The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge”

The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” is one of two dhāraṇī works in the Degé Kangyur1 that center on Maitreya, the bodhisattva who will, as alluded to in this text, awaken as the next buddha in our world. This text appears twice in the Degé Kangyur, first in the Action Tantra (kriyātantra) section and later in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section. In the Action Tantra section, it is classified as an individual action tantra (bya ba so so’i rgyud) belonging to the tathāgata family.

According to Buddhist tradition, Maitreya currently dwells in Tuṣita Heaven and, after the decline of Śākyamuni’s teachings, will appear in this world as the next buddha. Maitreya was perhaps the earliest bodhisattva to develop a devoted following in India, starting at least as early as the first centuries of the Common Era. Later, particularly in Central and East Asia, the cult of Maitreya would flourish widely from the fourth century. It was within this milieu that the text The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” first emerged.

The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” is comprised of two sections: the dhāraṇī and the pledge. The dhāraṇī formula is presented in three formulas: the root mantra, the heart mantra, and the auxiliary heart mantra. While terms like dhāraṇī, mantra, and vidyāmantra have different connotations and various usages throughout Buddhist literature, they can also be used interchangeably to a certain extent. In the case of this work, it appears that dhāraṇī refers to the three formulas together while mantra refers to the individual formulas themselves. This is corroborated by how the entire formula is presented as a single “dhāraṇī” in later compendiums. Following the dhāraṇī, Maitreya voices his pledge in which he describes the benefits of hearing, chanting, and contemplating the dhāraṇī and reciting it for others. The benefits primarily concern receiving a prophecy, and hence a guarantee of awakening, from Maitreya himself, which locates this dhāraṇī within a Mahāyāna-centric worldview. In addition to this, Maitreya also describes benefits of a more mundane nature, such as acquiring one’s desired material enjoyments. Maitreya makes clear that the benefits extend to any animals that hear the dhāraṇī and, thus, advocates reciting it into the ears of animals.

The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” is extant in Sanskrit in a number of dhāraṇīsaṃ­graha or “Dhāraṇī Compendiums.” Gergely Hidas identifies at least ten dhāraṇīsaṃ­grahas that contain Maitreya’s Pledge.2

The dhāraṇī was also translated into Chinese by Faxian (法賢 337–422).3 The Chinese version diverges in several ways. It begins with a narrative opening (nidāna) and includes a dialogue between the Buddha Śākyamuni and Maitreya. It would seem that these variations are unique to the version of the dhāraṇī transmitted to China since they do not appear in the Tibetan or the (albeit, much later) Sanskrit recensions.

The colophon to the Tibetan translation of The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” states that it was translated by the Indian paṇḍita Vajrapāṇi and the Tibetan translator Chökyi Sherap. According to Gö Lotsawa, Vajrapāṇi traveled to Tibet in 1066 at the age of sixty,4 which would situate the translation in the latter half of the eleventh century. As should be expected, this work is not listed in any of the extant catalogs from the Imperial Period (629–841) since it was translated during the Later Dissemination of Buddhism in Tibet (bstan pa phyi dar).

The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” had a small but unmistakable presence in the later Tibetan tradition. In the fourteenth century, the dhāraṇī was reproduced by Butön Rinchen Drup (bu ston rin chen grub, 1290–1364) in his Grand Anthology of Dhāraṇīs from the Four Classes of Secret Mantra Tantras (gsang sngags rgyud sde bzhi’i gzungs rnams gcig tu bsdus pa’i gzungs ’bum chen mo). Later, in the eighteenth century, the dhāraṇī was included in the quadrilingual imperial collection of dhāraṇīmantras produced by the court of the Qianlong Emperor (1711–99). The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” has also been included in several other Tibetan liturgy collections, particularly among the Geluk School.

The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” was not only subject to devotional reproduction in Tibet; it also inspired original composition. Most notably, the fifth Dalai Lama, Ngawang Losang Gyatso (1617–82), authored an aspiration prayer to be chanted after the recitation of The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge”.5 In the eighteenth century, the third Zimok, Champa Tenzin Trinlé, penned verses to be inserted before and after (mgo mjug gi tshig[s] bcad) the text.6 The meaning of the dhāraṇī’s words was also commented on by Ngawang Nyima (1907–90), a Mongolian geshé who was an abbot of the Gomang college at Drepung Monastery.7 That this short dhāraṇī text inspired a number of notable masters to write on it speaks to the relative prominence it maintained in Tibetan monasteries throughout history. Beyond these, there are numerous references to the dhāraṇī as a part of larger liturgies, as a member of records of transmissions received (gsan yig, thob yig), and in other textual records.

To the best of our knowledge, The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” has not been the subject of any in-depth academic studies in modern times. Zsuzsa Majer does, however, observe that the nineteenth-century Russian explorer A. M. Pozdneev records in his travelog of the Khalkha Mongol lands that The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” was performed in funerary rites. Despite this, Majer writes that she never witnessed its performance during her fieldwork, which was undertaken on modern Mongolian Buddhist postmortem rites between 2016 and 2017.8 Uranchimeg Tsultemin also mentions in her examination of the iconography of Maitreya in Mongolian art that Agwaankhaidav (ngag dbang mkhas grub, 1779–1839), the Mongolian abbot of Ikh Khüree, taught a longevity and transference (’pho ba) practice predicated on extensive accumulations of the dhāraṇī.

Our translation used the versions of the dhāraṇī preserved in the Degé Kangyur as our source text. We also consulted the variant readings found in the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) of the Kangyur and the Stok Palace Manuscript Kangyur.