The Dedication “Protecting All Beings”

This short text and The Dedication “Fulfilling All Aspirations” (Toh 285) that precedes it appear to constitute a pair, and this for several reasons. First, the two texts, both of which lack Sanskrit titles, appear side by side both in the Denkarma (ldan dkar ma) imperial catalog and in the extant Kangyurs of the Tshalpa and Thempangma lines. In the Tshalpa Kangyurs, the two are placed at the very end of the Mahāyāna division of the General Sūtra (mdo sde) section, and in the Thempangma Kangyurs toward the end of the entire General Sūtra section. Their function as dedications therefore seems to be reflected in that placement, and‍—in the Tshalpa Kangyurs at least‍—the two appear to be dedications meant specifically to seal the sections of Mahāyāna sūtras.

Furthermore, since the two texts are dedications, it is perhaps not surprising that they are neither called sūtras, nor show features typical of sūtras, such as the opening “Thus did I hear” or an introductory passage describing the setting and audience of the discourse. What is somewhat surprising is that both are nonetheless included in the sūtra section of the Kangyur, indicating that they are to be considered discourses of the Buddha.1 Along those lines, the lack of features that typically distinguish sūtras led the fifteenth-century scholar Pekar Sangpo (pad dkar bzang po), in his analytical survey of all the sūtras found in the Kangyur, to conclude that the two texts are extracts from another, longer sūtra‍—though he does not say which,2 and our own search for matches (at least in the Tibetan corpus) has not yet identified any such text, sūtra or otherwise. What can be said with a reasonable degree of confidence is that, regardless of their exact provenance, the two texts were translated from Sanskrit or another Indic language in the late eighth or early ninth century. The short colophon to the present text3 attests to that, providing the names of the two translators, the Indian preceptor Vidyākaraprabha and the Tibetan translator Bandé Yeshé Nyingpo, and the senior editor-translator Bandé Paltsek, who edited and finalized the text. The text is also listed in both the Denkarma and Phangthangma (’phang thang ma) catalogs. This confirms the dating of the Tibetan translation to the early ninth century at the latest.4

There is no extant Sanskrit text of this sūtra, and there are no known canonical or Tibetan commentaries. There is no known English translation of it nor any translation into any European language, and no academic research or scholarly studies of it are known. A translation of the Tibetan text is, however, available in the Mongolian Kangyur.5 The translation presented here is based on the Tibetan version in the Degé Kangyur and consultation of the Comparative Edition (dpe bsdur ma) as well as the Stok Palace manuscript.

The structure of the present text partly reflects the liturgy of “seven branches” or “seven limbs” (yan lag bdun pa), a set of practices that came to serve as the basic structure of many Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna Buddhist prayers, sādhanas, and pūjās. The seven branches are commonly as follows: prostration or homage, offering, confession, rejoicing in virtue, requesting the buddhas to teach, requesting the buddhas not to pass into nirvāṇa, and dedication of merit. Not all of these seven are present in this text, which suggests that perhaps the set was formalized only later. The structure of the present text also partly reflects the structure of the preceding text. For example, here there is also only a single line of homage at the very beginning, which might indicate that the line was intended only as the customary line of homage found at the beginning of all Kangyur works. Also in common with the preceding text, the line of homage is followed by a request that the buddhas and bodhisattvas pay heed to the reciter. And what immediately follows are four brief lines, each of them devoted to a single act in the order in which they appear in the preceding text: confession, rejoicing, supplicating the buddhas, and dedicating all merits.

What sets this short text apart, however, is the extensive dedication that follows, comprising the bulk of the prayer. This features an enumeration of the many faults, shortcomings, and afflictions that burden sentient beings, as well as the many possible attainments that they may have consequently not realized, with the reciter expressing the wish that everything negative that would otherwise ripen for sentient beings may instead “ripen for me” (bdag la smin), so that all sentient beings would thus be liberated and purified. This strongly resonates with the much later Tibetan mind training (blo sbyong) teachings, especially their central contem­plative exercise of “giving and taking” (gtong len). Considering how pervasive the mind training teachings became, and still remain, in the Tibetan Buddhist world, it might come as a surprise to learn that other sūtra sources in the Kangyur for the development of that specific aspiration‍—that the suffering and negative karma of sentient beings “ripen for me”‍—are practically nonexistent. In fact, it would appear that this hitherto unnoticed dedication contains the only explicit articulation to be found in the Kangyur of the paradigmatic aspiration of mind training‍—the wish that the suffering of others instead “ripen for me.”