རྒྱལ་པ་ལ་གདམས་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.4

intro.4

Only the third of these three (Toh 221) is attested in either Sanskrit or Chinese, while both the present text, Advice to King Bimbisāra (Toh 214), and Advice to Udayana, King of Vatsa (Toh 215) have no known Sanskrit or Chinese witnesses and exist only in Tibetan. In their colophons, both of these sūtras are attributed to the translators Dānaśīla and Bandé Yeshé Dé, who were active during the height of Tibetan imperial patronage of Buddhism in the late eighth and early ninth centuries ce. However, neither of the two texts is mentioned in the Phangthangma or Denkarma imperial-period catalogs,² nor are they mentioned in Chomden Raldri’s late thirteenth-century survey of translated texts. Adding further to the uncertainty of their provenance, neither text is found in any Kangyurs of the Thempangma recensional line.³