. dhāraṇī scriptures 177
consist of little other than these elements. Often such texts are simply
lists of prescriptions for specific ailments or situations.
Over time, however, the authors of dhāraṇī texts embedded their
ritual directives within typical Buddhist scriptural narratives, a prac-
tice that by the late seventh century became standard in the literature.
As Ryūichi Abé has noted, taken in the context of Mahāyāna Buddhist
scriptural literature as a whole, dhāraṇī scriptures of this kind featured
a reversal of the earlier place of dhāraṇīs in narrative sūtras. Whereas
in early Mahāyāna scriptures, such as the Lotus Sūtra, the incantations
are presented as ancillary to the main doctrinal and narrative thrusts of
the texts—usually as protection for those who would chant them and
propound their doctrines—in dhāraṇī sutras this situation is reversed:
the narrative and doctrines of these texts serve as the frameworks for
the incantations, which are their central events and purports.^2
Changes over time in dhāraṇī sūtras extant in Chinese suggest, as
well, a picture of a larger ritual tradition in which small elements of
an originally vast and diffuse landscape of incantations and practices
grew in popularity and came to shape individual and highly popu-
lar traditions of practice and imagination. This is most clear in cases
of particular incantations—or, perhaps more to the point, particular
names of incantations, since the actual syllables associated with these
names, like their practices, proved to be unstable over time. Spells
such as the “Great Peacock King” (Da kongque wang )
the “Wish-Fulfillment” (Suiqiu ; Mahāpratisarā dhāraṇī), and the
“Superlative” (Zunsheng ; Uṣṇīsavijayā dhāraṇ ̣ī), which came to
be the foci of individual cults of great popularity in the late medieval
period, first appeared as relatively unremarkable components of the
large compendia of earlier centuries.^3
The expansion of small ritual components into features emblematic
of specific incantatory traditions is also visible in the transformation
of ritual practice and imagination over the centuries. For example,
the two basic techniques of bodily enchantment (and their attendant
models of efficacy) described in a great many early collections—the
wearing of enchanted objects and the infusion into the body of incan-
tatory power, whether directly by speaking spells into the body or by
(^2) Ryūichi Abé 1999, 166–67.
(^3) For a discussion of this process in regard to the Zunsheng zhou, the Chinese ver-
sion of the Usṇ̣īṣavijayā dhāraṇī, see Ronald Davidson, “Sources and Inspirations:
Esoteric Buddhism in South Asia,” in this volume.