འཕགས་པ་ཚ་དང་ཡ་ཤས་དཔག་ཏ་མད་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.60

intro.60

The sūtra itself particularly emphasizes the beneficial effects of writing it out or causing it to be written out, and there is ample evidence that this recommendation was taken seriously in the form of the very large number of commissioned copies, mostly in Tibetan and Chinese and dating to the eighth and ninth centuries, found in the Dunhuang caves by Stein and Pelliot in the early years of the twentieth century. Many of them appear to have been commissioned in the name of the Tibetan king Ralpachen, who reigned in the early ninth century and was the grandson of Trisong Detsen. Among the bundles acquired by the two explorers for the British and French governments, there are over a thousand copies of the sūtra now in the British Library in London, and a similar number in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Some five hundred further copies remain in libraries in China, many have found their way to Japan, and there are some two hundred in St. Petersburg.³⁶ As noted in , a large majority of these manuscripts, and probably all of those from the period concerned, contain the equivalent of the “two oṁ” dhāraṇī³⁷