Yújiā jíyào yànkǒu shīshí yí 瑜伽集要燄口施食儀
Yoga Essentials Flaming-Mouth Food-Bestowing Ritual by 不空 Bùkōng (譯), 不動金剛 Bùdòng Jīngāng (重集), 受登 Shòudēng (詮次)
About the work
A one-fascicle (1卷) Yoga Flaming-Mouth (Yújiā yànkǒu 瑜伽燄口) ritual manual for feeding the hungry ghosts preserved as J19 no. B047 in the Jiāxīng dàzàng 嘉興大藏 (Jiāxīng Canon). The colophon (前 fascicle, after the yánqǐ 緣起 narrative) gives a three-layer attribution: (1) Táng Xìngshànsì sānzàng fǎshī Dàguǎngzhì Bùkōng yì 唐興善寺三藏法師大廣智不空譯 — original translation by 不空 Amoghavajra (705–774); (2) (Xī-Xià) Hùguó Rénwángsì fǎshī Bùdòng Jīngāng zhòngjí (西夏)護國仁王寺法師不動金剛重集 — Xī-Xià-period (1038–1227) re-collation by 不動金剛 Bùdòng Jīngāng (Achala-Vajra), monk of Hùguó Rénwángsì 護國仁王寺 in the Tangut empire; (3) Qīng Tiānxī Xiāngrǔ xíngzhě Shòudēng quáncì 清天溪香乳行者受登詮次 — Qīng-period editorial revision by 受登 Tiānxī Shòudēng (b. 1607), the late-Míng / early-Qīng Tiāntái master of Tiānxī (cf. Zhǔntí sānmèi xíngfǎ 准提三昧行法 (KR6j0759), his Cuṇḍā manual).
Prefaces
The text opens not with a dated preface but with a Yànkǒu shīshí yánqǐ 燄口施食緣起 (“Origin-narrative of the Flaming-Mouth Food-Offering”), excerpted (錄出) from the Yújiā jíyào jiù Ānántuó luóní yànkǒu yíguǐ jīng 瑜伽集要救阿難陀羅尼燄口儀軌經 (KR6j0549 = T21 no. 1318, the foundational Tang recension attributed to Amoghavajra). The narrative recounts the canonical Yànkǒu story: Ānanda, in night meditation, sees a hungry ghost (“Yànkǒu” 燄口, “Flaming Mouth”, with throat as fine as a needle and hair like a tangle) who informs him he will die in three days and be reborn as a hungry ghost; the only way to escape this fate is to feed “100,000 nayuta of Ganges-sands of hungry ghosts and 100,000 brāhmaṇa-seers, each with seven bushels of food.” Ānanda appeals to the Buddha, who teaches him the avalokiteśvara dhāraṇī of measureless awesome-virtue self-sovereign light (Wúliàng wēidé zìzài guāngmíng 無量威德自在光明), by which a single offering can multiply to feed all hungry ghosts and brāhmaṇa-seers without limit.
Abstract
The Yújiā jíyào yànkǒu shīshí yí is one of the canonical recensions of the Yújiā yànkǒu 瑜伽燄口 ritual — the principal East Asian Buddhist ceremony for the bestowing of food upon hungry ghosts and the universal living-and-dead, foundational to Chinese Buddhist mortuary ritual since the late Tang. The Yànkǒu lineage in the canons consists of: (a) Tang Esoteric originals — KR6j0544 (T21n1313, Fóshuō jiùbā yànkǒu èguǐ tuóluóní jīng), KR6j0549 (T21n1318), KR6j0550 (T21n1319), KR6j0551 (T21n1320, the original Yújiā jíyào yànkǒu shīshí yí) — translated principally by 不空 Amoghavajra; (b) Xī-Xià Tangut-period reformulations — among them the recompilation by 不動金剛 Bùdòng Jīngāng of Hùguó Rénwángsì in the Tangut state, which interpolated the Fódǐng zūnshèng tuóluóní 佛頂尊勝陀羅尼 (Buddha-Crown Victorious dhāraṇī) into the food-bestowal sequence as a vehicle for rebirth in Sukhāvatī; (c) Ming-Qing reformulations — the Yújiā jíyào shīshí yíguǐ 瑜伽集要施食儀軌 (KR6j0753) and Xiūshè yújiā jíyào shīshí tányí 修設瑜伽集要施食壇儀 (KR6j0754) of 袾宏 Yúnqī Zhūhóng (1535–1615); the present Yújiā jíyào yànkǒu shīshí yí by Shòudēng (Tiāntái-school, mid–late 17th c.); and the rival Yúmìshèn shīshí zhǐgài 於密滲施食旨槩 (KR6j0755) of 法藏 Sānfēng Fǎzàng (1573–1635) and his Xiūxí yújiā jíyào shīshí tányí 修習瑜伽集要施食壇儀 (KR6j0756).
The present text is a doctrinally pointed Tiāntái-school redaction: Shòudēng explicitly positions his recension as a return to the orthodox Bùdòng-shī orthodox text 不動上師正本 against the Ming-popular Yànkǒu corruption. In an extended internal note (Jiāxīng pp. 0211b–0212a), Shòudēng surveys the Fódǐng zūnshèng dhāraṇī’s textual transmission: the five Tang translations (by 佛陀波利 Buddhapāla, 地婆訶羅 Divākara, 杜行顗 Dù Xíngyǐ, 義淨 Yìjìng, and Amoghavajra’s own niànsòng yí); the two Sòng translations by 法天 Fǎtiān (the Zuìshèng fódǐng tuóluóní jīng 最勝佛頂陀羅尼經 and the Fóshuō yīqiè rúlái wūsènìshā zuìshèng zǒngchí jīng 佛說一切如來烏瑟膩沙最勝總持經); and the apocryphal Mènggǎn fóshuō xīyǒu gōngdé jīng 夢感佛說希有功德經 — the Yǒnglè-era (1420) text claimed as a dream-revelation to 仁孝皇后 Rénxiào huánghòu (Xú-shì 徐氏, consort of the Yǒnglè 永樂 emperor), which had been expelled from the canon by the Yǒnglè 18 catalog supervisor 一如 Yīrú with the verdict huāngtáng zhī yán, bùkě rùzàng 荒唐之言不可入藏 (“absurd words, must not enter the canon”). Shòudēng defends the orthodoxy of Bùdòng-shī’s Tangut-Tantric recension against the popular Ming versions that had incorporated the Yǒnglè-empress’s apocryphal text and the variant Yìjìng-form of the dhāraṇī, criticizing 袾宏 Yúnqī Zhūhóng (Yúnlóu Hóng héshàng 雲樓宏和尚) for failing to discriminate between the Yǒnglè-empress version and the orthodox transmission. The text thus stands as a rare witness to seventeenth-century Tantric textual scholarship within Chinese Buddhism, and a documentation of how Tiāntái-school philological method (anchored in the kèběn 刻本 collation tradition of the Tiāntái lineage) was extended to Esoteric liturgy.
The ritual itself is structured in three principal divisions — kāiqǐ fǎshì 開啟法事 (opening the ritual), shīshí sānmèi 施食三昧 (the food-bestowing samādhi), and gōngyuán jiěsàn 功圓解散 (concluding and dissolution) — with each subdivided into multiple ritual segments (jǐngwén fǎjiè 警聞法界 → ránxiāng dáxìn 然香達信 → jiéjiè guàndǐng 結界灌頂; the fāngbiàn jiāchí 方便加持 visualizations; the zhèngxíng sānmèi 正行三昧 main-practice; closing huíxiàng 回向 dedications and fèngān zhǔhù 奉安囑護). The text incorporates extensive Sanskrit-transliteration mantras with phonetic glosses (the characteristic èrhé 二合 / qùshēng 去聲 phonetic-notation of the Tangut and Yuan-Mongol-period Esoteric tradition), making it a major source for the Tibeto-Mongolian phonetic-tradition Tantra as it survived into Qing-period Han-Chinese Esoteric Buddhism.
Composition window. Bùdòng Jīngāng’s underlying Xī-Xià recompilation falls within 1038–1227. Shòudēng’s quáncì (editorial revision) into its received form is bracketed by his life-dates (b. 1607; productive into the late seventeenth century — see KR6j0759’s 1665 preface as a fixed point) and the publication horizon of the Jiāxīng canon (1589–1722); a defensible bracket is notBefore = 1640, notAfter = 1685 for Shòudēng’s recension, which is the form transmitted in J19.
Translations and research
- Charles D. Orzech, Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia (Brill, Handbook of Oriental Studies, 2011) — survey of the Yújiā yànkǒu lineage including the Xī-Xià / Yuan-Mongol Tangut transmission and the Ming-Qing reformulations.
- Lye Hung-yi (Lye Hung Yi Daniel), Feeding Ghosts: A Study of the Yuqie Yankou Rite (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 2003) — the principal modern study of the Yújiā yànkǒu, including discussion of the late-Míng / Qīng recensions and Shòudēng’s editorial intervention.
- Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Univ. of Hawai’i Press, 1994) — for the broader institutional context of mortuary ritual in late-imperial Chinese Buddhism.
- Hou Chong 侯沖, Zhōngguó fójiào yíshì yánjiū 中國佛教儀式研究 (Shanghai guji, 2018) — fundamental Chinese-language study of Chinese Buddhist ritual literature including the Yànkǒu recensions.
- Solonin Kirill (索羅寧), studies of Tangut Tantric Buddhism (numerous articles in Studies in Chinese Religions, Asia Major) — for the Bùdòng-shī Xī-Xià Tangut Tantric tradition.
Other points of interest
The text’s polemical defense of the Tangut-period recension over the Yǒnglè-empress’s Mènggǎn jīng is a significant document for understanding the Han-Tibet-Tangut Tantric exchange as it was received and refigured by Han-Chinese (Tiāntái) scholarship in the seventeenth century. The Tangut empire (1038–1227) was a major site of Han-Tibet Buddhist synthesis, and the survival of a Tangut-period recension as the doctrinal reference-point for a Qing-period Tiāntái master is a strong witness to the continuity of this exchange across the Yuán transition.