Introduction

i.1The Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla opens with a description of the deity Mahākāla, surrounded by a retinue of nonhuman beings in a palace named Joyous located in a sandalwood grove in the great southeastern charnel ground Aṭṭahāsa. Then, in the western world system, the deity Hayagrīva, or “The King of Horses,” enters into absorption, utters a Hayagrīva mantra, and summons Mahākāla before himself and the Four Great Kings. The great king of the western quarter, Virūpakṣa, then supplicates Hayagrīva and asks him to teach the secret practices related to the deity Mahākāla.

i.2Hayagrīva then provides instructions on Mahākāla’s sādhana and wrathful rites as well as instructions for when the rite does not work, a description of the signs of success, and a rite for generating hailstorms. As Hayagrīva notes, the enemy that is designated as the target of these rites is anyone who seeks to destroy the Buddhist teachings or create obstacles for yogins.

i.3It is not clear how popular the eight-chapter Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla may have been in India and Nepal prior to its translation into Tibetan. We are not aware of any surviving Sanskrit version of the text, or any Indic commentary.

i.4The Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla does not appear in the Denkarma or Pangthangma royal Tibetan catalogs of translated works. Thus, based on the information from the translators’ colophon, the first Tibetan translation of the text was likely completed in the eleventh century by the Indian preceptor Amoghavajra and the Tibetan translator Phurbu Ö. The text also does not appear to have been translated into Chinese.

i.5George Stablein notes in his study of the fifty-chapter Mahākāla­tantra (Toh 440) that the eight-chapter Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla is mentioned by Khedrub Jé (mkhas grub rje dge legs dpal bzang, 1385–1438) in his survey of tantras devoted to Mahākāla. The eight-chapter Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla also appears as the opening work in the cycle of texts on Mahākāla in Jamgön Kongtrül Lodrö Thayé’s (’jam mgon kong sprul blo gros mtha’ yas, 1813–99) nineteenth-century publication of The Indian Works of the Five-Part Dharma Corpus of the Glorious Shangpa Lineage (dpal ldan shangs pa’i chos skor rnam lnga’i rgya gzhung), which survives in a reprinted edition published and annotated by the late Kalu Rinpoche (karma rang byung kun khyab, 1905–89). In his short note on the text, Kalu Rinpoche tells us the following:

“This tantra is in most collections of offering rituals, and in most of the catalogs of past masters, which present the common tantras, it is classified as a kriyātantra. Hayagrīva is the one who taught the tantra, [F.8.b] and given that he is of Avalokiteśvara’s family, the tantra is counted among those of the lotus family.”

i.7It is thus clear that the eight-chapter Tantra of Glorious Mahākāla was relatively well known in Tibet, perhaps even more than the twenty-five chapter (Toh 416) and fifty-chapter (Toh 440) Mahākāla­tantras.

i.8This translation is based on the recension that appears in the Tantra Collection (rgyud ’bum) of the Degé Kangyur in consultation with the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) and the Stok Palace Kangyur.