Introduction

i.1This short text and The Dedication “Protecting Beings” (Toh 286) seem to constitute a pair, and this for several reasons. First, the two texts, both of which lack Sanskrit titles, appear side by side both in the Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) imperial catalogue and in the extant Kangyurs of the Tshalpa and Thempangma lines. In the Tshalpa Kangyurs, the two are placed at the very end of the Mahāyāna division of the General Sūtra (mdo sde) section, and in the Thempangma Kangyurs toward the end of the entire General Sūtra section. Their function as dedications therefore seems to be reflected in that placement, and‍—in the Tshalpa Kangyurs at least‍—the two appear to be dedications meant specifically to seal the sections of Mahāyāna sūtras.

i.2Furthermore, the fact that the two are consistently placed together in most Kangyurs suggests at least the possibility that the colophon to the following text refers also to this one, which otherwise lacks a colophon of its own. Since the two texts are dedications, it is perhaps not surprising that they are neither called sūtras, nor show features typical of sūtras, such as the opening “Thus did I hear” or an introductory passage describing the setting and audience of the discourse. What is somewhat surprising is that both are nonetheless included in the sūtra section of the Kangyur, indicating that they are to be considered discourses of the Buddha. Along those lines, the lack of features that typically distinguish sūtras led the fifteenth-century scholar Pekar Sangpo (pad dkar bzang po), in his analytical survey of all the sūtras found in the Kangyur, to conclude that the two texts are extracts from another, longer sūtra‍—though he does not say which, and our own search for matches (at least in the Tibetan corpus) has not yet identified any such text, sūtra or otherwise. Intriguingly, Pekar Sangpo also characterizes the present text as a sūtra of the Third Turning (bka’ tha ma). What can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence, however, is that, regardless of their exact provenance, the two texts were translated from Sanskrit or another Indic language in the early ninth century, as evidenced by the fact that the present text is listed in both the Denkarma and Phangthangma (’phang thang ma) catalogs.

i.3There is no extant Sanskrit text of this sūtra, and there are no known canonical or Tibetan commentaries. There is no known English translation of it nor any translation into any European language, and no academic research or scholarly studies of it are known. A translation of the Tibetan text is, however, available in the Mongolian Kangyur. The translation presented here is based on the Tibetan version in the Degé Kangyur and consultation of the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) as well as the Stok Palace manuscript.

i.4The structure of the present text partly reflects the liturgy of “seven branches” or “seven limbs” (yan lag bdun pa), a set of practices that came to serve as the basic structure of many Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna Buddhist prayers, sādhanas, and pūjās. The seven branches are commonly as follows: prostration or homage, offering, confession, rejoicing in virtue, requesting the buddhas to teach, requesting the buddhas not to pass into nirvāṇa, and dedication of merit. Not all of these seven are present in this text, which suggests that perhaps the set was formalized only later. Here, there is only a single line of homage at the very beginning of the text, which might have been intended only as the customary line of homage found at the beginning of all Kangyur works. Offering is not mentioned at all. The body of the text consists of two main sections, each of which opens with a request that the buddhas and bodhisattvas pay heed to the reciter and closes (intriguingly) with the sentence “Thus I recite a second time, and thus a third time.” The first section is devoted solely to confession, while the second is devoted to rejoicing, requesting to teach, requesting to remain, and dedication. Each of these features a lengthy enumeration of deeds, qualities, and accomplishments that are confessed, rejoiced in, requested, or dedicated. This division into two parts, the one a detailed confession and the other ending with a detailed dedication, has the effect of emphasizing those two elements, the distinguishing feature of this prayer.