Nilakantha Dharani Sutra

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.

The version that matters for East Asian practice is the Chinese one made by Bhagavaddharma in the middle of the seventh century, catalogued as Taisho 1060 and titled for the Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteshvara. Its frame is conventional: the bodhisattva asks the Buddha's leave to utter a dharani for the benefit of beings, receives it, and speaks. Around that frame the sutra sets out the benefits of recitation and the manner of it, and it is from these passages that the East Asian liturgical use descends.

The thousand-armed form the title names is one of the most widespread images in Asian Buddhist art, with an eye in each palm: the arms are the capacity to act and the eyes the capacity to see where action is needed, which is compassion described as a practical faculty rather than a feeling. In China this Avalokiteshvara became Guanyin, and over several centuries was increasingly represented as female, a transformation Chun-fang Yu has traced in detail and which has no close parallel in the Indian material.

The dharani is recited daily in Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Japanese monasteries, and in Korea the Cheonsugyeong built around it is among the most familiar of all Buddhist texts. Its currency is out of all proportion to the attention the sutra itself receives.