Toh 861 intro.5

intro.5

The Dhāraṇī “The Essence of Vairocana” lacks a Tibetan and Sanskrit title at the beginning and a final translators’ colophon. We have no knowledge regarding who translated it and when. To our knowledge, no Sanskrit text of this dhāṛaṇī is extant and it does not appear to have been translated into Chinese. The catalog of the early imperial translations, the Denkarma (lhan kar ma, Herrmann-Pfandt 2008), does not list it. However, it is listed under its short title in the catalog of translated works in the Kangyur that is included in Butön’s monumental fourteenth-century History of Buddhism.² This gives us only a very wide time frame for its translation, namely, sometime between the ninth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century.³