Toh 535Recollecting the Name of Moonlight

Summary

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight contains
the dhāraṇī of the Buddha Moonlight. The benefits of recollecting the Buddha
Moonlight’s name every morning after rising are that one will remember all one’s
lives of the past forty thousand kalpas, one will not fall into the lower realms
after death, and one will attain the attributes of awakening.

Acknowledgements

This publication was completed under the patronage and supervision of
84000: Translating the Words of the Buddha.

The text was translated, edited, and introduced by the 84000 translation
team. Bruno Galasek-Hul produced the translation and wrote the introduction.
Nathaniel Rich edited the translation and the introduction, and Dawn Collins
copyedited the text. Martina Cotter was in charge of the digital publication
process.

Introduction

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight is a
short dhāraṇī preserved in the Degé Kangyur in two nearly identical
versions, one in the Tantra section and the other in the Dhāraṇī
section.

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight
opens with a brief homage to the buddha named Moonlight. It lacks the
customary title (in Sanskrit and Tibetan) at the beginning and has no
narrative frame or interlocutors. The dhāraṇī concludes with an
enumeration of the benefits that accrue from reciting the dhāraṇī: a son or
a daughter of good family who recites this invocation of the Buddha
Moonlight every morning after rising will remember all their past lives
during forty thousand kalpas. Furthermore, they will not fall into the lower
realms after death and will attain the attributes of awakening.

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight also
lacks a translators’ colophon. Therefore, we do not know who the translators
were or when it was translated. To our knowledge, no Sanskrit text of this
dhāṛaṇī is extant and it does not appear to have been translated into
Chinese. The catalogs of the early imperial translations, the Denkarma and
Phangthangma, do not list it, but it is listed under the title zla ’od kyi mtshan rjes su dran pa in the
catalog of translated works in the Kangyur that is included in Butön’s
monumental fourteenth-century History of
Buddhism. This gives us a very wide time
frame for a possible date of its translation, namely, sometime between the
ninth century and the first quarter of the fourteenth century.

Texts like Recollecting the Name of
Moonlight can be understood in the context of the Mahāyāna
doctrine of the parallel existence of countless buddhas in different
universes, and the idea that hearing, remembering, and reciting the names of
these buddhas can become a condition for attaining awakening. A buddha
named Candraprabha (“Moonlight”) is mentioned in several important Mahāyāna
sūtras, and that might be the figure intended here.

This English translation was prepared based on the two witnesses in
the Degé Kangyur (Toh 535 and Toh 868 ), in consultation with the versions in
the Narthang Kangyur, the Stok Palace Kangyur, and the Comparative Edition
(dpe bsdur ma) of the Kangyur.

The Translation

Recollecting the Name of Moonlight

Homage to the thus-gone, worthy ,
fully and perfectly awakened Moonlight!

tadyathā| candre candre| sucandre|
maticandra candrakiraṇa| siri siri| buddhādhiṣṭhite| kili kili|
dharmādhiṣṭhite| kili kili| saṃghādhiṣṭhite svāhā.

A son or daughter of good family who, every morning after
rising, recollects the name of the tathāgata Moonlight, will remember all
their former lives during forty thousand kalpas and will not fall into the
lower realms. By recollecting Moonlight’s name, one will attain those
attributes.

Recollecting the Name of
Moonlight is complete.

Notes

Bibliography

Tibetan Sources

Other Sources