འཕགས་པ་མ་སྐྱས་དགྲའ་འགྱད་པ་བསལ་བ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.8

intro.8

As for the Tibetan translation, we know that it was produced, perhaps from the Sanskrit, no later than the early ninth century, since the text is included in the early ninth-century Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) catalog.¹³ Interestingly, in this catalog, Eliminating Ajātaśatru’s Remorse is included among the “Great Vehicle sūtras translated from Chinese” (theg pa chen po’i mdo sde rgya las bsgyur ba). Herrmann-Pfandt argues, however, that the Tibetan translation may very well have been produced from the Sanskrit regardless, as Mañjuśrīgarbha and Ratnarakṣita are both known to have worked with Indian texts rather than Chinese sources.¹⁴ Whether that is the case, or if perhaps the translation was indeed produced from the Chinese but subsequently edited to conform to the terminology employed in the later linguistic revisions that centered on Indic source texts, is unclear to us. At present, we can simply note that none of the Tibetan Kangyur collections specify who first translated the texts into Tibetan. Instead, they merely note that the translation was edited by the Indian scholar Mañjuśrīgarbha¹⁵ and the Tibetan translator Ratnarakṣita, both of whom flourished in the early ninth century. Apart from the Denkarma classification, the text itself bears no obvious marks of having been translated from the Chinese, but future research into this matter may determine the text’s pedigree with more certainty.¹⁶ In producing this English translation from the Tibetan, we have based our work on the Degé xylograph while consulting the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) as well as the Stok Palace manuscript.