(^648) MANICHAEAN LITERATURE
THE GREAT SONG TO MANI
1
MY BUDDHA MANI
O teacher of the original doctrine of the noble Jesus!
We are here to worship and revere you.
O my respected and famous father, my Buddha Mani!
We are here alone
to worship you from our heart of humility.
Be our hope and refuge
and receive the worship of each one of us.
Before you we bow with internal faith.
May each of our prayers be pure.^2
You told us the consequences of evil
... you blocked the road to hell
... preaching good laws.
... You rescued eight kinds of suffering beings
in poisonous savage animals
Unendingly submerged in the dust
of forgetting rebirths
and in a state of poisonous savage animals,
they were always mad.
When the passion of greed^3 poisoned them
and they were dying,
you prepared a medicine for them
from the herb of meditation.
YOU FREED FROM IGNORANCE
AND GAVE WISDOM
They raved in the passion of anger;
they lacked sense or coherent thought
- The Great Song to Mani: translated by Hans-Joachim Klimkeit (Gnosis on the Silk Road:
Gnostic Texts from Central Asia, 280-84); revised in verse by Willis Barnstone. - Of the next eleven lines, which are badly preserved, five line fragments are here given.
- The Pali Buddhist term for greed is lobha (a vice also in Manichaeism), for anger dvesa, for
ignorance moha.