8400184001 = 84000 + AI

Notes

n.1In Toh 842, the scene that corresponds with that found in the present text is at folio 232.a. Although the mantra that appears in both texts is the same, the two texts differ in their wording, so The Dhāraṇī of Devī Mahākālī is not a direct extract from Toh 842. For more details regarding Śrīdevī Mahākālī and Rematī, see the introduction to Toh 1090.

n.2The texts in this group are Toh 670, Toh 671, Toh 672, Toh 840, Toh 842, and Toh 1090/1777. While a detailed analysis of the provenance of these texts is beyond the scope of this introduction, we may briefly note that none of these works has a translator’s colophon. Therefore, their status as translated texts from Sanskrit cannot be verified. Indeed, this group of texts devoted to Śrīdevī Mahākālī and Rematī likely first began to circulate not in India but rather in the late eighth- or early ninth-century Tibet, where they appeared at the nexus of Indian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, a point of intersection where Indic figures, narratives, and iconography found new expressions within the unfolding Tibetan Buddhist idiom.

n.3Dharmachakra Translation Committee, trans., The Dhāraṇī of Glorious Mahākāla , Toh 668/Toh 1085 (84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha, 2023).

n.4Denkarma, 303.a.7. See also Herrmann-Pfandt 2008, p. 242, no. 423.

n.5Phangthangma, p. 29.

n.6Note that there is a discrepancy among various databases for cataloging the Toh 1087 version of this text within vol. 101 or 102 of the Degé Kangyur. See Toh 1087, n.­6, for details.

n.7D and S: bdag gi de. The Tibetan only has a pronoun here. The term vidyā has been added to the English translation for clarity.

n.8The objects of Mahākālī’s dhāraṇī are not made explicit here, but the close relationship between this text and The Dhāraṇī of Glorious Mahākāla (Toh 668/1085), might allow us to supply the following list of beings that are bound by Devī Mahākālī’s dhāraṇī as “all beings that cause illnesses and diseases, all grahas, beings that cause plague, bhūtas, and beings that cause faulty meditations and faulty views.”