Introduction

i.1The Dhāraṇī “One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening” presents a series of mantras and an explanation of their benefits, presumably taught by the Buddha Śākyamuni, though he is never explicitly named. Instead, the text begins abruptly with a presentation of the mantras, including a long root mantra (rtsa ba’i sngags; mūlamantra), a shorter essence mantra (snying po; hṛdaya), an ancillary essence mantra (nye ba’i snying po; upahṛdaya), and an additional undesignated mantra. A short prose section follows that explains the special function of these: anyone who writes them down and puts them inside a stūpa will see the effects of that deed multiply so that it will be as if they built one hundred thousand stūpas instead of just one. Making extensive offerings to that stūpa is likewise said to be tantamount to making offerings to the Three Jewels. The Buddha next addresses Nanda to explain that this teaching will be of specific benefit to beings in the future who will have little merit, weak faith, and bad karma because they have failed to read the sūtra and make extensive offerings. However, by simply relying on this dhāraṇī, the Buddha assures Nanda, “one will have made eighty-four thousand offerings adorned with the Dharma” and their merit will become inexhaustible. At the end it is stated that this dhāraṇī has the same effect as reading and reciting The Stem Array (Gaṇḍavyūha, Toh 44-45), the final chapter of the monumental Avataṃsaka Sūtra.

i.2The text’s colophon identifies it as an extraction (btus pa) of a longer dhāraṇī text with the identical title: The Dhāraṇī “One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening” (byang chub snying po’i rgyan ’bum zhes bya ba’i gzungs.) This refers to the text that immediately precedes this one in most prints of the Degé Kangyur (Toh 508). For a long time this longer version was considered lost, as stated by Butön Rinchen Drup in the early fourteenth century. The longer version is not found in any Kangyurs of the Tshalpa recensional lineage that were produced before the Degé; they include only the short version translated here. Nor was the longer version included in the first printing of the Degé Kangyur itself, the so-called par phud (first printed in 1737), or in the Choné Kangyur which was based on the Degé. Rather, as stated in its lengthy colophon, Toh 508 was only translated into Tibetan as late as 1743, when a translation from Chinese was made by the great Qing dynasty Mongolian scholar and translator Gönpo Kyab (mgon po skyabs). This was then included in later prints of the Degé Kangyur from the 1762 print onwards and in this way is also found in more recent Kangyurs such as the Lhasa (H 478). It was included in order to replace the text that Butön had considered to be lost, which was listed in the Denkarma imperial-period catalog from the early ninth century. Some scholars believe, however, that the version contained in the Phukdrak Kangyur (F 550) and other regional Kangyurs may preserve that earlier translation, for which there is also a Dunhuang manuscript witness.

i.3The colophon of the shorter version translated below does not include any information about its translation or compilation, making it challenging to determine precisely when and under what circumstances it was produced.

i.4A complete Sanskrit witness of the short version of the One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening is not presently available. A Sanskrit inscription of a text that corresponds to this text was identified on a stone slab held by the Provincial Museum of Orissa, Cuttack. The inscription, published by A. Ghosh (1941), can be dated to approximately the tenth century. Other witnesses of the root mantra, essence mantra, and ancillary essence mantra have been found among terracotta tablets dating from the sixth to the ninth century that were discovered at the site of Nālanda in northern India. The contemporary Tibetan tradition counts the One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening among the “the five great dhāraṇīs” (gzungs chen sde lnga) that are placed inside newly consecrated stūpas.

i.5Gregory Schopen has published the most detailed study to date of the Tibetan and Sanskrit witnesses of the One Hundred Thousand Ornaments of the Essence of Awakening. Part III of his study contains a critical edition and an English translation of the Tibetan text, with references to the fragmentary Sanskrit texts on the Cuttack slab and the Nālanda tablets.

i.6This English translation was prepared based on the two Degé witnesses of the text (Toh 509 and Toh 920), in comparison with the Stok Palace Manuscript Kangyur. The dhāraṇīs and mantras are given as they appear in Toh 509, with minor emendations made to clarify the Sanskrit readings. No attempt was made to edit them based on other Tibetan witnesses.