The Dhāraṇī of the Supreme Stem Ornament

The Dhāraṇī of the Supreme Stem Ornament is a short text that includes several prayers for protection, each of which is followed by an essence-mantra (hṛdaya). The prayers pay homage to the Three Jewels and a number of deities, requesting protection from astrologically inauspicious years, days, times, conjunctions, and the like, as well as from ghosts, bad dreams, malevolent spirits, enemies, and ill health. The final prayer requests protection from broken vows and samayas.

The Dhāraṇī of the Supreme Stem Ornament does not appear to be extant in Sanskrit or in Chinese. It lacks a translator’s colophon and does not appear either in the Denkarma or the Phangthangma imperial catalogs, or among the manuscripts found in Dunhuang.

It is included in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section of the Degé Kangyur and other Tshalpa-lineage Kangyurs that have a separate Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section, and in the equivalent part of the Tantra section in those that do not label it as such,1 but is not included in any Thempangma-lineage Kangyurs.

Notably, the dhāraṇī is one of only twelve works in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section that is not duplicated in other sections of the Kangyur. It therefore appears that these twelve texts found their way into the Tshalpa-lineage Kangyurs specifically because they were included in a Compendium of Dhāraṇīs that had been compiled on the basis of earlier collections of dhāraṇīs and associated ritual texts.2 These collections, known in Sanskrit as dhāraṇī­saṃgraha, circulated throughout South Asia and Tibet‍—including in Dunhuang‍—as extracanonical dhāraṇī collections.3

There are several factors that suggest the possibility (though it is by no means a certainty) that this particular work may have been translated into Tibetan from Chinese, rather than from Sanskrit. The first is a reference to an inauspicious divination result specific to a Chinese style of divination.4 But there are other factors, as well: the work’s immediate proximity in the Kangyur to a text that was certainly translated from Chinese (Toh 1067), the absence of a translator’s colophon, the incorrect/incoherent Sanskrit title given at the beginning of all of extant versions of the work, and the presence of at least one feature indicative of the older “Chinese” translation lexicon and style described by Stein (i.e., the vocabulary and style used to translate Buddhist texts from a variety of languages, including Chinese, prior to the lexical standardization imposed by the Mahāvyutpatti in 814 ᴄᴇ).5

The Sanskrit title and its variants do not seem to match the Tibetan title in meaning, and the relationship between the title in either language and the contents of the text remains puzzling. The transliterated Sanskrit title in the Degé and most Kangyurs reads ga Nu a laM ka ra a gra, while the Yongle and Qianlong Kangyurs have the slightly more plausible variant ga Nya in place of ga Nu. The Sanskrit gaṇ or gaṇya (“calculate” or “compute”) might conceivably relate to the theme of astrology present in the text, or refer to the “metrical” lines of verse that it contains, but both possibilities are quite unlikely. The Tibetan title, even by itself without reference to the Sanskrit, is difficult to account for, as there is no mention of a “tree” or “stem” (the most literal meaning of the Tibetan sdong po, Skt. gaṇḍa) in the text itself. Elsewhere in the Kangyur the phrase sdong pos brgyan pa is found in the chapter colophon of the Gaṇḍavyūha (the final chapter of the Buddhāvataṃsaka­sūtra, Toh 44-45) as one of several versions of that text’s title,6 but there is no obvious connection between this dhāraṇī and the themes of the Gaṇḍavyūha.7 On the one hand, to assume that the Tibetan sdong po translates the Sanskrit gaṇḍa, but in its less literal meaning of “chief” or “excellent,” could corroborate the interpretation of the dhāraṇī being a supreme ornament. On the other hand, if instead of gaṇḍa- one takes the gaṇya- of the Sanskrit title found in the Yongle and Qianlong‍—ga Nya a laM ka ra a gra (gaṇyālaṃkārāgra)‍—as part of a back-reconstruction from the Tibetan that could reasonably be rearranged with the word agra (Tib. mchog) at the beginning, the resulting agragaṇyālaṃkāra would make sense. Agragaṇya, literally “to be counted as the foremost,” simply means “best,” “principal,” or “supreme,” and the title agragaṇyālaṃkāra­dhāraṇī would thus mean “The Dhāraṇī That Is a Supreme Ornament.” Overall, however, we can only remain circumspect about how the titles of this text as they have been preserved in different Kangyurs can be understood.

The present English translation of The Dhāraṇī of the Supreme Stem Ornament was made from the Tibetan as found in the Degé Kangyur recension of the work, in consultation with the notes in the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma).