The Quintessence of the Peahen is a short text consisting of a series of dhāraṇīs and an accompanying ritual. The recitation and practice are said to bring protection from dangers and illnesses. The text is essentially an extract of the famous dhāraṇī The Great Peahen (Mahāmāyūrī).
This text was translated and introduced by The Buddhapīṭha Translation Group (Gergely Hidas and Péter-Dániel Szántó).
The translation was completed under the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. Ryan Damron edited the translation and the introduction, and Laura Goetz copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication process.
The translation of this text has been made possible through the generous sponsorship of DJKR, Herlintje, Hadi Widjaja, Lina Herlintje, Ocean Widjaja, Asia Widjaja, Star Widjaja, and Gold Widjaja.
The Quintessence of the Peahen is a short dhāraṇī text extracted from the famous Queen of Incantations: The Great Peahen,1 one of the Five Protections (Pañcarakṣā). Given The Great Peahen’s pervasive influence, various adaptations of it circulated, this short text being one among them. While we could not find an independently transmitted Sanskrit text of The Quintessence of the Peahen, most of its passages are paralleled or echoed in The Great Peahen.2
An early Sanskrit version of The Great Peahen was found in the Bower manuscript, an early-sixth-century collection of various texts that long held the distinction of being the earliest known Indic manuscript.3 Although this is no longer the case, there is also a fragment of an apotropaic scripture that shows strong connections to The Great Peahen among what are now known as the earliest Indic manuscripts, the Gāndhārī corpus.4 The famous Gilgit manuscript hoard is also rich in materials related to The Great Peahen.5 The text was also well known to non-Buddhists; for example, the seventh-century novel The Exploits of King Harṣa (Harṣacarita) by Bāṇa, a master of Sanskrit prose and a keen observer of the details of daily life, describes the chanting of The Great Peahen as one of the measures taken to counteract the illness of Harṣa's royal father.6
The Tibetan translation is not listed in the imperial catalogs, and the identity of the translators is not mentioned in the canonical version. We could also not find an exact equivalent in Chinese translation. This English translation is based on the version found in the Degé Kangyur’s Tantra Collection (rgyud ’bum), where it is located immediately after The Great Peahen. We also consulted the Stok Palace Kangyur without finding any significant differences.
[F.117.a]Homage to the blessed Great Peahen! Homage to the Buddha! Homage to the Dharma! Homage to the Saṅgha!7
Amid any kind of danger—the danger of enemies, conflict, hindrances, untimely death, snakes, wild beasts, poison, fire, water, or wind—one should call to mind the following.
Amid any kind of ailment—be it caused by imbalance of wind, bile,[F.117.b] phlegm, or a combination thereof, or through possession by grahas, affliction by pandemics, or drinking poison—one should call to mind the following.
namo bhagavate iṭṭiṭṭāya indragomisikāya āśane pāśane pāpanikūle kapilamitte ili mitte svāhā, may these mantra-words succeed!8
nārāyaṇi pārāyaṇi haritāli kuntāli ili misti kili tili misti svāhā, may these incantation-words succeed!9
haha hihi huhu kharā marā khahi khahi hūṃ hūṃ phaṭ phaṭ svāhā, protect me, protect, protect! May I live a hundred years! May I see a hundred autumns!10
One should recite this twenty-one times and perform a bali offering on a tall mountain. Everything11 will thereby be pacified and prevented from returning.
Here ends “The Quintessence of the Peahen Together with the Incantation.”12
The Quintessence of the Peahen is a short text consisting of a series of dhāraṇīs and an accompanying ritual. The recitation and practice are said to bring protection from dangers and illnesses. The text is essentially an extract of the famous dhāraṇī The Great Peahen (Mahāmāyūrī).
This text was translated and introduced by The Buddhapīṭha Translation Group (Gergely Hidas and Péter-Dániel Szántó).
The translation was completed under the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. Ryan Damron edited the translation and the introduction, and Laura Goetz copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication process.
The translation of this text has been made possible through the generous sponsorship of DJKR, Herlintje, Hadi Widjaja, Lina Herlintje, Ocean Widjaja, Asia Widjaja, Star Widjaja, and Gold Widjaja.
The Quintessence of the Peahen is a short dhāraṇī text extracted from the famous Queen of Incantations: The Great Peahen,1 one of the Five Protections (Pañcarakṣā). Given The Great Peahen’s pervasive influence, various adaptations of it circulated, this short text being one among them. While we could not find an independently transmitted Sanskrit text of The Quintessence of the Peahen, most of its passages are paralleled or echoed in The Great Peahen.2
An early Sanskrit version of The Great Peahen was found in the Bower manuscript, an early-sixth-century collection of various texts that long held the distinction of being the earliest known Indic manuscript.3 Although this is no longer the case, there is also a fragment of an apotropaic scripture that shows strong connections to The Great Peahen among what are now known as the earliest Indic manuscripts, the Gāndhārī corpus.4 The famous Gilgit manuscript hoard is also rich in materials related to The Great Peahen.5 The text was also well known to non-Buddhists; for example, the seventh-century novel The Exploits of King Harṣa (Harṣacarita) by Bāṇa, a master of Sanskrit prose and a keen observer of the details of daily life, describes the chanting of The Great Peahen as one of the measures taken to counteract the illness of Harṣa's royal father.6
The Tibetan translation is not listed in the imperial catalogs, and the identity of the translators is not mentioned in the canonical version. We could also not find an exact equivalent in Chinese translation. This English translation is based on the version found in the Degé Kangyur’s Tantra Collection (rgyud ’bum), where it is located immediately after The Great Peahen. We also consulted the Stok Palace Kangyur without finding any significant differences.
[F.117.a]Homage to the blessed Great Peahen! Homage to the Buddha! Homage to the Dharma! Homage to the Saṅgha!7
Amid any kind of danger—the danger of enemies, conflict, hindrances, untimely death, snakes, wild beasts, poison, fire, water, or wind—one should call to mind the following.
Amid any kind of ailment—be it caused by imbalance of wind, bile,[F.117.b] phlegm, or a combination thereof, or through possession by grahas, affliction by pandemics, or drinking poison—one should call to mind the following.
namo bhagavate iṭṭiṭṭāya indragomisikāya āśane pāśane pāpanikūle kapilamitte ili mitte svāhā, may these mantra-words succeed!8
nārāyaṇi pārāyaṇi haritāli kuntāli ili misti kili tili misti svāhā, may these incantation-words succeed!9
haha hihi huhu kharā marā khahi khahi hūṃ hūṃ phaṭ phaṭ svāhā, protect me, protect, protect! May I live a hundred years! May I see a hundred autumns!10
One should recite this twenty-one times and perform a bali offering on a tall mountain. Everything11 will thereby be pacified and prevented from returning.
Here ends “The Quintessence of the Peahen Together with the Incantation.”12
For more on The Great Peahen and the famous quintet of apotropaic texts it came to be part of, see the introduction to The Queen of Incantations: The Great Peahen.
The contents of this collection can be dated between the first century
On this collection see Hinüber 2014. There is one fragment of The Great Peahen in the Delhi collection of Gilgit manuscripts, (no. 56a on p. 109), which Hinüber has also edited (1980), and nearly thirty more in the Srinagar collection (2014, p. 113), which was not available to us.
It is difficult to determine which of these obeisance formulas is the translators’ homage (’gyur phyag) and which were intended as part of the main text.
Here we follow the formulation of the Tibetan. The corresponding Sanskrit formula refers to the third person, in which case we must interpret this person to be the client of the ritual (which may be the practitioner as well).
The title as transmitted here in the colophon is somewhat puzzling, as it is difficult to determine what incantation is supposed to accompany the shortened dhāraṇī.
A food offering made to a deity or spirits; such an offering may be varied and elaborate. In conventional use, the term bali can also mean “tax.”
According to classical Indian medicine (āyurveda), one of the three vital substances in the body, along with wind and phlegm, which result in good health when balanced and illness or less than optimal health when imbalanced.
In Buddhist literature, this is an epithet applied to buddhas, most often to Śākyamuni. The Sanskrit term generally means “possessing fortune,” but in specifically Buddhist contexts it implies that a buddha is in possession of six auspicious qualities (bhaga) associated with complete awakening. The Tibetan term—where bcom is said to refer to “subduing” the four māras, ldan to “possessing” the great qualities of buddhahood, and ’das to “going beyond” saṃsāra and nirvāṇa—possibly reflects the commentarial tradition where the Sanskrit bhagavat is interpreted, in addition, as “one who destroys the four māras.” This is achieved either by reading bhagavat as bhagnavat (“one who broke”), or by tracing the word bhaga to the root √bhañj (“to break”).
A fully awakened being; here it refers to the Buddha Śākyamuni, one of the Three Jewels.
The term dhāraṇī has the sense of something that “holds” or “retains,” and so it can refer to the special capacity of practitioners to memorize and recall detailed teachings. It can also refer to a verbal expression of the teachings—an incantation, spell, or mnemonic formula—that distills and “holds” essential points of the Dharma and is used by practitioners to attain mundane and supramundane goals. The same term is also used to denote texts that contain such formulas.
Here dharma refers to one of the Three Jewels. The term dharma conveys ten different meanings according to Vasubandhu’s Vyākhyāyukti. The primary meanings are as follows: the doctrine taught by the Buddha, the ultimate reality underlying and expressed through the Buddha’s teaching, the trainings that the Buddha’s teaching stipulates, the various awakened qualities or attainments acquired through practicing and realizing the Buddha’s teaching, qualities or aspects more generally (i.e., phenomena or phenomenal attributes), and mental objects.
The term graha refers to a class of nonhuman beings who “seize,” possess, or otherwise adversely influence other beings by causing a range of physical and mental afflictions, as well as various kinds of misfortune. The term can also be applied generically to other classes of supernatural beings who have the capacity to adversely affect health and well-being. The word also very often denotes the nine “planets”: the seven planets of classical astrology (including the sun and the moon) plus the two lunar nodes.
A term that at once refers to a type of mantra or dhāraṇī and to the deity it invokes, thereby reflecting their inseparability. A vidyā is typically applied to female deities and is often, but not exclusively, used for worldly goals in esoteric ritual. In worldly contexts a vidyā is similar to a “spell.”
According to classical Indian medicine (āyurveda), one of the three vital substances in the body, along with wind and bile, which result in good health when balanced and illness or less than optimal health when imbalanced.
Though often specifically reserved for the monastic community, this term can be applied to any of the four Buddhist communities—monks, nuns, laymen, and laywomen—as well as to identify the different groups of practitioners, like the community of bodhisattvas or the community of śrāvakas. It is also the third of the Three Jewels (triratna) of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Teaching, and the Community.
According to classical Indian medicine (āyurveda), one of the three vital substances in the body, along with phlegm and bile, which result in good health when balanced and illness or less than optimal health when imbalanced.
rma bya’i yang snying (Māyūrīvidyāgarbha). Toh 560, Degé Kangyur vol. 90 (rgyud, pha), folios 117.a–117.b.
rma bya’i yang snying. Skorupski 519, Stok Palace Kangyur vol. 103 (rgyud, na), folios 516.a–516.b.
rig sngags kyi rgyal mo rma bya chen mo (Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī). Toh 559, Degé Kangyur vol. 90 (rgyud, pha), folios 87.b–117.a. English translation The Queen of Incantations: The Great Peahen 2023.
Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī. GRETIL edition input by Klaus Wille, based on Takubo 1972. Accessed April 23, 2024.
84000. The Queen of Incantations: The Great Peahen (Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī, rigs sngags kyi rgyal po rma bya chen mo, Toh 559). Translated by the Dharmachakra Translation Committee. Online publication. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2023.
Bernhard, Franz. “Zur Entstehung einer Dhāraṇī.” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 117 (1967): 148–68.
Cowell, E. B., and F. W. Thomas, trans. The Harṣa-Carita of Bāṇa. London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1897.
Hinüber, Oskar von. “Namen in Schutzzaubern aus Gilgit.” Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik 7 (1980): 163–171 [= in Kleine Schriften zur Epigraphik, 2:722–30. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2009].
Hinüber, Oskar von. “The Gilgit Manuscripts: An Ancient Buddhist Library in Modern Research.” In From Birch Bark to Digital Data: Recent Advances in Buddhist Manuscript Research, edited by Paul Harrison and Jens-Uwe Hartmann, 79–135. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2014.
Hoernle, Rudolf, ed. The Bower Manuscript: Facsimile Leaves, Nagari Transcript, Romanised Transliteration and English Translation with Notes. Parts III to VII. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Printing, 1897.
Strauch, Ingo. “The Evolution of the Buddhist rakṣā Genre in the Light of New Evidence from Gandhāra: The *Manasvi-nāgarāja-sūtra from the Bajaur Collection of Kharoṣṭhī Manuscripts.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 77, no. 1 (2014): 63–84.
Takubo, Shūyo, ed. Ārya-Mahā-Māyūrī Vidyā-rājñī. Tokyo: Sankibo, 1972.
