དཔལ་ལྷ་མ་སྒྲ་དབྱངས་ལ་བསྟད་པ intro.4

intro.4

In Praise of the Glorious Goddess Sarasvatī lacks a Sanskrit title and is not otherwise available in a Sanskrit witness, making it challenging to determine the history of the text in India. The Tibetan translation of the text is preserved twice in the Kangyur—in the Action Tantra (Skt. kriyātantra; Tib. bya ba’i rgyud) section and in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs² (Tib. gzungs ’dus)—with only minor variations between the two versions.³ The translation is not recorded in the Denkarma or Phangthangma catalogs, the two extant records of texts translated during the Imperial Period (btsan po’i skabs; 629–842), nor does it appear in the Dunhuang collections, suggesting that the praise was either translated or compiled in the Period of Fragmentation (sil bu’i dus; ca. mid-eighth to late-tenth centuries) or during the subsequent period of Buddhism’s spread in Tibet (bstan pa’i phyi dar). With no colophon that includes information about the team of translators, it is difficult to precisely determine the history of the text’s transmission and translation in Tibet.