The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla
Introduction

The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla consists of a dialogue between Mahākāla and the Goddess on a broad range of topics, including the consecration rites, deity generation practices, and rituals for attaining various siddhis associated with the deity Mahākāla. The introductory line of the tantra notes that this dialogue takes place while the Blessed One, Mahākāla, is surrounded by an array of goddesses. While the primary Goddess who directs most of the dialogue in the tantra is never identified by name, she should perhaps be understood as the goddess Umā, who in this text is Mahākāla’s primary consort. The dialogue throughout this tantra is not restricted to these two parties, and several goddesses and other beings also pose questions to Mahākāla.

The topics discussed by Mahākāla and his interlocutors in this text are, for the most part,2 focused on the meditative and ritual applications of Mahākāla and his maṇḍala of yoginīs.3 The tantra’s dialogic structure does not always adhere to a clear organizational scheme, but it is possible to divide the general subject matter in the text into a few topical categories.

The dialogue in chapters 1 through 7 outlines instructions for the generation and completion stage yogas, constructing the various fire pits, reciting the mantras for all the forms of Mahākāla and the goddesses in his maṇḍala, performing the consecration rites, and practice instructions for the fully initiated advanced practitioner.

In chapters 8 through 14, the dialogue focuses primarily on instructions for making various collyria, pills, salves, and alchemical preparations of mercury that grant siddhis such as being able to locate subterranean chambers containing hidden treasure, rendering oneself invisible, and flight.

The dialogue in chapter 15 turns to Mahākāla’s account of the rise and fall of past, current, and future royal lineages across the Indian subcontinent and beyond. It then returns in chapters 16 through 25 to a discussion of the application of Mahākāla’s mantras for the performance of a number of ritual actions such as enthralling or paralyzing a target, making and halting rainfall, and controlling and repelling celestial deities.

Chapters 26 to 50 cover a broad range of topics. These chapters are all relatively short, with the exception of chapter 33, which occupies five folios of the text and discusses a number of different rites for making offerings to the seven kumārīs and the goddess Sarasvatī. The tantra concludes with a short chapter on the goddess Atharvaśabarī’s mantra.

The tantra’s chapter on mantras (chapter 2) contains mantras for eight different forms of Mahākāla (the two-, four-, six-, eight-, ten-, twelve-, fourteen-, and sixteen-armed forms), while chapter 7, the main chapter on the deity generation practices, focuses on six forms of the deity (the two-, four-, six-, eight-, twelve-, and sixteen-armed forms).

There is significant variation in the identity and number of yoginīs or goddesses who are said to accompany different forms of Mahākāla throughout the tantra. Chapter 1 provides the following list of eight goddesses:

The goddess mantras included in chapter 3 reflect a different list of seven goddesses:

Finally, in the description of the goddesses that accompany the sixteen-armed form of Mahākāla in chapter 7, the tantra provides the following slightly different set of eight goddesses:

The number of goddesses or yoginīs who accompany Mahākāla can vary depending on the particular visualization practice, but one core group of four goddesses‍—Caṇḍeśvarī, Carcikā, Kālikā, and Kulikeśvarī‍—is fairly consistent across the various forms of the deity. These goddesses are located to the east, south, west, and north, respectively. Some exceptions to this configuration are the four- and two-armed forms of Mahākāla, which are flanked by a set of unnamed goddesses, and the sixteen-armed form of Mahākāla, which is surrounded by the core group of four goddesses in the inner circle of the maṇḍala and the goddesses Caurī, Lañjanī, Mahānandi, and Nandeśvarī in the east, south, west, and north of the outer circle, respectively. In those instances in which Mahākāla’s primary consort is mentioned, she is identified as the goddess Umā.

The Tibetan Kangyurs contain three tantras related to the deity Mahākāla: one in eight chapters (Toh 667),4 one in twenty-five chapters (Toh 416),5 and the text translated here, which consists of fifty chapters. All three works appear in the Tantra Collection (rgyud ’bum) of the Degé Kangyur. The current work, The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla, and the twenty-five chapter Vajra­mahākāla­tantra are found in separate volumes among other texts of the Unexcelled Yoga Tantra genre, while the eight-chapter Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla appears in the Action Tantra section. All three of these texts are products of the later translation period and do not appear in the Denkarma (ldan kar ma) or Phangthangma (’phang thang ma) Tibetan catalogs of translated works. They were each translated by a different team of Indian (or Nepalese, in the case of The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla) and Tibetan translators, and their style and content reflect three separate textual lineages of the deity Mahākāla. In addition to these three tantras, the Tibetan Kangyurs also contain two Dhāraṇī texts devoted to Mahākāla, The Dhāraṇī of Glorious Mahākāla6 and The Mahākāla Dhāraṇī: A Cure for All Diseases and Illnesses.7 Finally, the Tibetan Tengyurs contain no fewer than twenty-seven works devoted to Mahākāla that consist of different sādhana instructions and praises, and at least one extensive commentary, the *Rudra­kalpa­mahāśmaśāna­nāma­ṭīkā attributed to Aśvaghoṣa,8 on a separate and presently unknown Mahākālatantra. None of the three tantras devoted to Mahākāla in the Tibetan Kangyurs appear to have been translated into Chinese.

Of the three tantras devoted to Mahākāla in the Tibetan Kangyurs, The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla demonstrates the greatest correlation with Śaiva tantric literature. Unlike the other tantras and dhāraṇīs associated with Mahākāla, the introductory material in The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla follows a dialogical format between Mahākāla and several goddesses that finds close parallels in those Śaiva texts that belong to the Mantrapīṭha (Mantra Corpus), which are structured as dialogues between Śiva in his form of Bhairava and the Goddess or a host of goddesses.9 Mahākāla is referred to as Mahābhairava several times in The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla. In the following passage from the opening of the Mantra chapter, the tantra also directly addresses the fact that Śiva, presumably in the form of Mahākāla, is a protector of the Buddhist teachings:

Later, in the ritual instructions for the mercury siddhi in chapter 13, Mahākāla states that any yogin who consumes a particular alchemical preparation of mercury “will become Śiva’s equal” (śivasamam, zhi ba dang mnyam par ’gyur).

In his dissertation on The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla, George Stablein identifies twelve extant Sanskrit witnesses to the text.11 The majority of these Sanskrit witnesses preserve a version of The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla that contains just over twenty-nine chapters of material, and it is this version of the text that was known to the Newar vajrācāryas Stablein consulted throughout the Kathmandu Valley.12 Stablein also notes that he witnessed a rite at the main Mahākāla temple in Tuṇḍikhel, Kathmandu, in which the text of the Mahākālatantra was worshiped and used to bless devotees.13

Six of the seven Sanskrit witnesses consulted for this translation belong to versions of the twenty-nine-chapter recensions of the text. The oldest among this group is N_{D 44-5}, which is held by the National Archives of Nepal and dated to c. 1633 ᴄᴇ (Nepal Saṃvat 754) in the manuscript’s colophon. The Sanskrit witness in the Hodgson Collection at the Royal Asiatic Society (RAS_{H 47}) is dated to c. 1800 (Nepal Saṃvat 921), and the colophon to BnF_{S 84}, the first of two Sanskrit witnesses in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, provides a date of 1829 ᴄᴇ (Nepal Saṃvat 950).14

The oldest known Sanskrit witness for The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla is a palm leaf manuscript of Indic origin that was photographed by Rahul Sāṅkṛtyāyana in Tibet in the 1930s.15 The colophon to this Sanskrit witness notes that it was “completed in the fifth year of the reign of His Majesty the glorious emperor Madanapāla, a devotee of the supreme Sugata and the supreme venerable ones.”16 The years of Madanapāla’s reign (c. 1143–62 ᴄᴇ) during the Pāla dynasty are known based an inscription from Valgūdār17 that identifies the eighteenth year of Madanapāla’s reign as the Śaka-era year 1083 (1161). This allows us to locate the beginning of Madanapāla’s reign in the year 1143, and the date for the completion of this manuscript in the year 1148.

The colophon to the Tibetan translation of The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla tells us that the text was translated at the Ramoché temple in Lhasa by the paṇḍita Samantaśrī, who was from Nepal, and the Tibetan editor and translator Ra Gelong Chörap, both of whom were active during the eleventh century. The Tibetan translation preserves a fifty-chapter recension of The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla, but it demonstrates a rather inconsistent degree of correlation with the fifty-chapter recension preserved in the twelfth-century Sanskrit manuscript witness.18 Our preliminary observations have found the Tibetan witness corresponds much more closely to the twenty-nine-chapter Sanskrit witnesses, with the material in this witness demonstrating direct and approximate parallels to the material in the first twenty-nine chapters of the Tibetan translation.

Two important conclusions can be drawn from these observations. First, the translation of The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla in the Tibetan Kangyurs is undoubtedly part of the same textual lineage as the twenty-nine-chapter Sanskrit witnesses, which places it within the same textual lineage as the contemporary Newar cult of Mahākāla. Second, the high level of divergence between Sāṅkṛtyāyana’s palm leaf manuscript and the Tibetan translation suggests that there may have been two separate textual traditions of a fifty-chapter recension of The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla by the twelfth century. The twenty-nine chapter and fifty-chapter Sanskrit texts are not entirely unrelated, and we do find material that is shared across all the available Tibetan and Sanskrit witnesses. In some cases, to make matters more complicated, the Sanskrit fifty-chapter version preserves readings that are closer to the Tibetan translation than corresponding passages in the twenty-nine-chapter recensions. The relationship between the Tibetan and Sanskrit witnesses for The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla is undoubtedly more complex than the few observations made here, and it is our hope that this translation might provide some support for further research on this textual tradition.

The English translation that follows is based on the Tibetan translation of the text preserved in the Degé Kangyur, in consultation with the versions in the Stok Palace Kangyur, Phukdrak Kangyur, and the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) of the Kangyur. Seven Sanskrit manuscript witnesses were consulted for the translation, and Stablein’s Sanskrit edition of the first eight chapters of the text provided an extremely helpful introduction to working with these sources.

While this translation relies primarily on the Tibetan witnesses, the Sanskrit sources were often an invaluable resource, and it would not have been possible to accurately translate a great deal of the Tibetan text without them. The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla contains an enormous number of references to various substances that are used in its ritual instructions for attaining siddhis and performing various ritual actions, and in many cases the Tibetan translators chose to transliterate rather than translate these terms. Many of these transliterated terms in the Tibetan are corrupted readings of Sanskrit terminology or, perhaps, were derived from other Sanskritic dialects or entirely different languages. In many cases (but certainly not all), the readings in the Sanskrit sources contained important corrections to the Tibetan transliterations of the hundreds of different ingredients featured in the ritual instructions throughout the text. Interestingly, there were also instances in which the Tibetan transliterations of these terms were closer to their classical Sanskrit spelling than the readings in the Sanskrit witnesses. Where possible, we have attempted to identify these ingredients based on available resources, but these identifications should be regarded as tentative.

The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla also contains a handful of passages composed in Apabhraṃśa. Two of these passages were reproduced and translated in Stablein’s dissertation on The Glorious Sovereign Tantra of Mahākāla, and his translations are included in the notes to this translation. In the translation itself, however, all these passages have been rendered in their original language (or languages) following the transliteration given in the Degé Kangyur.