The Mantra at the end of Xuanzang's Dà bānrě bōluómìduō jīng «大般若波羅蜜多經»

In my review of Ji Yun's article on the Heart Sutra (01 June 2018), I noted that, in section 7, in discussing the work of Chén Jiǔchéng 沈九成 (whom he refers to as "Shen"), Ji comments on the mantra as the end of Xuanzang's massive compilation of Prajñāpāramitā texts called Dà bānrě bōluómìduō jīng «大般若波羅蜜多經» (Dà jīng 大經). I noted then:

Ji makes a great deal of the fact that Shen found a mantra at the end of Xuánzàng's collection of Prajñāpāramitā texts that is very similar to the one in the Heart Sutra.... Ji writes about this as "an important discovery" (Ji 40), going to a lot of trouble to reproduce (and correct) the Siddham text from the Taishō page in his article.

In my review, I was more concerned with Ji's self-contradiction in this part of his article than with the implications of this fact. In this post, I will revisit this small point and show that the mantra in question is a late interpolation and thus not very significant when considering the origins of the Heart Sutra.

Note that Xuanzang's text fills three volumes of the Tasihō Tripiṭaka (V–VII). For comparison all the other Prajñāpāramitā translations, including multiple copies of most texts, fill just one volume (VIII).

On the last page (1110) of volume VII (fascicle 600 of 600) of the Dà jīng in the Taishō edition we find two mantras in Siddham script with a Chinese equivalent. They are labelled Bānrě fó mǔ xīn zhòu 般若佛姆心呪 *Prajñā-buddha-mātā-hṛdaya-mantra and Bānrě fó mǔ qīn xīn zhòu 般若佛姆親心呪 *Prajñā-buddha-mātṛpriya-hṛdaya-mantra.

tadyathā oṃ gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā.

oṃ prajñā prajñā mahāprajñā svāhā

The mantra on the left is the familiar Heart Sutra dhāraṇī, with the addition of oṃ and the inclusion of tadyathā (see also Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra. 13.11.09). It's only Tantric Buddhists that add these features to the dhāraṇī, presumably with a view to making a non-tantric incantation appear to be a mantra. It might appear from this that the mantras are part of the Dà jīng. This is problematic, since Xuanzang the translator was not a tantric Buddhist, and his translation betrays no other influences from Tantric Buddhists.

Another problem is that the accompanying Chinese version is not the standard transcription found in the Heart Sutra (differences highlighted):

T220: 怛耶他 唵　伽帝　伽帝　鉢囉伽帝　鉢囉僧伽帝　菩提　薩嚩訶

T251: 　　　　　揭帝　揭帝　般羅揭帝　般羅僧揭帝　菩提　薩婆訶。

As far as I can tell, the version of the dhāraṇī from T 220 does not occur anywhere else in the Taishō Edition. This looks like an independent transcription based on the Sanskrit text of Hṛd, created at a time when Tantric Buddhism was ascendent. 

The positioning of the mantras is also problematic because they occur after the final line of the text:

時，薄伽梵說是經已，善勇猛等諸大菩薩及餘四眾，天、龍、藥叉、健達縛、阿素洛、揭路茶、緊捺洛、莫呼洛伽、人非人等一切大眾，聞佛所說皆大歡喜、信受奉行。(T 220 7.1110a17-21)

At that time, after the Bhagavān had spoken this scripture, the great bodhisattvas such as Śūravikrāntavikrāmin, as well as the fourfold assembly, devas, nāgas, yakṣas, gandharvas, asuras, garuḍas, kiṃnaras, mahoragas, humans, and non-humans, all the great assembly, having heard what the Buddha had said, were filled with great joy, and faithfully accepted and followed it.

This is followed by a restatement of the title, which is usually the end of a sutra. Thus the spells that follow in Taishō appear to be adventitious, adapted into mantras, and not the same transcription as the Heart Sutra.

The final lines in the Kimura edition of the Nepalese Pañc manuscripts reads

idam avocad bhagavān āttamanaso maitreyapramukhā bodhisattvā mahāsattvāḥ, āyuṣmāṃś ca subhūtir āyuṣmāṃś ca śāriputra āyuṣmāṃś cānandaḥ, śakraś ca devānām indraḥ sadevamānuṣāsuragandharvaś ca loko bhagavato bhāṣitam abhyanandann iti.

āryapañcaviṃśatisāhasrikāyāṃ bhagavatyāni prajñāpāramitāyām abhisamayālaṃkārānusāreṇa saṃśodhitāyāṃ dharmakāyādhikāraḥ śikṣāparivarto nāmāṣṭamaḥ samāpta iti

The Bhagavān spoke thus, and the bodhisattvas, led by Maitreya, the great beings, as well as Elder Subhūti, Elder Śāriputra, Elder Ānanda, and Śakra, the lord of the gods, along with the worlds of gods, humans, asuras, and gandharvas, rejoiced at Bhagavān's words.

The Noble Perfection of Wisdom in 25,000 lines, according to the Abhisamayālaṃkāra, the eighth [sic] section concerning the Dharmakāya is complete.

I think eighth (aṣṭamaḥ) is a mistake for eightieth (aṣṭāśīti). This is followed by two well-known incantations:

ye dharmā hetuprabhavā hetuṃ teṣāṃ tathāgato hy avadat, teṣāñ ca yo nirodha evaṃvādī mahāśramaṇaḥ.

oṃ gate 2 pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā.

It is relatively common for Buddhist manuscripts to use the numeral 2 as a kind of ditto mark. So instead of writing gate gate, they write gate 2. It's interesting that editors preserve this quirk and not others. For example, Buddhist manuscripts almost always write ārya as āryya (which is standard Sanskrit), and bodhisattva as bodhisatva (which is non-standard). 

Again, although the mantra is included, it is included after the conclusion and end title. Which means it's not "included in" the text, but rather appended after the end of it. In other words, it's not part of the original text, but was added some time later. That said, since it appears in different witnesses, it seems to have become naturalised.

Other Texts

A mantra is appended to Taishō version of Kumārajīva's Vajracchedikā translation (T 235; 8.7525-7):

那謨婆伽跋帝　鉢喇壤　波羅弭多曳　唵 伊利底　伊室利　輸盧馱　毘舍耶　毘舍耶　莎婆訶
Namo bhagavate prajñāpāramitāya oṃ īriti īṣiri śruta viśāya viśāya svāhā.

The transcription is from Sørensen (2020: 90). (Note that in this article, vajracchedikā is unfortunately mispelled as vajracheedikā throughout).

Where We Don't Find the Mantra

The CBETA version of the canon now includes links to the printed Tripiṭaka Koreana (13th century) which formed the basis of the Taishō Edition. The last page of the Dà jīng clearly has no mantras:

The text here seems to be more or less identical to T 220.

時，薄伽梵說是經已，善勇猛等諸大菩薩及餘四衆，天、龍、藥叉、健達縛、阿素洛、揭路茶、緊柰洛、莫呼洛伽、人非人等一切大衆，聞佛所說皆大歡喜、信受奉行。

大般若波羅蜜多經卷第六百

庚子歲高麗國大藏都監奉勅雕造

The only difference is that the last line refers to the carving of the woodblock: "In the gēngzǐ year (1231 CE), carved by imperial decree at the Dazang Directorate of Goryeo."

There are three other Chinese translations of the Large Sutra:

• Fàng guāng bānrě jīng «放光般若經» (T 221), by Mokṣala (291 CE)
• Guāng zàn jīng «光讚經» (T 222) a partial translation by Dharmarakṣa (286 CE)
• Móhē bānrě bōluómì jīng «摩訶般若波羅蜜經» (T 223); by Kumārajīva (404 CE)

None of these contain the dhāraṇī either.

The Tibetan version of Pañc—Shes rab kyi pha rol tu phyin pa stong phrag nyi shu lnga pa. Toh 9—has a lengthy colophon, including a religious poem, but it ends with:

At the time when the carving of the xylographs of this very text, along with those of the Multitude of the Buddhas (Buddhāvataṃsaka), was completed, in the presence of King Tenpa Tsering, the ruler of Degé, the beggar monk Tashi Wangchuk composed these verses at Sharkha Dzongsar Palace, where the wood-carving workshop was based. May they be victorious!

ye dharmā hetuprabhavā hetun teṣāṃ tathāgato bhavat āha teṣāṃ ca yo nirodho evaṃ vādī mahāśramaṇaḥ [ye svāhā]

The Tibetan Aṣṭādaśasāhasrikā prajñāpāramitā (Toh 10) has no mantras or formulas in the colophon

The last page of the Gilgit Pañc manuscript (Karashima et al 2016: 308) has some text following the final samāptaṃ

Gilgit Ms folio 308 verso

We are fortunate to have a transcription of the colophon by Oskar von Hinüber (2017: 129-130) which consists of the title of the eighty-second (and final) chapter (line 9), followed by four lines, and some interlineal notes, that record the names of the donors who sponsored the copy (many of whom have royal titles).

|| ʘ || prajñāpāramitāyām akopyadharmatānirdeśaparivartaḥ dvyaśītimaḥ samāptaḥ || ʘ ||

10: deyadharmo yaṃ mahāśraddhopāsaka mahāgakhravida nā(ma)siṃhasya. sārdhaṃ śrī deva paṭola ṣāhi vikramādityanandinā. sārdhaṃ śrī paramadevyā torahaṃsikayā. sārdhaṃ śāmīdevyā saharaṇamālena.

11: sārdhaṃ devyā surendrabhaṭṭārika(y)ā sārdhaṃ devyā di + (ysa) puṇyena. sārdhaṃ mātunā nāmasukhena. sārdhaṃ bhrātunā khukhisiṃhena. sārdhaṃ dāya cicīena. sārdhaṃ rājñī tejaḍiyena. rājaḍiena.

11a: sārdhaṃ gakhragavida śupha(rṇe)na.

12: sārdhaṃm maysakka jendravīreṇa sārdhaṃ kṣatra (s.) + pūrena. sārdhaṃ mahāsāmanta gugena. sārdhaṃ gakhravida titsena. sārdhaṃ mahāsāmanta la(tn)anena. sārdhaṃ sarena. sārdhaṃ burohida drugilena.

13: sārdhaṃ pariśuddhabuddhakṣetropapannena + + + + + lvāsena sārdhaṃ pitunā śāmathulena. sārdhaṃ utrasiṃhena. sumasteṇena. butsena. khavāṣena. śiri. yad atra puṇyaṃ tad bhavatu {sarvasatvā}nām anuttarajñānavāptaye stu

13a:  tvetsena || sārdhaṃ maghatī(rena) + + + + + +

Note that the repeating term sārdhaṃ means "together with". For further details one can consult von Hinüber's (2017) article, but for our purposes, this shows that there is no mantra or dhāraṇī appended to the text.

Conclusions

The mantra at the end of the Dà bānrě bōluómìduō jīng «大般若波羅蜜多經» (T 220) is clearly a late addition to the end of the text. This is a minor point, but it was useful to my project to clarify it.

We can see that the later addition of features such as mantras or the Ye dharma formula to manuscripts was by no means unusual. At the same time we see Buddhists adding other sources of good fortune to their texts, such as adding āryya or śrī to the title.

It's easy to forget that, unlike the Pāli texts, the Prajñāpāramitā texts were never canonised in India. That is to say, they never attained a fixed or final form. Rather they continued to be redacted, usually expanded, while there was life in Indian Buddhism. And each community saw the text that they had as "the text".

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Hinüber, Oskar von (2017) "Names and Titles in the Colophon of the ‘Larger Prajñāpāramitā’ from Gilgit." ARIRIAB XX, 129 - 138.

Karashima, S., et al. (2016). Mahāyāna Texts: Prajñāpāramitā Texts (1). Gilgit Manuscripts in the National Archives of India Facsimile Edition Volume II.1. The National Archives of India and The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology, Soka University, Tokyo.

Li, Rongxi. (1995). A Biography of the Tripiṭaka of the Great Ci'en Monastery of the Great Tang Dynasty. Numata Center for Buddhist Translation and Research.

Liu, Shufen. (2022). “The Waning Years of the Eminent Monk Xuanzang and his Deification in China and Japan.” In Chinese Buddhism and the Scholarship of Erik Zürcher. Edited by Jonathan A. Silk and Stefano Zacchetti, 255–289. Leiden: Brill. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004522152_010

Sørensen, Henrik H. (2020). “Offerings and the Production of Buddhist Scriptures in Dunhuang during the Tenth Century.” Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 3(1): 70–107.

Whitney, William Dwight. (1950). Sanskrit Grammar: Including both the Classical Language and the Older Dialects of Veda and Brahmana. Cambridge, Mass. Harvard University Press.

Mantra in the Early Prajñāpāramitā Literature

One of the loose ends that needs tying up in thinking about the context of the Heart Sutra is the reference to mantra in the Sanskrit text. Of course, I have shown that the word doesn't occur in Chinese, but still, it does occur in the Sanskrit, so whoever translated the text into Sanskrit felt it was relevant. What we need to show is that it doesn't relate to the Prajñāpāramitā tradition, per se. 

The word mantra does occur in early Prajñāpāramitā texts, but not in the tantric sense and not in reference to Buddhist practices. Prajñāpāramitā makes it clear that mantra are not used by bodhisatvas because they are associated with trivial magic. 

A survey of all the uses of the word mantra in the extant Sanskrit texts is very manageable though identifying all the Chinese counterparts is more difficult due to lack of standardised translations. But the Chinese texts are important. Even the earliest Sanskrit texts come from the last century or two of Buddhism in India and although we now have a 1st Century CE Gāndhārī manuscript it only covers two chapters and has suffered a lot of damage. The Chinese translations from the Tang and before represent an earlier phase of development that is far more relevant to the creation of the Heart Sutra than, say, the late Nepalese manuscripts. If we want to know how mantra was seen in 7th Century China, we will need to take the Chinese texts of that period into account. 

As previously, this essay will survey the occurrence of the word mantra in the text now known as the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Aṣṭa) and the text now known as the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Pañc). The Chinese names for these vary and it's not clear that there was a distinction in the early translations. My principal points of reference in Chinese will be Kumārajīva's early 5th Century translations: Xiǎopǐnbōrě jīng 《小品般若經》(T. 227) and  Móhēbōrěbōluómì jīng《摩訶般若波羅蜜經》(T. 223). I will also include references to Dàoxíngbōrě jīng《道行般若經》(T. 224) by Lokakṣema (179 CE) — a translation of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra before there were smaller and larger recensions.* I will use Xiaojing a generic term for Chinese translations of the smaller sutra and Dajing for the larger. So as usual in the Nattier method we have four texts: Aṣṭa, Pañc, Xiaojing, and Dajing. We expect that occurrences in Aṣṭa will be copied into Pañc, and that Xiaojing and Dajing will reflect this (although, spoiler, this pattern is broken with respect to the word mantra). 

* Note the title of Lokakṣema's text translates as The Way of Practising Gnosis Sutra or something like prajñācāryamarga sūtra.

There is no Mantra in the Heart Sutra

By finishing a project begun by Yamabe Nobuyoshi and published by Jan Nattier (1992: n.54a) my article on the "epithets" passage (Attwood 2017) showed that the word mantra does not occur in the Xīnjīng. We know, from comparing his translations to the surviving Sanskrit versions of the same texts, that Kumārajīva translated Sanskrit vidyā as míng zhòu 明咒. But when Xuánzàng compiled the Xīnjīng in 656 CE, he read míng zhòu 明咒 as two words: bright dhāraṇī. One way we know this is that Xuánzàng included two epithets—dà shénzhòu 大神咒  and dà míngzhòu大明咒—that in Kumārajīva's Chinese both mean mahāvidyā. Keep in mind that Xuánzàng compiled the Xīnjīng from Kumārajīva's Prajñāpāramita five years before he began his own translations. Xuanzang also included a dhāraṇī (咒) incantation from the recently translated Dhāranīsamuccaya (trans. 654 by Atikūṭa), probably because he knew that Wu Zetian liked magic.

As suggested by Abé Ryūichi (1999), Tantra is a context - something that I think is much clearer in Shingon Buddhism than in Tibetan Tantra. The presence of isolated elements, such as a mantra, outside of that context cannot be considered tantric. Specifically, Tantra requires the communication of the cosmic body, speech, and mind of the Dharmakāya Buddha in the abhiṣekha ritual via mudrā, mantra, and maṇḍala. By replicating the cosmic body, speech, and mind the sādhaka transforms themself into a tathāgata. Nothing of this context is present in the Heart Sutra, or in the broader Prajñāparamitā tradition that it draws on. But Tantric Prajñāpāramitā texts were composed later on, potentially confusing matters.  

As a reflection of the translator's source text, mantra is obviously incorrect. Still, the choice of mantra in the Sanskrit translation is relevant to understanding the context. The monk who translated the Xīnjīng into Sanskrit either thought that zhòu 咒 meant mantra, or he wanted us to think that it did (i.e. he wanted to expressly link the Heart Sutra to the newly arrived Tantric Buddhism). He may have been unaware of the Sanskrit Prajñāpāramitā texts (and thus that the source has vidyā), but he must have been aware of the potential ambiguity of the character zhòu 咒. Like many Buddhist technical terms it has a straightforward use in Medieval Chinese, i.e. "incantation" as well as the specific uses mantra, dhāraṇī, vidyā.

With this in mind, and beginning with the Sanskrit, we can now look for mantra in the Prajñāpāramitā.

In the Prajñāpāramitā

I can identify three passages in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā that use the word mantra. However, not all of them have parallels in the Xiaopin. Curiously, only one of the three occurrences has a parallel in Pañcaviṃśātisāhasrikā although it also has another use but this is clearly much later. Where possible, I have tried to identify where the word occurs in Lokakṣema's translation of the Xiaopin (T 224).

Passage 1

teṣu ca susthitāḥ samāhitāśca bhaviṣyanti asyāṃ prajñāpāramitāyām | māreṇāpi te na śakyā bhedayitum, kutaḥ punar anyaiḥ sattvaiḥ, yad uta cchandato vā mantrato vā | tat kasya hetoḥ? yathāpi nāma tad dṛḍha-sthāmatvād anuttarāyāṃ samyaksaṃbodhau | te ca kulaputrāḥ kuladuhitaraś ca śrutvā enāṃ prajñāpāramitām udāraṃ prītiprāmodyaprasādaṃ pratilapsyante |(Vaidya 1960: 113)

They will be stable and concentrated in this perfect insight. They cannot be separated from it because of a verse or mantra, even by Māra, much less by other beings. Why is that? Precisely because of their resolute steadfastness with respect to ultimate complete awakening. And that disciple having heard this of this perfect insight will partake in excellent rapture, joy, and tranquility. 

Conze treats cchandato as "willpower" (1973. p. 160) i.e. reading chandataḥ "at will, according to desire". Paired with mantra the more obvious reading is chandas "sacred hymn; metre, metred verse". I think we have to see both words as being ablatives of cause, in -taḥ. Bhedayitum is an infinitive of the causative √bhid "break, injure, separate". Monier-Williams makes a distinction here by relating chandas to the Atharvaveda and mantra to the Ṛgveda, Samaveda, and Yajurveda. The Pāli texts separate the three Vedas and the Atharvaveda, treating the latter as something apart and characterise it negatively (See Who Were the Atharvans?).

The counterpart passage in Xiaopin begins at T 8.555.b06 but there is no mention of mantra. 

Passage 2

punar aparaṃ subhūte avinivartanīyasya bodhisattvasya mahāsattvasya vajrapāṇir mahāyakṣo nityānubaddho bhavati |... sa yānīmāni strīṇāṃ vaśīkaraṇāni mantra-jāpyauṣadhi-vidyā-bhaiṣajyādīni, tāni sarvāṇi sarveṇa sarvaṃ na prayojayati | (Vaidya 1960: 166)

Furthermore Subhūti, there is an eternal connection of the irreversible bodhisatva mahāsatva to the great yakṣa Vajrapāṇi...  He does not employ any of the mantras, recitations, herbs, spells, potions, etc for the subjugating of women.

阿惟越致菩薩，執金剛神常隨侍衛，不令非人近之。... 不以呪術藥草引接女人。(T 227, 8.565a24)

The irreversible bodhisatva, Vajrapāṇi (執金剛神), is always bound (常隨) to serve and protect, he does not command nonhumans to draw near him, ... doesn't use incantations [and] herbs to attract women.

Conze got this translation wrong, making strīṇāṃ vaśīkaraṇāni mean "the work of women" (399), but vaśī√kṛ means to "subdue", "subjugate". Women are not the agents of this, the agent of the sentence is, i.e. the bodhisatva.

The Sanskrit phrase mantra-jāpyauṣadhi-vidyā-bhaiṣajyādīni could be treated differently i.e. as mantrajāpya-oṣadhividyā-bhaiṣajya-ādīni "mantra-recitation, herb-lore, potions, and so on". Either way, these are practices associated with vulgar magic and sex (which for a community of monks is off limits). 

Kumārajīva's Chinese is quite different. Here zhòushù 呪術 means incantation and has been used in the past to translate vidyā, dhāraṇī, mantra, mantra-vidhi, and jāpya. "Non-humans" (fēi rén 非人) = Skt. amanuṣya and refers to devas, nāgas, yakṣas, it's not clear to me why not allowing (bù lìng 不令) them near him (jìn zhī 近之) is a good thing.

There is a Chinese counterpart in Lokakṣema's translation at T 224 (8.455.b26, but with Seishi Karashima's corrections 2010). I'm quite sure this is the right passage but to be honest I'm struggling to make sense of it - it is very different from Kumārajīva.

是菩薩，和夷羅洹化諸鬼神，隨後，亦不敢近附。... 終不誘他人婦女。若有治道符祝，行藥，身不自為，亦不教他人為，見他人為者心不喜也。終不說男子若女人為。 (T. 224; 8.455b.28-c.3). 

Here 和夷羅洹 Vajrapāṇī is actually a transliteration of a Middle Indic form of the name: *Vajiravāṇi. One of many indications that Lokakṣema was translating from Gāndhārī rather than Sanskrit. The phrase is zhōng bù yòu tā rén fùnǚ. 終不誘他人婦女。It means something like: "In the end he does not seduce these women". I don't think this should be followed by "。" since what follows are the means associated with the seduction in all the other texts, i.e. zhì dào 治道 "uses witchcraft", fú zhòu 符祝 "incantations", xíng yào 行藥 "practising medicine".

There is a counterpart of this passage in the Large Sutra that doesn't mention Vajrapāṇi.

punar aparaṃ subhūte bodhisattvo mahāsattvo bodhimanasikāraiḥ samanvāgato yāni tāni strīṇām āveśanāni vaśīkaraṇāni mantravidyauṣadhibhaiṣajyāni tāni sarvāṇi sarveṇa sarvaṃ sarvathā sarvan na prayukte na ca prayojayati na ca strīṇām āveśanam anyatarānyataraṃ karoti, na striyāḥ puruṣasya vā ādeśanāprātihāryaṃ karoti, putro vā te bhaviṣyati dhītā vā te bhaviṣyati, kulodgato vā bhaviṣyati, dīrghāyuṣko vā bhaviṣyati. (Kimura 4:157)

Furthermore, Subhūti, the bodhisatva mahāsatva endowed with attention to awakening does not employ, in any way, shape, or form the mantras, spells, herbs, potions (mantra-vidyā-oṣadhi-bhaiṣajyāni) etc. used to magically subdue women; and he does not engage in doing other magic on women: he will not declare mind-reading of a woman or a man, he will not predict the sex of children, or lineage, or lifespan.

(Chapter 50 of Conze's translation). 

I think the latter part of the passage in Lokakṣema is quite similar to the latter part of this.

Passage 3

punaraparaṃ subhūte avinivartanīyā bodhisattvā mahāsattvāḥ kāmāvacarebhyo devebhyaścyutā rūpāvacarebhya ārūpyāvacarebhyo vā devebhyaścyutāḥ santaḥ ihaiva madhyadeśe jambūdvīpe pratyājāyante / yatra sattvāḥ kalāsu kovidāḥ, kāvyeṣu kovidāḥ, mantreṣu kovidāḥ, vidyāsu kovidāḥ, śāstreṣu kovidāḥ, nimitteṣu kovidāḥ, dharmārthakovidāḥ / Vaidya 167)

Furthermore, Subhūti, irreversible bodhisatvas, being fallen from the sphere of desire, or from the gods of the form sphere, or the gods of the formless sphere, are reborn right here in the middle country (madhyadeśe) where beings are learned (kovida) in the arts, verse, incantations, spells, exegesis, etymology, and understanding duty. 

須菩提！阿惟越致菩薩，多於欲界、色界命終來生中國，善於伎藝，明解經書， 呪術占相，悉能了知。(T. 227; 8.565b.11-15)

Subhūti. The irreversible bodhisatva, exceeding the kāmadhātu (欲界) and the rūpadhātu (色界) after death he is born in the middle country (中國), [where people are] good at the arts (善於伎藝), experienced (明解) in exegesis (經書), divination (占相), all kinds of learning (悉能了知)

The region of madhyadeśa is roughly speaking the Ganges Valley border to the north by the Himalaya mountains, to the south by the Vindhya Hills. In other words this is the Buddhist heartland. People there are learned in kalā, kāvya, vidyā, śāstra, nimitta, dharmārtha.  

• kalā is ambiguous, literally "a sixteenth" (of unknown etymology) but "the arts" seems to fit, later kalā formalised as the 64 kinds of performing arts; 
• kāvya is the art of metered verse especially as found in the Vedas and Epics, 
• mantra is ambiguous since it can refer to magical spells generally or it is a way of referring to verse from the Vedas used within rituals (this was the original sense), as we have seen Tantra is definitely not intended; 
• vidyā in this context is the practical arts, but also the soteriological arts;
• śāstra is the art of explaining the content of religious and/or grammatical texts; 
• nimitta is ambiguous and could be related to divination ("signs") or grammar where it refers to etymology roughly a synonym of nirukta;
• dharmārtha is also ambiguous and could refer either to "the meaning of the Dharma", or to the contrast between the letter (dharma) and the spirit (artha) of, for example, a religious teaching, or to religion (Dharma) and to wealth (artha), i.e. to what Christians call the spiritual and temporal realms.  

This is the long way of saying that the people of Madhyadeśa were educated. Probably not everyone, but everyone you'd expect to be educated was - in this case male landowners and their sons. (Note this is just a description of the times). Either Kumārajīva's text was shorter or he felt that a few examples followed by "all kinds of learning" (xī néng le zhī 悉能了知) got the point across. 

The phrase "being fallen" (cyutāḥ santaḥ) is a euphemism for dying.

The passage is found in Lokakṣema's translation at T 224; 8.455c.17-18. (從欲處、色處、空處，從彼間來生中國，常於善人黠慧中生，在工談語曉經書家生。)

Passage 4

There is one further passage that occurs in Pañc, but it evidently late and a reference to tantric Buddhism since it mentions that the superior man (satpuruṣa) "protects the secret mantras" (guhyamantrarakṣaṇāc). Note that Conze's translation does not include it where we expect it from Kimura's Sanskrit text (i.e. at p.584) but he does include the parallel translation in Appendix II  (p.660), which deals with the reasons why a Buddha has the thirty marks of the superior man.

Given that this passage is an interpolation we need not dwell on it and can now move to concluding remarks.

Conclusions

We have some simple and obvious conclusions from this material:

1. Mantra was not considered part of the bodhisatva path.
2. Mantra was considered vulgar magic (used for attracting women, etc), 
3. There is no sign of a Tantric context in our source texts.
4. The fact that mantra occurs less often in Pañc than in Aṣṭa suggests that perhaps such references were added to Aṣṭa after the creation of Pañc (evidence of something similar happened to the epithets passage - see Attwood 2017)

It is simply not possible that if the gate gate incantation were a mantra, that an Indian Buddhist writing in the first half of the first millennium of the Common Era would have included a mantra in a Prajñāpāramiā text. Ergo, the Heart Sutra was not composed in India when Conze suggests it was. 

Furthermore, we know that the so-called mantra is, in fact, a dhāraṇī and dhāraṇī were added to texts in India. However, there is still no evidence of the Heart Sutra outside of China before the 8th Century. What we can say is that Indians who went to Tibet wrote commentaries on it (Lopez 1988, 1996). However, while Lopez assumes that the commentaries were composed in India, the evidence does not support this. We can really only say that this is evidence for the text in 8th-12th Century Tibet. It is not evidence for the presence of the Heart Sutra in India. Rather, the earliest evidence for the text anywhere near India is a 13th Century Nepalese ms., Cambridge ADD 1680 (see my transcription of this ms).

We know that there are many copies of the Heart Sutra at Dunhuang, including many in Tibetan. Both Chinese and Tibetan Buddhists were capable of composing the extended version, taking it to Tibet. We can only hope that someone studies these texts at some point (I have a conference paper on this issue by Ben Nourse that is not for publication, but Nourse has not returned to the topic of the Heart Sutra at Dunhuang). I think this would be a great PhD topic for someone well versed in Tibetan and Chinese. 

If I write this up for publication at some point, I'll need to look at Mokṣala's translation of the Large Sutra as well. 

This is all confirmation of the revisionist history of the Heart Sutra proposed by Nattier and which has been my main focus for eight years. The Heart Sutra was not composed in Sanskrit. It was composed, probably by Xuanzang, in Chinese, using excerpts from Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation. Xuanzang added a dhāraṇī onto the end of the text. No one at the time confused this for a mantra until the monk who translated the Heart Sutra into Sanskrit made the mistake of translating zhòu 咒 as mantra. Once that happened and the fraud was successful, everyone started thinking of the gate gate dhāraṇī as the gate gate mantra. 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Attwood, Jayarava. (2017). ‘Epithets of the Mantra’ in the Heart Sutra.’ Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 12, 26–57.

Abé, Ryūichi (1999). The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press.

Karashima Seishi. 2010. A Glossary of Lokakṣema's Translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Tokyo: IRIAB, Soka University.

Karashima Seishi. 2011. Critical edition of Lokakṣema's translation of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Tokyo: IRIAB, Soka University.

Kimura, Takayasu. 2009. Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin.

Vaidya, P.L. 1960. Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra. Darbhanga: The Mithila Institute. (Gretil Archive, 2014. Including Karashima, S. (2013) On the "Missing" Portion in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. ARIRIAB, 16: 189-192).


Note: I had made some statements about mantra in the Prajñāpāramitā in the past when Alexander O'Neill wrote to me in February 2018. He challenged my conclusions, which admittedly were based on a rather cursory reading and my Pāli bias. I have had in the back of my mind to do a close reading of the relevant passages since then but have only just gotten around to it. My thanks to Alexander for prompting me to go the extra mile and look closely at the details (wherein the Devil lurks). 

Heart Sutra Mantra Epithets

The material in this essay has been rewritten, peer-reviewed, and published as

Attwood, Jayarava. (2017). ‘Epithets of the Mantra’ in the Heart Sutra. Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 12, 26–57. http://jocbs.org/index.php/jocbs/article/view/155

~o~

Karaṇḍamudrā dhāraṇī

My last essay mined the footnotes of Jan Nattier's excellent article 1992 on the provenance of the Heart Sutra. Her article is a remarkable piece of scholarship and repays close study. The footnotes are no less interesting and in this essay I want to expand on a single long footnote: 54a (211-213). The 'a' is added because this information was included just as the article was going to press and the note, amounting to two full pages, had to be squeezed in, sans any Chinese characters (which in any case were hand written on a separate page at the end of the article).

The subject of this note is the epithets of the mantra. The section we're interested in reads:

tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāmantro mahāvidyāmantro ‘nuttaramantro ‘samasama-mantraḥ

Therefore, it should be known that the perfection of wisdom is a great mantra, a mantra of great insight, an unexcelled mantra, an unequalled mantra

For Conze these are epithets of the Buddha applied to a mantra as a way of conveying the magical power of the mantra: "The prañāpāramitā... is here envisaged as a spell" (1973: 101-104). The epithets in question are those from the familiar itipi so gathā that Triratna Buddhist Community members will know as the Buddha Vandana. In Pāli:

iti pi so bhagavā arahaṃ sammāsambuddho vijjācarana sampanno sugato lokavidū anuttaro purisadammasārathi satthā devamanussānaṃ buddho bhagavā ti

As we can see by simple comparison Conze is stretching things somewhat with this comparison. Of the Heart Sutra terms only anuttara 'unexcelled' has an actual parallel and it is a rather common superlative applied to any and all Buddhist ideals.

Nattier cites two letters sent to her by Nobuyoshi Yamabe. Yamabe San completed a PhD at Yale in 1999 and is the author of several books on Buddhism. Yamabe identified a number passages in Chinese which closely parallel the Heart Sutra epithets. Nattier adds two extra passages to those identified by Yamabe. We'll begin with the passage found in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Aṣṭa). This text is the basis for the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrika Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (Pañcaviṃśati) and is therefore of some interest. Also the existence of a clear Sanskrit text allows us some insight into another matter.

The Chinese Heart Sutra (T 8.251) reads:

故知般若波羅蜜多，是大神咒 ，是大明咒，是無上咒，是無等等咒， 

Gùzhī bōrěbōluómìduō, shì dàshén zhòu, shì dàmíng zhòu, shì wúshàng zhòu, shì wúděngděng zhòu, 

Therefore know the perfection of wisdom, the great magical mantra, it is the great knowledge mantra, unsurpassed mantra, an unequalled mantra,

般若波羅蜜多 bōrěbōluómìduō is a transliteration of prajñāpāramitā. A short digression here. The Middle Chinese pronunciation of 般若波羅蜜多, reconstructed from rhymes, but lacking information on tones, would have been ban ya ba ra mil da. As we will see shortly the Aṣṭa is written in Classical Sanskrit. However the transliteration banya suggests a spelling more like Pāli paññā than Sanskrit prajñā. Baum and Glass's interim Gāndhārī Dictionary record several spellings of prajñā from the Gāndhārī Dhammapada: praña, prañaï, prañaya. The transliteration of prajñā is quite standard across genres. I can find only one variant: 鉢若 bōruò, Middle Chinese balya. It seems the initial syllable was not heard or seen as a conjunct /pra/ by early Chinese translators even when we can be reasonably sure the text used it.

神 shén is a term from Daoism that is sometimes used to translate Sanskrit ṛddhi 'supernatural power' or even deva. Generally is means 'supernatural, divine' or 'magical'. It's missing from all of the Sanskrit versions of the text, which opens the possibility that it was added to the Chinese after the Sanskrit text was created.

Yamabe identified a counterpart from the Chinese Aṣṭa, early 5th century CE, translation by Kumārajīva (T 8.227 843b25-27) reads:

般若波羅蜜是大明呪，
般若波羅蜜是無上呪，
般若波羅蜜是無等等呪

Bōrěbōluómì shì dà míngzhòu,
bōrěbōluómì shì wúshàng zhòu,
bōrěbōluómì shì wúděngděng zhòu.

Prajñāpāramitā is a great vidyā (明呪),
Prajñāpāramitā is an unsurpassed vidyā (呪),
Prajñāpāramitā is an unequalled vidyā (呪).

As in the last essay, one doesn't need to know Chinese to see that these are the identical characters, except that the anomalous 是大神咒 shì dà shén zhòu is absent. If one knows that Chinese languages, like English, are subject-verb-object languages, one can even guess that 是 means 'is'. Also note that in the Aṣṭa the last syllable of prajñāpāramitā is left off, which is typical. The reason for translating 明呪 míngzhòu and 呪 zhòu as vidyā becomes apparent when we look at the Sanskrit text below. Note also the substitution of 呪 zhòu for 咒 zhòu, on which I will say more below.

The Sanskrit version of this text has been edited by Vaidya (p.36, line 30-p.37 line 7 = Conze 's translation p.108-109). This is one of the best attested texts of Buddhist Sanskrit literature. I have seen and handled the beautiful Cambridge manuscript (Add 1643) dated to 1015 CE, which forms the basis of the critical edition. It's written in Classical Sanskrit with just a few Prakritisms. The edition by Vaidya has been digitised, from which I take the following (placing each sentence on a new line to facilitate reading):

mahāvidyeyaṁ kauśika yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
apramāṇeyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
aparimāṇeyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
anuttareyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
asameyaṁ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā|
asamasameyaṁ kauśika [vidyā] yad uta prajñāpāramitā|

O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly a great spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly an immeasurable spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly a measureless spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly an unsurpassed spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly an unequalled spell.
O Kauśika, the perfection of wisdom is certainly a peerless spell.

Kauśika is one of the epithets of the Vedic God Indra, usually called Śakra (Pāli Sakka) in Buddhist texts, who plays an important role in early Buddhism and is one of the main interlocutors of the Aṣṭa. The context here is the Perfection of Wisdom per se. Both apramāṇa and aparimāṇa mean 'not-measured or measureless'. Similarly both asama and asamasama mean 'without equal'. I translate vidyā here as 'spell', as the context shows that the idea is something to be spoken or chanted that has magical powers. There is an irreducible element of magical thinking in these texts that is inherent in their pre-scientific world view. It's nothing to be embarrassed about.

Note that the word in Sanskrit is vidyā throughout, and not mantra or dhāraṇī. Here we see 明呪 míngzhòu translating vidyā. Note that in the Heart Sutra epithets we get the sequence 大明咒，無上咒，無等等咒. In the context of the Heart Sutra the tendency is to see 明 as an extra character: the great 大 knowledge 明 mantra 咒. We know from the Aṣṭa passages that 明呪 means vidyā, so we ought to read 大明咒 as 'great vidyā'. And this means that 咒 is a shorthand reference to vidyā. The character 明 is being dropped from the other epithets, not added to only one of them. 

This passage from the Aṣṭa is a slightly more elaborate version of what we find in the Heart Sutra. Now compare the parallel passage in Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T 8.223).

是般若波羅蜜是大明呪，是無上明呪。
Shì bōrěbōluómì shì dàmíngzhòu, shì wúshàng míngzhòu.
The prajñāpāramitā is a great vidyā, an unsurpassed vidyā.

Though Nattier notes that the relevant chapter is missing from earlier editions of the Sanskrit, it is found twice in the more recent Sanskrit edition produced by Takayasu Kimura (vols 2&3). Kimura has edited the earlier Sanskrit text of Dutt and referenced both the Chinese and Tibetan translations to produce a new Sanskrit edition based on the same late Sanskrit manuscripts used by Dutt. So we cannot be entirely sure that Kimura has not, once again, back translated an existing Chinese passage into Sanskrit to fill a perceived void. In any case the two passages are:

mahāvidyaiṣā kauśika yad uta prajñāpāramitā, anuttaraiṣā kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā. (Vol. 2-3:55)

evam ukte bhagavān śakraṃ devānām indram etad avocat: evam etat kauśikaivam etat, mahāvidyeyaṃ kauśika yad uta prajñāpāramitā, anuttareyaṃ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā, asamasameyaṃ kauśika vidyā yad uta prajñāpāramitā.
(Vol. 2-3:70)

The second of these more closely matches what we find in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra with three epithets: mahāvidyā, anuttara vidyā, and asamasama vidyā. It also alerts us to a further occurrence in Kumārajīva's Pañcaviṃśati (T. 223) at p. 286b28 (unnoticed by Yamabe or Nattier)

般若波羅蜜是大明呪、無上明呪、無等等明呪。
Bōrěbōluómì shì dàmíngzhòu, wúshàng míngzhòu, wúděngděng míngzhòu.
The prajñāpāramitā is a great vidyā, an unsurpassed vidyā, an unequalled vidyā.

Again we see from comparing Chinese with Sanskrit, that 明呪 translates vidyā and here it is not abbreviated to 呪 but spelt out each time. If the core part of the Heart Sutra comes from the earlier passage of the Pañcaviṃśati then this passage suggests that the epithets were also borrowed, probably from this passage. Except that it is clear from the context that these epithets are not describing the mantra, but the perfection of wisdom itself. We associate the epithets with the mantra because the word mantra appears in the Sanskrit Heart Sutra. The word is used just twice in the Aṣṭa and not at all in the Pañcaviṃśati (suggesting perhaps that the Aṣṭa occurrences are interpolations).

Vidyā has a number of connotations. Clearly both Aṣṭa and Pañcaviṃśati are applying the word to the prajñāpāramitā per se, not to the mantra (as we typically read the Heart Sutra). Vidyā derives from the verbal root √vid 'to know, to discover' (cognate with 'wise, wisdom' etc). Sometimes you'll see vidyā translated as 'science' but the whole context is pre-scientific so this is anachronistic. No body of knowledge before ca. 1700 fits today's definition of science, which is not to say that there was no valid knowledge, only that it could not be considered scientific until the scientific method ha been invented during the European Enlightenment. Vidyā means knowledge in a particular field: knowledge of the Vedas, knowledge of political governance etc. Knowledge cultivated through learning and experience, rather than divinely inspired knowledge or insight. It also have a magical connotation. Knowledge in the sense of vidyā bestows control over the subject studied, when one thoroughly knows a subject one is said to have "mastered" it. Ironically we are stuck using 'wisdom' for prajñā, which means (and is cognate with) knowledge; and 'knowledge' for vidyā, which is cognate with wisdom.

Although vidyā later becomes, at times, almost synonymous with mantra, at the time the Aṣṭa was composed, and probably even the Pañcaviṃśati, Indian Buddhists still probably thought of mantras as the spells mumbled by Brahmins (for money) at ceremonies. The Pāli texts contain a few passages making it clear that the chanting of mantras is un-Buddhist (DN 1 [i.9]; SN 7.8, SN 28.10, Sn 480). By contrast the chanting of parittās, or protective texts, was already established as a popular Buddhist practice in the Milindapañha, which predates the Aṣṭa.

The parittā practice may well be connected to the idea of the saccakiriyā (Skt satyakriyā) or 'truth act'. This practice, attested in for example the Pāli Aṅgulimālā Sutta, insists that plainly and clearly stating a truth can alter reality. Aṅgulimālā, for example, uses a saccakiriya to ease the pain of a women and baby experiencing a difficult childbirth. Many other examples are found in Pāli. Some scholars have attempted to link the practice to similar ideas in Vedic culture. There is even a suggestion that some aspects of the power of truth are Indo-European. Holding a red-hot axe-head is a test of truth in both Vedic and Celtic literature for example. It may be that by chanting a sacred text aloud, sacred texts being true by definition, that one might avoid calamity or avert disaster. As mentioned last week, this was how Xuánzàng used the Heart Sutra.

Nattier cites the example of the word for mantra as an example of a back translation. Her thesis is that the order of textual production was like this:

1. Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati
2. Chinese translation Pañcaviṃśati
3. Chinese Heart Sutra - short text
4. Sanskrit Heart Sutra - short text
5. Sanskrit Heart Sutra - long text
6. Chinese Heart Sutra - long text

We can see that Nattier's theory explains the changes that occur in the word vidyā. In this case the Sanskrit Pañcaviṃśati (itself based on Aṣṭa) uses the word vidyā. Kumārajīva translated this as 明呪 míngzhòu, the usual translation of vidyā. The Heart Sutra first uses 明咒 míngzhòu then abbreviates to 咒 zhòu; where 咒 zhòu is a homonym for 呪 zhòu meaning dhāraṇī (or mantra). This is then back translated as Sanskrit mantra. The change from 呪 zhòu to 咒 zhòu might have occurred for any number of reasons, not excluding simple error based on similarities of sound and graphic form.

It is interesting to note here that T 250 (attributed to Kumārajīva) has 明呪 míngzhòu in each of the epithets, which conforms to the general pattern of Kumārajīva's translations noted above. Nattier's conclusion regarding T 250 is "[it] was based not directly on his version of the Large Sūtra, but on citations from the sūtra contained in the Ta chih-tu lun*" (187).

* i.e. T 25.1509 大智度論 Dàzhìdù lùn (Mahāprajñāpāramitāśastra) Attributed to Nāgārjuna and translated by Kumārajīva.

Dàzhìdù lùn itself shows signs of partly Chinese authorship: "Some of the most notable evidence provided by Chou is that the Dazhidu lun’s commentary on the Mahaprajñaparamita Sutra follows Chinese word order rather than Indian..." (McBride 332-333)

At the time the Heart was composed in China we might expect the key term to be dhāraṇī, since the mid seventh century date proposed by Nattier slightly predates the arrival of Tantra in China, while dhāraṇī texts, such as the Karaṇḍamudra Dhāraṇī depicted above, were and to some extent still are, a central aspect of Chinese Buddhism. The first Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra was produced in India, probably in the late seventh or early eighth century at a time when Tantra was in full swing. These dates coincide for example with Stephen Hodges' proposed dates for the composition of the Sarvatathagata-tattvasaṃgraha. In such an environment mantra might have be the natural translation of 咒. Hence find a mantra where we expect not to and, according to my own definitions, where we might expect to find a dhāraṇī.

This is further evidence that the Heart Sutra is synthetic, which is to say it was constructed in China from a variety of sources, probably by a devotee of Avalokiteśvara in the 7th century. Now on the basis of a comparison with the Sanskrit sources, there is an argument for revising this portion of the Sanskrit text:

tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāmantro mahāvidyāmantro ‘nuttaramantro ‘samasama-mantraḥ,

becomes

tasmāj jñātavyam prajñāpāramitā mahāvidyā anuttaravidyā asamasamavidyā.

It should be understood that the perfection of wisdom is great knowledge, supreme knowledge, peerless knowledge.

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

• Conze, Edward (1973). The Perfection of Wisdom in 8000 Lines and its Verse Summary. San Francisco: City Lights.

• Takayasu Kimura (2010). Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Vol. I-1, Tokyo: Sankibo Busshorin 2007. Online: http://fiindolo.sub.uni-goettingen.de/gretil/1_sanskr/4_rellit/buddh/psp_1u.htm [Input by Klaus Wille, Göttingen, April 2010]. 

• McBride, Richard D, II. (2004) 'Is there really "Esoteric" Buddhism?'  Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 27(2): 329-356.

• Nattier, Jan (1992). 'The Heart Sūtra : a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

• Vaidya, P. L. (1960) Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā. The Mithila Institute of Post-Graduate Studies and Research in Sanskrit Learning. Online: http://www.dsbcproject.org/node/8242

Heart Sutra Mantra

My calligraphy of Heart Sutra
Siddhaṃ script

The Heart Sutra is a synthetic text composed in China from three main elements:

1. Extracts from Kumārajīva's translation of the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra (T 8.223; ca. 5th century).
2. Elements drawn from the devotional cult of Avalokiteśvara (觀自在 Guānzìzài). 
3. The cult of dhāraṇī chanting, and a mantra probably drawn from existing Chinese texts. 

The first element is quite well covered in the literature, especially as Jan Nattier (1992) focusses on this part of the text in her reconstruction of its provenance. My next essay will address a lesser known aspect of this issue which is buried in Nattier's footnotes. The second element deserves a little more attention, but is covered briefly in Nattier (174-5). This essay will largely focus on the third element. 

In her long essay on the origins of the Heart Sutra, Jan Nattier notes (footnote 52 & 53) that two other scholars have found mantras similar to the Heart Sutra mantra in other places in the Chinese Tripiṭaka. One of these references is particularly significant as it seems to pre-date the composition of the Heart Sutra itself. This essay will present the Chinese source texts for these mantras. Before dealing with these mantras, we need to pay some attention to the dhāraṇī cult itself, and try to establish some terminological boundaries. 

The cult of dhāraṇī chanting is sometimes placed in the context of Tantric Buddhism, but I think this is a mistake. It is true that mantras are a feature of Tantric Buddhism. However, as Ryūichi Abé. has shown, Tantric Buddhism requires certain elements to be present in order to be Tantric. In The Weaving of Mantra he emphasises the abhiṣeka or initiation in particular because the abhiṣeka is the ür-ritual which underpins all of Tantric Buddhist practice. In Japan, prior to the arrival of Kūkai and Saichō with genuine Tantric Buddhism, some Tantric elements were present: images, dhāraṇī and mantra, and even texts such as the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra. However, in the absence of the Tantric paradigm and organising principles, these elements did not add up to Tantric Buddhism.

Abé is trying to revise the history of Japanese Buddhism, but he has enunciated an important hermeneutic for discussing the presence or absence of a mode of Buddhist thought. For example: if a person bows before a Buddha statue, burns incense, and chants oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ, but has no knowledge of why Buddhists do such things, does this make them a Buddhist? These are simply decontextualised actions with no intentional underpinning. They are Buddhist in externals only. A similar argument is simmering away with respect to the Jon Kabat Zinn inspired mindfulness treatments. Does the teaching of mindfulness amount to teaching Buddhism, or does it lack key elements, such as "going for refuge", that render the teaching non-Buddhist? Some Buddhists who teach mindfulness argue that they are teaching Buddhism when they teaching mindfulness. Others argue that the lack of context for the practice, particularly the absence of Buddhist metaphysics, means this is a beneficial secular practice that does not conduce to liberation.

In any case, the point is that although dhāraṇīs were incorporated into Tantric Buddhism, there is nothing in the dhāraṇī sūtras or the chapters inserted into larger texts such as the Saddharma-puṇḍarīka or Survabhāṣotama, to indicate a Tantric context. The first hints of Tantra associated with a mantra seem to be found in the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra according to Alexander Studholm's study of that text, which includes an account of something like an initiation, though it still lacks the central features of the abhiṣeka ritual. The point of chanting dhāraṇīs seems largely to have been protection from malign forces or entities. And thus they have much more in common with the Theravāda practice of parittā chanting than with Tantric practice (at least with respect to the Tantric Buddhism practised by Kūkai). It's not until they are incorporated into rituals centred on the abhiṣeka, that they become Tantric. This criteria is common to other elements that were incorporated, not least the elements from Vedic ritual. No one, to my knowledge, argues that Vedic fire rituals were "proto-Tantric". 

Nattier points to the opinion of Fukui Fumimasa (1981. Source text is in Japanese) that the name of the Heart Sutra in Chinese is 心經 Xīnjīng, literally "heart sūtra", but that 心 xīn (heart) here connotes dhāraṇī rather than 'pith' and that the text might well be a chanting text, i.e. a dhāraṇī text. We know from Xuánzàng's record of his journey to India that he used the text as a protective measure against unseen malevolent spirits. The title of the short text in Sanskrit, Prajñāpāramitāhṛdaya, does not include the word sūtra, and it seems likely that the original, short text was not considered as a sūtra. That transition probably happened in India when the traditional elements of a sūtra, such as the beginning evaṃ maya śrutaṃ... and the appreciation at the end were added. Another reading of 心 is "gist" with the idea that rather than Heart Sutra, the meaning is Gist Text, with the text representing the gist of Prajñāpāramitā.

The dhāraṇīs of the pre-tantric Mahāyāna texts are often radically different in form from the mantras of later Tantric Buddhism. Of course there is a huge amount of variation and cast-iron definitions are difficult to construct.


Defining Mantra and Dhāraṇī

Tantric mantras have a number of structural features in common: a beginning (usually oṃ); a name or function; and a final seed-syllable. 

Typically Tantric mantras begin with oṃ (not auṃ) which served to mark what follows as a mantra. However in the earliest fully-fledged Tantra, the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra, the mantras all begin namas samanta-buddhānāṃ or namas samanta-vajrānāṃ. The ending -ānām indicated the genitive plural case (of the Buddhas). However, in Prakrits (including Pāli) the dative case (to or for the Buddhas) endings began to be replaced by the genitive case endings. Here ending is the usual genitive, but the sense is dative and the words mean "homage to all Buddhas/vajras".

What follows oṃ can be the name of a deity (oṃ amideva hrīḥ, oṃ vajrapāṇi hūṃ, oṃ vagiśvara muṃ) or relate to a function in the ritual, especially purification with the śūnyatā mantra or the Vajrasattva mantra. Names of deities are sometimes in the dative case, or in a kind of faux dative created by the addition of -ye to the end of the word: oṃ muni muni mahāmuni śākyamuniye svāhā. The correct dative of śākyamuni is śākyamunaye (final i is replaced by aye)

Tantric mantras typically end with a seed-syllable (bījākṣara) related to the deity or with svāhā. Sometimes the seed-syllable is specific to the deity, or to the "family" they belong to. Mantras of the vajra family typically end in hūṃ, while the padma family often end in hrīḥ. At other times it seems unconnected to other considerations. For example  oṃ maṇīpadme hūṃ is a padma family mantra. Some mantras incorporate dhāraṇī style features into them which would include the Heart Sūtra mantra and the Tārā mantra (oṃ tāre tuttāre ture svāhā). The variety of mantras is partly due to their being a number of systems existing in parallel. 

Dhāraṇī by contrast seldom begin with oṃ and almost never end in a seed-syllable. They almost always end with svāhā. The word svāhā is the Vedic equivalent to the Hebrew amen. It is used in the Yajurveda to solemnise offerings: one makes an offering of rice mixed with ghee to the fire while chanting, for example "agnaye svāhā" or 'For Agni, amen' (Taittirīra Saṃhitā 7.1.14.1). The content of the dhāraṇī is a string of words or sounds which seldom reference names of deities, and frequently include nonsense words such as hilli, huru often with repetition and ringing the changes of the first syllable: hilli hilli milli milli. There is a tendency to use words ending in -e. Various theories have been proposed to explain this phenomenon, but my opinion is that the -e ending is a Prakrit masculine nominative singular. This probably also applies to the well known oṃ maṇipadme hūṃ mantra. A feature of dhāraṇī, then, is the use of Prakrit or Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit. 

Typical dhāraṇīs from the Saddharmapuṇḍarikā Sūtra:

anye manye mane mamane citte carite same samitā viśānte mukte muktatame same aviṣame samasame jaye kṣaye akṣaye akṣiṇe śānte samite dhāraṇi ālokabhāṣe pratyavekṣaṇi nidhiru abhyantaraniviṣṭe abhyantarapāriśuddhimutkule araḍe paraḍe sukāṅkṣi asamasame buddhavilokite dharmaparīkṣite saṁghanirghoṣaṇi nirghoṇi bhayābhayaviśodhani mantre mantrākṣayate rute rutakauśalye akṣaye akṣayavanatāye vakkule valoḍra amanyanatāye svāhā.

iti me iti me iti me iti me iti me; nime nime nime nime nime; ruhe ruhe ruhe ruhe ruhe| stuhe stuhe stuhe stuhe stuhe svāhā.

There is a world of difference between these two dhāraṇī and most Tantric mantras.


The Heart Sutra Mantra

The Heart Sutra mantra is clearly referred to as a mantra by the text. But it has more features in common with dhāraṇī in form and content. It's lacks the opening oṃ for example, though some traditions have simply added one. The repetition and play of sounds in gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate is typical of dhāraṇī. Why then does the text refer to this as a mantra? I will look more closely at this issue in the next essay.

Meanwhile let us compare the Heart Sutra mantra with the three mantra/dhāraṇī listed in Nattier's footnotes as being similar. Of these T 12.387  大方等無想經  Dàfāngděng wúxiǎng jīng (Mahāmegha Sūtra), identified by Fukui (1981), is important because it was translated in the early fifth century, two centuries before the proposed date for the composition of the Heart Sutra.

Mantras and dhāraṇīs are typically not translated by the Chinese, but the sounds are represented using characters for their pronunciation.  Unfortunately it can be very difficult to reconstruct the Sanskrit from a Chinese transliteration. For example the character 卑 bēi has been used to transliterate the Sanskrit syllables pra, pre, pe, pi, vi, and vai. Note that I'm using Pinyin Romanisation in these posts, which often does not reflect pronunciation at the time the texts were composed. The language of the day is referred to as Middle-Chinese (MC). Where relevant and possible I will indicate the MC pronunciation 

The dhāraṇī in question is:

竭帝　波利竭帝　僧竭帝　波羅僧竭帝波羅卑羅延坻　
三波羅卑羅延坻　婆羅 婆羅　波沙羅　波娑羅　摩文闍　摩文闍　
遮羅帝　遮羅坻 波遮羅坻 波遮羅坻　三波羅遮羅坻
比提 嘻利 嘻梨　薩隷醯　薩隷醯　富嚧 富嚧 莎呵

jiédì bōlìjiédì sēngjiédì bōluósēngjiédì bōluóbēiluóyánchí
sānbōluóbēiluóyánchí póluó póluó bōshāluó bōsuōluó mówéndū mówéndū
zhēluódì zhēluóchí bōzhēluóchí bōzhēluóchí sānbōluózhēluóchí
bǐtí xīlì xīlí sàlìxī sàlìxī fùlú fùlú shā hē

Fortunately for us some markers are clear at the beginning.  The Mantra in the Heart Sutra in Chinese is:

揭帝　揭帝　般羅揭帝　般羅僧揭帝　菩提 僧 莎訶
jiēdì jiēdì bānluójiēdì bānluósēngjiēdì pútí sēng shāhē

One does not need to understand the characters to see that many of them graphically match up between the two mantras above, especially at the beginning. The opening characters of both are very similar. Both 竭帝 jiédì and  揭帝  jiēdì are transliterations of Sanskrit gate (the difference in pronunciation is a matter of tone). MC pronunciation in both cases was gal (with a hard g sound).

The first words in the Mahāmegha Sutra mantra are: jiédì bōlìjiédì sēngjiédì bōluósēngjiédì which most likely represent Sanskrit: gate parigate saṃgate paragate. The Mahāmegha mantra ends 莎呵 shāhē; the Heart Sutra has 莎訶 shāhē; both represent svāhā. Note the graphic similarity of 呵 and 訶 which have the same pronunciation, he, in MC.

A little note here that the mantra in Xuánzàng's version of the Heart Sutra (T 8.251) has an extra out-of-place character, 僧 sēng, between bodhi (菩提 pútí) and svāhā (莎訶 shāhē). Even though this is probably the oldest version of the text, it is not without problems! 

A similar dhāraṇi is also found in T. 21.1353 東方最勝燈王陀羅尼經 Dōngfāng zuìshèng dēngwáng tuóluóní jīng (First-radiance Knowledge King Sūtra = Sanskrit Agrapradīpadhārāṇīvidyarāja-sūtra). As in T 12.387 the dhāraṇī shares opening elements with the Heart Sutra mantra using the same transliterating characters.

阿  竭帝　波羅竭帝 波羅僧竭帝　    
a    jiédì    bōluójiédì  bōluósēngjiédì   

a gate paragate parasaṃgate

Here the character 阿 is often used for the Sanskrit short 'a' vowel and thus may reference the idea of the perfection of wisdom  in one letter, or more precisely the fact that all dharmas are empty of self existence (sarvadharmāḥ svabhāvaśūnyatāḥ) because they are unarisen (anutpanna). See also The Essence of All Mantras; and Sound, Word, Reality.

The gate gate mantra itself, with the same transliteration, is found in T 18.901 陀羅尼集經 Tuóluóní jí jīng (Dhāraṇī Collection Sūtra). This was translated ca. 653 CE which is around the same time that Nattier proposes for the composition of the Heart Sutra. Note also that it is a collection of dhāraṇī (陀羅尼 Tuóluóní) rather than mantra. The presence of a dhāraṇī in a collection is not conclusive evidence that it existed detached from the Heart Sutra before its composition, but it at least shows that dhāraṇīs can be detachable. It's quite possible that similar examples may turn up with further examination. 

It seems that, not only is the core of the Heart Sutra an extract, but the "mantra" might also be an extract from a dhāraṇī. It might be thought that the fact that the Heart Sutra is a mash-up of bits from other texts invalidates the text. However the composition method closely resembles many Pāli texts which are clearly constructed from pre-existing elements that can be found scattered around the Canon. Far from being unusual, the Heart Sutra is following standard Buddhist procedure. Even the subsequent addition of a proper sūtra introduction is in keeping with general Buddhist practice. 

In my discussion of cladistic methods applied to studying manuscripts, I argued that it would help to iron out biases. Another bias that Buddhist Studies faces is the prejudice in favour of texts with Indian "originals". In my essay Which Mahāyāna Texts? I outlined an observation made in another publication by Jan Nattier about which Mahāyāna texts are prominent in the West. The existence of a Sanskrit manuscript is one of the influential factors likely to bring a Mahāyāna text to prominence. The fact is that the Heart Sutra is broadly accepted as a genuine masterpiece of Buddhist thought. Commentaries from across the spectrum of Buddhist schools adopt the Heart Sutra as an epitome of their thought. Is a text any less authentic because it was not composed in India? It is true that Buddhists believed that the text was of Indian origin and that was an element in popularising it. Now that we know differently will Buddhists have to abandon this text? I think there is no question of abandoning the text, but the necessary adjustments might be quite difficult. One sign of this is the rejection of the Chinese origin thesis by Red Pine in the introduction to his translation and commentary on the Heart Sutra. Though his reasoning is spurious, it is none-the-less interesting to see how difficult Buddhists find it to absorb information like this.

One of the reasons for writing about Nattier's work is that it has yet to penetrate to the heart of popular imagination and the discussion about textual origins is in its infancy. Such writing raises questions for Buddhists. If we take scholarship seriously, then we are forced to examine our own beliefs and sometimes to admit that our beliefs are based on false assumptions such as authenticity being related to India. 

~~oOo~~

A further note 26 sept 2013.

The Tibetan canonical versions of the Heart Sutra both include tadyathā in the mantra itself. I've looked at this generally in Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra - the inclusion of tadyathā 'like this' in the mantra is like actors speaking stage directions out loud. One of the versions also interpolates oṃ into the mantra as do some of the Nepalese manuscripts. 

 

Bibliography

I've already written about the mantra of this text a couple of times:

• Words in Mantras that end in -e (see also Some Additional Notes).

• Tadyathā in the Heart Sūtra. 

• Heart Sūtra Mantra. (on my mantra website). 

All Chinese texts from CBETA.

• Abé, Ryūichi (1999). The Weaving of Mantra: Kūkai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse. New York: Columbia University Press.

• Fukui Fumimasa (1981) Hannya shingyô no rekishiteki kenkyû. [= Historical studies of the Buddhist scripture Prajñaparamita-hrdaya or Heart Sutra.] Tōkyō: Shunjūsha. 

• Nattier, Jan (1992). 'The Heart Sūtra: a Chinese apocryphal text?' Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies. 15 (2) 153-223. Online: http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/ojs/index.php/jiabs/article/view/8800/2707

• Studholme, Alexander (2002). The origins of oṃ manipadme hūṃ : a study of the Kāraṇḍavyūha Sūtra. Albany: State university of New York Press.

Canonical Sources for the Vajrasattva Mantra

I've mentioned that Maitiu O'Ceileachair and I have identified the earliest textual occurrence of the Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra in the Chinese Tripiṭika. Circumstances have meant that Maitiu and I have not been able to write up our notes formally. I know there is considerable interest in this mantra, and the Vajrasattva Mantra continues to be the most popular page on my mantra website. So I thought I would write up some of the basic stuff that we've found, along with transcriptions of the mantra from various Canonical sources. This blog post represents our collaborative effort, but credit for all the observations on the Chinese goes to Maitiu.

The earliest occurrence in the Chinese Canon, which is really the only candidate for the earliest literary use of the mantra, since only the Chinese dated their texts, is in T.866, a collection of mantras related to the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha (STTS). T.866 was translated into Chinese by Vajrabodhi (ca 671-741) in 723 CE. Stephen Hodge (2003) says that Vajrabodhi acquired his STTS manuscript circa 700 CE, so it had to have been composed before that date.

Two Sanskrit manuscripts of STTS are extant, though both are relatively recent copies. One has been published in facsimile edition (Candra & Snellgrove), and another forms the basis of a critical edition by Yamada (which means that he compares his Sanskrit manuscript with other versions).  *see comments. We also looked at two versions in printed editions of the Tibetan Canon (the Peking and Derge editions) and several other Chinese versions from the Taisho Edition of the Tripiṭaka (e.g. T.873, 875, 884, 1224, 1320, 1956), including Amoghavajra's translation into Chinese (T. 873).

The mantra occurs in the context of a brief introductory paragraph and is followed by another brief paragraph.

Sanskrit text

atha sarvamudrāṇāṁ sāmānyaḥ svakāyavākcittavajreṣu vajrīkaraṇavidhivistaro bhavati| yadā mudrādhiṣṭhānaṁ śithilībhavati, svayaṁ vā muktukāmo bhavati, tato'nena hṛdayena dṛḍhīkartavyā|

oṃ vajra-satva-samayam anupālaya
vajrasatvatvenopatiṣṭha
dṛḍho me bhava su-toṣyo me bhavānurakto me bhava
su-poṣyo me bhava sarva-siddhiñ ca me prayaccha
sarva-karmasu ca me citta-śreyaḥ kuru hūṃ
ha ha ha ha hoḥ
Bhagavan sarva-tathāgata-vajra mā me muṃca
vajrī bhava mahā-samaya-sattva āḥ ||

anenānantaryakāriṇo'pi sarvatathāgatamokṣā api saddharmapratikṣepakā api sarvaduṣkṛtakāriṇo'pi sarvatathāgatamudrāsādhakā varjasattvadṛḍhībhāvādihaiva janmanyāsu yathābhirucitāṁ sarvasiddhimuttamasiddhiṁ vajrasiddhiṁ vajrasattvasiddhiṁ vā yāvat tathāgatasiddhiṁ vā prāpsyantī-tyāha bhagavāṁ sarvatathāgatavajrasattvaḥ||

Todaro's translation of the Sanskrit.
(except for the mantra which is my translation)

"Now an explanation of the rite of the strengthened of all mudrās alike in one's own body, speech and mind thunderbolt is given. When the mudrā empowerment becomes weak or when there is a desire for liberation by oneself, then one should be made firm with this mantra:

oṃ
O Vajrasattva honour the agreement!
Reveal yourself as the vajra-being!
Be steadfast for me!
Be fully nourishing for me!
Be very pleased for me!

Be passionate for me!
Grant me all success and attainment!
And in all actions make my mind more lucid!
hūṃ
ha ha ha ha hoḥ
O Blessed One, vajra of all those in that state, don't abandon me!
O great agreement-being become real!
āḥ

"The Bhagavat Vajrasattva of all the Tathāgatas said: "Notwithstanding continuous killing, the slander of all the Tathāgatas, the repudiation of the true teaching and even all evil and injury, (by this) the perfection of all the Tathāgata's mudrās from the strengthening of Vajrasattva, in the present life as you desire, and all accomplishments, the supreme accomplishment, the thunderbolt accomplishment or the accomplishment of Vajrasattva, up to the accomplishment of the Tathāgata, will be attained quickly."

Comments

The reconstructed version of the mantra created on the basis of Sthiramati's work in Jayarava (2010) reflects the extant Sanskrit and Chinese texts of STTS quite well, with only minor differences. It may be that the Tibetans were working from a different source text.

The mantra explicitly allows that someone who has done evil, more or less any kind of evil, will not be prevented from making progress. The Chinese version includes the five atekicca or unforgivable actions. (Giebel p.99). This represents that last phase of turning a tenet of Early Buddhism on its head, i.e. that the consequences of actions are inescapable. This role of the mantra--usually referred to as 'purifying karma'--remains central in the narratives surrounding its use in Tibetan Buddhism. The mantra seems much less prominent in Sino-Japanese Tantric Buddhism, and Vajrasattva (Japanese: 金剛薩埵 Kongosatta) plays quite a different role than in Tibet.

The text refers to the mantra as hṛdaya, i.e, 'heart mantra' or 'heart essence'.

Both extant Sanskrit versions spell sattva with one t, i.e. satva; which may indicate some Middle-Indic influence, although the language of this passage appears to conform to Classical Sanskrit norms.

The main difference between this mantra text and the one reconstructed from the Tibetan in Jayarava (2010) is that Yamada has su-toṣyo me bhavānurakto me bhavasu-poṣyo me bhava; where as the Tibetan (and the Chinese texts) transpose the last two phrases:  sutoṣyo me bhava, supoṣyo me bhava, anurakto me bhava. Note that bhavānurakto is a coalescence of bhava anurakto forced by Sanskrit sandhi rules (-a a- > -ā-).

Tibetan Versions of the Mantra

The Tibetan texts below are transcribed as they appears in the printed text, including punctuation marks, see also note at the end of this section. The lines of woodblock prints are long, and the mantra goes over a couple of long lines in both cases--difficult to reproduce in this medium so I haven't tried.

Derge Ed.

ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་སཏྭ་ས་མ་ཡ། མ་ནུ་པཱ་ལ་ཡ། བཛྲ་ས་ཏྭ་ཏྭེ་ནོ་པ། ཏི་ཥྛ་དྲྀ་ཌྷོ་མེ་བྷ་བ། སུ་ཏོ་ཥྱོ་མེ་བྷ་བ། ཨ་ནུ་ར་ ཀྟོ་མེ་བྷ་བ། སུ་བོ་ཥྱོ་མེ་བྷ་བ། སརྦྦ་སི་ དྡྷི་མྨེ་པྲ་ཡཱ་ཙྪ། སརྦྦ་ཀརྨྨ་སུ་ཙ་མེ་ཙི་ཏྟཾ་ཤྲེ་ཡཿ་ཀུ་རུ་ཧཱུྂ། ཧ་ཧ་ཧ་ཧ་ཧོཿ། བྷ་ག་བཱན། སརྦྦ་ཏ་ཐཱ་ག་ཏོ། བཛྲ་མཱ་མེ་མུཉྩ་བཛྲི་བྷ་བ་མ་ཧཱ་ས་མ་ཡ་སཏྭ་ཨཿ།

oṃ badzra satva sa ma ya| ma nu pā la ya| badzra satva tve no pa| ti ṣṭha dṛ ḍho me bha ba| su to ṣya bha ba| a nu ra kto me bha ba| su po ṣyo me bha ba| sa rbba siddhi mme pra ya tsatsha| sa rbba ka rmma su tsa me tsi ttaṃ śre yaḥ kuru hūṃ| ha ha ha ha hoḥ| bha ga vān| sa rbba ta thā ga ta| badzra mā me nu ñca ba drī bha ba ma hā sa ma ya satva aḥ

Peking Ed.

།ཨོཾ་བཛྲ་སཏྭ་ས་མ་ཡ། །མ་ནུ་པཱ་ལ་ཡ།བཛྲ་ས་ཏྭ་ཏྭེ་ནོ་བ།ཏི་ཥྛ་ཌི་ཌྷོ་མེ་བྷ་བ་སུ་ཏོ་ཥྱོ་མེ་བྷ་བ།སུ་བོ་ཥྱོ་མེ་བྷ་བ།ཨ་ནུ་རག་ཏོ་མེ་བྷ་བ།སརྦྦ་སིད་དྷི་མྨེ་པྲ་ཡཱ་ཙྪ་་་་་་་་་་སརྦ་ཀརྨ་སུ་ཙ་མེ།ཙི་ཏྟཾ་ཤྲེ་ཡཾ་ཀུ་རུ་ཧཱུྂ།ཧ་ཧ་ཧ་ཧ་ཧོཿ་བྷ་ག་བཱན།སརྦྦ་ཏ་ཐཱ་ག་ཏོ། །བཛྲ་མཱ་མེ་མུཾཙ་་་་་་བཛྲི་བྷ་བ་མ་ཧཱ་ས་མ་ཡ་སཏྭ་ཨཱཿ

| oṃ badzra satva sa ma ya | | ma nu pā la ya | badzra sa tva tve no ba | ti ṣṭha ḍi ḍho me bha ba su to ṣyo me bha ba | su po ṣyo me bha ba | a nu rag to me bha ba | sa rbba sid dhi mme pra ya tsatsha ……….. sarva karma su tsa me | tsi ttaṃ śre yaṃ ku ru hūṃ | ha ha ha ha hōḥ bha ga vān | sa rbba ta thā ga to | | badzra mā me muṃtsa……badzri bha ba ma hā sa ma ya satva āḥ

Peking ed. shows signs of being slavishly copied from a woodblock of a different size. The repeated shad | | (not to be confused with a nyis shad || ), for example in the first line 'ya | | ma' indicates that the original line ends with ya | and the new line starts with | ma. The groups of multiple tsheg indicate space filling. We've included the exact number of tsheg as in the printed text (C.f. Beginning and End Markers in Buddhist Texts).

Tibetan regularly makes several substitutions: va > ba; ja > dza; ca > tsa. In addition rva > rbba; rma > rmma (Derge). Medial nasals are sometimes replaced by anusvāra, e.g. muñca > muṃtsa. Both have satva for sattva, but so do extant Sanskrit texts.

General anomalies in the Tibetan versions of the mantra are discussed in Jayarava (2010). Particularly the break between samayam anupālaya becoming samaya manupālaya from an Indic original that would have written individual syllables with no word breaks: e.g. स म य म नु पा ल य sa ma ya ma nu pā la ya (See also the Chinese Siddhaṃ script preserved in T. 875 below.) This is quite simply an error, and was probably a mistake of reading rather than listening.

Both texts incorrectly add a shad in the middle of vajrasattvatvenopatiṣṭha. The words are vajrasattvatvena upatiṣṭha with a sandhi  -a u- > -o- (See Jayarava 2010 for more on this).

Chinese Versions of the Mantra

Reconstructing Sanskrit from Chinese is an imprecise art and often relies on knowing what the Sanskrit 'should' say. Chinese transcriptions are not very good at representing visarga and anusvāra can go missing as well (though this might be the Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit source material rather than the translators). Some translators indicate vowel length and some don't. Generally Amoghavajra is pretty good and many translators followed his conventions.

The earliest occurrance is T. 866.

T. 866
金剛頂瑜伽中略出念誦經
A Summary of Recitations Taken from the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha(sūtra)
Translation by Vajrabodhi: 11th year of Kaiyuan (開元), Tang dynasty (CE 723) in Zisheng Monastery (資聖寺). (fasc. 2)

[each section of the mantra is transliterated and then followed, in parentheses, by a gloss in Chinese]

[0239a12] 唵　跋折囉　薩埵三摩耶　麼奴波邏耶。(金剛薩埵三摩耶願守護我)跋折囉薩埵 哆吠奴烏(二合)播底瑟吒(以為金剛薩埵)涅哩茶烏(二合)銘婆嚩(為堅牢我)素覩沙揄(二合)銘婆嚩(於我所歡喜)阿努囉(上 )訖覩(二合)婆銘縛 素補使榆(二合)銘婆嚩　薩婆悉地　含銘般囉野綽(授與我一 切悉地)薩婆羯磨素遮銘(及諸事業)質多失唎耶(令我安隱)句嚧吽呵 呵呵呵護(引)薄伽梵(世尊)薩婆怛他揭多(一切如來)跋折囉麼迷悶遮(願金剛莫捨離我)跋折哩婆嚩(令我為金剛三摩耶薩埵)摩訶三摩耶薩埵阿(去 引)

oṃ vajra sattvasamaya manupālaya (vajrasattvasamaya please protect me) vajrasattvatvenopatiṣṭha (become vajrasattva) dṛḍho me bhava (be strong [for] me) sutoṣyo me bhava (be pleased with me) anurakto me bhava supoṣyo me bhava sarvasiddhi [there is an extra syllable here gam/kam] me prayaccha (bestow on me all siddhis) sarvakarmasu ca me (and all karmas) citta śreyaḥ (make me at peace) kuru hūṃ ha ha ha ha hoḥ bhagavan sarvatathāgata vajra mā me muñca (please Vajra do not abandon me) vajrībhava (make me the vajra samayasattva) mahāsamayasattva āḥ

Vajrabodhi gives glosses for some parts of the mantra that make it clear that he understands sarvasiddhi to mean 'all the siddhis'. I suspect that the punctuation of this line is incorrect and 含 has been moved from directly behind 悉地 and that these characters should be read together as siddhiṃ or siddhaṃ. It is possible that siddhiṃ is a Middle-Indic form of siddhīn. According to Edgerton (BHSD) when the nasal of -īn is retained the vowel is shortened.

Note that the Chinese appears to read vajra sattvasamaya manupālaya rather than vajrasattva samayam anupālaya in line with the Sanskrit mss. If this is correct then the error could have occurred on Indian soil and been transmitted to Tibet and China as it was.

T.865
金剛頂一切如來真實攝大乘現證大教王經
(translated by Amoghavajra 753 CE. 1st chapter only)

唵日羅 薩 怛 三 摩 耶 麼 努 波 (引) 耶
日羅 薩 怛 怛 尾 怒 波 底 瑟 奼
捏 哩 濁 寐 婆 蘇 都 使 庾 寐 婆
阿 努 囉 羯 都 寐 婆
蘇 布 使 庾 寐 婆
薩 悉 朕 寐 缽 囉 也 車
薩 羯 摩 素 者 寐 質 多 室 哩 藥 矩嚕 吽
呵呵呵呵 斛 (引)
婆 伽 梵 薩 怛 他 櫱 多 日囉 摩 弭 悶 遮
日哩 婆 摩 訶 三 摩 耶薩怛 噁(引)

ǎn rì luó sà dá sān mā yē me nǔ bō (yǐn) yē
rì luó sà dá dá wěi nù bō de sè chà
niē li zhuó mèi pó sū dōu shǐ yǔ mèi pó
ā nǔ luo jié dōu mèi pó
sū bù shǐ yǔ mèi pó
sà xī zhèn mèi bō luo yě chē
sà jié mā sù zhě mèi zhì duō shì li yào ju lū hōng
a a a a hú (yǐn)
pó gā fàn sà dá tā niè duō rì luó mā mǐ mēn zhē
rì li pó mā hē sān mā yē sà dá ě (yǐn)

Amongst the Chinese versions are two which preserve a (corrupt) Siddhaṃ version of the mantra. We include one of these for comparison. (The Siddhaṃ is written using the CBETA Font which is not aesthetically pleasing but gives us an idea of what Chinese Siddhaṃ looks like.)

T.875
蓮華部心念誦儀軌 [平安時代寫東寺三密藏藏本]
A Ritual Manual of the Mental Recitation of the Lotus Section.
Written during the Heian Period (794-1185 CE). From the Sanmitsu Collection of the Tō-ji.
[0326a26] 金剛三昧。
[0326a27]

Transliteration

oṃ va jra sa tva sa ma ya ma nu pā la ya va jra sa tva nve no pa ti ṣṭa dṛ ho me bha va mi su tu ṣuo me bha va a nu ra kto me bh ba sup u ṣo me bha va sa rva si ddhiṃ me pra ya ccha sa rva ka rma su ca me cit ta śre ya ku ru hūṃ ha ha ha ha hoḥ bha ga vaṃ sa rva ta thā ga ta va jra mā ma muṃ ca va jrī bha va ma hā sa ma ya sa tvā āḥ

Be aware that this mantra is corrupted and contains many introduced errors. It is provided for comparison purposes only.

Conclusion

These then are principle canonical sources of the Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra in the Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chinese versions of the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha. Since the Chinese accurately recorded the date of their translations we can be confident that T. 866 is the earliest translated text in the Chinese Tripiṭika to contain this mantra. The differences between the various versions are relatively minor, though they suggest that even at the earliest times this text existed in several versions containing these minor differences, i.e. not all the differences are due to translations or scribal error.

All of these canonical versions tend confirm the notion that the mantra was originally written in good Sanskrit rather than the somewhat garbled version in the received Tibetan tradition. The garbling of the mantra forms part of the discussion in Jayarava (2010), as does the tension created by received tradition vs. other forms of authority. However T. 866 suggests that at least some of the errors were present in the Indian tradition already. The fact of the difference between the canonical and received versions of the mantra highlights the conflict of sources of authority in the Buddhist tradition. Though Tantric Buddhism places great emphasis on guru to disciple transmission, which tends to outweigh textual authority; the fact that we now have much greater access to the Tripiṭika and the knowledge that the mantra has been partially garbled are difficult to ignore for Western converts unconsciously inculcated with the valorisation of textual authority.

The Vajrasattva mantra was set free from this context in the Tibetan Tantric tradition where it performs an important role in purifying karma that might otherwise impede progress on the Buddhist path.  In its self this is a fascinating aspect of the history of ideas in Buddhism.

~~oOo~~

Sources

大正新脩大藏經 [Taishō Revised Tripiṭaka]

Chandra, Lokesh and Snellgrove, David L. Sarva-tathāgata-tattva-saṅgraha : facsimile reproduction of a tenth century Sanskrit manuscript from Nepal. New Delhi : Sharada Rani, 1981. Online transcription Digital Sanskrit Buddhist Canon. http://dsbc.uwest.edu/node/7269

Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association (CBETA) http://www.cbeta.org/

'De-bshin-gśegs-pa thams-cad-kyi de-kho-na-ñid bsdusp-pa shes-bya-ba theg-pa chen-poḥi mdo (Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha-nāma-mahāyāna Sūtra).' The Tibetan Tripitaka Peking Edition. (Ed. D. T. Suzuki) Tokyo: Tibetan Tripitaka Research Institute, 1956. Vol.4, p.233. (Ña 37a-b)

‘De-bshin-gśegs-pa thams-cad-kyi de-kho-na-ñid bsdusp-pa shes-bya-ba theg-pa chen-poḥi mdo (Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha-nāma-mahāyāna Sūtra).’ Derge: The Sde-dge Mtshal-par Bka’-’gyur: A Facsimile Edition of the 18th Century Redaction of Si-tu Chos-kyi-’byuṅ-gnas Prepared under the Direction of H.H the 16th Rgyal-dbaṅ Karma-pa. Delhi: Delhi Karmapae Chodhey Gyalwae Sungrab Partun Khang, 1976-1979.

Giebel, R. W. (2001) Two Esoteric Sutras. Numata.

Hodge, Stephen. The Māhvairocana-Ambhisaṃbodhi Tantra: With Buddhaguhya's Commentary. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Jayarava. 'The Hundred Syllable Vajrasattva Mantra.' Western Buddhist Review, 5, Oct 2010. Online: http://westernbuddhistreview.com/vol5/vajrasattva-mantra.pdf

Tadaro, Dale Allen. An Annotated Translation of the Tattvasamgraha (Part 1) with an Explanation of the Role of the Tattvasamgraha Lineage in the Teachings of Kukai. Doctoral dissertation Columbia University, 1985.

Weinberger, Steven Neal. The significance of yoga tantra and the "Compendium of Principles" ("Tattvasamgraha Tantra") within tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Virginia, 2003.

Yamada, Isshi. Sarva-tathāgata-tattva-saṅgraha nāma mahāyāna-sūtra : a critical edition based on a Sanskrit manuscript and Chinese and Tibetan translations. New Delhi : Sharada Rani, 1981 p 95.