The Dhāraṇī “One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening”

Translation of བྱང་ཆབ་ཀྱ་སྙང་པའ་རྒྱན་འབམ་གྱ་གཟངས (བྱང་ཆུབ་ཀྱི་སྙིང་པོའི་རྒྱན་འབུམ་གྱི་གཟུངས)

Language: English
Translator: Bruno Galasek-Hul
Extent: 29 passages, 1,955 words
Text: partly digitised
Source: 84000 · Published by 84000 (v 1.0.6 2024). 84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha,… · 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 — 7 parts
1
2
notes Notes — 20 parts

Text

84000's introduction

intro.1

This short text presents a set of mantras that, when placed inside a stūpa, multiply the merit of having built one stūpa by one hundred thousand. These dhāraṇīs are specifically said to be of benefit to future generations whose merit will be weak.

intro.2

The Dhāraṇī “One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening” presents a series of mantras and an explanation of their benefits, presumably taught by the Buddha Śākyamuni, though he is never explicitly named.¹ Instead, the text begins abruptly with a presentation of the mantras, including a long root mantra (rtsa ba’i sngags; mūlamantra),² a shorter essence mantra (snying po; hṛdaya), an ancillary essence mantra (nye ba’i snying po; upahṛdaya), and an additional undesignated mantra. A short prose section follows that explains the special function of these: anyone who writes them down and puts them inside a stūpa will see the effects of that deed multiply so that it will be as if they built one hundred thousand stūpas instead of just one. Making extensive offerings to that stūpa is likewise said to be tantamount to making offerings to the Three Jewels. The Buddha next addresses Nanda to explain that this teaching will be of specific benefit to beings in the future who will have little merit, weak faith, and bad karma because they have failed to read the sūtra and make extensive offerings. However, by simply relying on this dhāraṇī, the Buddha assures Nanda, “one will have made eighty-four thousand offerings adorned with the Dharma” and their merit will become inexhaustible. At the end it is stated that this dhāraṇī has the same effect as reading and reciting The Stem Array (Gaṇḍavyūha, Toh 44-45),³ the final chapter of the monumental Avataṃsaka Sūtra.

intro.3

The text’s colophon identifies it as an extraction (btus pa) of a longer dhāraṇī text with the identical title: The Dhāraṇī “One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening” (byang chub snying po’i rgyan ’bum zhes bya ba’i gzungs.) This refers to the text that immediately precedes this one in most prints of the Degé Kangyur (Toh 508). For a long time this longer version was considered lost, as stated by Butön Rinchen Drup in the early fourteenth century.⁴ The longer version is not found in any Kangyurs of the Tshalpa recensional lineage that were produced before the Degé; they include only the short version translated here. Nor was the longer version included in the first printing of the Degé Kangyur itself, the so-called par phud (first printed in 1737), or in the Choné Kangyur which was based on the Degé. Rather, as stated in its lengthy colophon, Toh 508 was only translated into Tibetan as late as 1743, when a translation from Chinese was made by the great Qing dynasty Mongolian scholar and translator Gönpo Kyab (mgon po skyabs).⁵ This was then included in later prints of the Degé Kangyur from the 1762 print onwards and in this way is also found in more recent Kangyurs such as the Lhasa (H 478). It was included in order to replace the text that Butön had considered to be lost, which was listed in the Denkarma imperial-period catalog from the early ninth century.⁶ Some scholars believe, however, that the version contained in the Phukdrak Kangyur (F 550) and other regional Kangyurs may preserve that earlier translation, for which there is also a Dunhuang manuscript witness.⁷

intro.4

The colophon of the shorter version translated below does not include any information about its translation or compilation, making it challenging to determine precisely when and under what circumstances it was produced.

intro.5

A complete Sanskrit witness of the short version of the One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening is not presently available. A Sanskrit inscription of a text that corresponds to this text was identified on a stone slab held by the Provincial Museum of Orissa, Cuttack. The inscription, published by A. Ghosh (1941), can be dated to approximately the tenth century.⁸ Other witnesses of the root mantra, essence mantra, and ancillary essence mantra have been found among terracotta tablets dating from the sixth to the ninth century that were discovered at the site of Nālanda in northern India. The contemporary Tibetan tradition counts the One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening among the “the five great dhāraṇīs” (gzungs chen sde lnga) that are placed inside newly consecrated stūpas. ⁹

intro.6

Gregory Schopen has published the most detailed study to date of the Tibetan and Sanskrit witnesses of the One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening. Part III of his study contains a critical edition and an English translation of the Tibetan text, with references to the fragmentary Sanskrit texts on the Cuttack slab and the Nālanda tablets.¹⁰

intro.7

This English translation was prepared based on the two Degé witnesses of the text (Toh 509 and Toh 920), ¹¹ in comparison with the Stok Palace Manuscript Kangyur. The dhāraṇīs and mantras are given as they appear in Toh 509, with minor emendations made to clarify the Sanskrit readings. No attempt was made to edit them based on other Tibetan witnesses.

1

¹² Homage to all buddhas and bodhisattvas.

The root mantra:¹³

oṁ namo bhagavate vipulavadanakāñcanotkṣiptaprabhāsaketumūrdhane tathāgatāya arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya | namo bhagavate śākyamunaye tathāgatāya arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya |

tadyathā | bodhi bodhi | bodhani bodhani |

2

sarvatathāgata sarvatathāgatagocari | dhara dhara | hara hara | prahara prahara | mahābodhicittadhāre | culu culu | śataraśmisañcodite | sarvatathāgatābhiṣikte | guṇiguṇapate | sarvabuddhaguṇāvabhāse | mili mili | gaganatale | sarvatathāgatādhiṣṭhite | nabhasthale | śame śame | praśame praśame | sarvapāpam praśame | sarvapāpaṃ viśodhane | hulu hulu | mahābodhimārgasampratiṣṭhite | sarvatathāgatasupratiṣṭhite śuddhe svāhā ||

The essence mantra:¹⁴

oṁ sarvatathāgatavyavalokite | jaya jaya svāhā || ¹⁵

The ancillary essence mantra:¹⁶

oṁ hulu hulu jayamukhe svāhā ||¹⁷

And:

oṁ vajrāyuṣe svāhā ||¹⁸

“When a bhikṣu, bhikṣuṇī, upāsaka, or upāsikā, or any other son of good family or daughter of good family, writes this dhāraṇī down, builds a stūpa, and places it in that stūpa, the building of that single stūpa will equal the building of one hundred thousand stūpas. When offering exquisite flowers, fragrance, garlands, ointments, powders, garments, parasols, banners, pennants, and so forth, one will not just have made offerings to the stūpa alone, but will have offered these articles to the jewel of the Buddha, the jewel of the Dharma, and the jewel of the Saṅgha.

“Nanda,¹⁹ I have taught this sūtra, this dhāraṇī, to benefit beings such as those whose merit is weak, who have no faith, who harbor wrong views, who are consumed with doubt, who have committed actions that bring immediate retribution, whose lifespan is short, and who are to be immediately reborn in the hell realms, in animal realms, or in Yama’s realm.

“Nanda, it is said that in the future, at a later time, the majority of householders and monks will neither read this dhāraṇī nor make offerings, and renunciants and householders alike will suffer. This being the case, when one builds a stūpa after making offerings to the Buddha and hearing this dhāraṇī,²⁰ one will have made eighty-four thousand offerings adorned with the Dharma. Moreover, one’s accumulation of merit will be inexhaustible, and it will be as if one had read and recited The Stem Array. One will enter the mundane and transcendent maṇḍalas.

Notes

notes.1

1. We can be reasonably confident that Śākyamuni is the primary speaker because, as detailed below, he is explicitly identified in the longer text of the same title from which this dhāraṇī text was extracted.

notes.2

2. Toh 508 identifies this dhāraṇī or root mantra as “the dhāraṇī called one hundred thousand ornaments of the essence of awakening, the king of ritual manuals” (rtog pa’i rgyal po byang chub snying po’i rgyan ’bum zhes bya ba’i gzungs).

notes.3

3. The Stem Array (translated 2021).

notes.4

4. Butön, rgyud ’bum gyi dkar chag, 382. Khedrub Jé also makes reference to an earlier translation that was no longer extant in Tibet in the fifteenth century (Schopen 2005, pp. 318–19).

notes.5

5. Toh 508, folio 28.b. On Gönpo Kyab, see his entry (under the name Gonbujab) at The Treasury of Lives, published July 2020. The Chinese version used by Gönpo Kyab for his Tibetan translation has the title puti chang zhuangyan tuoluoni jing (菩提場莊嚴陀羅尼經, Taishō 1008) and was translated by Amoghavajra in the third quarter of the eighth century.

notes.6

6. See Herrmann-Pfandt 2008, p. 190. The Denkarma lists a text called ’phags pa byang chub snying po rgyan ’bum gyi gzungs, as being 250 ślokas in length. The other extant imperial-era catalog, the Phangthangma, also lists a text with a similar title: byang chub kyi snying po ’bum gyi rgyan cho ga dang bcas pa as being 200 ślokas in length.

notes.7

7. Pelliot tibétain 555. Neither the Phukdrak nor the Dunhuang version were consulted for this translation.

notes.8

8. See Ghosh 1941, pp. 170–74, and Schopen 2005, p. 315. As Ghosh notes, the original location of the inscription is unknown.

notes.9

9. The other four dhāraṇīs in the set are The Uṣṇīṣavijāyā Dhāraṇī , The Dhāraṇī of Vimaloṣṇīṣa , The Dhāraṇī for Secret Relics , and the “essence of dependent arising” (rten ’brel snying po) the frequently cited formula that begins oṁ ye dharma…

notes.10

10. Schopen 2005, pp. 322–26.

notes.11

11. This text, Toh 920, and all those contained in this same volume (gzungs, e), are listed as being located in volume 100 of the Degé Kangyur by the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). However, several other Kangyur databases—including the eKangyur that supplies the digital input version displayed by the 84000 Reading Room—list this work as being located in volume 101. This discrepancy is partly due to the fact that the two volumes of the gzungs ’dus section are an added supplement not mentioned in the original catalog, and also hinges on the fact that the compilers of the Tōhoku catalog placed another text—which forms a whole, very large volume—the Vimalaprabhānāmakālacakratantraṭīkā (dus ’khor ’grel bshad dri med ’od, Toh 845), before the volume 100 of the Degé Kangyur, numbering it as vol. 100, although it is almost certainly intended to come right at the end of the Degé Kangyur texts as volume 102; indeed its final fifth chapter is often carried over and wrapped in the same volume as the Kangyur dkar chags (catalog). Please note this discrepancy when using the eKangyur viewer in this translation. Note that there is a discrepancy among various databases for cataloging the Toh 920 version of this text within vol. 100 or 101 of the Degé Kangyur. See Toh 920, , for details.

notes.12

12. Two sets of folio references have been included in this translation due to a discrepancy in volume 88 (rgyud ’bum, na) of the Degé Kangyur between the 1737 par phud printings and the late (post par phud) printings. In the latter case, an extra work, Bodhimaṇḍasyālaṃkāralakṣadhāraṇī (byang chub snying po’i rgyan ’bum gyi gzungs, Toh 508), was added as the second text in the volume, thereby displacing the pagination of all the following texts in the same volume by 17 folios. Since the eKangyur follows the later printing, both references have been provided, with the highlighted one linking to the eKangyur viewer. In the Toh 509 version of the text there is a slight discrepancy in the folio numbering between the 1737 par phud printings and the late (post par phud) printings of the Degé Kangyur. Although the discrepancy is irrelevant here, further details concerning this may be found in of the Toh 509 version of this text.