Dharani
parittas, are lengthier Buddhist mantras[1] functioning as mnemonic codes, incantations, or recitations, and almost exclusively written originally in Sanskrit[2] while Pali dharanis also exist.
[11] The dharani-genre of literature became popular in East Asia in the first millennium CE,[11] with Chinese records suggesting their profusion by the early centuries of the common era.
[23] The dharani-genre ideas also inspired Buddhist chanting practices such as the Nianfo (Chinese: 念佛; Pinyin: niànfó; Rōmaji: nenbutsu; RR: yeombul; Vietnamese: niệm Phật), the Daimoku,[24] as well as the Koshiki texts in Japan.
[25][26][27] They are a significant part of the historic Chinese dazangjing (scriptures of the great repository) and the Korean daejanggyeong – the East Asian compilations of the Buddhist canon between the 5th and 10th centuries.
[35] According to Eugène Burnouf, the 19th-century French Indologist and a scholar of Buddhism, dharanis are magical formulas that to Buddhist devotees are the most important parts of their books.
[37] The Indologist Moriz Winternitz concurred in the early 20th century that dharanis constituted a "large and important" part of Mahayana Buddhism, and that they were magic formulae and "protective spells" as well as amulets.
He will be content, not experience a catastrophe, lead a life lacking terror, his enemies destroyed, his opponents ruined, himself untouched, freed from fear of any poison, living long and prosperously, only excepting the results of prior karma.
According to Paul Copp, one of the earliest attestable literary mandate about writing dharanis as an effective spell in itself is found in a Chinese text dated between 317 and 420 CE.
[50] This text is the Qifo bapusa suoshuo da tuoluoni shenzhou jing (or, Great Dharani Spirit-Spell Scripture Spoken by the Seven Buddhas and Eight Bodhisattvas).
[35] Other than such scant remarks, little was known about the Dharani-genre of literature or its value in Buddhism till the mid-19th-century colonial era, when Brian Hodgson began buying Sanskrit and related manuscripts in Nepal, Tibet and India for a more thorough scholarship, often at his personal expense.
[35] According to Hodgson, as quoted by Ronald Davidson, dharani were esoteric short prayers "derived from [Buddhist tantric] Upadesa" that are believed to be amulet to be constantly repeated or worn inside little lockets, something that leads to "a charmed life".
[35][4] The colonial era scholarship initially proposed that the dharanis and related rituals may have been an influence on Buddhism of other Indian religions such as from the esoteric tantra traditions of Hinduism around the mid-1st-millennium CE.
Phonic mysticism and musical chanting based on dharanis – parittas or raksas in the Theravada Pali literature[note 4] – along with related mantras were important in early Buddhism.
Theologically, the vidya mantras constitute that knowledge in tantric Buddhism, according to Cabezon, which "pacifies the suffering experienced in the existential world (samsara) and the heaps of faults such as desire".
[5][39] The Japanese Horiuzi manuscript of Prajna paramita hrdaya sutra and Usnisha Vijaya dharani dated to 609 CE illustrate both, with the latter being only invocations consisting of meaningless series of syllables.
[39] In Buddhism, a dharani has been believed to have magical virtues and a means to earn merit to offset the past karma, allay fear, diseases and disasters in this life, and for a better rebirth.
There exist "single seed-syllable bija like dharanis, treated as having special powers to protect chanters from dangers such as "snakes, enemies, demons and robbers".
[13] In an appointment recommendation letter dated 732 CE, as an example, a Japanese priest named Chishu supports the ordination of his student Hata no kimi Toyotari by listing that he can recite following dharanis: "the Greater Prajna-paramita, Amoghapasa Avalokiteshvara, Eleven-faced Avalokiteshvara, the Golden Light, Akashagarbha, Bhaisajyaguru, consecrating water, concealing ritual space" with the dharani rituals of prostration after eight years of training.
[77] The dharanis as conceptualized by medieval era Buddhist intellectuals and eminent Chinese monks were an "integral component of mainstream Sinitic Buddhism", states Richard McBride.
[12] According to Robert Buswell and Donald Lopez, it is "almost certain" that some of the East Asian Buddhist literature on dharani were indigenous Chinese texts and syncretic with the Daoist practices.
A ritsuryo code for Buddhist clerics dated 718 CE, promulgated by the Nara government in Japan, forbid the use of dharani for any unauthorized medical treatment, military and political rebellion.
For example, in Digha Nikaya (DN I.116.14), Sonadanda remarks that wherever the Buddha stays, "non-humans do not harm the people of that town or village", states the Buddhism scholar Peter Skilling.
The average Theravada monk in other southeast Asian countries who may not know much about a Tipitaka, states Skilling, is likely to "be able to recite numerous chants [paritta, dharani] from memory".
[85] Though the dharani appears at the end of the text and the associated chant in Thai Buddhist practice occurs at the close of the ceremony, they highlight their key role in "the buddhabhiseka ritual".
The earliest extant example of printing on paper is a fragment of a dhāraṇī miniature scroll in Sanskrit unearthed in a tomb in Xi'an, called the Great spell of unsullied pure light (Wugou jingguang da tuoluoni jing 無垢淨光大陀羅尼經).
[88] This coincides with the reign of Wu Zetian, under which the Longer Sukhāvatīvyūha Sūtra, which advocates printing apotropaic and merit making texts and images, was translated by Chinese monks.
[16][19][89] According to Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin, the Korean dharani scrolls were printed after the era of Empress Wu in China, and these date "no earlier than 704 CE, when the translation of the sutra was finished, and no later than 751, when the building of the temple and stupa was completed".
By the 9th century, the era of mass printing and the sale of books had begun covering additional subjects such as "astrology, divination of dreams, alchemy, and geomancy".
[94] These were mass-produced as a set consisting of miniature hollow wooden pagodas each containing a printed dharani prayer or charm in Sanskrit on thick paper strips.
[94] According to Ross Bender, these events and Empress Shōtoku's initiatives led to the founding of major new Buddhist temples, a "great acceleration" and the "active propagation of Buddhism" in Japan.
