The Aparimitāyurjñāna Sūtra (1)

Two translations of this text into Chinese were made, one by Facheng (Taishō 936) in the early ninth century, and the other by Fatian (Taishō 937) in the late tenth century.¹³ Both Chinese translations contain the “two oṁ” dhāraṇī, and are therefore closer to the Khotanese, the other Tibetan version (2) of the text (Toh 675), and the Dunhuang manuscripts than they are to the Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts and to the present version (1) in Tibetan.

There are many surviving manuscripts of the text in Sanskrit, but none that can be reliably dated much before the early ninth century, the period when it was first translated into Chinese, and probably into Tibetan for the first time (see below). Most of the Sanskrit manuscripts are Nepalese and are dated considerably later.

The oldest known Indic version of the text may be one from east Turkestan in what came to be called “Khotanese,” the old Iranian dialect of that region during the later period of the time when Buddhism was prevalent there. It is written in the Upright Gupta script, and probably dates to the seventh or eighth century. The manuscript was discovered in the Mogao caves in Dunhuang by Sir Aurel Stein in 1907, and in 1912 Ernst Leumann made a short comparison of the Sanskrit of this sūtra’s opening sentences with a few fragments of the Khotanese text. In 1916, two Sanskrit editions saw the light independently. One, by Sten Konow, compared an edition of a Nepalese Sanskrit version with a complete edition of the Khotanese manuscript, along with the first English translation. The other, by Max Walleser, was based on a Nepalese manuscript and included a German translation. Walleser’s German translation has been translated into English by Richard K. Payne in his paper on this sūtra.¹⁴ Jonathan Silk has made an English translation from Walleser’s edition of the Sanskrit,¹⁵ and attests in his unpublished paper, “The Most Important Buddhist Scripture? The Aparimitāyur­jñāna and Medieval Buddhism,” to the relatively large number of extant Sanskrit manuscripts‍—well over one hundred‍—either in isolation or compilations, indicating how popular this sūtra was in Buddhist practice.

The Nepalese Sanskrit manuscripts are all of the “three oṁ” version of the text, and therefore correspond more closely to the present version (1), Toh 674. The Khotanese, on the other hand, contains the “two oṁ” version of the dhāranī throughout, and is thus closer to version (2) in Tibetan, Toh 675, to the many Dunhuang manuscripts in Tibetan, and to the two Chinese translations.