co.

Table of Contents

s.

Summary

s.­1

This very short text gives the Essence Dhāraṇī of the Medicine Buddha, Bhaiṣajya­guru­vaiḍūrya­prabha­rāja.

ac.

Acknowledgements

ac.­1

This publication was completed under the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

ac.­2

The text was translated, edited, and introduced by the 84000 translation team. Catherine Dalton produced the translation and wrote the introduction. Ryan Damron edited the translation and the introduction, and Dawn Collins copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication process.

i.

Introduction

i.­1

This very short dhāraṇī text contains only an homage to the Medicine Buddha Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabha followed by his essence dhāraṇī (snying po’i gzungs). The dhāraṇī taught here is nearly identical to a section of the longer Bhaiṣajyaguru dhāraṇī taught in The Vaiḍūryaprabha Dhāraṇī (Toh 505).1

i.­2

The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru does not appear to be extant in Sanskrit or to have been translated into Chinese. The Tibetan translation lacks a colophon that could inform us of its translation team and the approximate date of its translation. However, The Dhāraṇī of Vaiḍūryaprabha, to which the short dhāraṇī in this text is closely related, was translated during the imperial period by the Tibetan translator Bandé Yeshé Dé and the Indian masters Jinamitra, Dānaśīla, and Śilendrabodhi, and was later revised by Atīśa Dīpaṅkaraśrījñāna and Tsultrim Gyalwa (tshul khrims rgya ba, c. eleventh century).

i.­3

The text is included in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section of the Degé Kangyur and other Tshalpa lineage Kangyurs that include a separate Dhāraṇī section.2 In Tshalpa lineage Kangyurs that lack a section so named, the text is only found in the equivalent but unnamed dhāraṇī collection comprising part of the Tantra section. It is not included in any Thempangma lineage Kangyurs.

i.­4

Notably, the dhāraṇī is one of only twelve works in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section that are not duplicated in other sections of the Kangyur. Therefore, it appears that these twelve texts found their way into the Tshalpa lineage Kangyurs specifically because of being part of the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs, which most likely was compiled based on earlier collections of dhāraṇīs and associated ritual texts.3 These collections, known in Sanskrit as dhāraṇī­saṃgrahas, circulated throughout South Asia and Tibet‍—including at Dunhuang‍—as extracanonical dhāraṇī collections.4

i.­5

The present English translation of The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru was made on the basis of the Degé Kangyur recension of the work, with additional reference to the notes from the Comparative Edition (dpe sdur ma).5 The text is stable across all recensions consulted.

Text Body

The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru
1.

The Translation

[F.87.a]


1.­1

Homage to the thus-gone, worthy, perfectly awakened Bhaiṣajya­guru­vaiḍūrya­prabha­rāja.


oṃ bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye mahā­bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajyarāja­samudgate svāhā

1.­2

This completes “The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru.”

n.

Notes

n.­2
An explicitly named Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section is found in the Degé and Urga Kangyurs as well as in the peripheral Kangyurs of the Tshalpa lineage (Dodedrak, Phajoding, and Ragya). In contrast, the Berlin, Choné, Lithang, and Peking Qianlong Kangyurs include the same collection of dhāraṇīs in a separate part of their Tantra sections that has no distinct label. With or without the label, these collections of dhāraṇīs contain many duplicates of texts also found in the general sūtra or tantra sections, and in the latter group of Kangyurs many dhāraṇī texts therefore appear twice in different parts of the Tantra section.
n.­3
The opening lines of the table of contents (dkar chag) of an independent dhāraṇī collection printed in Beijing in 1731, found in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and transcribed by Orosz, identify the source of all such dhāraṇī collections as the extracanonical collection edited by Tāranātha (Orosz 2010, pp. 67 and 100). This mention is also noted by Hidas 2021, p. 7, n. 56.
n.­4
See J. Dalton 2016, and J. Dalton and S. van Schaik 2006, on the dhāraṇī­saṃgraha collections preserved at Dunhuang like the canonical collection, these contain praises and prayers as well as dhāraṇīs. See Hidas 2021 for the catalogs of eighteen dhāraṇī­saṃgraha collections surviving in Sanskrit.
n.­5

This text, Toh 862, 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.

b.

Bibliography

Tibetan Sources

de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla’i snying po’i gzungs. Toh 862, Degé Kangyur vol. 100 (gzungs, e), folio 87.a.

de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla’i snying po’i gzungs. bka’ ’gyur (dpe bsdur ma) [Comparative Edition of the Kangyur], krung go’i bod rig pa zhib ’jug ste gnas kyi bka’ bstan dpe sdur khang (The Tibetan Tripitaka Collation Bureau of the China Tibetology Research Secondary Sources Center). 108 volumes. Beijing: krung go’i bod rig pa dpe skrun khang (China Tibetology Publishing House), 2006–9, vol. 97, pp. 239–40.

Secondary Sources

84000. The Vaiḍūryaprabha Dhāraṇī (Vaiḍūrya­prabha­dharaṇī, bai DUr+ya’i ’od gyi gzungs, Toh 505). Translated by Adam C. Krug. Online publication, 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2024.

Dalton, Jacob P. “How Dhāraṇīs WERE Proto-Tantric: Liturgies, Ritual Manuals, and the Origins of the Tantras.” In Tantric Traditions in Transmission and Translation, edited by David Gray and Ryan Richard Overbey, 199-229. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Dalton, Jacob and Sam van Schaik, eds. Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library. Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library 12. Leiden: Brill, 2006.

dkar chag ’phang thang ma. Beijing: mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 2003.

Hidas, Gergely. Powers of Protection: The Buddhist Tradition of Spells in the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha Collections. Beyond Boundaries 9. Boston: de Gruyter, 2021.

Kawagoe, Eshin, ed. dKar chag ’Phang thang ma. Sendai: Tōhuku Indo Chibetto Kenkyū Sōsho 3. Sendai: Tohuku Society for Indo-Tibetan Studies, 2005.

Lalou, Marcelle. “Les textes bouddhiques au temps du roi Khri-sroṅ-lde-bcan.” Journal Asiatique 241 (1953): 313–53.

Orosz, Gergely. A Catalogue of the Tibetan Manuscripts and Block Prints in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Budapest: Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2010.

g.

Glossary

Types of attestation for names and terms of the corresponding source language

AS

Attested in source text

This term is attested in a manuscript used as a source for this translation.

AO

Attested in other text

This term is attested in other manuscripts with a parallel or similar context.

AD

Attested in dictionary

This term is attested in dictionaries matching Tibetan to the corresponding language.

AA

Approximate attestation

The attestation of this name is approximate. It is based on other names where the relationship between the Tibetan and source language is attested in dictionaries or other manuscripts.

RP

Reconstruction from Tibetan phonetic rendering

This term is a reconstruction based on the Tibetan phonetic rendering of the term.

RS

Reconstruction from Tibetan semantic rendering

This term is a reconstruction based on the semantics of the Tibetan translation.

SU

Source unspecified

This term has been supplied from an unspecified source, which most often is a widely trusted dictionary.

g.­1

Atīśa Dīpaṅkaraśrījñāna

  • —
  • —
  • atīśa dīpaṅkara­śrījñāna

The famed Indian scholar who spent twelve years in Tibet from 1042–1054.

g.­2

Bandé Yeshé Dé

  • ye shes sde
  • ཡེ་ཤེས་སྡེ།
  • —

Definition from the 84000 Glossary of Terms:

Yeshé Dé (late eighth to early ninth century) was the most prolific translator of sūtras into Tibetan. Altogether he is credited with the translation of more than one hundred sixty sūtra translations and more than one hundred additional translations, mostly on tantric topics. In spite of Yeshé Dé’s great importance for the propagation of Buddhism in Tibet during the imperial era, only a few biographical details about this figure are known. Later sources describe him as a student of the Indian teacher Padmasambhava, and he is also credited with teaching both sūtra and tantra widely to students of his own. He was also known as Nanam Yeshé Dé, from the Nanam (sna nam) clan.

g.­3

Bhaiṣajya­guru­vaiḍūrya­prabha­rāja

  • sman gyi bla bai DUr+ya’i ’od kyi rgyal po
  • sman gyi bla
  • སྨན་གྱི་བླ་བཻ་ཌཱུརྱའི་འོད་ཀྱི་རྒྱལ་པོ།
  • སྨན་གྱི་བླ།
  • bhaiṣajya­gurvaiḍūrya­prabhāsa­rāja

The Medicine Buddha; one of The Seven Tathāgatas.

g.­4

Dānaśīla

  • dA na shI la
  • དཱ་ན་ཤཱི་ལ།
  • —

An Indian paṇḍita who was resident in Tibet during the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

g.­5

Jinamitra

  • dzi na mi tra
  • ཛི་ན་མི་ཏྲ།
  • —

Definition from the 84000 Glossary of Terms:

Jinamitra was invited to Tibet during the reign of King Tri Songdetsen (khri srong lde btsan, r. 742–98 ᴄᴇ) and was involved with the translation of nearly two hundred texts, continuing into the reign of King Ralpachen (ral pa can, r. 815–38 ᴄᴇ). He was one of the small group of paṇḍitas responsible for the Mahāvyutpatti Sanskrit–Tibetan dictionary.

g.­6

Śilendrabodhi

  • shI len dra bo d+hi
  • ཤཱི་ལེན་དྲ་བོ་དྷི།
  • —

An Indian paṇḍita resident in Tibet during the late eighth and early ninth centuries.

g.­7

Thempangma Kangyur

  • them spangs ma bka’ ’gyur
  • ཐེམ་སྤངས་མ་བཀའ་འགྱུར།
  • —

One of the two textual lineages of the Kangyur, starting from a manuscript so named that was produced at Gyantsé (rgyal rtse) in 1431.

g.­8

Tshalpa Kangyur

  • tshal pa bka’ ’gyur
  • ཚལ་པ་བཀའ་འགྱུར།
  • —

An edition of the Kangyur produced at Gungthang (gung thang) monastery in central Tibet from 1347–51 under the sponsorship of the local ruler, Tshalpa Künga Dorje (tshal pa kun dga’ rdo rje, 1309–64), which provided the basis for a branch of subsequent Kangyur editions.

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84000. The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajya­guru (de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla’i snying po’i gzungs, Toh 862). Translated by 84000 Associate Translators. Online publication. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2025. https://84000.co/translation/toh862.Copy
84000. The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajya­guru (de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla’i snying po’i gzungs, Toh 862). Translated by 84000 Associate Translators, online publication, 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2025, 84000.co/translation/toh862.Copy
84000. (2025) The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajya­guru (de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla’i snying po’i gzungs, Toh 862). (84000 Associate Translators, Trans.). Online publication. 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha. https://84000.co/translation/toh862.Copy
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