Dharani, and Why the Sound Was Not Translated

A dharani is a string of syllables transmitted as sound, and the Buddhist traditions that carried Siddham east did not translate them. Chinese translators who rendered whole sutras into fluent Chinese stopped at these passages and transcribed them syllable by syllable, and that decision is the single reason the script had to travel with the texts.

The reasoning is recorded in the tradition itself: what a dharani does is held to depend on its being said correctly rather than on its being understood, so a rendering that preserved the meaning and lost the sound would have preserved the wrong thing. Some dharani have construable sense and some have little or none, and the decision applies either way.

The consequence for the written record is that these passages are the most textually fragile part of any manuscript. Prose survives a copying error because context restores it; a string of syllables does not. A wrong letter in a dharani is unrecoverable from within the text, which is why the tradition kept both the Chinese transcription and the Siddham original, and why the reading traditions were transmitted by voice alongside the manuscripts.

It is also why the atlas describes rather than reproduces this material as practice. What a dharani is, where it comes from and how it was transmitted are matters of record. Its use belongs to the traditions that hold it.