Recollecting the Name of Moonlight

Translation of Toh 868

Language: English
Translator: Bruno Galasek-Hul
Extent: 14 passages, 1,004 words
Text: complete digital text
Source: 84000 · Published by 84000 (v 1.0.1 2025). 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…

intro 84000's introduction — 6 parts
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notes Notes — 6 parts

Text

84000's introduction

intro.1

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight contains the dhāraṇī of the Buddha Moonlight. The benefits of recollecting the Buddha Moonlight’s name every morning after rising are that one will remember all one’s lives of the past forty thousand kalpas, one will not fall into the lower realms after death, and one will attain the attributes of awakening.

intro.2

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight is a short dhāraṇī preserved in the Degé Kangyur in two nearly identical versions, one in the Tantra section and the other in the Dhāraṇī section.

intro.3

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight opens with a brief homage to the buddha named Moonlight. It lacks the customary title (in Sanskrit and Tibetan) at the beginning and has no narrative frame or interlocutors. The dhāraṇī concludes with an enumeration of the benefits that accrue from reciting the dhāraṇī: a son or a daughter of good family who recites this invocation of the Buddha Moonlight every morning after rising will remember all their past lives during forty thousand kalpas. Furthermore, they will not fall into the lower realms after death and will attain the attributes of awakening.

intro.4

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight also lacks a translators’ colophon. Therefore, we do not know who the translators were or when it was translated. To our knowledge, no Sanskrit text of this dhāṛaṇī is extant and it does not appear to have been translated into Chinese. The catalogs of the early imperial translations, the Denkarma and Phangthangma, do not list it, but it is listed under the title zla ’od kyi mtshan rjes su dran pa in the catalog of translated works in the Kangyur that is included in Butön’s monumental fourteenth-century History of Buddhism.¹ This gives us a very wide time frame for a possible date of its translation, namely, sometime between the ninth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century.²

intro.5

Texts like Recollecting the Name of Moonlight can be understood in the context of the Mahāyāna doctrine of the parallel existence of countless buddhas in different universes, and the idea that hearing, remembering, and reciting the names of these buddhas can become a condition for attaining awakening.³ A buddha named Candraprabha (“Moonlight”) is mentioned in several important Mahāyāna sūtras, and that might be the figure intended here.⁴

intro.6

This English translation was prepared based on the two witnesses in the Degé Kangyur (Toh 535⁵ and Toh 868⁶), in consultation with the versions in the Narthang Kangyur, the Stok Palace Kangyur, and the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) of the Kangyur.

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every morning after rising, recollects the name of the tathāgata Moonlight, will remember all their former lives during forty thousand kalpas and will not fall into the lower realms. By recollecting Moonlight’s name, one will attain those attributes.

Notes

notes.1

1. Butön Rinchen Drup, folio 175.a/ 980.

notes.2

2. 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).

notes.3

3. See the introduction to Bouquet of Flowers (Kusumasañcaya, Toh 266), –, for a discussion of this. Other sūtras that similarly teach the efficacy of hearing, remembering, and reciting the names of various buddhas include The Questions of Guṇaratnasaṅkusumita (Guṇaratnasaṅkusumitaparipṛcchā, Toh 78), The Questions of Ratnajālin (Ratnajāliparipṛcchā, Toh 163), The Eight Buddhas (Aṣṭabuddhaka, Toh 271), and The Twelve Buddhas (Dvādaśabuddhaka, Toh 273).

notes.4

4. See, e.g., Bouquet of Flowers (me tog gi tshogs, Toh 266), , and Calling Witness with a Hundred Prostrations (dpang skong phyag brgya pa, Toh 267), .

notes.5

5. 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 535 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 of the Toh 535 version of this text.

notes.6

6. This text, Toh 868, 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. Note that there is a discrepancy among various databases for cataloging the Toh 868 version of this text within vol. 100 or 101 of the Degé Kangyur. See Toh 868, , for details.

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight

Contents

Text

84000's introduction

Notes