. song tiantai ghost-feeding rituals 523
embedded within a more fully formed esoteric ritual framework and
the liturgy is meant for the use of a trained ritualist. In contrast, in
a tract included in the Survey of Food-bestowal Rituals urging the
replacement of offering blood sacrifices and alcohol with Buddhist-
style ghost-feeding, Zunshi implores all persons “whether monastic
or lay, male or female, to exhaustively practice this method” (X. 961:
57.111c). In his efforts to extend Buddhist ethical norms and ritual
forms from the confines of monastic cloisters into the wider society,
Zunshi’s own liturgies were necessarily brief, simple, and thus acces-
sible to everyone. Conversely, Bestowing Drink and Food belongs to a
genre that makes no apologies for specialization and controlled trans-
mission. And while Zunshi’s liturgies follow the Flaming Mouth Sūtra
closely, Bestowing Drink and Food includes many spells, incantations,
and ritual sequences drawn from other sources that are more clearly
identifiable as belonging to the esoteric pedigree.
In addition, the spells and visualizations in Bestowing Drink and
Food have corresponding mudrās, but no mudrā is used in Zunshi’s
ghost-feeding liturgies (since none is given in the Flaming Mouth
Sūtra). Mudrās are also consistently absent in later Tiantai ghost-
feeding texts, including the Shuilu fahui Seven-day Water-
land Dharma Assembly).^4 This conspicuous lack further strengthens
the thesis that Tiantai ghost-feeding liturgies developed independently
from those represented by the Method of Bestowing Drink and Food.^5
This discussion leads us to a noteworthy point regarding the his-
tory of esoteric Buddhism in China in general and the development
of Chinese Buddhist ghost-feeding practices in particular: There were
two discernable directions in regard to the esotericization of Bud-
dhist practices in China. Practices represented by the Bestowing Drink
and Food were clearly produced within the context of an emerging
systematic esoteric tradition rallying around the charismatic Tang
(^4) The absence of mudrās, even in multi-day rituals such as the water-land Dharma
assembly, further highlights the discontinuities between Tiantai ghost-feeding rituals
and those ghost-feeding rituals that are grounded more self-consciously within the
esoteric rubric. 5
Another ghost-feeding liturgy that very obviously belongs to the same line of
development as the Method of Bestowing Drink and Food and also attributed to
Amoghavajra is the Yuqie jiyao jiu Anan tuoluoni yankou yigui jing
T. 1318.21:468c–472b). This liturgy clearly postdates the Method
of Bestowing Drink and Food, turning up for the first time only in the Jin dynasty
(1115–1234) section of the Fangshan canon.