Qiānbì jūntúlì fànzì zhēnyán 千臂軍荼利梵字真言
Sanskrit-Script Mantra of the Thousand-Armed Kuṇḍalin by 義操 (Yìcāo, 梵書)
About the work
A short one-fascicle text giving the Sanskrit-script (fànzì, brāhmī / siddham-script) form of the dhāraṇī of the Thousand-Armed Kuṇḍalin (千臂軍荼利, Sahasrabhuja-Kuṇḍalin). The colophon names Yìcāo (義操, fl. 805–824) of the Qīnglóngsì East-Pagoda Cloister (青龍寺東塔院, Cháng’ān) — the disciple of Huìguǒ (惠果) (and thus an Esoteric grand-disciple of 不空 Amoghavajra) — as the scribe of the Sanskrit script (梵書). The role 梵書 is “Sanskrit-calligrapher”, i.e., one who copies out the siddham version of the mantra: this is a script-recovery text rather than a translation.
Abstract
The text consists of a single block of siddham-script (in the Taishō, the Sanskrit characters are reproduced in image form) representing the Thousand-Armed Kuṇḍalin’s dhāraṇī. The colophon reads:
「大唐青龍寺東塔院內供奉傳法灌頂故大阿闍梨義操梵書記」 — “Recorded by the late great ācārya Yìcāo, the Inner-Court Imperial Service-Provider, Dharma-Transmitter and Abhiṣeka-Master of the East-Pagoda Cloister of the Qīnglóngsì in the Táng capital.”
The text supplements the prose-only Chinese translations of the Kuṇḍalin cycle (T1211 KR6j0438; T1212 KR6j0439) by preserving the canonical Sanskrit form of the principal mantra in the script in which it would actually have been recited and copied by Táng Esoteric practitioners. Siddham mastery was a core skill of Táng Esoteric ācāryas: the bīja-syllables and dhāraṇīs were considered effective only when written and pronounced according to their siddham-Sanskrit form, and the preservation of these scripts was a central concern of the lineage.
The dating bracket follows Yìcāo’s documented activity at the Qīnglóngsì (805–824).
Translations and research
- Pollock, Sheldon. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. (For the cosmopolitan Sanskrit-script tradition.)
- Sharf, Robert H., and Elizabeth Horton Sharf, eds. Living Images: Japanese Buddhist Icons in Context. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. (For the siddham script tradition in East Asian Esotericism.)
Other points of interest
This is one of the very few East Asian Esoteric texts whose explicit purpose is the preservation of the siddham-Sanskrit form of a mantra rather than its translation or ritual application. Such “Sanskrit-script texts” are textual fossils of the Táng Esoteric concern with phonological-graphical fidelity to the Indian original, and represent an important counter-tradition to the more familiar translation-and-transliteration practice of Chinese Buddhism.