Toh 533 intro.4

intro.4

The Dhāraṇī of the Essence of Śākyamuni has no Sanskrit title, no translators’ colophon, and we do not know who translated it or when. 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 the Phangthangma, do not list it. The short title is mentioned in the catalog of translated works in the Kangyur that is included in Butön’s monumental fourteenth-century History of Buddhism.¹ Richard O. Meisezahl records an interesting variant of the dhāraṇī in a catalog of Tibetan manuscripts and prints kept in the Linden Museum in Stuttgart. Here, the dhāraṇī of Śākyamuni is clearly comprised of the homage (in transcribed Sanskrit) and the essence mantra, while in the Degé version of The Dhāraṇī of the Essence of Śākyamuni, the homage is translated into Tibetan and appears separate from the essence mantra. The version in the Linden Museum reads as follows: na maḥ śākya mu na ye ta thā ga tā ya| arha te sam­yaksaṃ buddhā ya| tadya thā| mu ni mu ni ma hā mu ni ye sbā hā.²