Chízhòu xiānrén fēibō yíguǐ 持咒仙人飛鉢儀軌
Ritual Procedure for the Dhāraṇī-Holding Adept’s Flying-Bowl by 不空 (拔出)
About the work
A one-fascicle (1卷) Esoteric ritual manual “extracted” (báchū 拔出) by Bùkōng 不空 (Amoghavajra, 705–774), the Tang-period Esoteric patriarch and abbot of the Dàxìngshànsì 大興善寺 in Chángān. Preserved as X59 no. 1048 in the Xùzàngjīng. The title-line identifies the author as Dàxìngshànsì shāmén Bùkōng báchū (“Dàxìngshànsì monk Amoghavajra extracted”); the báchū function-marker identifies the work as one of Bùkōng’s selective extractions from larger Sanskrit Vajrayāna source-texts.
Abstract
The manual sets out the procedure for the fēibō 飛鉢 (“flying bowl”) siddhi-rite — a Vajrayāna-style technique by which the adept (xiānrén 仙人, “Daoistic immortal” — here repurposed for the Buddhist Esoteric adept) makes the alms-bowl fly through the air. The procedure begins with the selection of an extremely remote and pure mountain-valley environment (“shēnshān yōugǔ, bìluó miǎomínglíngcǎo, biàndì língqín qíshòu zhī suǒ jiūjí, xiānrén fēixiáng, xiánshèng yōudá yōuyuǎn zhī dì” 深山幽谷薜蘿苗泠柔草遍地靈禽奇獸之所鳩集仙人飛翔賢聖優達幽遠之地) — explicitly described in the language of medieval Daoist mountain-immortal hagiography. The adept then takes one dòu of glutinous rice that has been “held” (chí 持, presumably mantra-charged) for a hundred days and resides on a mountain-summit “shaped like an inverted bowl” or “in a hidden cliff with no people.” The first forty-nine days are zhāijiè 齋戒 (precepts-observance); the next, food-fasting; the next, three further days of fasting; thereafter, a single gě 合 (a tenth of a shēng) of rice per day until the rice is exhausted, accompanied by purified ritual practice.
The manual is one of the most exotic of the Tang Esoteric ritual texts attributed to Amoghavajra and reflects the cross-cultural Buddhist-Daoist interface in late-Tang Esoteric practice. Composition: between Bùkōng’s Tang court establishment (c. 750) and his death in 774.
Translations and research
- Charles Orzech et al., eds., Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia (Brill, 2011) — standard reference for Bùkōng’s textual corpus.