Dharanis (IAST: ), also known as (Skt.) vidyās and paritas or (Pal.) parittas, are lengthier Buddhist mantrasGergely Hidas, with J. Silk, O. von Hinüber, V. Eltschinger (eds.), "Dhāraṇī Sūtras". Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Vol. I. Literature and Languages. Brill: Leiden, 2015. p.129-137. that function as mnemonic codes, incantations, or recitations. Almost all were composed in Sanskrit, although there are some Pali dharanis. Believed to generate protection and the power to generate merit for the Buddhist practitioner, they constitute a major part of historic Buddhist literature. Most dharanis are in Sanskrit written in scripts such as Siddhaṃ as can be transliterated into Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese, Sinhala, Thai and other regional scripts. They are similar to and reflect a continuity of the Vedic chants and mantras., Quote: "[Wayman] stressed the continuity between Vedic and Buddhist mantras and has concluded his survey of Buddhist Tantric mantras by saying, it is... obvious from the present study that the later religious practices of India, such as the Buddhist Tantra, have a profound debt to the Vedic religion". [...] They [Buddhist Yogacara philosophers] distinguish [like Vedic ones], between artha-dharani, mantra-dharani, [...]
Dharanis are found in the ancient texts of all major traditions of Buddhism. They are a major part of the Pali canon preserved by the Theravada tradition. Mahayana sutras such as the Lotus Sutra and the Heart Sutra include or conclude with dharani. Some Buddhist texts, such as Pancarakṣa found in the homes of many Buddhist tantra tradition followers, are entirely dedicated to dharani. They are a part of the regular ritual prayers as well as considered to be an amulet and charm in themselves, whose recitation believed to allay bad luck, diseases or other calamity. They were an essential part of the monastic training in Buddhism's history in East Asia., Quote: "Buddhist intellectuals and eminent monks conceptualized dharani and spells as integral components of mainstream Sinitic Buddhism. Zhoushu, “spell techniques,” was one of the most prevalent translations of dharani used by Buddhists in medieval China. Seminal Buddhist literature describes an ordinary monk as a student of spell techniques and the acquisition of dharani as a prominent quality of a bodhisattva. Dharani have a firmly established position in the Mahayana doctrine of the bodhisattva path. They were perceived to be part of an ordinary monk's religious cultivation and a by-product of meditation. In this respect they are closely associated with an advanced monk or bodhisattva's acquisition of the spiritual penetrations, supernormal powers and the ability to work miracles. [...] Dharani and spells were functional and fashionable in medieval Sinitic Buddhism and their role in Chinese religion has continued to the present. They were understood and used as powerful practices to promote the Buddhist teaching and to protect the personal and spiritual welfare of believers. Yet, the very success of Buddhist spells was probably due to the long-standing value of spells and talismans in Chinese religion." In some Buddhist regions, they served as texts upon which the Buddhist witness would swear to tell the truth.
The dharani-genre of literature became popular in East Asia in the first millennium CE, with Chinese records suggesting their profusion by the early centuries of the common era. These migrated from China to Korea and Japan. The demand for printed dharani among the Buddhist lay devotees may have led to the development of textual printing innovations. The dharani records of East Asia are the oldest known "authenticated printed texts in the world", state Robert Sewell and other scholars.Hyakumantō Darani, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Quote: "Hyakumantō Darani [The one million pagodas and Dharani prayers] is considered to be the oldest traceable publication in the world whose production date is clearly identified. In 764, the Empress Shōtoku (718–770) ordered the creation of one million small wooden pagodas, each containing a scroll printed with four Buddhist Dharani sutras.";One of the “One Million Pagodas” (Hyakumanto) and Invocation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Quote: "Each pagoda was painted white and contained a printed Buddhist text called a darani (Sanskrit: dharani), or invocation. The text displayed here came from the pagoda on known as the Jishin’in darani, the invocation is one of four from the sacred text Mukujōkōkyō (Sanskrit: Vimala Mirbhasa Sutra) found in the pagodas. These printed texts are among the oldest known in the world. They are likely to have been printed from bronze plates, but some scholars maintain that they were printed from woodblocks."; The early-eighth-century dharani texts discovered in the Bulguksa of Gyeongju, Korea are considered as the oldest known printed texts in the world., Quote: "The earliest examples of Buddhist printing involve a type of charm or spell called a dharanI. To date, the oldest printed material that has been discovered is the Korean Mugu chong-gwang tae-darani kyong [dharani]";;, Quote: "The earliest surviving printed texts are eighth-century samples of Buddhist charms preserved in Korea and Japan. The oldest is a scroll discovered in 1966 in a stone stupa in the Pulguk-sa temple in Kyongju, Korea. [...] Another specimen of the same scroll printed between 764 and 770 has been preserved in Japan."
Dharani recitation for the purposes of healing and protection is referred to as Paritta in some Buddhist regions, particularly in Theravada communities. 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, as well as the Koshiki texts in Japan.Allan Andrews (1987), Pure Land Buddhist Hermeneutics: Hōnen's Interpretation of Nembutsu, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 7–25 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.
Etymology and nomenclature
The word dhāraṇī derives from a Sanskrit root √dhṛ meaning "to hold or maintain".Braarvig, Jens (1985), p.19 This root is likely derived from the historical Vedic religion of ancient India, where chants and melodious sounds were believed to have innate spiritual and healing powers even if the sound cannot be translated and has no meaning (as in a music). The same root gives dharma or dhamma. According to the East Asian Buddhism studies scholar Paul Copp, some Buddhist communities outside India sometimes refer to dharanis with alternate terms such as "mantra, hṛdaya (hridiya), paritrana (paritta), raksha (Pali: rakkha), gutti, or vidyā" though these terms also have other contextual meanings in Buddhism.
According to the traditional belief in Tibetan texts, states José Ignacio Cabezón, there were three councils and the term dharani was recorded and became the norm after the third council. The first council, according to this belief, compiled the sūtrānta, the Vinaya and the Abhidharma in Vimalabhada to the south of Rajagriha in India. The first council was held in the year Buddha died, but the compiled dhamma consisted of spoken words that were not written down. The second council occurred about 200 years after the death of the Buddha in a grove provided by Ashoka, where the knowledge was compiled again, but it too did not write anything down. The third council gathered in Kashmir a century later, according to the Tibetan tradition, and the teachings were put down in writing for those "who had not obtained the power (dharani) of not-forgetting" because people were reciting corrupted forms of the teachings of the Buddha. In this context, dharani were acknowledged in the Buddhist tradition by about the second century BCE, and they were a memory aid to ground and remember the dharma teachings.
Description The term dharani as used in the history of Mahayana and tantric Buddhism, and its interpretation has been problematic since the mid-19th century, states Ronald Davidson. It was initially understood as "magical formula or phrase", but later studies such as by Lamotte and Berhard interpreted them to be "memory", while Davidson proposes that some dharani are "codes". 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. Burnouf, states Davidson, was the first scholar to realise how important and widespread dharani had been in Buddhism sutras and Mahayana texts. 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.
According to Winternitz, a dharani resembles the incantations found in the Atharvaveda and Yajurveda of Hinduism. The dharani-genre of Buddhist literature includes mantra, states Étienne Lamotte, but they were also a "memory aid" to memorize and chant Buddha's teachings. This practice was linked to concentration (samadhi) and believed to have magical virtues and a means to both spiritual and material karma-related merit making. According to Braarvig, the dharanis are "seemingly meaningless strings of syllables". While they may once have been "memory aids", the dharanis that have survived into the modern era do not match with any text. In later practice, the dharanis were "hardly employed as summaries of doctrine, but were employed as aids to concentration and magical protection benefits".
According to Jan Nattier, Vedic mantras are more ancient than Buddhist dharani, but over time they both were forms of incantations that are quite similar. In the early texts of Buddhism, proposes Nattier, "it would appear that the word dharani was first employed in reference to mnemonic devices used to retain (Skt. "hold") certain elements of Buddhist doctrine in one's memory". In Nattier's view, the term dharani is "peculiar to Buddhism". A dhāraṇī can be a mnemonic to encapsulate the meaning of a section or chapter of a sutra.Nattier 1992, pg. 158 According to the Buddhism-related writer Red Pine, mantra and dharani were originally interchangeable, but at some point dhāraṇī came to be used for meaningful, intelligible phrases, and mantra for syllabic formulae which are not meant to be understood.Pine 2004, pg. 146
According to Robert Buswell and Ronald Davidson, dharani were codes in some Buddhist texts. They appeared at the end of the text, and they may be seen as a coded, distilled summary of Buddhist teachings in the chapters that preceded it. For example, the Vajrasamadhi-sutra – a Korean Buddhist text likely composed in the 7th century by an unknown monk, one important to the Chan and Zen Buddhist tradition in East Asia, the Dharani chapter is the eighth (second last), with a brief conversational epilogue between the Tathagata Buddha and Ananda being the last chapter. This dharani chapter, states Buswell, "encodes (dharayati) the important meanings, without forgetting them, and it reminds and codes the points to remember.
The Indologist Frits Staal who is known for his scholarship on mantras and chants in Indian religions, states the Dharani mantras reflect a continuity of the Vedic mantras. He quotes Wayman to be similarly stressing the view that the Buddhist chants have a "profound debt to the Vedic religion". The Yogacara scholars, states Staal, followed the same classification as one found in the Vedas – arthadharani, dharmadharani and mantradharani, along with express acknowledgment like the Vedas that some "dharani are meaningful and others are meaningless" yet all effective for ritual purposes.
History