འཕགས་པ་བྱམས་པས་དམ་བཅས་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བའ་གཟངས intro.10

intro.10

To the best of our knowledge, The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” has not been the subject of any in-depth academic studies in modern times. Zsuzsa Majer does, however, observe that the nineteenth-century Russian explorer A. M. Pozdneev records in his travelog of the Khalkha Mongol lands that The Dhāraṇī “Maitreya’s Pledge” was performed in funerary rites. Despite this, Majer writes that she never witnessed its performance during her fieldwork, which was undertaken on modern Mongolian Buddhist postmortem rites between 2016 and 2017.⁸ Uranchimeg Tsultemin also mentions in her examination of the iconography of Maitreya in Mongolian art that Agwaankhaidav (ngag dbang mkhas grub, 1779–1839), the Mongolian abbot of Ikh Khüree, taught a longevity and transference (’pho ba) practice predicated on extensive accumulations of the dhāraṇī.