Chuánshī bìng kǒuchuán 傳屍病口傳
Oral Transmission on the Corpse-Transmitting Disease Author unknown
About the work
A single-fascicle medico-religious manual on the diagnosis and treatment of chuán-shī bìng 傳屍病 (Jp. denshibyō, “corpse-transmitting disease”) — the premodern East Asian designation for the disease syndrome roughly corresponding to pulmonary tuberculosis (consumption / phthisis) and its socio-religious dimensions. The text is anonymous; neither the CANWWW database nor the catalog meta records an author. The earliest copyist’s colophon dates to Shōan 3 (1173), 10th month, 18th day, copied at the Jōjō-bō 乘乘房 by Śramaṇa Keihan 慶範 — placing the work’s composition no later than the mid-12th century.
Abstract
Manuscript transmission: three principal Kamakura-period copyist colophons are preserved: (1) Shōan 3 (1173), 10th month, 18th day, copied by Keihan from the Jōjō-bō manuscript; (2) Jōō 3 (1224), 9th month, 13th day at night, copied by Sōshū Śramaṇa Keisei 慶政 — who notes that he has re-transcribed the kana-and-common-script original into proper script for the reader’s convenience; and (3) further collation by Rishin 理眞.
Content: the work opens with the clinical-symptomatic description:
Disease aspects: in general, this disease begins lightly and becomes heavy in the end. The ears gradually sink into wasting. It is as a fish in a pool whose water has dried up — death is not noticed.
In the morning, the heart-state is well; from the noon hour and after, unwell. This is like the arising of the heart-state.
The body and mind suffer fever, gradually becoming dry and thin; or the patient remains in proper-mindfulness but is happy in the preta realms; or remains in proper-mindfulness but is in indolence and disorder in the human body; or refuses food and habitually loves sleep; or at irregular times suddenly arouses bodhicitta and weeps; or sometimes loves licentiousness; or sometimes gives rise to anger and wrath; or sometimes is greatly aroused, sometimes is becalmed. As death approaches, the patient prefers to lie on his left side; even in death he sits up to die.
The text then identifies the etiological framework — the three corpse-worms (三尸) of Daoist physiology — and offers a Buddhist-tantric etiology: the demon Aritadakṣa (阿梨多夜叉) and his nine-myriad-strong retinue of cold-mountain demons who consume human jing-qi, blood, and flesh; the Atyabaka great-deity 阿多婆𤘽大神 who subdued this demon at the request of the Empty-King Buddha 空王佛 and now protects sentient beings.
Treatment section: includes (a) recitation of the Sahasrabhuja-dhāraṇī (Thousand-armed Avalokiteśvara mantra) while burning jugulaka (拙具羅 = anshitsu-kō 安悉香, gum benzoin) incense administered through the patient’s nostrils; (b) moxa burning at specific points: the crown ten-character point, the wind-gate point, upper and lower altar-mirror, heart-organ, cinnabar field, Wind-bazaar, Pangjiao point, shoulder-well, Ren point, head-back point — with detailed measurements (“one inch equals the distance from the patient’s left middle-finger peak down to the next joint”); and (c) the Ārya Vajrayakṣa demon-repelling rite — visualization of Vajrayakṣa, recitation of his mantra 21 times, scattering of mustard-seeds, and beating the patient with willow or pomegranate branches. The text closes with a citation of the Zhǐguān 止觀: “If the disease is a demon-disease, this must be removed; the power of meditation-practice and the great-mantra-power can effect the recovery. If it is karmic disease, internally the patient must use the power of repentance, externally must perform confession; both treatments are different and the practitioner must grasp the meaning of each.”
The work is a primary medieval Japanese document of the Buddhist-tantric integration of medicine and a key witness to the demonic etiology of phthisis in pre-modern East Asia.
Translations and research
- No complete Western-language translation located.
- The premodern East Asian construction of denshibyō / 傳尸 disease is treated in Andrew Goble, Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan: Buddhist Healing, Chinese Knowledge, Islamic Formulas, and Wounds of War (2011) — see esp. the discussion of medieval Buddhist medical literature.
- The text is also treated in Japanese medical-historical scholarship: Nihon ishigaku zasshi articles on denshibyō.
Other points of interest
The text quotes extensively from the apocryphal Filial-Son Guarding-Kōshin Long-Life Sūtra (孝子守庚申求長生經), an East Asian Daoist-Buddhist syncretic text on the three corpse-worms, the gengshen-night vigil tradition, and longevity practices. This is one of the only places in the medieval Japanese Buddhist canon where this Daoist material is preserved, making the work an important witness to kōshinshinkō 庚申信仰 (the Kōshin cult) within Heian-Kamakura Buddhism.
Links
- CBETA: T78n2507
- Related: KR6t0214 Denshibyō kyūji (the moxa-treatment diagrams that supplement this work).