Fó shuō Ānzhái shénzhòu jīng 佛說安宅神呪經
Sūtra of the Divine Spell for Settling the Dwelling
by 失譯 (譯)
About the work
A short single-juan dhāraṇī-text preserved as a shī-yì 失譯 (“lost-translator”) translation, attributed in the Taishō colophon to “Hòuhàn shīyì rén-míng 後漢失譯人名” — i.e. an anonymous Eastern-Hàn translation. The catalog meta does not preserve a dynasty, but the Taishō colophon gives 後漢 (25–220 CE), making this — if the attribution is sound — one of the earliest Chinese Buddhist zhòu-jīng-texts. Modern scholarship (Tokuno; Nattier) treats the Eastern-Hàn ascription with caution: many shī-yì texts now bearing Hàn ascriptions were redacted later, and the lexicon of T1394 contains some terminology suggestive of post-Hàn redaction. The dating window 25–220 here follows the catalog colophon; the received recension may belong to a later date. Recorded under Nanjio N0478.
Abstract
The Buddha is at Śrāvastī, Jeta Grove, with twelve hundred and fifty bhikṣus — all arhats, the influxes ended, body and mind serene, the six superknowledges unobstructed — Śāriputra, Mahāmaudgalyāyana, Mahākāśyapa, Mahā-Kātyāyana, Subhūti, etc. With them are eight thousand bodhisattva-mahāsattvas: Mañjuśrī, Daoshi (導師), Ākāśagarbha, Avalokiteśvara, Trāṇamukti (Jiùtuó 救脫), and so on. The text proceeds to enunciate the Ān-zhái shénzhòu — a long vidyā for the consecration and pacification of dwellings, which became one of the most influential Chinese Buddhist domestic-protection spells of the medieval period, with a long afterlife in Tang and Song sectarian and lay use.
Translations and research
- Tokuno, Kyoko. “The Evaluation of Indigenous Scriptures in Chinese Buddhist Bibliographical Catalogues,” in R. E. Buswell, Jr. (ed.), Chinese Buddhist Apocrypha, Honolulu: U Hawaiʻi P, 1990, pp. 31–74. — for the shī-yì category broadly.
- Strickmann, Michel. Chinese Magical Medicine. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2002. — discusses the Ān-zhái tradition.
- Mollier, Christine. Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China. Honolulu: U Hawaiʻi P, 2008. — for the parallel Daoist Ān-zhái texts and Buddhist-Daoist exchange.
Other points of interest
The Ānzhái shénzhòu jīng should be read together with the closely-related Daoist Ānzhái shénzhòu texts catalogued in the Daoist canon: this is one of the better-attested loci of Buddhist–Daoist mutual borrowing in medieval Chinese spell-literature, traced in Mollier (2008) and Strickmann (2002).