Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia

54. YUQIE YANKOU IN THE MINGQING

Hun Y. Lye

Yuqie was greatly propagated by Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra of

the Tang dynasty. These two masters could command ghosts and spirits

and move mountains and oceans. The power of their awesome spirit was

inconceivable. After a few generations of transmission, there were, how-

ever, no capable heirs but the one teaching that remains is this method

of food-bestowal. Forming mudrās with the hands, chanting spells

with the mouth, and performing visualizations with the mind—when

these three actions are mutually corresponding (xiangying ), this

is Yuqie.^1

Writing in the late Ming, the revivalist monk Yunqi Zhuhong
(1535–1615) simultaneously lamented and acclaimed the Yuqie
yankou Yoga of Flaming-mouth, henceforth Yankou) as
the only vestige of the Tang esoteric masters to survive the vicissitudes
of time.^2 Although the goal of the Yankou (i.e., feeding hungry ghosts)
can be traced to a minor sūtra translated by Amoghavajra,^3 the full rit-
ual lexicon and syntax of the Yankou as known to Zhuhong is derived
from a historically and culturally diverse collection of liturgies, ritual tra-
ditions, oral instructions, meditative techniques, and operatic devices of
Chinese, Indian, and Tibetan provenance spanning a period of at least a
millennium. The Yankou remains one of the most colorful and complex
Chinese Buddhist rituals, one that is simultaneously situated within the
rhetoric of esotericism as well as transparently concerned about being
accessible and appealing to public audiences.
That practice of the Yankou ritual was widespread and common
by the beginning of the Ming dynasty is clear from a 1382 edict of
the Hongwu emperor (r. 1368–1398), which revised a tripartite

(^1) X. 1081.59:300a–b.
(^2) Some of the earliest Western-language discussions on this important late impe-
rial Chinese esoteric ritual are in the works of Charles D. Orzech. See Orzech 1989,
1994a, 2002. This essay is also based on material on the ritual discussed in my Ph.D.
dissertation; see Lye 2003.
(^3) Foshuo jiuba yankou egui tuoluoni jing (Sūtra Spo-
ken by the Buddha on the Dhāraṇī that Rescued Flaming-mouth Hungry Ghost),
T. 1313.21:464b–465b.