Buddhist Apocrypha: 佛說眼明經 The Bright-Eye sutra spoken by the Buddha

佛說眼明經 The Bright-Eye sutra spoken by the Buddha 

Continuing in this blog's series on Buddhist apocrypha, here is a positively tiny "sutra", the Fo shuo Yanguangming Jing: The Bright-eye sutra spoken by the Buddha  Just a hundred characters long, it might be more properly characterised as an incantation which cures eye trouble.  

The sutra seems to be relatively popular. There are at last two copies of the sutra online http://www.boder.idv.tw/fsumj.htm and  https://simple.taolibrary.com/category/category50/c50126.htm, and the sutra appears in the otherwise solidly canonical collection of sutras called 五經合刊 (A collection of Five Sutras) published by 和裕出版社 in Taiwan (See appendix 1). What makes this surprising, is that from a preliminary search, a sutra of this name does not appear in any of the Buddhist canons, even as an apocryphon. I have yet to find the sutra's true origin. It does not seem to appear in the Chanmen Risong (Zen daily recitations) which otherwise contains numerous apocrypha, that have been translated elsewhere on this blog 

However, it appears elsewhere, as for example appended to a copy of the Surangama Mantra that I possess. (see appendix 2). The text also appears in a book entitled 九品高王觀音經  (Nine Sutras including the High King Guanyin Sutra) by 佛經堂 (hall of buddhist sutras), which I have scanned on Archive, and is accessible here https://archive.org/details/fojingtang/page/n13/mode/2up. This is a collection of numerous Guanyin-related sutras, and the text of the sutra in that book has been reproduced as appendix 3. This sutra is followed by a "Mantra to give brightness to the eyes" 眼光明咒 

To confuse matters,  there is another scripture of the same title 佛說眼明經 , but is somewhat longer. This sutra is associated with the True Buddha School(the sect of Lu Sheng-yen). A translation of the sutra into English has been made here http://lotuschef.blogspot.com/2016/06/clear-vision-sutra_27.html as the "Clear Vision Sutra". These two sutras have little in common with one another. For starters, the Clear Vision Sutra begins by invoking Guanyin, and then ends by invoking Mahamayuri.

 For more discussion about these two sutras in Chinese see https://ch.tbsn.org/dynamics/detail/494 and http://www.gelupa.org/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=19843&extra=&page=1 

UPDATE: 16 April 2026: Rearranged introduction to make it clearer; added additional source of the scripture