258 martin lehnertand sancti cation of social and imperial order, employing apotropaic
techne for a Buddhist liturgy of state protection.
The traditional narrative of the transmission to China—documented
by Amoghavajra in his Jingangding jing da yujia bimi xindi famen yijue
(Instructions on the Gate of
Teaching about the Secret State of Mind of the Great Yoga, the
Vajra Pinnacle Scripture), a commentary related to the rst part of the
Sarvatathgata-tattvasa graha as abridged and translated by his teacher
Vajrabodhi^38 —serves to validate the promulgators’ legitimacy. Recount-
ing the mythic origin of the secret “root text”, Amoghavajra stressed
the divine and unchangeable truth expressed therein in contrast to the
gradual decline of the Buddhist dharma in India. His purpose being to
testify authenticity, he rendered Vajrabodhi’s oral description of how
these scriptures were nally brought to China:
I (i.e., Vajrabodhi) set forth from the western country to cross the south-
ern ocean in a eet of more than thirty great ships, each one carrying
more than ve or six hundred persons. Once, when all were crossing in
convoy in the very middle of the great ocean we ran into a typhoon.
All the ships were tossed about, and the ship I was on was about to be
inundated. At that time I always kept the two scriptures I was bringing
nearby so that I could receive and keep them and do the offerings. Now,
when the captain saw that the ship was about to sink, everything on board
was cast into the ocean, and in a moment of fright the one-hundred-
thousand-verse text was ung into the ocean, and only the super cial
text was saved. At that time I aroused my mind in meditation. Doing
the technique for eliminating disasters, and the typhoon abated, and for
perhaps more than a quarter mile around the ship, wind and water did
not move. All on board took refuge in me, and bit by bit we got to the
shore and arrived in this country.^39Amoghavajra emphasised that the extant text is merely a fragment of
the lost full-length scripture, “broad and long as a bed, and four or ve
feet thick.”^40 Corroborating the fragmentary condition of the text on
which Vajrabodhi’s translations were based, Amoghavajra composed
a summary indicating content and structure of the full length scrip-
ture, a mythical corpus consisting of 18 assemblies, generally referred
to as the Jingangding jing (Vajra Pinnacle Scripture; Skt.(^38) T.1798.39.808a–821a; T.866.18.223b–253c.
(^39) T.1798.39.808b16–25; tr. Orzech 1995, p. 317.
(^40) T.1798.39.808a26.
HEIRMAN_f9_247-276.indd 258 3/13/2007 6:40:07 PM