The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana”, which pays homage to the Three Jewels, the Buddha Vairocana, and the bodhisattva mahāsattva Ākāśagarbha, contains the dhāraṇī of Vairocana or Ākāśagarbha. It lists the following benefits for one who recites it: protection from weapons, fire, water, poison, poisoned food and drink, hostile magic, kings, thieves, epidemics, pain, contagions, and so forth, and the attainment of the samādhi called stainless light.
This publication was completed under the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.
The text was translated, edited, and introduced by the 84000 translation team. Bruno Galasek-Hul produced the translation and wrote the introduction. Rory Lindsay edited the translation and the introduction, and Dawn Collins copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication process.
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” is a short text contained in the Degé Kangyur in both the Tantra section (Toh 534) and in the Dhāraṇī section (Toh 861). It is further subcategorized as an Action tantra (bya rgyud, kriyātantra).
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” lacks a narrative frame, as well as a location and interlocutors. It starts with formulaic homages to the Three Jewels, the Buddha Vairocana, and the bodhisattva mahāsattva Ākāsagarbha. These canonical expressions of reverence are followed by the dhāraṇī itself, which invokes the Buddha Vairocana. The text concludes with an enumeration of the benefits that accrue from reciting the dhāraṇī: the reciter will be protected from weapons, fire, water, poison, poisoned food and drink, kākhordas, kings, thieves, epidemics, pain, contagions, and so forth, and will attain a particular samādhi called stainless light.
The dhāraṇī proper contains, besides many non-lexical phonemes, the perfectly intelligible Sanskrit phrase vairocanaraśmi sañcodite āgaccha| āryākāśagarbha, “Come, ordered by Vairocana’s light rays, noble Ākāśagarbha (‘Essence of the Sky’)!” This exhortation to the bodhisattva Ākāśagarbha suggests that this may be his dhāraṇī and not Vairocana’s. The bodhisattva Ākāśagarbha is closely associated with the Buddha Vairocana, and one of his most important roles is the purification of negative actions. This pair are especially prominent in East Asian esoteric traditions.1
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” lacks a Tibetan and Sanskrit title at the beginning and a final translators’ colophon. We have no knowledge regarding who translated it and when. To our knowledge, no Sanskrit text of this dhāṛaṇī is extant and it does not appear to have been translated into Chinese. The catalog of the early imperial translations, the Denkarma (lhan kar ma, Herrmann-Pfandt 2008), does not list it. However, it is listed under its short title in the catalog of translated works in the Kangyur that is included in Butön’s monumental fourteenth-century History of Buddhism.2 This gives us only a very wide time frame for its translation, namely, sometime between the ninth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century.3
The present English translation was prepared based on the two Degé witnesses (Toh 53444 and Toh 86155). We also consulted the versions contained in the Phukdrak Kangyur and Stok Palace Kangyur.
tadyathā| kala kala| kili kili| viri viri| huru huru| vairocanaraśmisañcodite āgaccha| āryākāśagarbha mahākāruṇikā pūraya haśāna| dhāraya buddhe viścayana| cara cara| ciri ciri svāhā7
By reciting it, this will be accomplished: weapons, fire, water, poison, poisoned food and drink, or kākhordas will not hurt one. One will not be harmed by a king, thieves, and so forth. Wherever this is written down and stored, epidemics,8 harm, and contagions will not arise.9 What is more, one will attain the samādhi called stainless light.”
The Noble Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” is complete.
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana”, which pays homage to the Three Jewels, the Buddha Vairocana, and the bodhisattva mahāsattva Ākāśagarbha, contains the dhāraṇī of Vairocana or Ākāśagarbha. It lists the following benefits for one who recites it: protection from weapons, fire, water, poison, poisoned food and drink, hostile magic, kings, thieves, epidemics, pain, contagions, and so forth, and the attainment of the samādhi called stainless light.
This publication was completed under the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.
The text was translated, edited, and introduced by the 84000 translation team. Bruno Galasek-Hul produced the translation and wrote the introduction. Rory Lindsay edited the translation and the introduction, and Dawn Collins copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication process.
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” is a short text contained in the Degé Kangyur in both the Tantra section (Toh 534) and in the Dhāraṇī section (Toh 861). It is further subcategorized as an Action tantra (bya rgyud, kriyātantra).
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” lacks a narrative frame, as well as a location and interlocutors. It starts with formulaic homages to the Three Jewels, the Buddha Vairocana, and the bodhisattva mahāsattva Ākāsagarbha. These canonical expressions of reverence are followed by the dhāraṇī itself, which invokes the Buddha Vairocana. The text concludes with an enumeration of the benefits that accrue from reciting the dhāraṇī: the reciter will be protected from weapons, fire, water, poison, poisoned food and drink, kākhordas, kings, thieves, epidemics, pain, contagions, and so forth, and will attain a particular samādhi called stainless light.
The dhāraṇī proper contains, besides many non-lexical phonemes, the perfectly intelligible Sanskrit phrase vairocanaraśmi sañcodite āgaccha| āryākāśagarbha, “Come, ordered by Vairocana’s light rays, noble Ākāśagarbha (‘Essence of the Sky’)!” This exhortation to the bodhisattva Ākāśagarbha suggests that this may be his dhāraṇī and not Vairocana’s. The bodhisattva Ākāśagarbha is closely associated with the Buddha Vairocana, and one of his most important roles is the purification of negative actions. This pair are especially prominent in East Asian esoteric traditions.1
The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” lacks a Tibetan and Sanskrit title at the beginning and a final translators’ colophon. We have no knowledge regarding who translated it and when. To our knowledge, no Sanskrit text of this dhāṛaṇī is extant and it does not appear to have been translated into Chinese. The catalog of the early imperial translations, the Denkarma (lhan kar ma, Herrmann-Pfandt 2008), does not list it. However, it is listed under its short title in the catalog of translated works in the Kangyur that is included in Butön’s monumental fourteenth-century History of Buddhism.2 This gives us only a very wide time frame for its translation, namely, sometime between the ninth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century.3
The present English translation was prepared based on the two Degé witnesses (Toh 53444 and Toh 86155). We also consulted the versions contained in the Phukdrak Kangyur and Stok Palace Kangyur.
tadyathā| kala kala| kili kili| viri viri| huru huru| vairocanaraśmisañcodite āgaccha| āryākāśagarbha mahākāruṇikā pūraya haśāna| dhāraya buddhe viścayana| cara cara| ciri ciri svāhā7
By reciting it, this will be accomplished: weapons, fire, water, poison, poisoned food and drink, or kākhordas will not hurt one. One will not be harmed by a king, thieves, and so forth. Wherever this is written down and stored, epidemics,8 harm, and contagions will not arise.9 What is more, one will attain the samādhi called stainless light.”
The Noble Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” is complete.
Most scholars consider the Denkarma to have been completed sometime in the first half of the ninth century (for a discussion of the different possible dates, see Herrmann-Pfandt 2008, xvii–xxii). Bu ston completed his History of Buddhism sometime before the year 1326 (for a detailed discussion, see van der Kuijp 2016, pp. 227–35).
Two sets of folio references have been included in this translation due to a discrepancy in volume 88 (rgyud, na) of the Degé Kangyur between the 1737 par phud printings and the late (post par phud) printings. In the latter case, an extra work, Bodhimaṇḍasyālaṃkāralakṣadhāraṇī (Toh 508, byang chub snying po’i rgyan ’bum gyi gzungs), was added as the second text in the volume, thereby displacing the pagination of all the following texts in the same volume by 17 folios. Since the eKangyur follows the later printing, both references have been provided, with the highlighted one linking to the eKangyur viewer.
In the Toh 534 version of the text there is a slight discrepancy in the folio numbering between the 1737 par phud printings and the late (post par phud) printings of the Degé Kangyur. Although the discrepancy is irrelevant here, further details concerning this may be found in n.4 of the Toh 534 version of this text.
This text, Toh 861, and all those contained in this same volume (gzungs, e), are listed as being located in volume 100 of the Degé Kangyur by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). However, several other Kangyur databases—including the eKangyur that supplies the digital input version displayed by the 84000 Reading Room—list this work as being located in volume 101. This discrepancy is partly due to the fact that the two volumes of the gzungs ’dus section are an added supplement not mentioned in the original catalog, and also hinges on the fact that the compilers of the Tōhoku catalog placed another text—which forms a whole, very large volume—the Vimalaprabhānāmakālacakratantraṭīkā (dus ’khor ’grel bshad dri med ’od, Toh 845), before the volume 100 of the Degé Kangyur, numbering it as vol. 100, although it is almost certainly intended to come right at the end of the Degé Kangyur texts as volume 102; indeed its final fifth chapter is often carried over and wrapped in the same volume as the Kangyur dkar chags (catalog). Please note this discrepancy when using the eKangyur viewer in this translation.
The phrase vairocanaraśmi sañcodite āgaccha| āryākāśagarbha “Come, ordered by Vairocana’s light rays! Noble Ākāśagarbha (“Essence of the Sky”)” in the dhāraṇī rather seems to suggest that this is the dhāraṇī of the bodhisattva Ākāśagarbha.
An important bodhisattva whose name means “essence of space.” He is one of the “eight great close sons” (aṣṭamahopaputra, nye ba’i sras chen brgyad).
A being who is dedicated to the cultivation and fulfilment of the altruistic intention to attain perfect buddhahood, traversing the ten bodhisattva levels (daśabhūmi, sa bcu). Bodhisattvas purposely opt to remain within cyclic existence in order to liberate all sentient beings, instead of simply seeking personal freedom from suffering. In terms of the view, they realize both the selflessness of persons and the selflessness of phenomena.
General name for transmittable diseases.
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.
An epidemic disease.
See kākhorda.
A term used in hostile magical rites that can alternatively refer to a class of nonhuman being or type of magical device employed against the target of the rite.
The term can be understood to mean “great courageous one” or "great hero,” or (from the Sanskrit) simply “great being,” and is almost always found as an epithet of “bodhisattva.” The qualification “great” in this term, according to the majority of canonical definitions, focuses on the generic greatness common to all bodhisattvas, i.e., the greatness implicit in the bodhisattva vow itself in terms of outlook, aspiration, number of beings to be benefited, potential or eventual accomplishments, and so forth. In this sense the mahā- (“great”) is close in its connotations to the mahā- in “Mahāyāna.” While individual bodhisattvas described as mahāsattva may in many cases also be “great” in terms of their level of realization, this is largely coincidental, and in the canonical texts the epithet is not restricted to bodhisattvas at any particular point in their career. Indeed, in a few cases even bodhisattvas whose path has taken a wrong direction are still described as bodhisattva mahāsattva.
Later commentarial writings do nevertheless define the term—variably—in terms of bodhisattvas having attained a particular level (bhūmi) or realization. The most common qualifying criteria mentioned are attaining the path of seeing, attaining irreversibility (according to its various definitions), or attaining the seventh bhūmi.
In a general sense, samādhi can describe a number of different meditative states. In the Mahāyāna literature, in particular in the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras, we find extensive lists of different samādhis, numbering over one hundred.
In a more restricted sense, and when understood as a mental state, samādhi is defined as the one-pointedness of the mind (cittaikāgratā), the ability to remain on the same object over long periods of time. The Drajor Bamponyipa (sgra sbyor bam po gnyis pa) commentary on the Mahāvyutpatti explains the term samādhi as referring to the instrument through which mind and mental states “get collected,” i.e., it is by the force of samādhi that the continuum of mind and mental states becomes collected on a single point of reference without getting distracted.
The Buddha, Dharma, and Saṅgha—the three objects of Buddhist refuge. In the Tibetan rendering, “the three rare and supreme ones.”
The name Vairocana, literally, “solar,” is used in some important Mahāyāna sūtras such as The Stem Array (g.1377) and The Ten Bhūmis (g.209) as an epithet for the Buddha Śākyamuni. As a distinct tathāgata, Vairocana presides over the tathāgata family among the five buddha families.
’phags pa rnam par snang mdzad kyi snying po zhes bya ba’i gzungs. Toh 534, Degé Kangyur vol. 88 (rgyud, na), folio 99.b.
’phags pa rnam par snang mdzad kyi snying po zhes bya ba’i gzungs. Toh 861, Degé Kangyur vol. 100 (gzungs, e), folio 87.a.
’phags pa rnam par snang mdzad kyi snying po zhes bya ba’i gzungs. Stok Palace Kangyur vol. 102 (rgyud, da), folio 102.a.
rnam par snang mdzad kyi snying po. Phukdrak Kangyur, vol. 116 (rgyud, tsha), folios 168.b–169.a.
Butön Rinchen Drup (bu ston rin chen grub). chos ’byung (bde bar gshegs pa’i bstan pa’i gsal byed chos kyi ’byung gnas gsung rab rin po che’i gter mdzod). In The Collected Works of Bu-Ston, vol. 24 (ya), pp. 633–1055. New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1965–71. BDRC W22106.
84000. The Nectar of Speech (Amṛtavyāharaṇa, Toh 197). Translated by the Dharmasāgara Translation Committee. Online publication. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2020.
84000. The Ākāśagarbha Sūtra (Ākāśagarbhasūtra, nam mkha’i snying po’i mdo, Toh 260). Translated by the Sakya Pandita Translation Group. Online publication. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2014.
Davidson, Ronald M. “Studies in Dhāraṇī III: Seeking the Parameters of a Dhāraṇī-piṭaka, the Formation of the Dhāraṇīsaṃgrahas, and the Place of the Seven Buddhas.” In Scripture:Canon::Text:Context: Essays Honoring Lewis Lancaster, edited by Richard K. Payne, 119–80. Berkeley: Institute of Buddhist Studies and BDK America, 2015.
Herrmann-Pfandt, Adelheid. Die lHan kar ma: ein früher Katalog der ins Tibetische übersetzten buddhistischen Texte. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2008.
Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp. “The Lives of Bu ston Rin chen grub and the Date and Sources of His Chos ’byung, a Chronicle of Buddhism in India and Tibet.” Revue d’Etudes Tibétaines 35 (April 2016): 203–308.
Schopen, Gregory (1977). “Review of The Large Sutra on Perfect Wisdom, by Edward Conze.” Indo-Iranian Journal 19, No. 1/2 (May/June 1977): 135–152.
Schopen, Gregory (1978). “The Bhaiṣajyaguru-Sūtra and the Buddhism of Gilgit.” PhD diss., Australian National University, 1978.
F Phukdrak Kangyur
N Narthang Kangyur
S Stok Palace Kangyur
