Introduction

i.1The Bali Ritual to Relieve the Female Preta Flaming Mouth is one of two closely related texts found together in the Degé Kangyur in which the Buddha teaches a dhāraṇī and associated food offering ritual to relieve pretas of their sufferings. The other text is The Dhāraṇī of Refuge for the Preta Flaming Mouth (Toh 646/1080). These texts have had a significant legacy for the ritual traditions of Buddhist Asia, serving as foundations for the traditions of giving compassionate food offerings to alleviate the suffering of spirits and ghosts. The present text is the shorter of the two, corresponding (though not precisely matching) Śikṣānanda’s Chinese translation in the Chinese Buddhist canon (Taishō 1314).

i.2The sūtra narrates Ānanda’s nocturnal encounter with a gruesome female preta, or “hungry ghost,” known by the epithet Flaming Mouth (Tib. kha ’bar ma), who threatens him with imminent death unless he satisfies innumerable pretas and brahmin ascetics with food offerings. Ānanda seeks the Buddha’s advice, whereupon the Buddha gives him a dhāraṇī and brief instructions for how to use it to consecrate bali (Tib. gtor ma) offerings that will magically satisfy innumerable pretas, relieve them of their suffering, and cause them to be reborn as gods. The Buddha further states that the ritual will be of great benefit to whoever performs it and will prevent them from being bothered by nonhuman spirits and hostile forces. He instructs Ānanda to propagate the practice widely.

i.3The Tibetan text has no colophon, so little is known for certainty about its translation history or possible Indian origins. However, it is listed in the Denkarma imperial catalog, indicating that the Tibetan translation was made no later than the early ninth century ᴄᴇ. A version of the parallel text (Toh 646/1080) also exists among the manuscripts discovered in the cave library at Dunhuang (IOL Tib J 349). No extant Sanskrit version of either text has been identified, and its Sanskrit title is unknown.

i.4This text was translated into Chinese by Śikṣānanda between 700 and 704 ᴄᴇ (Foshuo jiu mianran egui tuoluoni shenzhou jing 說救面燃餓鬼陀羅尼神咒經, Taishō 1314). Some decades later, between 757 and 770, a slightly longer version, corresponding to Toh 646, was translated into Chinese by Amoghavajra (Taishō 1313). Both Chinese texts have been translated into English by Lye (2003). The Chinese and Tibetan texts mirror each other in their respective length and content (Toh 647 with Taishō 1314, and Toh 646 with Taishō 1313), so it is possible that the Tibetan translations were made from the Chinese. However, in some significant details they diverge. For example, in the Tibetan of the present text (Toh 647) the main preta protagonist is explicitly female (Tib. yi dags mo), something that is not found in either Chinese text. This observation led Lye (2003) to tentatively conclude that the Tibetan versions were probably made directly from two variant iterations of the narration that circulated in Sanskrit. The two Tibetan texts, while clearly presenting the same narrative, differ in their wording.

i.5As shown by Lye (2003), the Chinese versions of these texts are foundational to the Yuqie yankou (瑜伽燄口) and Shuilu (水陸) ghost-feeding rites, as well as the annual Ghost Festival in Chinese Buddhism, which takes place in the seventh lunar month. Such rituals appear to have developed from the late Tang and early Song periods in China, from whence they spread to Vietnam and also to Japan.

i.6Fire and flames are a common‍—if secondary‍—feature of descriptions of pretas in the canonical literature both Chinese and Tibetan, and in some Tibetan sources, the preta known by the epithet “flaming mouth” is presented as a “queen of pretas” (Tib. yi dwags kyi rgyal mo), though she is not explicitly described as such in this text. The torma (Tib. gtor ma, Skt. bali ) offering ritual for the preta Flaming Mouth has a long history in Tibet. The Blue Annals, for example, mentions the eleventh–twelfth-century master Dzeng Dharmabodhi requesting instruction on the “Great Torma Offering of Flaming Mouth.” The ritual is also mentioned in the writings of Sakya Paṇḍita (1182–1251) in the thirteenth century, who identified it as a rite that was inaccurately performed in Tibet. In the eighteenth century the actual dhāraṇī was included in the compendium of dhāraṇī in four scripts (Tibetan, Manchurian, Chinese, and Mongolian) compiled under Chankya Rolpé Dorjé and the Qianlong emperor.

i.7The epithet “flaming mouth” or “blazing mouth” (Tib. kha ’bar ma) for pitiful female ghosts, both as a name for an individual figure and a class of beings, features in a number of “averting death” (Tib. ’chi bslu), repelling harm (bzlog pa), and “thread-cross” (mdos) rituals. For example, the figure White Flaming Mouth (kha ’bar ma dkar mo) is found in a number of such ritual texts dating from the eighteenth century, though the relationship between this figure and the protagonist of the present canonical text remains to be explored.

i.8As a proper name, “Flaming Mouth,” kha ’bar ma in Tibetan, corresponding in at least some attested sources to the Sanskrit Jvālāmukhī (female) or Jvālāmukha (male), is also found in a range of tantras referring to various minor deities. Of more specific relevance, in the Guhyagarbhatantra and other tantras of the Nyingma tradition the masculine form is the name of the nirmāṇakāya sage (Muni) who manifests in the realm of the pretas, one of six such Munis corresponding to the six realms and numbered among the one hundred peaceful and wrathful deities of the maṇḍala.

i.9The dhāraṇī and the associated rite of compassionate appeasement for worldly spirits described here, as well as a large number of liturgical arrangements incorporating the dhāraṇī formula are still widely used in the Tibetan and Mongolian cultural areas. Many such liturgies involve the invocation or visualization of Avalokiteśvara, just as some of the related practices in Chinese tradition may incorporate the bodhisattva Guanyin.

i.10The category of such practices in which the offering consists of water alone (Tib. chu gtor) may derive from the additional way of making offerings mentioned in the present text (see 1.­11)‍—but not in the other version, Toh 646/ 1080, even though the latter, with its greater detail in other respects, may represent a later and more elaborated form.

i.11As far as we are aware, this is the first translation of the Tibetan text into any European language. An early French translation of the parallel text (Toh 646) was published by Léon Feer in 1883.

i.12This translation was made from the Tibetan version in the Degé Kangyur, where the text is found twice in almost identical editions, once in the Tantra (rgyud) section and once in the Dhāraṇī (gzungs) section. The Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace Kangyur editions were also consulted for variant readings.