Introduction

i.1The King of the Array of All Dharma Qualities is a scripture found in both the general sūtra and the tantra sections of most Kangyurs. The sūtra is set in the Bamboo Grove at Kalanda­kanivāpa, a park outside Rājagṛha where several sūtras are said to have been taught. Here, the Buddha resides together with a great saṅgha of monks and with several bodhisattvas. The Buddha enters a state of meditative absorption, whereby the earth shakes, and various supernatural manifestations appear. At the sight of these magical displays, many other beings are attracted to the place where the Buddha is about to teach and, joining those already present, they listen. The bodhisattva Vajrapāṇi then supplicates the Buddha to teach the sūtra called The King of the Array of All Dharma Qualities.

i.2After the Buddha has instructed the audience on the four proper attitudes for finding a spiritual friend, Avaloki­teśvara tells the audience that those who hear this Dharma teaching will be blessed by all the buddhas and will be reborn in Sukhāvatī. At the request of Vajrapāṇi, the Buddha then explains the significance of Avaloki­teśvara’s name. Next, the Buddha and Vajrapāṇi successively utter two powerful dhāraṇīs for the benefit of those present in the assembly. Vajrapāṇi accompanies the recitation of his dhāraṇī with the description of a ritual featuring the maṇḍalas of Vajradhara, Śākyamuni, and Avaloki­teśvara.

i.3In the remainder of the sūtra, the Buddha entrusts his teaching to Vajrapāṇi and the rest of the audience, repeatedly insisting that this text and those who teach it should be regarded as thus-gone ones themselves. The benefits derived from worshiping and propagating this teaching and its teachers are then repeatedly presented to the assembly. The Buddha concludes his discourse by explaining the unfortunate consequences of not persevering in the Dharma but instead relapsing into saṃsāric pursuits. He illustrates this with three analogies: (1) a woman who forgets the difficulty of childbirth and allows herself to become pregnant again; (2) a man who has recovered from his drunkenness yet quickly returns to his old habits; and (3) a being who escapes hell and is born as a human, only to engage in the very actions that lead straight back to hell. Having warned his audience about the dire outcomes of such careless attitudes, the Buddha provides Ānanda with five alternative titles for this sūtra, and the entire world with its human and non-human beings rejoices and praises the teaching.

i.4The Buddha’s main interlocutors in this sūtra are the bodhisattvas Vajrapāṇi and Avaloki­teśvara. The bodhisattva Vyūharāja, “King of the Array,” plays only a minor role, and the fact that the title includes the words that make up his name does not seem likely to be due to his presence in the cast of characters. On the other hand, the relationship between the content of the sūtra and its title (which is repeated at several points within the text) remains unclear. The content is generally heterogeneous, but it is noteworthy that it contains two dhāraṇīs and descriptions of a ritual. The presence of these ritual elements in a Mahāyāna teaching is probably the reason why this text is included twice in the Degé and other Kangyurs with Tshalpa influence, appearing not only in the General Sūtra section (as Toh 114) but also in the section of Action tantras (as Toh 527). In Kangyurs more closely aligned to the Thempangma tradition, the text appears only in the Action tantra section.

i.5The sūtra was translated into both Chinese and Tibetan. The Chinese translation (T.1374) was produced by the famous Chinese pilgrim Yijing (635–713) at the beginning of the eighth century, while the Tibetan translation rendered here in English was prepared a century later by the prolific Tibetan translator Yeshé Dé (fl. eighth to ninth centuries) in collaboration with the Indian preceptors Prajñāvarman and Surendrabodhi.

i.6In both early ninth century inventories of translated texts, the Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) and Phangthangma (’phang thang ma), a text with this title is listed as having six bam po (fascicles), which would make it at least ten times longer than the present text. The Phangthangma additionally lists another text with the same name, but with four hundred ślokas, which would correspond more closely to the sūtra translated here. Butön (bu ston rin chen grub), in his fourteenth century canonical list that was an important influence in the compilation of the Kangyur, ascribes six bam po to a text with this title, too, and then a few folios later goes on to mention another text with this same title, but of only four hundred ślokas, among thirty-six texts that he had not found. Although there may have been errors in the inventories, it is not easy to mistake a six bam po text for a four hundred śloka one, and it remains a possibility that two texts of very different length but the same title co-existed at some time. The fact that it is the longer of the two whose existence Butön seems to confirm, and not the shorter, adds to the uncertainty. Nevertheless, no trace of a longer version has come to light. The versions found in the Tabo and Gondhla proto-Kangyur collections appear to be different Tibetan translations of the same original.

i.7It is hard to evaluate the influence of this sūtra on the wider tradition. Compared to some of the other texts with which it is placed (in most Kangyurs) in the first thirty or so works of the General Sūtra section, it does not seem to have had a significant impact‍—unlike, for example, The White Lotus of the Good Dharma immediately preceding it and The Display of the Pure Land of Sukhāvatī that follows. In contrast to its much-cited neighbours with predominant doctrinal themes, it has not been the focus of any specific practice or tradition, and it is not immediately obvious which of its relatively brief and quite disparate statements might at one time have been most valued. The few citations in later literature that we have identified do not collectively focus on one of its topics in particular. Nevertheless, the most sustained message of the sūtra‍—that respect, worship, and preservation of the sūtra itself will bring immense spiritual benefits, including rebirth in Sukhāvatī‍—carries reflections of both The White Lotus of the Good Dharma and The Display of the Pure Land of Sukhāvatī, and is perhaps a sufficient explanation of its presence in many Kangyurs between these two texts.

i.8Significantly, a Sanskrit palm leaf manuscript was discovered in Gilgit in 1938 among numerous other Buddhist texts (Hinüber 1979 and Hartmann 1997). Dr. Oliver von Criegern of the University of Munich has produced an edition of this Sanskrit manuscript, as well as an edition of the Tibetan text (including proto-Kangyur manuscripts from Tabo and Gondhla) and a full translation into German that we consulted during the translation to resolve several difficult passages (Criegern 2009). While we consulted the Sanskrit edition during our work, this translation mainly follows the Tibetan Degé woodblock print. However, in a few instances where the Tibetan seems corrupt and the Sanskrit offers the more sensible reading, we have followed the Sanskrit edition. Significant differences from the proto-Kangyur manuscripts are recorded in endnotes. The dhāraṇīs are transcribed according to the Degé edition; the Sanskrit is also provided in endnotes, together with tentative translations.