Zhòumèi jīng 呪魅經
Sūtra on Sorcery and Bewitchment Anonymous Chinese composition.
About the work
A short apocryphal sūtra confronting gŭmèi 蠱魅 (sorcery, ensorcelling) practices and prescribing Buddhist counter-measures. The text — set at the Jetavana of the buddha “Kōngwáng” 空王 — describes an old fox-spirit who at midnight burns its own oil before the sun, moon, and Five Planets to fabricate sorcery, drawing upon celestial gods, the Five Emperors, mountain-spirits, river-lords, military generals, and the Five-Path Great Spirit, and attended by hundreds of demons. The fabricated forms of sorcery include reed-effigies, anthropomorphic figurines, written charms, name-curses, thorn-pricks, sacrifices to the sun and moon, taking of clothing and belts, the use of five-coloured silk threads, of household cèngdài (bands of grain-steamers), and pottery vessels, etc.
Abstract
T85n2882 is one of the most distinctive of the Dūnhuáng apocrypha, providing the richest single Buddhist enumeration of medieval Chinese popular sorcery practices. The text is preserved with substantial lacunae and is collated in the Tàishō with the 甲 witness. Christine Mollier (2008) treats it at length, demonstrating that the text — though Buddhist in framing — depends heavily on Daoist ritual taxonomy and on indigenous Chinese exorcistic categories. The catalogue of Zhīshēng (730) registers it among the doubtful works (偽妄). The work is a key source for the social and religious history of Chinese sorcery beliefs and for the Buddhist–Daoist competition over exorcistic authority. Modern Chinese scholarship (Yú Xīnzhōng 余欣 et al.) draws on the text for reconstructing late medieval Dūnhuáng ritual culture.
Translations and research
- Christine Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face: Scripture, Ritual, and Iconographic Exchange in Medieval China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008) — extended treatment.
- Makita Tairyō 牧田諦亮, Gikyō kenkyū 疑經研究 (Kyōto: Jinbun Kagaku Kenkyūsho, 1976).
- Yú Xīnzhōng 余欣, Shénhěo qiánxiàn: Tángsòng shíqí Dūnhuáng mínjiān xìnyǎng yánjiū 神道闡微：唐宋時期敦煌民間信仰研究 (Shànghǎi: Zhōnghuá shūjú, 2006) — Dūnhuáng popular religion.
Other points of interest
The catalogue of practices the sūtra deplores is itself a uniquely valuable inventory of medieval Chinese popular ritual; the text functions in modern scholarship as an unintentional ethnography of medieval sorcery.