Notes

n.1An explicitly named Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section is found in the Degé and Urga Kangyurs as well as in the peripheral Kangyurs of the Tshalpa lineage (Dodedrak, Phajoding, and Ragya). In contrast, the Berlin, Choné, Lithang, and Peking Qianlong Kangyurs include the same collection of dhāraṇīs in a separate part of their Tantra sections that has no distinct label. With or without the label, these collections of dhāraṇīs contain many duplicates of texts also found in the General Sūtra or Tantra sections, and in the latter group of Kangyurs many dhāraṇī texts therefore appear twice in different parts of the Tantra section.

n.2The opening lines of the table of contents (dkar chag) of an independent dhāraṇī collection printed in Beijing in 1731, found in the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest and transcribed by Orosz, identify the source of all such dhāraṇī collections as the extracanonical collection edited by Tāranātha (Orosz 2010, pp. 67 and 100). This mention is also noted by Hidas 2021, p. 7, n. 56.

n.3See J. Dalton 2016 and J. Dalton and S. van Schaik 2006 on the dhāraṇī­saṃgraha collections preserved in Dunhuang, which, like the canonical collection, contain praises and prayers as well as dhāraṇīs. See Hidas 2021 for the catalogs of eighteen dhāraṇī­saṃgraha collections suviving in Sanskrit.

n.4This is the term bdud gcod. See the note on this term in the translation below for more details.

n.5This feature is the spelling of the terminating particle at the end of the work: rdzogs sho rather than the later standard rdzogs so. See Stein 2010, pp. 15–16. For further details on these two distinctive lexicons see Stein’s Tibetica Antiqua, especially the chapter on “The Two Vocabularies in the Dunhuang Manuscripts.” We would also note the presence in our text of the term phra men to refer to a sort of malevolent female spirit. This term also occurs in other manuscripts from Dunhuang that use the older vocabulary. See Stein 2010, p.54. In the context of one such manuscript, Stein translates ’phra men ma it as “witch-goddess,” and notes an association with “Bon and Yol.” We have rendered the term in the present text as “malevolent female spirits,” though we do think that Stein’s translation captures its intended sense. This term phra men ma was also used to translate the Sanskrit ḍākinī, usually in the sense of ḍākinīs as malevolent female entities, not as the “wisdom ḍākinīs” found in the higher tantras, where the term is usually translated as mkha’ ’gro (ma). See also the note to this term below in the translation and the glossary entry on phra men ma for further details.

n.6See Roberts, Peter Alan. trans., The Stem Array , Toh 44-45 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2021).

n.7It therefore seems unlikely that this dhāraṇī could have been considered a condensed essence or other adjunct of that influential text‍—as one finds with other dhāraṇīs that have an explicit relationship to sūtras, a genre found in the groups Toh 583–589 and Toh 939–945. Indeed, such a possibility is made even less likely by the existence of another dhāraṇī that fulfills the “condensed essence” function, The Quintessence of “The Stem Array” , Toh 941.

n.8“Days of the week” would more commonly be gza’, rather than the reading here, za, but gza’ is used in the next line where it seems to indicate the planets (another meaning of the word). Our translation here is tentative.

n.9Here the Degé, and most of the other Kangyurs consulted in the Pedurma edition, read ’dre lnga sdod (“the five ghosts remaining”), which we understand to mean possession by the ghosts. The Yongle and Kangxi Kangyurs read ’dre lgna gdon (“the demonic five ghosts” or “the demons/spirits who are the five ghosts”), which is also a plausible reading. Given two plausible readings, we simply chose the one that is predominant.

n.10bdud gcod. This is the name of an inauspicious divination result in the trigram divinations according to the Chinese elemental divination system.

n.11dmar kyi mthun. Here we follow the Yongle and Kangxi Kangyurs which read dmar kyi mthun, thus taking the phrase to mean “violence” (lit. “that which accords with violence”), rather than the Degé, which reads dmar kyi thun (this might possibly be translated as “violent incanted substances” or “violent practices”). While we believe we can make most sense of the Kangxi and Yongle reading, we nonetheless remain unsure about the meaning of this phrase, and suspect that the passage may be corrupt.

n.12The term phra men is one of two Tibetan translations of the word ḍākinī, the other being the more familiar mkha’ ’gro (ma). It seems the term phra men (ma) was used more frequently to render the idea of ḍākinīs as a class of potentially malevolent female spirits, while the term mkha’ ’gro (ma), while also used to refer to such worldly spirits, was preferred for the “wisdom” ḍākinīs in the higher tantras, in which context the term ḍākinī is better known to English-speaking audiences. To avoid such confusion (and also because we speculate that this text may have been translated from Chinese rather than from Sanskrit), we have chosen to translate the word phra men here as “malevolent female spirit,” since what is clear is that its referent here is a class of potentially harmful entities. See the glossary entry on phra men for further uses of the term.