. dhāraṇī scriptures 179
usual sense. The eight-syllable dhāraṇī featured in this text is to be
enacted first of all through a meditative and ethical practice (best
performed in secluded locales such as mountains and marshlands)
centering on the contemplation of the coded meanings of dhāraṇī
syllables, which are to be written out to facilitate the practice. This
practice is closely related to one recommended in a widely-cited pas-
sage in the Bodhisattvabhūmi, which, while not contained within a
dhāraṇī scripture, was clearly representative in its own way of this
contemplative strand of early dhāraṇī practice. After a general dis-
cussion of the bodhisattva’s skill in employing incantatory syllables
(a skill it calls mantra-dhāraṇī), the Bodhisattvabhūmi gives a specific
example of how this skill is employed. It discusses a practice called the
“dhāraṇī in which one attains the patient acceptance of a bodhisat-
tva” (de pusa ren tuoluoni ), or ks ̣ānti-dhāraṇī. In
the Bodhisattvabhūmi, kṣānti-dhāraṇī “consists,” as Jens Braarvig has
explained, “in pondering a mantra until one understands its meaning,
namely that it is without meaning, and accordingly understands all
dharmas as being beyond expression.”^5 Attaining this understanding,
the bodhisattva is able to abide without fear amid the “unarisen,” or
empty-of-essence, phenomenal world, a fearlessness characteristic of
one of the loftiest states of spiritual attainment in Buddhism, and one
associated as well with the dhāraṇī practice of Zhi Qian’s version of
the Anantamukha.
Among the key differences between these early contemplative
dhāraṇīs and their later incantatory cousins is that the “potency” of
the earlier set lies entirely in the contemplative practices that center
on them; the syllables themselves are said to be inert, except as codes
or metaphors. Over time, these early forms of dhāraṇīs, or of man-
tras in dhāraṇī practices, seem to have fallen entirely out of use. Later
translations of the Anantamukha, for example, feature, instead of syl-
lables encoding doctrinal profundities, a dhāraṇī incantation of the
kind familiar from later incantation scriptures, whose potency lies not
in the contemplation of the dhāraṇī but rather is said to inhere in the
syllables themselves.^6
(^5) Braarvig 1985.
(^6) See, for example, Amoghavajra’s (Bukong , 705–774) rendering, the Chu-
sheng wubianmen tuoluoni jing , T. 1009.