འཕགས་པ་མཚན་མ་བཟང་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བའ་མད intro.14

intro.14

Sanskrit witnesses to Auspicious Night are preserved in two manuscript fragments. The first takes up approximately one folio of a palm-leaf manuscript from the Kizil cave complex in the Kucha area, an oasis kingdom at the edge of the Taklamakan Desert on the northern branch of the Silk Road.⁷ In this Sanskrit fragment, the sūtra is set in Prince Jeta’s Grove in Śrāvastī, differing from the Tibetan text but in accord with the Pali Bhaddekarattasutta. The fragment also preserves a few scattered syllables of mantras, including a phrase that can be reconstructed as piśācini pārṇaśavari (“O piśācinī Parṇaśavarī!”), which is also found in the version of the text translated into Tibetan.