.” In Hōbōgirin, fasc. 3 (1937), 224–270 — passing discussion in the standard study of Buddhist illness-vocabulary.