A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them

Translation of Toh 505a

Language: English
Translator: Catherine Dalton
Extent: 16 passages, 1,275 words
Text: complete digital text
Source: 84000 · Translated by Catherine Daltonunder the patronage and supervision of 84000: Translating the Words of the… · 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
1
notes Notes — 9 parts

Text

84000's introduction

intro.1

A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them is a short work that pays homage to the Three Jewels and the Medicine Buddha, and provides a mantra to be used for incanting medicines.

A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them is a short work that pays homage to the Three Jewels and the Medicine Buddha, Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja, and provides a mantra to be used for incanting medicines. The text itself does not mention the original source of the mantra, but it may have been extracted from The Dhāraṇī of Vaiḍūryaprabha (Toh 505),¹ where it appears as the final part of the longer dhāraṇī taught there. The short mantra presented in A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them was later incorporated into the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā and Aṣtāṅgasaṅgraha, two important works of the Indian Āyurvedic medical tradition that are believed to have been composed by Vāgbhaṭa (ca. 600 ce).² In both works the mantra is used in an emetic procedure (vamanavidhi) to incant a medicinal beverage immediately before it is administered to the patient.³ The mantra incorporated into Vāgbhaṭa’s texts includes both the mantra formula itself and the initial homage to Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja.

intro.3

A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them is included in both the Tantra section (Toh 505a) and the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs (Toh 1059a) in the Degé Kangyur and other Tshalpa-lineage Kangyurs that include a Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section.⁴ In the Tshalpa-lineage Kangyurs that do not include a separate dhāraṇī section, as well as in the Thempangma-lineage Kangyurs, it is included in the Tantra section. There are no significant variations between the recensions in terms of their textual content.⁵

intro.4

The present work lacks a Sanskrit title at the beginning and a translator’s colophon at the end. It is possible that like A Mantra for Incanting Medicines, Extracted From “Destroyer of the Great Trichiliocosm” (Toh 1059),⁶ the short work that immediately precedes it in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section, it may have been extracted from its source text and given its present form in Tibet, rather than in India. It is perhaps not surprising then that A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them does not appear to be extant as an independent work in Sanskrit or in Chinese translation. A work with this title is not found in the Denkarma or Phangtangma imperial catalogs of Tibetan translations, but the Denkarma catalog does include one prayer to Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabha and the Phangtangma lists two,⁷ thus indicating that Medicine Buddha practices were being translated into Tibetan in the eighth and ninth centuries.

intro.5

Additionally, The Dhāraṇī of Vaiḍūryaprabha, from which the mantra found in this text may have been extracted, was translated by the imperial-period translator Yeshé Dé, working with the Indian paṇḍitas Jinamitra, Dānaśīla, and Śīlendrabodhi, and was later revised by Atiśa and Tsültrim Gyalwa. However, although its colophon suggests it was translated during the imperial period, a text with that title does not appear in either of the imperial catalogs.

intro.6

The present English translation of A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them was made on the basis of the two Degé Kangyur recensions of this work (Toh 505a and Toh 1059a), with additional reference to the notes from the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma), and the single recension of the work found in the Stok Palace Kangyur. We also compared the mantra against its occurrence in the Degé recension of The Dhāraṇī of Vaiḍūryaprabha (Toh 505) and found it to be nearly identical with that presented in this work.⁸

1

Homage to the Three Jewels!

Homage to the blessed, thus-gone, worthy, completely perfect Buddha Bhaiṣajyaguruvaiḍūryaprabharāja!

tadyathā oṁ bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye mahābhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye samudgate svāhā ⁹

Notes

notes.1

1. 84000 Translation Team, trans., The Vaiḍūryaprabha Dhāraṇī , Toh 505 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2024).

notes.2

2. It has been argued, tentatively, that Vāgbhaṭa was a Buddhist. For more on Vāgbhaṭa and his works, see Meulenbeld 1999, pp. 597–656 and Wujastyk 1998, pp. 236–39.

notes.3

3. See the Aṣtāṅga Hṛdaya of Vāgbhaṭa, pp. 188–89, and the Aṣṭāṅga Samgraha of Vāgbhaṭa, pp. 466–69.

notes.4

4. An explicitly named Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section is found in the Degé and Urga Kangyurs, as well as in the peripheral Kangyurs of the Tshalpa lineage (Dodedrak, Phajoding, and Ragya). In contrast, the Berlin, Choné, Lithang, and Peking Qianlong Kangyurs include the same collection of dhāraṇīs in a separate part of their Tantra sections, which has no distinct label. With or without the label, these collections of dhāraṇīs contain many duplicates of texts also found in the General Sūtra or Tantra sections, and in the latter group of Kangyurs many dhāraṇī texts therefore appear twice in different parts of the Tantra section.

notes.5

5. It is nonetheless notable that the recension in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section preserves the older orthography for the concluding particle rdzogs sho at the end of the work, whereas the recension in the Tantra section of the canon, in all but one (the Narthang) of the recensions we consulted in both the Tshalpa and Tempangma Kangyur lineages, has been updated to the more common—and later—orthography, rdzogs so. The two recensions also have one minor spelling difference that is consistent across recensions (sman gyi lha in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section recension and sman gyi bla in the Tantra section recension), suggesting that the two recensions were transmitted separately. This may indicate that the recension adopted into the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section was incorporated into the canon due to its being part of an earlier collection or collections of dhāraṇīs and associated ritual texts that were brought together to constitute the canonical Compendium of Dhāraṇīs collection. Indeed, apart from the canonical dhāraṇī collection appearing in several of the Tshalpa-lineage Kangyurs, these popular dhāraṇī collections, known in Sanskrit as dhāraṇīsaṅgraha, appear in South Asia as well as in Tibet—including at Dunhuang, and as extracanonical Tibetan dhāraṇī collections—and it appears that the canonical dhāraṇī collection may have been created on the basis of an earlier such collection or collections (see Hidas 2021, p. 7, n. 56; see also Dalton 2016 and Dalton and van Schaik 2006 on the dhāraṇīsaṅgraha collections preserved at Dunhuang; see Hidas 2021 for the catalogs of eighteen Sanskrit dhāraṇīsaṅgraha collections). It therefore seems likely that one recension of A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them entered the canon via its inclusion in a dhāraṇīsaṅgraha collection that was brought into the canonical Compendium of Dhāraṇīs, while the very same text, in a different recension that had been updated to a more modern orthography, was then adopted into the Tantra section of a wider range of Kangyurs in a fitting place—immediately following the work from which its mantra was extracted.

notes.6

6. Dalton, Catherine. trans., A Mantra for Incanting Medicines, Extracted from “Destroyer of the Great Trichiliocosm” , Toh 1059 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2023).

notes.7

7. The Denkarma includes the ’phags pa de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla bai DU rya ’od kyi sngon gyi smon lam gyi khyad par rgyas pa (no. 148; Hermann-Pfandt 2008, p. 81) and the Phangthangma lists de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla be dur rya’i sngon gyi smon lam chen po (no. 117) and the de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla be dur rya’i ’od kyi smon lam chen po chung ngu (no. 179; Kawagoe 2005, pp. 11 and 13).

notes.8

8. The mantra in the present work includes an additional repetition of the word bhaiṣajye, which is not found in the dhāraṇī in Toh 505. The mantra in the present work reads tadyathā oṁ bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye mahābhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye samudgate svāhā. The final line of dhāraṇī in Toh 505 () reads tadyathā oṁ bhaṣajya bhaiṣajya mahābhaiṣajya samudgate svāhā.

notes.9

9. The final line of the dhāraṇī that appears in Toh 505 () reads tadyathā oṁ bhaṣajya bhaiṣajya mahābhaiṣajya samudgate svāhā.