The Dhāraṇī “Essence of Immeasurable Longevity and Wisdom”

The Dhāraṇī “Essence of Immeasurable Longevity and Wisdom” opens at a pool by the Ganges, where the Buddha Śākyamuni is seated with five hundred monks and a great saṅgha of bodhisattvas. The Buddha begins his teaching with a short set of verses on the Buddha Aparimitāyus and the realm of Sukhāvatī in which that buddha dwells, telling the gathering that anyone who recites Aparimitāyus’ name will be reborn there.

He then begins a summary of the circumstances of Aparimitāyus’ lifetime as an awakened one. We learn that, like Śākyamuni, Aparimitāyus was born into a kṣatriya family. The Buddha then enumerates the names of Aparimitāyus’ father (a universal ruler), mother, queen, son, and attendant, and then those of his two foremost disciples in terms of insight and miraculous powers‍—the equivalent of Śākyamuni’s disciples Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana‍—and the extent of his saṅgha of hearers. This account, in following the classic paradigm that the life stories and deeds of all buddhas conform to the same template of analogous events and participants, goes further than even the best-known work of the genre, the Bhadrakalpika (Toh 94),1 by adding the names of figures in Aparamitāyus’ realm who are the equivalents of Māra and Devadatta in Śākyamuni’s realm.

The beautiful and wondrous qualities of Sukhāvatī, well known from texts such as the Sukhāvatīvyūha (Toh 115)2 and Amitābhavyūha (Toh 49), are described in very little detail in this text, but are subsumed in the statements that all the beings there are miraculously born from a jeweled lotus and that there is no female gender,3 and in the descriptions later in the text of Aparimitāyus’ lotus seat and Bodhi tree.

The Buddha then provides a set of instructions for visualizing Aparimitāyus that include performing prostrations three times a day and three times a night for ten days while reciting the dhāraṇī of Dundubhisvararāja. The successful performance of this practice will result, he says, in visions of Aparimitāyus and of all the buddhas of the ten directions. After the Buddha has recited the dhāraṇī, he provides instructions for a further practice that consists of visualizing Aparimitāyus on his lotus seat under his particular Bodhi tree, accompanied by the bodhisattvas Avalokiteśvara and Mahāsthāmaprāpta. In addition to bringing visions of Aparimitāyus, these practices will result in practitioners being reborn in Sukhāvatī in their next life.

The Tibetan translation that survives to this day in the Kangyur dates to the eleventh century ᴄᴇ, but the text must have been in circulation in India considerably earlier, since a Chinese translation (Taishō 370) had been completed by an unknown translator during the Liang dynasty in the early half of the sixth century.4 The Tibetan translation was made by the Indian preceptor Puṇya­sambhava and the Tibetan Lotsāwa Patsap Nyima Drak (b. 1055). Almost nothing is known of Puṇya­sambhava, while Patsap Lotsāwa was responsible not only for bringing to Tibet the philosophical works for which he is best known, but also for introducing new lineages of a few tantric practices from Kashmir, where he studied for twenty-three years.

In most Kangyurs the text translated here is included in the section of works classified as tantras belonging to the Action (kriyā) class, and is grouped with eight texts (Toh 673A–680) corresponding to the principal buddha (rigs kyi gtso bo) of the padma (lotus) family. This group, in addition to the present dhāraṇī (Toh 676), and the four works on Amitābha that follow it (Toh 677–80),5 also contains the very widely used The Aparimitāyur­jñāna Sūtra (1) (Toh 674) and The Aparimitāyur­jñāna Sūtra (2) (Toh 675)‍—the two versions of the text commonly known as the “Sūtra of Long Life” or, in Tibetan, Tsédo (tshe mdo)‍—and a dhāraṇī related to it, The Essence of Aparimitāyus (Toh 673A).6 The names of the buddha or buddhas on which this group of texts focus are variable: Amitābha, Amitāyus, Aparimitāyur­jñāna, and‍—both in the present text‍—Aparimitāyus and Dundubhi­svara­rāja. The finer distinctions between these figures have not always been entirely clear. In India, the names Amitāyus and Amitābha appear to have been almost synonymous, but distinctions of role and perhaps even identity seem to have arisen later in both China and Tibet. Alternatively, some of the figures in these texts may derive from originally independent textual traditions that later came to be grouped together. In discussing these distinctions, Tibetan scholars used such terms as “the Amitāyus of Sukhāvatī” (bde ba can gyi tshe dpag med), “the Amitāyus of the Zenith” (steng gi tshe dpag med), “the Amitāyus of Akaniṣṭha” (’og min gyi tshe dpag med), and “the Amitāyus of the Immortal Sound of the Drum” (’chi med rnga sgra’i tshe dpag med). The need for such terms suggests that in Tibetan the rendering Tsépamé (tshe dpag med) as a short form of both Aparimitāyur­jñāna and Aparimitāyus, as well as of Amitāyus, may have contributed to some blurring of differences between them.

These terms also demonstrate that the clearest basis on which distinctions may be made is the buddha field in which these buddhas dwell. In the present text, the explicit focus is on the buddha who presides over the pure realm of the western direction known as Sukhāvatī (bde ba can). He is referred to in the Tibetan text as Tsépamé (tshe dpag med), and although this could be back translated as Amitāyus, and must surely here be identified with Amitābha, we have chosen to render it instead as Aparimitāyus. This is in deference to the title, which is a little problematic in that it appears to identify the text instead with Aparimitāyur­jñāna, the buddha of the pure realm in the zenith who is the focus of the Aparimitāyur­jñāna­sūtra texts (or Tsédo, Toh 674 and 675) mentioned above.7

Perhaps as one result of potential ambiguity regarding the exact reference of its title, the text translated here, The Dhāraṇī “Essence of Immeasurable Longevity and Wisdom,” is also referred to in some Tibetan works as The Sūtra [or Dhāraṇī] of the King of the Sound of the Drum (rnga sgra’i rgyal po’i mdo/gzungs), which in Sanskrit would be *Dundubhi­svara­rāja­sūtra. Indeed, the name of the dhāraṇī that this work contains is explicitly stated in the text to be Dundubhi­svara­rāja, or Amṛta­dundubhi­svara­rāja, and tradition has taken this to be yet another moniker of Amitābha or Amitāyus of Sukhāvatī. As a name, Dundubhi­svara is not uncommon in Indian literature, and other Mahāyāna works list Dundubhi­svara­rāja (or the alternatives Dundubhi­svara and Dundubhi­svara­nirgoṣa) as names of a former buddha, a series of former buddhas, and the buddha who dwells in the northern quarter,8 but in this context, no doubt on the basis of the mentions in this text, Tibetan Buddhist tradition equates the names Dundubhi­svara­rāja (rnga sgra’i rgyal po) and Amṛta­dundubhi­svara­rāja (’chi med rnga sgra’i rgyal po) most frequently with Amitābha or Amitāyus of Sukhāvatī.

This translation was completed based on the Tibetan translation of the text found in the “Tantra Collection” (rgyud ’bum) and “Compendium of Dhāraṇī” (gzungs ’dus) sections of the Degé Kangyur9 in consultation with the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace Kangyur.