བསལ་བའ་ཚལ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.5

intro.5

While it seems certain that the five texts each developed independently and were only later combined into the well-known collection, their popularity as a set is attested by their eventual spread from India to Nepal, Tibet, Central Asia, China, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, and Indonesia.⁷ Among the five texts, the status of The Sūtra of Great Cool Grove is perhaps the most ambiguous. The sūtra is listed as one of the “Five Great Dhāraṇīs” in the Denkarma (ldan kar ma), the imperial-period catalog of Tibetan translations, indicating that it was counted among the set as early as the ninth century.⁸ Similarly, it was also counted among the same set in a ninth-century Tibetan manuscript found at Tabo monastery in Ladakh.⁹ However, in later Sanskrit Pañcarakṣā collections it was replaced with the similarly titled but otherwise distinct dhāraṇī Great Cool Goddess (Mahāśītavatī).¹⁰ Thus, the collection of five dhāraṇīs preserved in the Tibetan canon and recorded in Denkarma catalog as the “Five Great Dhāraṇīs” may represent a “proto-Pañcarakṣā collection” that evolved into the collection that includes the dhāraṇī Great Cool Goddess rather than The Sūtra of Great Cool Grove.¹¹ It is the later arrangement of the Five Great Dhāraṇīs, the set that does not include The Sūtra of Great Cool Grove, that has achieved widespread popularity in the Buddhist world, particularly in Nepal, where numerous versions of the text have been preserved in Sanskrit and vernacular languages into modern times.¹²