འཕགས་པ་ཚ་དང་ཡ་ཤས་དཔག་ཏ་མད་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད notes.50

notes.50

50. One hundred and eight names for this buddha are not given in this sūtra or in any other. This mention might possibly refer to another, lost sūtra, or perhaps be a corruption of repeating these actions 108 times (as one of the mentions in one of the Chinese translations seems to suggest). Alternatively, and most plausibly for this “three oṁ” version, it could also be a peculiarly worded reference to the dhāraṇī having 108 syllables, which is the case if the two instances of the final and initial a in the Tibetan transliteration are elided into ā as they should be according to the rules of euphonic combination in classical Sanskrit (and as they are in the Sanskrit versions). Indeed, in the paragraph that follows and in , “the one hundred and eight names” seems to refer to the dhāraṇī, and could therefore be interpreted as “the-one-hundred-and-eight-syllable appellation” of Buddha Aparimitāyus. On the other hand, in the “two oṁ” versions of the text (Toh 675, the Dunhuang manuscripts, the Khotanese, and all the Chinese versions), the dhāraṇī only has 77 syllables, yet this mention is present nevertheless (though in the case of the Dunhuang manuscripts only in the equivalent of the following paragraph, not in this one). The possible discrepancy was used by some Sarma authors (see introduction to Toh 675 at i.26) as proof that the “two oṁ” dhāraṇī was incomplete, but they may not have been aware of the existence of Sanskrit manuscripts and Chinese translations featuring the “two oṁ” version.