The Blue-Throated One, and What a Dharani Is For

The name of this text is a puzzle worth stopping on. Nilakantha means "blue-throated", and in Indian religion that is Shiva, whose throat was stained blue when he swallowed the poison churned from the ocean to save the world. In this dharani the epithet belongs to Avalokiteshvara, who is addressed as Nilakantha and described in terms drawn straight from Shaiva iconography. Buddhist tantric literature absorbed a great deal of Shaiva material, and this is one of the clearest and least disguised instances of it.

A dharani is not quite a mantra and not quite a prayer. The word derives from a root meaning to hold, and the older understanding is mnemonic: a dharani holds a teaching in compressed form. In devotional practice it functions as a protective and purifying formula recited at length, in Sanskrit transcribed into Chinese characters and pronounced quite unlike the original. Practitioners across East Asia have recited this one daily for a thousand years, largely without knowing what the syllables mean, and the tradition has generally regarded that as no obstacle, which is itself a fact about how such texts work.

The atlas keeps a distinction here that is easy to blur. The Great Compassion Dharani is the formula and is held in this atlas as a mantra; this entry is the sutra that transmits it. They are not the same object, and the mantra entry points here as its source rather than to itself.