The Essence Dhāraṇī of the Tathāgata Bhaiṣajyaguru
Translation of Toh 862
- Language
- English
- Translator
- Catherine Dalton
- Extent
- 11 passages, 770 words
- Text
- complete digital text
- Source
- 84000 · Published by 84000 (v 1.0.2 2024). 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha,… · CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha). Shown whole and unaltered, with its notes, on a…
Contents
- intro 84000's introduction — 6 parts
- 1
- notes Notes — 4 parts
Text
84000's introduction
intro.1
This very short text gives the Essence Dhāraṇī of the Medicine Buddha, Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja.
intro.2
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 Dhāraṇī of Vaiḍūryaprabha (Toh 505).
intro.3
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).
intro.4
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.¹ 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.
intro.5
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.² These collections, known in Sanskrit as dhāraṇīsaṃgrahas, circulated throughout South Asia and Tibet—including at Dunhuang—as extracanonical dhāraṇī collections.³
intro.6
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).⁴ The text is stable across all recensions consulted.
1
Homage to the thus-gone, worthy, perfectly awakened Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja.
oṃ bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye mahābhaiṣajye bhaiṣajyarājasamudgate svāhā
Notes
notes.1
1. 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.
notes.2
2. 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.
notes.3
3. 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.
notes.4
4. 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.