Notes

n.184000 Translation Team, trans., The Vaiḍūryaprabha Dhāraṇī , Toh 505 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2024).

n.2It has been argued, tentatively, that Vāgbhaṭa was a Buddhist. For more on Vāgbhaṭa and his works, see Meulenbeld 1999, pp. 597–656 and Wujastyk 1998, pp. 236–39.

n.3See the Aṣtāṅga Hṛdaya of Vāgbhaṭa, pp. 188–89, and the Aṣṭāṅga Samgraha of Vāgbhaṭa, pp. 466–69.

n.4An 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, which 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.5It is nonetheless notable that the recension in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section preserves the older orthography for the concluding particle rdzogs sho at the end of the work, whereas the recension in the Tantra section of the canon, in all but one (the Narthang) of the recensions we consulted in both the Tshalpa and Tempangma Kangyur lineages, has been updated to the more common‍—and later‍—orthography, rdzogs so. The two recensions also have one minor spelling difference that is consistent across recensions (sman gyi lha in the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section recension and sman gyi bla in the Tantra section recension), suggesting that the two recensions were transmitted separately. This may indicate that the recension adopted into the Compendium of Dhāraṇīs section was incorporated into the canon due to its being part of an earlier collection or collections of dhāraṇīs and associated ritual texts that were brought together to constitute the canonical Compendium of Dhāraṇīs collection. Indeed, apart from the canonical dhāraṇī collection appearing in several of the Tshalpa-lineage Kangyurs, these popular dhāraṇī collections, known in Sanskrit as dhāraṇī­saṅgraha, appear in South Asia as well as in Tibet‍—including at Dunhuang, and as extracanonical Tibetan dhāraṇī collections‍—and it appears that the canonical dhāraṇī collection may have been created on the basis of an earlier such collection or collections (see Hidas 2021, p. 7, n. 56; see also Dalton 2016 and Dalton and van Schaik 2006 on the dhāraṇī­saṅgraha collections preserved at Dunhuang; see Hidas 2021 for the catalogs of eighteen Sanskrit dhāraṇī­saṅgraha collections). It therefore seems likely that one recension of A Mantra for Incanting Medicines When Administering Them entered the canon via its inclusion in a dhāraṇī­saṅgraha collection that was brought into the canonical Compendium of Dhāraṇīs, while the very same text, in a different recension that had been updated to a more modern orthography, was then adopted into the Tantra section of a wider range of Kangyurs in a fitting place‍—immediately following the work from which its mantra was extracted.

n.6Dalton, Catherine. trans., A Mantra for Incanting Medicines, Extracted from “Destroyer of the Great Trichiliocosm” , Toh 1059 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2023).

n.7The Denkarma includes the ’phags pa de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla bai DU rya ’od kyi sngon gyi smon lam gyi khyad par rgyas pa (no. 148; Hermann-Pfandt 2008, p. 81) and the Phangthangma lists de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla be dur rya’i sngon gyi smon lam chen po (no. 117) and the de bzhin gshegs pa sman gyi bla be dur rya’i ’od kyi smon lam chen po chung ngu (no. 179; Kawagoe 2005, pp. 11 and 13).

n.8The mantra in the present work includes an additional repetition of the word bhaiṣajye, which is not found in the dhāraṇī in Toh 505. The mantra in the present work reads tadyathā oṁ bhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye mahābhaiṣajye bhaiṣajye samudgate svāhā. The final line of dhāraṇī in Toh 505 (1.­38) reads tadyathā oṁ bhaṣajya bhaiṣajya mahābhaiṣajya samudgate svāhā.

n.9The final line of the dhāraṇī that appears in Toh 505 (1.­38) reads tadyathā oṁ bhaṣajya bhaiṣajya mahābhaiṣajya samudgate svāhā.