Introduction

Overview

i.1The Prophecy on Mount Gośṛṅga is an account of the Buddha Śākyamuni visiting the ancient Central Asian oasis state of Khotan, and prophesying its future as a Buddhist kingdom. It is one of a number of canonical texts in the form of prophecies that furnish Khotan with its Buddhist founding mythology. While other texts (detailed below) relate how the Buddha prophesied key figures in Khotan’s founding, rule, and protection, this sūtra provides an account of how the Buddha also established and blessed the landscape itself and other physical features of the country.

i.2More generally, the text belongs to a category of works that describe the spread of the Buddhist teachings and their eventual decline. Whereas in many sūtras the term “prophecy” (vyākaraṇa, which can also mean “revelation” or simply “explanation”) is used in the specific sense of the Buddha predicting the future awakening to buddhahood of a particular individual, in the titles of a few texts like the present one it refers to prophecies of a more general kind.

The Narrative

i.3Together with a large retinue of bodhisattvas, hearers, gods, and other beings, the Buddha travels miraculously through the sky from Rājagṛha in India to Khotan, which in this discourse has not yet been established as a country and at the outset remains covered by a giant lake. Once there, the Buddha visits the lakeshore and the nearby Mount Gośṛṅga. Gośṛṅga means “cow horn” in Sanskrit and the hill is said to have received this name due to having two pointed peaks. From the top of Mount Gośṛṅga the Buddha foretells how this will be the site of a future Buddhist land called Virtue , which will contain a stūpa known as Gomasalaganda and a range of other sacred temples and monuments. The Buddha continues to explain to his retinue the excellent qualities of this land, foretelling many future events, and instructing his disciples how to guard and protect the land for the sake of beings at that time. At the end of the discourse, the Buddha instructs the great hearer Śāriputra and the divine king Vaiśravaṇa to drain the lake’s water by using their miraculous powers to crush one of the surrounding mountains, thus diverting the water and rendering the land ready for future inhabitants.

Khotan and Tibet

i.4The once great city-state of Khotan, called li yul in Tibetan, is today called Hotan (or Hetian) and is located in China’s Xinjiang province. An oasis kingdom on the southwest edge of the vast Taklamakhan desert that fills the Tarim Basin, Khotan lies to the north of the Kunlun mountain range, which divides it from present-day Ladakh to the southwest and from Western Tibet to the southeast. It was an important trade center on the southern branch of the Silk Route, which from Kashgar followed the southern side of the desert through Khotan and Shanshan to Lop Nor and Dunhuang. From the time of the emperor Aśoka onwards Khotan became an outpost of Indian culture and gradually, during the first millennium ᴄᴇ, a place where Chinese merchants, monks, and scholars encountered Indian Buddhist doctrine, practices, and texts. It therefore had an important role in the transmission of Buddhism to China and the rest of east Asia.

i.5Tibetans, too, may have encountered some aspects of the Indian Buddhist traditions in Khotan. Khotan was invaded by the Tibetans around the mid-seventh century ᴄᴇ at a time when, during the reigns of Songtsen Gampo and his successors, Tibetan political and military power were expanding. Khotanese accounts of the time saw the arrival of the Tibetans as destructive of Buddhist institutions there, and although the Tibetan court had recently begun to adopt Buddhist culture it is likely that its influence had not yet reached the far-flung army commanders. However, soon afterwards it appears that Tibetan occupation had proved relatively benign to Khotan’s Buddhists, and for the next three centuries while Khotan was twice subject to Tibetan administration the cultural ties between Tibet and Khotan grew stronger. Indeed, some scholars attribute considerable importance to Khotan in the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet. Khotanese monks seem to have been welcomed in Tibet in the early eighth century by the Chinese queen of Tridé Tsukten, father of Trisong Deutsen, and for several centuries even after the collapse of the Tibetan imperial power in the mid-ninth century Tibetan and Khotanese monks and scholars were in frequent contact in Dunhuang and other cultural centers in Central Asia.

The Sūtra in Khotanese and Tibetan Literature

i.6A considerable range of Buddhist literature in Khotanese, mostly Mahāyāna texts and many represented only by fragmentary manuscripts, has been identified. Khotanese was a Middle Iranian form of the Indo-European language family that developed from the vernacular of the region and, written in Brāhmī script, was used in Khotan for Buddhist texts from the sixth century ᴄᴇ onward. Many such texts must have circulated in Tibet as Buddhism took root there, alongside texts in other Central Asian languages, Chinese, and increasingly‍—as the great imperial period of translations gathered pace‍—in Sanskrit.

i.7The text must have been first translated into Tibetan no later than the early ninth century, since it is recorded in the Denkarma and Phangthangma inventories of Tibetan imperial translations. The sūtra may possibly have been known to the Chinese monk Xuanzang (600–664 ᴄᴇ), who referenced the legends contained in this text and associated works when writing about his travels through Khotan, which he visited in the first half of the seventh century. Interestingly, however, while the sūtra describes Khotan as a contested wilderness region sought after by various foreign powers, it foretells a time when the area will gain peace, prosperity, and protection under the governance of Tibetan and Chinese Buddhist kingdoms. At the time of Xuanzang’s visit, not very long before the first Tibetan invasion of the country, it is unlikely that any Tibetan governance would have been foreseen as either Buddhist or benevolent. If the sūtra itself existed in some earlier form during the first half of the seventh century when the Buddhist rulers of Khotan were clinging to power in the face of rising threats from neighboring foreign powers, including Tibet and China, it is likely to have been adapted later to cast Tibet in a more favorable light. Any dating must therefore remain speculative in the absence of corroborating evidence.

i.8Apart from the Tibetan translation and its presumed Khotanese source text, now lost, the sūtra is not known to exist in any other Asian language. It has no colophon to aid in determining who translated it and from what language. However, given both its content and Xuanzang’s testimony, it seems reasonable to assume that it came to Tibet from Khotan, and indeed Chomden Rikpai Raltri, the great thirteenth century scholar of Narthang who was instrumental in producing the first prototype Kangyur, includes it in a list of twenty canonical works that he believed (with doubt in a few cases) to have been translated into Tibetan from Khotanese.

i.9Among these texts with a linguistic link to Khotan, a smaller number are works whose content also focuses on Khotan. Included among them is this sūtra, as well as The Questions of Vimalaprabhā (Vimala­prabha­paripṛcchā, Toh 168), which prophetically establishes the cast of characters who will play an important role in Khotan’s history and links them to the Buddha’s lifetime in India. The princess Vimalaprabhā, bodhisattva daughter of King Ajātaśatru of Magadha, receives a detailed prophecy of her future lives as a series of important and powerful female figures in Khotan, and especially one life as the formidable lady Rabngé‍—sister of the king of one neighboring country, widow of the king of another, Buddhist nun, and protectress of Khotan. Also related to Khotan are two texts found in the epistles section of the Tengyur: The Prophecy of the Arhat Saṅghavardhana (Arhat­saṅghavardhana­vyākaraṇa, Toh 4201) relates the future expulsion of Buddhist monks from Khotan and the difficulties they will encounter as they travel through Tibet to India, while The Prophecy Concerning the Land of Khotan (li’i yul lung bstan pa, Toh 4202) also relates Saṅghavardhana’s prophecy and then goes on to provide versions of the Buddha’s prophecies to Vimalaprabhā, Vaiśravaṇa, and others, and of his visit to Khotan as recounted in the present text, before detailing a long historical account of the country, its rulers, and its people. Its title, confusingly but understandably, has sometimes been used to refer to the present text in the Tibetan literature.

i.10The sūtra itself, and to a greater degree these other texts associated with it, are part of a wider group of texts that focus on the spread, duration, and eventual decline of the Buddha’s teachings, and have sometimes been termed “prophecies of decline” or “prophetic histories.” Many of them include the term “prophecy” (vyākaraṇa) in their title, but unlike the majority of “prophecy” sūtras in which an individual’s future awakening to buddhahood in another realm is proclaimed, the prophecies in this group of texts are concerned with broader events in this world, may contain warnings and advice on how to avoid the most negative outcomes, and recount events that may range from the mythical to the historical. Curiously, mentions of Khotan feature in texts of this genre more frequently than might be expected from its relatively modest historical profile, and the Khotan texts make up a substantial portion of the group, suggesting that the theme may have been especially popular in Central Asia. One example of the genre that references Khotan but was probably not translated from a Khotanese source is the Sūrya­garbha-mahā­vaipulya­sūtra (Toh 257), which briefly tells the story of the Gomasalaganda stūpa that is also found in the sūtra translated here.

The Text Interpreted as Applying to Nepal

i.11One of the themes central to this text, of a lake being miraculously drained to open a valley to habitation, is a recurrent legend common to several geographical locations, including Kashmir as related in the Purāṇas, places in Tibet, and in particular the Kathmandu valley. The legend as applied to the Kathmandu valley almost certainly had several other sources, but a tendency among some Tibetan scholars specifically to locate this text in Nepal rather than Khotan appears to have contributed significantly to the corresponding mythology of the Kathmandu valley, as related in the much more recent Nepalese Svayambhū­purāṇa and Vaṃśāvalī, leading to a widespread belief in both Tibet and Nepal that the land described in this sūtra was‍—or at least could also be‍—Nepal, and that Gośṛṅga was the hill at the western edge of the Kathmandu Valley on which the famous Svayambhū stūpa rests.

i.12This mistaken location of the narrative seems to have been due to a lack of complete consensus among Tibetan authors as to what country the name Liyul (li yul, the usual Tibetan name for Khotan) actually refers. Evidence that some early Tibetan authors applied the name Liyul to Nepal can be inferred from specific refutations of that notion by early figures like Drolungpa, Sakya Paṇḍita, Chomden Rikpai Raltri, and Rendawa. Confirmation that it nevertheless persisted into the twentieth century can be seen in the writings of the renowned Tibetan traveler and scholar Gendun Chopel (1903–51), who felt the need to point out to his countrymen that this identification is not correct and that the features of the country, as described in this sūtra and the texts related to it, refer to Khotan.

Western Interest in Khotan and its Literature

i.13The first scholar in the West to take an interest in Khotan seems to have been the nineteenth century French Sinologist, Abel Rémusat, who in 1820 published a study of Chinese texts about Khotan. W. Woodville Rockhill drew attention to the Tibetan texts on Khotan in his Life of the Buddha, published in 1884, while Édouard Chavannes and Sylvain Lévi published articles mentioning Khotanese texts in 1903 and 1905.

i.14A few years earlier, in 1900, Sir Auriel Stein, the great explorer of Central Asia, set out for Chinese Turkestan after learning of discoveries of Kharoṣṭhī manuscripts in Kuchā and Khotan through the writings of Émile Senart and Rudolf Hoernle. In 1907, Stein published a full account of his archaeological findings together with a wealth of geographical, historical, and linguistic observations, identifying and describing the sacred geography and architecture mentioned in this sūtra.

i.15Stein’s initial work on the Tibetan texts was subsequently developed further by Frederick Thomas, culminating in the publication in 1935 of complete English translations of this text and of the other closely associated texts mentioned above, The Questions of Vimalaprabhā (Toh 168), The Prophecy of the Arhat Saṅghavardhana (Toh 4201) and The Prophecy Concerning the Land of Khotan (Toh 4202), along with extracts from some other related works.

i.16More recently, in 1967, Ronald Emmerick published translations of the two parts of The Prophecy Concerning the Land of Khotan (Toh 4202). He also published translations of other Khotanese works and a guide to Khotanese literature. A useful article by Sam van Schaik published in 2016 summarizes published studies on Khotanese literature in general and on Khotanese works discovered at Dunhuang, including studies by Karashima, Kumamoto, Skjaervø, van Schaik, and Zhang and Rong.

i.17This English translation was prepared based on the Tibetan translation in the Degé Kangyur in consultation with the Comparative Edition (Tib. dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace Kangyur.