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Recollecting the Names of the Buddha Ratnaśikhin

Translation of Toh 870

Language
English
Translator
Catherine Dalton
Extent
15 passages, 1,220 words
Text
complete digital text
Source
84000 · Published by 84000 (v 1.0.0 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…

Contents

Text

84000's introduction

intro.1

Recollecting the Names of the Buddha Ratnaśikhin includes a short dhāraṇī and the brief statement that if it is recited at the time of death, one will avoid lower rebirth and be reborn in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three.

intro.2

Recollecting the Names of the Buddha Ratnaśikhin includes a dhāraṇī invoking the buddha Ratnaśikhin. The text then states that whoever recites it at the time of death will not be reborn in the lower realms but will instead take rebirth in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three.

intro.3

This dhāraṇī text appears to be connected with the account from The Sūtra of the Sublime Golden Light (Toh 555), in which it is recounted that, in the past, the Buddha Ratnaśikhin made a commitment that any being who hears his name at the time of death will be reborn in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three.¹ The fruits of his commitment are borne out in the narrative of The Sūtra of the Sublime Golden Light, in which several beings report having taken higher rebirths through the fortune of hearing the Buddha Ratnaśikhin’s name. The specific dhāraṇī found in the present text is, however, not included in The Sūtra of the Sublime Golden Light.

intro.4

According to a number of canonical works, the Buddha Ratnaśikhin is a buddha from the past in whose presence the Buddha Śākyamuni trained during earlier lifetimes, prior to his awakening. The Play in Full, in describing Śākyamuni’s service to former buddhas, mentions that Śākyamuni “offered a candle to Ratnaśikhin.”² Vasubhandu’s Abhidharmakośa identifies Ratnaśikhin as the buddha under whom Śākyamuni completed the first of his three “incalculable eons” of training.³

intro.5

Like many dhāraṇī texts, Recollecting the Names of the Buddha Ratnaśikhin is found in both the Tantra section as well as the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section of the Degé Kangyur. It lacks a Sanskrit title as well as a colophon and it is not listed in any of the imperial-period catalogs. However, a text bearing a nearly identical title does appear at Dunhuang, suggesting that Recollecting the Names of the Buddha Ratnaśikhin was translated into Tibetan and circulated in Tibet in a relatively early period.⁴

intro.6

The Sanskrit for the first part of the dhāraṇī proper is included in a series of dhāraṇīs located on two gold foils found in a reliquary from a shrine at Candi Plaosan in Indonesia. A variant of the dhāraṇī is found in the Sūtra of the Dhāraṇī of Knowledge of Former Lives (Sumingzhi tuolouni jing), which was translated into Chinese by Faxian in 996.⁵ However, it appears that no Sanskrit recension or Chinese translation of Recollecting the Names of the Buddha Ratnaśikhin is extant.

intro.7

This English translation was made on the basis of the two Degé Kangyur recensions of the text (Toh 537⁶ and Toh 870⁷), with reference to the Stok Palace edition as well as the notes to the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma). The recensions consulted have no significant discrepancies. The dhāraṇī itself has been transcribed exactly as it appears in Toh 537.

1

Homage to the Buddha Ratnaśikhin.

namo ratnaśikhine| tathāgatāya| arhate sam­yaksaṃ­buddhāya| tadyathā| ratne ratne ratna­śikhine svāhā||

If someone remembers this at the moment of death, they will be freed from the lower realms. When they do die and transmigrate, they will take birth as a god in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three.

Notes

notes.1

1. The Sūtra of the Sublime Golden Light (Suvarṇa­prabhāsottama­sūtra, Toh 555), 25.22.

notes.2

2. The Play in Full (Lalitavistara, Toh 95), 13:68.

notes.3

3. See Poussin (trans. Pruden) 1988–90, p. 543, n. 505 and Roberts 2010, p. 404.

notes.4

4. A text with a parallel title (de gshin [sic? bzhin?] gshegs pa rin cen [sic? chen] gtsug phud mtshan rjes su dran pa), which appears to have similar content to the present work, is listed in Dalton and van Schaik’s catalog as IOL Tib-J 312/7. However, the manuscript that contains this text has not yet been digitized and, therefore, does not appear on the International Dunhuang Project’s webpage. Therefore, we were unable to ascertain with full certainty that it is the same as the present text. In their summary, Dalton and van Schaik mention that according to IOL Tib-J 312/7, when the dhāraṇī found there is recollected at the moment of death, it brings rebirth in the heavens. Given that this is precisely the content of the present text, it is likely to be the same dhāraṇī text. Moreover, the immediately preceding text in the same Dunhuang manuscript, IOL Tib-J 312/6, bears the same title and a similar description to Toh 536, increasing the likelihood that these two works in the Degé Kangyur are the same as those that appear in the very same order in IOL Tib-J 312. Notably, the Tibetan translation of Ratnaśikhin’s name in IOL Tib-J 312 (rin cen [sic? chen?] gtsug phud) is different from that in the present text (rin chen gtsug tor). However, both variants are found in other works in the Tibetan canon, and it appears that both are accepted Tibetan translations of the name Ratnaśikhin.

notes.5

5. On the Indonesian foils, see Griffiths 2014, p. 164 and p. 166. On the variant of the dhāraṇī in the Sūtra of the Dhāraṇī of Knowledge of Former Lives, see Griffiths 2014, p. 164, n. 93, where he cites Rolf Geibel.

notes.6

6. Two sets of folio references have been included in this translation due to a discrepancy in volume 88 (rgyud ’bum, 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 537 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 537 version of this text.

notes.7

7. This text, Toh 870, and all those contained in this same volume (gzungs ’dus, waM), 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 870 version of this text within vol. 100 or 101 of the Degé Kangyur. See Toh 870, , for details.