Introduction

i.1The Avalokinī Sūtra is a scripture that belongs to the General Sūtra section of the Kangyur. The meaning of its title is somewhat elusive. Avalokinī could be a reference to the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, but neither the name Avalokiteśvara nor any reference to this bodhisattva appears in the text. The sūtra’s central theme is the excellent rewards resulting from venerating a stūpa containing the relics of a buddha by faithfully engaging in various acts of worship, such as circumambulation, presentation of offerings, or acts of maintenance.

i.2The benefits of building stūpas and of honoring them are mentioned in numerous passages in the sūtras and vinaya texts, but this is one of only a small number in which this theme is the principal one. The venerating of stūpas is an important practice in all traditions of Buddhism, and must have started shortly after the Buddha’s parinirvāṇa with the honoring of the memorials containing his relics that were erected at the time. The Buddha’s relics were regarded as the living presence of the Buddha and functioned as a tangible symbol of the awakened state. As such, the stūpas that enshrined them represented both a site of his authority and a source of blessings, which encouraged the Buddha’s followers to engage in stūpa worship for spiritual benefit as well as mundane success.

i.3The major part of the Avalokinī consists of verses describing the immeasurable merit generated by a devotee who worships the thus-gone ones, either while they are alive or through their relics after they have passed away. In particular, the sūtra presents a series of mundane and supramundane rewards gained through various acts of stūpa worship. The worldly boons that manifest from making specific kinds of offerings to the stūpa of a thus-gone one are presented in great detail. Concerning long-term spiritual rewards, the devotee will progress steadily on the Dharma path and eventually reach the state of awakening, without any unnecessary detours in saṃsāra. An important act of worship mentioned in the sūtra is the upholding of the Dharma at a time when it is endangered. Those who uphold the Dharma of the buddhas and worship their stūpas after they have passed into nirvāṇa are promised happiness and fortunate rebirths. At the end of the sūtra, the Buddha encourages devotees who have learned of these benefits to take up the practice of stūpa worship, so that they may also quickly awaken to the state of buddhahood.

i.4Many verses from the Avalokinī are preserved in Sanskrit. Most significantly, Śāntideva’s Śikṣāsamuccaya includes eighty-five verses matching those of the Avalokinī. In producing this translation, we compared these Sanskrit verses to the Tibetan text. The Sanskrit verses quoted in the Śikṣāsamuccaya generally correspond to the Tibetan Avalokinī, although there are many minor variations between the two texts. Most importantly, in the Śikṣāsamuccaya they do not appear in the sequence in which they are found in the Avalokinī’s 275 verses. As such, it appears unlikely that the verses in the Śikṣāsamuccaya represent the direct Sanskrit source from which the Tibetan Avalokinī was translated, although, clearly, the two texts are closely related.

i.5Moreover, significant similarities with the Avalokinī are also found in the Mahāvastu, a Vinaya work belonging to the Lokottaravādin school of the Mahāsāṃghikas, which contains a section on stūpa worship in 232 verses. More than half of these verses correspond to some degree to verses found in the Avalokinī: 130 verses are almost identical to those in the Avalokinī, while another 40 only partially match the Tibetan (typically one or two lines in a verse). The remaining verses in this section of the Mahāvastu do not correspond to the Avalokinī at all. Hence, due to the complex differences between the Avalokinī and the relevant section of the Mahāvastu, we did not systematically compare the two for this translation.

i.6The precise historical relationship between the Avalokinī and our two Sanskrit sources remains unresolved. Even the title differs slightly in the various sources. In the Śikṣāsamuccaya the title is Avalokana, whereas the Mahāvastu has Avalokita. Among the Tibetan witnesses, Degé and Lhasa read Avalokinī, while Narthang, Shelkar, and Stok read Avalokini. Apart from the surviving portions of the Sanskrit original, the Avalokinī exists only in Tibetan, as the text was never translated into Chinese. For this translation, five editions of the sūtra contained in the different Kangyurs were considered. The colophon of the Tibetan text mentions that it was translated by the Indian scholars Jinamitra and Dānaśīla, along with the chief editor-translator Yeshé Dé, which places the sūtra temporally in the early ninth-century when the majority of the Tibetan sūtra translations were produced. That dating is also attested by the text’s inclusion in the early 9th century Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) catalog.