འཕགས་པ་ཤན་ཏ་རྒྱས་པ་ཆན་པའ་སྡ་ཉ་མའ་སྙང་པ་ཞས་བྱ་བའ་མད intro.4

intro.4

With the exception of a short Sanskrit manuscript fragment found in Central Asia,¹ no Sanskrit manuscript of the text appears to be extant. We do, however, have translations of the sūtra into both Chinese and Tibetan. The Chinese translation (Rizang fen 日藏分, Taishō ) was translated in 585 ce by Narendrayaśas (517–89), an Indian translator from Oḍḍiyāna who traveled the Silk Road in order to propagate Buddhism. He arrived in China during the Northern Qi dynasty in 556. At the request of Emperor Wenxuan, he resided at Tianpingsi and later at Daxingshansi, where he translated fourteen Indian sūtras into Chinese, including the Karuṇāpuṇḍarīka­sūtra, ² the Samādhi­rāja­sūtra,³ and the Mahāmeghasūtra.⁴ The Tibetan translation was completed in the early translation period and is listed in the early ninth-century Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) catalog.⁵ According to the colophon of the Tibetan translation, the sūtra was translated into Tibetan by the Indian scholars Sarvajñādeva, Vidyākaraprabha, and Dharmākara and by the Tibetan translator Zangkyong. It was then edited and finalized by Kawa Paltsek, the prolific translator who participated in numerous translation projects in Tibet during the early translation period, when the majority of Indian sūtras were translated into Tibetan. In producing this English rendering, we have based our work on the Tibetan Degé block print with reference to the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace manuscript.