The Ocean of Wisdom and the Eleven Faces of Compassion
On the Heart-Dhāraṇī of Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara: its history, its recensions and its meaning
Prelude
The dhāraṇī that begins namo ratnatrayāya and flowers into dhara dhara, dhiri dhiri, dhuru dhuru is genuinely the heart-dhāraṇī of the Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara, attested in Sanskrit, Chinese and Tibetan, and it is far older than the Chinese additions that are sometimes suspected of having produced it. It is one of the oldest living witnesses we possess to the moment when the Great Vehicle began to speak in the language of mantra.
There are texts that are read and texts that are entered. This one is entered. In a few dozen syllables it moves from refuge, through homage to a Buddha whose very name is the Ocean of Wisdom, into the presence of the Great Compassionate One, and then breaks open into sound that no grammar fully contains. Monks in Gilgit copied it on birch bark while the Buddhadharma still flourished in the high valleys of the Karakoram. Translators carried it to the courts of the Northern Zhou and the Tang. Tibetan nuns and laypeople fasting under the vow of Bhikṣuṇī Lakṣmī have chanted it for a thousand years, and in Nara it is still sung each spring in the night-long rite of repentance at the Hall of the Second Month.
This study has three aims. The first is historical: to set out what the witnesses actually say, to distinguish the recensions, and to answer plainly whether the beloved form of the dhāraṇī is Indian in origin or a later accretion. The second is contemplative: to unfold the meaning of every element, from the triple refuge to the final svāhā, and to show why the homage names Jñānasāgara, Vairocana and the King of the Array. The third concerns something about the history of Secret Mantra itself: how such a dhāraṇī, freely given to any person of faith without empowerment, already carries within it the seed-structure from which Secret Mantra would unfold as a tradition of revelation.
Along the way we shall meet the blue throat of Nīlakaṇṭha, the eleven faces that echo the eleven Rudras, the queen who is the Ocean of Wisdom that would one day be born in Tibet, and a ritual architecture that already contains, in miniature, the whole later edifice of mantra practice.
The Witnesses: History and Attested Sources
The Ekādaśamukha, the scripture of the Eleven-Faced One, survives in a Sanskrit manuscript, in four Chinese renderings spanning two centuries, and in the Tibetan canon. No other dhāraṇī of Avalokiteśvara, save the six syllables of the Kāraṇḍavyūha, is attested so early and so widely.
The Gilgit manuscript
The oldest physical witness is a Sanskrit manuscript recovered from the stūpa deposit at Gilgit, a library hidden in the sixth or seventh century in the Buddhist kingdom of Palola. Its scribe wrote a rough and uneven Sanskrit, yet the frame of the scripture is entirely clear. The Blessed One dwells at Śrāvastī. Avalokiteśvara approaches surrounded by countless hundreds of thousands of millions of vidyādharas, holders of the esoteric sciences, and announces that he possesses a heart-essence, a hṛdaya, called Eleven-Faced, proclaimed by Buddhas for eleven koṭis of aeons. He will speak it for the welfare and happiness of all beings: to calm every illness, to turn back sin, misfortune and evil dreams, to avert untimely death, to bring the faithless to faith, and to pacify every obstructing power.
He then recounts its lineage. Aeons as numerous as the sands of the Gaṅgā ago, he heard it from a Tathāgata whose name the manuscript gives in a magnificent compound, the King of Rays whose hundred lotus-eyes and crown are unobstructed; at the very moment of receiving it, all the Buddhas of the ten directions turned their faces toward him and he attained the patient acceptance of unarisen phenomena. Ten Gaṅgā-aeons earlier still, as a householder, he had received it from the Tathāgata Mandāravagandha, and through it turned back forty thousand aeons of saṃsāra and obtained the liberation called the Womb of Wisdom of the Compassionate Way.
The practice is stated with striking simplicity. A faithful son or daughter of good family should accomplish this heart with reverence and an undistracted mind, rising at dawn and repeating it one hundred and eight times. Ten benefits in this life follow: freedom from disease, the protection of all Tathāgatas, inexhaustible wealth and grain, the subduing of enemies, honour in the royal assembly, immunity from poison, fever and weapons, safety from water and fire, and freedom from untimely death. Four further fruits ripen at death: the vision of the Tathāgatas, no fall into the lower realms, no death by calamity, and birth in Amitābha’s Pureland of Bliss. Whoever keeps the fast on the fourteenth or fifteenth day of the lunar fortnight, dedicating it to Avalokiteśvara, turns back forty thousand aeons of saṃsāra. Even to call his name equals in merit the calling of the names of hundreds of thousands of millions of Buddhas.
The Buddha praises him, and Avalokiteśvara rises, bares one shoulder, bows at the Buddha's feet and speaks the heart. In the Gilgit text the homage is brief: namo ratnatrayāya, namo vairocanāya tathāgatāya, nama āryāvalokiteśvarāya bodhisattvāya mahāsattvāya mahākāruṇikāya, namaḥ atītānāgatapratyutpannebhyaḥ sarvatathāgatebhyo 'rhadbhyaḥ samyaksaṃbuddhebhyaḥ. The mantra follows: oṃ dhara dhara dhiri dhiri dhuru dhuru iṭṭe viṭṭe cale cale pracale pracale kusume kusumavare ili mili viṭi svāhā. The scribe closes it with the words evaṃ mūlamantraḥ, “thus the root-mantra."
What follows in the manuscript is as important as the dhāraṇī itself. A sequence of subsidiary mantras accompanies each phase of a ritual: one for bathing, rinsing and robing; one for offering incense and lamps; one for offering perfume and flowers; one for the torma or bali offering, recited twenty-one times; one for the fire offering, with instructions to kindle the fire and offer curd, honey and ghee; one for binding the boundary with water, ash or mustard seed; and finally a mantra of dismissal: gaccha gaccha bhagavān [sic] āryāvalokiteśvara svabhavanam, “go, go, Blessed Noble Avalokiteśvara, to your own abode." We shall return to this architecture, for it is the hidden key to the whole history.
Yaśogupta and the Northern Zhou
The first Chinese translation was made not by Xuanzang, as is often said, but by the Gandhāran monk Yaśogupta at the court of the Northern Zhou, around 570, under the title Scripture of the Divine Vidyā of the Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara Spoken by the Buddha. The setting moves to the Vulture Peak at Rājagṛha, but the narrative is the same. Crucially, Yaśogupta's phonetic transcription already contains the expanded homage: after the three jewels it reads namo jñānasāgara, vairocanāya tathāgatāya. The Ocean of Wisdom was therefore present in an Indian manuscript carried to China within a generation or two of the Gilgit copy. Yaśogupta's heart also preserves a fuller ending than Gilgit, with ili mili citi followed by a phrase ending in āpanāya, and an address to the bodhisattva, the great compassionate one, before svāhā.
Yaśogupta's text also gives the classic instructions for the image, repeated by Xuanzang: an image carved of fine white sandalwood, a Chinese foot and three inches high, with eleven faces. The three faces in front are compassionate, the three on the left wrathful, the three on the right peaceful with white tusks emerging upward, the one at the back laughing a great and terrifying laugh, and the uppermost a Buddha's face. Here, in a scripture the Chinese recorded in the sixth century, the whole emotional range of the later wrathful and peaceful deities is already gathered into a single form of compassion.
Atikūṭa’s Collection of Dhāraṇīs
In 653 and 654 the Central Indian master Atikūṭa translated, at Chang'an, a vast Collection of Dhāraṇīs, a compendium of ritual manuals. Its fourth fascicle contains an Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara scripture with a much more elaborate ritual of altar, image, consecration of the practitioner and fire offering. This is the clearest witness that already in the early seventh century the Eleven-Faced cult in India had a fully developed manual tradition alongside the simpler scripture.
Xuanzang
In 656 Xuanzang, returned from Nālandā, translated the Heart-Scripture of the Eleven-Faced Divine Vidyā. The scene is again Śrāvastī. Avalokiteśvara arrives surrounded by countless vidyādhara (the vidyā-holding) sages, and the past Buddha from whom he received the spell is named the King of Light Blazing with Virtue, with Hundred Lotus Eyes and Unobstructed Crown. Avalokiteśvara says that at that time he was a great sage, a ṛṣi. Xuanzang's text was soon commented upon by his disciples, including Huizhao, which shows how seriously the scholastic tradition of Nālandā's Chinese heirs regarded this dhāraṇī.
Amoghavajra
A century later Amoghavajra, the great teacher of the Tang esoteric school, produced the Ritual Scripture for Reciting the Heart Secret Words of the Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara in three fascicles. The scene now moves to Mount Potalaka, Avalokiteśvara's own palace, and the material has been absorbed into the fully systematised liturgy of the Yoga tantras, with mudrās, envisioning and the identification of practitioner and deity. His Sanskrit gives the homage in its fullest form, nama āryajñānasāgaravairocanavyūharājāya, and his mantra ends ili mili ciri citi jvalam apanaya paramaśuddhasattva mahākāruṇika svāhā.
The Tibetan canon
The Tibetan Kangyur preserves The Dhāraṇī of the Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara, translated from Sanskrit, in two places: in the section of Kriyā tantras and again in the collection of dhāraṇīs. Beside it stands a longer and distinct work, The Dhāraṇī of the Essence of the Vidyā of the Eleven-Faced One. Through the Bhikṣuṇī Lakṣmī, called Gelongma Palmo, a royal nun of Kashmir or Oḍḍiyāna who was healed of leprosy through the practice of the Eleven-Faced, Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara, the dhāraṇī entered the great Tibetan fasting practice of smyung gnas. The Tibetan recitation text is the form now most widely chanted on earth:
namo ratnatrayāya, nama ārya-jñānasāgara-vairocana-vyūharājāya tathāgatāya arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya, namaḥ sarvatathāgatebhyaḥ arhatebhyaḥ samyaksaṃbuddhebhyaḥ, nama āryāvalokiteśvarāya bodhisattvāya mahāsattvāya mahākāruṇikāya, tadyathā: oṃ dhara dhara dhiri dhiri dhuru dhuru iṭṭe vaṭṭe cale cale pracale pracale kusume kusumavare ili mili citi jvalam āpanāya svāhā.
It is no accident that the fasting days of the Gilgit scripture, the fourteenth and fifteenth of the fortnight, became in Gelongma Palmo's lineage the two days of the smyung gnas. The whole Himalayan fasting tradition is already sketched in a single sentence of the Indian sūtra.
Indian or Chinese? Weighing the Recensions
The dhāraṇī is not a Chinese addition. It stands at the very centre of the Indian scripture as its mūlamantra or root-mantra, and every element of the popular form except a short closing epithet is attested in witnesses translated directly from Sanskrit. What the witnesses show is not invention but growth: a short Indian recension and a longer Indian recension, both circulating by the sixth century.
Three observations settle the question. First, the Gilgit manuscript, copied on Indian soil and never touched by a Chinese hand, contains the heart of the dhāraṇī from oṃ dhara dhara to svāhā and names it the root-mantra of the Eleven-Faced One. The core is therefore securely Indian. Second, Yaśogupta's transcription, made around 570 from a manuscript brought out of Gandhāra, already invokes the Ocean of Wisdom before Vairocana. The expanded homage was therefore present in Indian manuscripts within the same century as the Gilgit copy. Third, the Tibetan translation, made independently from Sanskrit in a different land and a different century, gives the full name Jñānasāgara-Vairocana-Vyūharāja and the ending citi jvalam āpanāya. When a Chinese line and a Tibetan line, translated from separate Sanskrit exemplars, agree on a reading the Gilgit scribe lacks, the reading belongs to an Indian recension.
The witnesses thus fall into a clear sequence. The short recension, best seen at Gilgit, honours Vairocana simply as Tathāgata and ends ili mili viṭi svāhā. The long recension, seen in Yaśogupta, in the Tang transcriptions and in the Tibetan Kangyur, expands the Buddha's name into Jñānasāgara-Vairocana-Vyūharāja, adds the formal epithets arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya, and lengthens the close into ili mili citi jvalam āpanāya. Amoghavajra's ritual recension, finally, adds a vocative address, paramaśuddhasattva mahākāruṇika, “O supremely pure being, O great compassionate one," before svāhā. Only this last element might reasonably be called a later liturgical expansion, and even it has a seed in Yaśogupta's address to the bodhisattva, the great compassionate one.
The variant readings are themselves instructive. Where Gilgit has iṭṭe viṭṭe, the Tibetan has iṭṭe vaṭṭe and the Chinese transcriptions ite vate. Where the Tibetan reads kusumavare, Amoghavajra reads kusumavale, for r and l interchange freely in the Prakrit-coloured Sanskrit of the dhāraṇīs. Where the Tibetan reads jvalam, Amoghavajra reads jaram, which can be heard as jvaram. These are not corruptions to be smoothed away but the living breath of a text that was always sung before it was written, and whose phonetic shape mattered more than its spelling.
One must therefore say both things together. The form that is chanted today in the Himalaya and sung across East Asia is a genuine Indian recension of the Eleven-Faced heart-dhāraṇī. It is not, however, the only Indian form, and the austere Gilgit reading, with its simple homage to Vairocana, preserves an earlier or at least a more concise state of the same text.
Eleven Faces and the Blue Throat: Two Dhāraṇīs of One Compassion
The Eleven-Faced heart-dhāraṇī and the Nīlakaṇṭha dhāraṇī are two distinct Indian texts, and the confusion between them arises because both came to belong to the same figure: the Eleven-Faced, Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara. In East Asia the sung form of the Eleven-Faced dhāraṇī is very often labelled “the Great Compassion Mantra in Sanskrit" or “the Tibetan Great Compassion Mantra," though the Great Compassion Mantra of the Chinese liturgy is a different text altogether.
The Nīlakaṇṭha dhāraṇī, “the dhāraṇī of the Blue-Throated One," is the heart of the Scripture of the Thousand-Handed, Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara's Vast, Perfect, Unobstructed Great Compassionate Heart Dhāraṇī, translated by the Indian monk Bhagavaddharma in the mid-seventh century. Recited every morning in Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese monasteries, it opens namo ratnatrayāya, nama āryāvalokiteśvarāya bodhisattvāya mahāsattvāya mahākāruṇikāya and then calls Avalokiteśvara by names that every Indian listener would have recognised as names of the great deities: nīlakaṇṭha, the Blue-Throated; hari, a name of Viṣṇu; the bearer of the discus, the conch and the club; the lion-faced and the boar-faced; the one who wears a black serpent as his sacred thread and a tiger-skin as his garment. Amoghavajra's Sanskrit transcription of the same dhāraṇī and the ritual scriptures of the Blue-Throated Avalokiteśvara preserve this imagery with great precision, and the Tibetan canon received its version of the thousand-armed scripture through a translation made from the Chinese at Dunhuang.
The Eleven-Faced heart contains none of these epithets. It names no god, no weapon, no animal face. Its homage is to the three jewels, to a Tathāgata, to all Buddhas and to the bodhisattva, and its heart is pure sonorous supplication. Nīlakaṇṭha is therefore not a word of the Eleven-Faced dhāraṇī.
Yet the two belong together in the iconography and in practice, and this is why they converge. The Eleven-Faced One became, in India itself, the head of the Thousand-Armed One: eleven faces crown a body with a thousand arms, each palm holding an eye. The Tibetan lineage of Bhikṣuṇī Lakṣmī recites the Eleven-Faced long dhāraṇī as the dhāraṇī of the Thousand-Armed form. The East Asian tradition recites the Nīlakaṇṭha as the dhāraṇī of the same Thousand-Armed form. The same body of compassion is thus approached through two different mouths. A practitioner who knows both is not confusing two traditions but standing before one presence from two sides.
There is a deeper kinship too. Both dhāraṇīs open with the same refuge and the same address to the Great Compassionate One, and both pass, after tadyathā and oṃ, into chains of reduplicated syllables that call the deity down. The Nīlakaṇṭha's sara sara, siri siri, suru suru is the sister of the Eleven-Faced dhara dhara, dhiri dhiri, dhuru dhuru, built on the identical vowel ladder of a, i, u. They are two expressions of one Indian liturgical grammar of invoking the embodiment of compassion.
The Blue Throat: Avalokiteśvara and Śiva
The Blue-Throated Avalokiteśvara and the Blue-Throated Śiva share a single gesture: each takes the world's poison into himself so that the world may live. This is the meeting-point of the two traditions, and it explains why the Buddhist bodhisattva could wear the god's epithet without being reduced to him.
The Purāṇas and the Mahābhārata tell how gods and asuras churned the ocean of milk for the nectar of immortality. Before the nectar rose, there rose the hālāhala, a poison so fierce that it threatened to burn the three worlds. From compassion, Śiva drank it. The divine mother Umā pressed his throat so that it would not descend, and the poison remained there, staining it blue. Thus he is Nīlakaṇṭha: the one who neither rejects the poison nor is destroyed by it, but holds it in his throat.
To a Mahāyāna eye this is the whole of bodhisattva practice in one image. The Bodhicaryāvatāra asks that the suffering of all beings ripen upon oneself; the practice of exchanging self and other breathes in the dark smoke of others' suffering and breathes out light. Avalokiteśvara Nīlakaṇṭha is that practice made visible. The blue throat is compassion that has swallowed the world's poison and turned it into the sound of mantra.
The Buddhist texts were fully aware of this intimate connection with the late-Vedic fold. The Kāraṇḍavyūha describes Avalokiteśvara as emanating the late-Vedic deities themselves: from his forehead arises Maheśvara, from his shoulders Brahmā, from his heart Nārāyaṇa, from his eyes the sun and moon. In the same scripture Maheśvara and Umā are tamed, receive prophecy, and are predicted to become Buddhas. Maheśvara is honoured as an emanation within the field of a bodhisattva's compassion. Even the name expresses this. The older form attested in Central Asian manuscripts of the Lotus Sūtra is Avalokitasvara, “the one who perceives sounds (with compassion)," which the Chinese rendered as “Perceiver of the World's Sounds." The later form, Avalokiteśvara, joins avalokita, “looking (with compassion)," with īśvara, "lord," the very title by which Śiva is worshipped as Maheśvara.
The eleven faces themselves resonate with late-Vedic, early Śaiva cosmology, where the Rudras are eleven in number. Whether or not the iconographers of the Eleven-Faced One intended the echo, a seventh-century Indian devotee could not have missed it. Yet the Buddhist form transforms what it borrows: its topmost face is not a god's but a Buddha's, its wrathful faces serve the subjugation of afflictions, and its laughing face at the back laughs at the illusion of saṁsāra, of a self that would hold on. This laughing face would — later, or from the very start — be Hayagrīva, something still echoed in our Root-Teacher’s Avalokiteśvara terma “The Great Compassionate One”, from his fresh revelation, the Pema Nyingthig terma cycle.
The later Secret Mantra traditions would carry this dialogue to its height. In the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha Vajrapāṇi as Trailokyavijaya tames Maheśvara, who becomes ashes and is reborn as a Buddha; in the great Mahāyoga cycles the charnel ground ornaments of Śaiva ascetics become the dress of Heruka. And from the other side, the Kashmir Śaiva masters would speak of consciousness as the free ground of all manifestation. Śiva and Avalokiteśvara thus look at one another across a long history of mutual borrowing. The Eleven-Faced dhāraṇī belongs to this world, but its own speech is wholly Buddhist.
The Text: The Common Recension and Its Variants
The form most widely chanted today, in the Himalayan fasting practice and in the sung versions heard across East Asia, is the long Indian recension preserved in the Tibetan Kangyur. It falls naturally into four movements: refuge, homage to the Buddha, homage to all Buddhas and to the bodhisattva, and the heart itself.
The refuge
namo ratnatrayāya
Homage to the Three Jewels.
Homage to the Tathāgata
nama ārya-jñānasāgara-vairocana-vyūharājāya tathāgatāya arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya
Homage to the noble Ocean of Wisdom, King of the Array of Vairocana, the Tathāgata, the Arhat, the perfectly and completely awakened Buddha.
Homage to all Buddhas
namaḥ sarvatathāgatebhyaḥ arhatebhyaḥ samyaksaṃbuddhebhyaḥ
Homage to all the Tathāgatas, the Arhat, the perfectly and completely awakened Buddhas.
Homage to the bodhisattva
nama āryāvalokiteśvarāya bodhisattvāya mahāsattvāya mahākāruṇikāya
Homage to the noble Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva, the great being, the great compassionate one.
The heart
tadyathā: oṃ dhara dhara dhiri dhiri dhuru dhuru iṭṭe vaṭṭe cale cale pracale pracale kusume kusumavare ili mili citi jvalam āpanāya svāhā
Thus: oṃ. Hold, hold; sustain, sustain; bear, bear. Rise and spread. O moving one, O moving one; O one who moves forth, O one who moves forth. O flower, O most excellent of flowers. ili mili, O awareness; take away the burning. svāhā.
The principal variants across the witnesses are these. The Gilgit manuscript gives the homage simply as namo vairocanāya tathāgatāya, places the homage to the bodhisattva before the homage to all Buddhas, and expands the latter to the Buddhas “of past, future and present," atītānāgatapratyutpannebhyaḥ. It omits tadyathā, reads iṭṭe viṭṭe, and closes ili mili viṭi svāhā. Yaśogupta's sixth-century Chinese gives jñānasāgara before Vairocana and closes with ili mili citi, a phrase in āpanāya, and an address to the bodhisattva, the great compassionate one. Amoghavajra's eighth-century ritual gives the full name with vyūharāja, reads ite vate, śale praśale for cale pracale in some transcriptions, kusumavale, iri viri ciriti or ili mili ciri citi, jaram apanaya or jvalam apanaya, and adds paramaśuddhasattva mahākāruṇika before svāhā. Some Tibetan recitation texts write kusume kusume vare where others write kusume kusumavare; some read buddharājāya where most read vyūharājāya.
None of these variants changes the shape of the dhāraṇī. Each preserves the same descent: from refuge, through the Buddha whose name is an ocean, to the compassionate bodhisattva, and from there into the living, trembling speech of the heart.
The Homage: Why the Ocean, Why Vairocana, Why the King of the Array
The Buddha honoured in the second line is not a vague abstraction of radiance but a single Tathāgata, named in one great compound: Ārya-Jñānasāgara-Vairocana-Vyūharāja. The Gilgit reading namo vairocanāya tathāgatāya proves that the name refers to the Tathāgata Vairocana, and the longer recension unfolds what that name contains. Each member deserves to be contemplated on its own and then heard again as one.
namo ratnatrayāya: the ground of refuge
Every dhāraṇī of the Great Vehicle begins where the path begins. Namaḥ, before a vowel namo, is the bow of body, speech and mind, the gesture that releases the self's claim to stand at the centre. Ratnatraya is the threefold jewel: Buddha, Dharma and Saṅgha. The dative suffix transformed into -āya means “to" or "for," so the phrase is not a statement but an offering. Before any power is asked for, the reciter places himself under the protection of what is truly trustworthy. In this the dhāraṇī already teaches that mantra without refuge is useless, and mantra with refuge is Dharma.
ārya: the noble one
Ārya marks the one who has seen reality directly, who has crossed into the path of seeing. It is the same word that names the four noble truths. To call a Buddha ārya is to honour him not as a deity to be propitiated but as one who has seen what we too must see.
jñānasāgara: the ocean of wisdom
Jñāna is primordial knowing, the wisdom that does not think about reality but is its luminous awareness. Sāgara is the ocean, and in Indian poetry the ocean has three qualities above all: depth that cannot be sounded, breadth that cannot be crossed, and the capacity to receive every river without overflowing or being changed in taste. The Avataṃsaka speaks of the ocean of wisdom of the Buddhas into which all streams of practice flow, and the Ratnagotravibhāga describes the qualities of the awakened state as an ocean of jewels. A Buddha whose name is Ocean of Wisdom is one whose knowing receives all phenomena without being stirred, as the sea receives the Gaṅgā and the Sindhu and yet remains one taste. Jñānasāgara, when turned into a feminine Jñānasāgarā, is Yeshe Tsogyal.
vairocana: the radiant one
Vairocana derives from vi- and √ruc, “to shine," and means “belonging to the one who shines forth in all directions," the sun-like illuminator. In the Avataṃsaka and the Brahmajāla of the East Asian tradition, Vairocana is the Buddha of the Dharmakāya whose light pervades the boundless world-systems. In the later Mahāvairocana and in the Yoga tantras he becomes the centre of the maṇḍala, the Buddha of the tathāgata family, the embodiment of the wisdom of the dharmadhātu. The Eleven-Faced dhāraṇī stands at the doorway between these two worlds: it honours Vairocana in a scripture not yet explicitly organised around a maṇḍala, yet already reaching for the Buddha who is the space of the maṇḍala itself.
Why should the heart of Avalokiteśvara be preceded by Vairocana rather than by Amitābha, his familiar lord? The answer lies in the structure of the homage. Amitābha is the Buddha of Avalokiteśvara's family, but Vairocana is the Buddha of totality, the sun from which every family's light derives. By invoking Vairocana first, the dhāraṇī declares that Avalokiteśvara's compassion is nothing other than the all-pervading light of the dharmakāya appearing as a face turned toward suffering. The rays of Vairocana are the rays of compassion, and the sūtra's own past Buddha, the King of Rays with Hundred Lotus-Eyes, makes the same point in another key.
vyūharāja: the king of the array
Vyūha is a word of great richness. It means an arrangement, an array, a magnificent display. It names the battle formation of an army, the ornamented arrangement of a buddhafield, and, in the Pāñcarātra, the emanated forms of the supreme god. In the titles of the great Mahāyāna scriptures it recurs again and again: the Sukhāvatīvyūha, the array of the Land of Bliss; the Gaṇḍavyūha, the array of the flower-garland of Sudhana's pilgrimage; the Kāraṇḍavyūha, the array of the basket in which Avalokiteśvara's own qualities are revealed. Tibetan renders it with bkod pa, the same word that names the array of that most beautiful of all the Seventeen Dzogchen tantras Nor bu phra bkod, the Array of Jewels.
A king of the array is therefore one who presides over the manifested display of awakening: the buddhafields, the emanations, the forms of compassion arrayed across the ten directions. Here lies the profound fittingness of this name before the Eleven-Faced One. The eleven faces are themselves a vyūha, an array of compassion: peaceful, wrathful, fanged, laughing and awakened, arranged in tiers around a single crown. The thousand arms that later spread from that body are a vyūha. And the Buddha who is King of that array is the radiant ocean of wisdom from which all such appearances arise.
The name as a whole
Heard as one compound, the name reveals a complete teaching on the nature of mind and its display. Jñānasāgara is the ground: the oceanic, unmoving depth of primordial knowing. Vairocana is its nature: luminous, self-radiant, shining in all directions. Vyūharāja is its display: the sovereign manifestation of forms, fields and emanations. The Great Perfection would later speak of the same three as essence, nature and compassionate energy: empty essence, luminous nature and all-pervading responsiveness. To the contemplative ear of a practitioner of the Great Perfection, it is astonishing that an Indian dhāraṇī already names its Buddha in precisely this order: ocean, light, array.
tathāgatāya arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya
The three epithets complete the homage with the classic titles of a Buddha. Tathāgata is the one thus gone and thus come, gone into suchness and come forth from it. Arhat is the worthy one, the one who has seen reality and overcome the enemy of affliction. Samyaksaṃbuddha is the perfectly and completely awakened one. The Ocean of Wisdom is the very same awakening that the Lord Śākyamuni realised beneath the Bodhi tree.
namaḥ sarvatathāgatebhyaḥ
The homage then opens out to all the Tathāgatas, the Worthy Ones, the fully awakened, and in the Gilgit reading to all those of past, future and present. A single Buddha is honoured, and then the whole field of Buddhas, for one Buddha's awakening is the awakening of all.
nama āryāvalokiteśvarāya bodhisattvāya mahāsattvāya mahākāruṇikāya
Now the dhāraṇī turn to Avalokiteśvara, and it does so with four titles that move from his name to his heart. Ārya-avalokita-īśvara is the noble lord who looks upon the world (with compassion), or, in the older form, the one who perceives its cries. Bodhisattva is the being bent on awakening. Mahāsattva is the great being, whose courage has become vast. Mahākāruṇika is the great compassionate one, the one whose very nature is karuṇā. The homage ends here, at compassion, and from compassion the heart will break forth.
Jñānasāgara and Yeshe Tsogyal
The Sanskrit name that the terma tradition gives to Yeshe Tsogyal is Jñānasāgara (grammatically correct would be Jñānasāgarā in the feminine), and this is not a loose poetic gloss but a precise equivalence. Ye shes is the standard Tibetan rendering of jñāna; mtsho, the lake or sea, renders sāgara; and rgyal, victorious or sovereign, answers to the royal element of a large expanse of water (“king of waters”, i.e. the ocean). When Tibetan translators rendered the dhāraṇī's Buddha-name into their own tongue, they had to use exactly these words: wisdom, ocean and king. The name of the Mother of the Secret Mantra of Tibet and the name of the Buddha honoured in the Eleven-Faced dhāraṇī are woven from the same three threads.
The treasure literature tells that at her birth a lake beside her family's house swelled and overflowed, and for this she was named Tsogyal, Queen of the Lake. In the Copper Island biography of Guru Padmasambhava, which the tradition records as written down by her, and in the biographies of her own life revealed as treasure, she is the one endowed with unforgetting memory, who received every word of the Lotus-Born, wrote it in the symbolic script of the ḍākinīs, and concealed it in rocks, lakes and the sky of mind for future generations. Her name is therefore not an ornament but her vocation. She is the ocean into which the whole river of Padmasambhava's teaching poured and in which it was kept without loss, as the ocean receives every river without overflowing.
This is precisely the quality that makes an ocean the image of jñāna in the dhāraṇī. The Ocean of Wisdom is one whose knowing receives all things without disturbance and gives them back without diminishment. Yeshe Tsogyal is that ocean in the form of the immortal woman and lineage holder. The terma tradition speaks of the gter, the treasure, as something sealed within the expanse of a disciple's mind and later rising from it as from the depths of a lake. How else could such treasures be hidden but by the ocean of wisdom?
There is a further harmony that deepens the connection. Yeshe Tsogyal is revered as an emanation of Tārā, and Tārā, in the most widely told story of her origin, was born from a tear of Avalokiteśvara, shed as he wept for all beings who suffered. The heart of the Eleven-Faced dhāraṇī is filled with feminine vocatives: cale, pracale, kusume, kusumavare, all addressed to a feminine presence. When we chant nama ārya-jñānasāgara, the heart infused by Secret Mantra and the Luminous Great Perfection may well hear in it an early echo of a homage to the Ocean of Wisdom, to the Noble Lady, the Princess who would one day take birth in Kharchen as the Wisdom Lake Queen, and in the feminine cadences that follow, the echo of the compassionate one whose tear became Tārā in a distant aeon.
It must be said with care: the Indian compilers of the dhāraṇī were not thinking of an eighth-century Tibetan woman. Yet the Great Perfection teaches that names spoken from awakening are not arbitrary labels but symbols in which the meaning is self-revealing. In the Ocean of Wisdom, radiant and sovereign over the array of appearance, the sūtra names the dharmakāya; in Yeshe Tsogyal, the same ocean takes form as the ḍākinī who holds the treasures of that dharmakāya for all who come after. To recite this dhāraṇī as a Nyingma practitioner is thus to honour, under a single name Jñānasāgara, the Buddha of the ocean of wisdom and the Mother through whom that ocean reached Tibet.
The Heart: An Exposition, Syllable by Syllable
The heart of the dhāraṇī is not meaningless, but its meaning works on three levels at once: the grammatical sense of the Sanskrit forms, the sonic architecture of vowels and repetitions, and the contemplative sense that the tradition has drawn from both. A student who holds all three together will hear it as its first reciters heard it, as speech that both says and does.
tadyathā: “it is thus”
Tadyathā means “namely" or “it is like this." It is the hinge of almost every Mahāyāna dhāraṇī, for example, the mantra of the Heart Sūtra: tadyathā gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Everything before it is spoken in ordinary language, the language of homage. Everything after it is spoken in another register. Tadyathā is the threshold where explanation ends and the mantra itself begins. It says: what follows is not a description of awakened compassion; it is that very compassionate energy now embodied as reverberating sound.
oṃ: the primordial syllable
Oṃ is the most ancient of all sacred sounds in India, the syllable with which the Vedic hymns begin and end, analysed by the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad into four parts: a, u and m and the silence beyond them. In Buddhist mantra it does not name a creator but opens the field of awakened body, speech, mind, and primordial awareness. In the later Secret Mantra it is white, the syllable of the body of all Buddhas, placed at the crown or forehead. Here it is the first sound of the heart, gathering the whole homage into one vibrating seed before the dhāraṇī unfolds.
dhara dhara: “hold, hold”
Dhara is the imperative of the root √dhṛ, "to hold, to bear, to sustain, to support." It can also be heard as the vocative of dharā, “the bearer," a name of the earth. The repetition intensifies it: hold fast, hold fast. This root is the most important in the whole vocabulary of the Dharma. Dharma itself is from √dhṛ: that which holds, upholds and supports. Dhāraṇī is from √dhṛ: that which holds the meaning, the memory, the protective power. So the very first word of the heart is the dhāraṇī naming its own nature. Dhara dhara means: be the one who holds; hold me; hold all beings; and let this dhāraṇī hold its meaning within my mind.
The classical teaching on dhāraṇī distinguishes four kinds: the dhāraṇī of words, which retains teachings without forgetting; the dhāraṇī of meaning, which retains their sense; the dhāraṇī of mantra, which protects beings; and the dhāraṇī that brings acceptance of non-arising. Dhara dhara invokes all four at once. It is a plea to Avalokiteśvara to hold beings in compassion and a reminder that the practitioner, too, is to become a holder.
dhiri dhiri, dhuru dhuru: the ladder of vowels
Here grammar yields to music. Dhiri and dhuru are not ordinary Sanskrit words. They are the same consonant frame carried through the three primal vowels of the Sanskrit alphabet: a, i, u. Indian phonetic science regarded these three as the root vowels from which all others derive. Dhara, dhiri, dhuru is therefore a complete gesture in sound: the open a, the bright and rising i, the deep and rounded u. The same ladder appears in the Nīlakaṇṭha dhāraṇī's sara sara, siri siri, suru suru and in countless other dhāraṇīs. The Vedic seers already said that the gods love what is hidden (parokṣa-priyā iva hi devāḥ), and this vocalic variation was felt to impel the deity to descend.
The contemplative tradition reads the three in many ways. One may hear in them the movement of compassion through body, speech and mind. One may hear in a the syllable of the unborn, which the Mahāvairocana and the Prajñāpāramitā's arapacana alphabet teach as the gate of the realisation that all things are unborn from the beginning; in i the rising of luminosity; in u its fullness returning to the ground. Or one may hear the three as a progressive deepening of a single plea: hold, sustain, bear up to the end. What matters is that the reciter does not merely understand but resonates. The ladder of vowels is a ladder down which compassion descends and up which the mind ascends.
iṭṭe vaṭṭe: rise and spread
These words are the most obscure of the dhāraṇī, and the variants show it: iṭṭe viṭṭe in the Gilgit manuscript, iṭṭe vaṭṭe in the Tibetan, ite vate in the Chinese. They are feminine vocative or locative forms in -e, the ending that runs through the rest of the heart. Some have related iṭṭe to forms of √iṣ, “to desire," or to the Prakrit of iṣṭe, “O desired one," and vaṭṭe to vartate, “turning" or “abiding." No such derivation is certain, and honesty requires saying so. The doubling of the dental-retroflex sound, ṭṭ, gives them a percussive quality, like a drum struck twice. If one seeks a contemplative sense, they can be heard as the moment where the energy that has been called down begins to turn and spread through the body and the world: what is desired, turning; what is invoked, abiding.
cale cale, pracale pracale: “O moving one”
Here the grammar becomes clear again. Cale is the vocative of calā, “the moving one," from √cal, "to move, to stir, to tremble." Pracale adds the prefix pra-, “forth, forward, intensely": “O one who moves forth, O one who stirs mightily." The same words appear in the dhāraṇī of Cundī, oṃ cale cule cunde svāhā, and the same pattern is heard in Tārā's tāre tuttāre ture. They address the feminine power, the active, dynamic aspect of compassion, which does not sit in serene detachment but moves toward suffering wherever it is.
The parallel with the Heart Sūtra is exact and illuminating. Gate gate pāragate: “O gone, gone, gone beyond." Cale cale pracale: “O moving, moving, moving forth." In both, a feminine vocative is doubled and then intensified with a prefix. The Heart Sūtra's mantra moves toward the other shore of wisdom; the Eleven-Faced heart moves toward this shore of beings. One is the crossing of prajñā, the other the return of karuṇā. Recited together, they are the two directions of the bodhisattva's single path.
kusume kusumavare: “O flower, O most excellent of flowers”
Kusuma means flower, and also blossom and fruit. Kusume is its feminine vocative or locative: “O flower-one," or “in the flower." Kusumavare joins kusuma with vara, “best, excellent," and also “boon, gift": “O most excellent among flowers," or “O you who bestow the boon of flowers." In Amoghavajra's transcription it is kusumavale, by the interchange of r and l.
The image is inexhaustible. Avalokiteśvara is Padmapāṇi, the lotus-holder; the lotus is the flower that grows from mud without being stained, as compassion arises within saṃsāra without being defiled by it. The Avataṃsaka is the Flower Garland, and Vairocana's world is the Ocean of the Lotus-Treasury. Flowers are the first offering in every Indian ritual, and the Gilgit scripture itself prescribes a mantra for offering them. And the flower is the moment of opening: the heart of the practitioner, closed like a bud, opens under the warmth of compassion. Kusume kusumavare addresses Avalokiteśvara as the flowering of awakening itself and asks that same flowering for the one who recites.
ili mili: the hidden syllables
Ili mili belongs to the rhyming pairs that recur throughout the dhāraṇī literature: ili mili, hili mili, kili mili, tili tili. The Gilgit scripture itself contains a lamp mantra ili mili tili tili hili svāhā. Such pairs are not translatable, and they are not meant to be. Indian tradition knew them as mantrapada, words of power whose efficacy does not depend on their lexical sense. They are the point where language turns into pure vibration, like the sound of bells or the rustling of leaves. They remind the reciter that the deepest layer of mantra is not understood but entered.
citi: awareness
With citi the dhāraṇī turns again toward meaning. Citi is a feminine noun from √cit, “to perceive, to know, to be aware": consciousness, understanding, awareness. In the vocative it is “O awareness." The Gilgit reading viṭi may preserve an older sonic form or a scribal variant; Amoghavajra's ciri citi doubles the sound in the pattern of what precedes. But the Tibetan and Yaśogupta's reading citi yields a word of extraordinary depth, and centuries later the Kashmir master Kṣemarāja would open his Heart of Recognition with the sentence citiḥ svatantrā viśvasiddhihetuḥ: “Awareness, free in itself, is the cause of the accomplishment of the universe." My intuition is, however, that citi in our dhāraṇī here was, like ili mili simply a mantrapada.
For a practitioner of the Great Perfection, nevertheless — if understood as an actual Sanskrit word — citi is very close to rig pa, the self-knowing awareness that is the ground of all. The Tantrarāja too uses the word cit.
If we wish to take it as a Sanskrit word, then the interpretation allows this: At this point in the dhāraṇī, after compassion has been invoked as holding, moving and flowering, it is named as awareness itself. Compassion that is not awareness becomes sentimentality; awareness that is not compassion becomes cold. In citi the two are one.
jvalam āpanāya: take away the burning
The final phrase carries the dhāraṇī's whole purpose, and its readings open into one another. Āpanāya or apanaya is the imperative of the causative of apa-√nī, “to lead away, to remove, to take away." What is to be removed? The Tibetan reads jvalam, from √jval, "to blaze"; Amoghavajra reads jaram, which can be heard as jvaram, "fever," or as jarām, "old age, decay." My intuition is that the original was jvaram, and perhaps Indians (or the Chinese?) in antiquity pronounced this as jvalam.
The three readings form a single teaching. Jvaram apanaya: “take away the fever." The Gilgit scripture promises that no fever will touch the body of the one who recites, and among the ten benefits it is the healing of illness that comes first; it was through this practice that Bhikṣuṇī Lakṣmī was healed of her disease. Jarām apanaya: “take away decay," the aging and dying from which the Buddha set out to find release. Jvalam apanaya: “take away the blaze," the burning of the three poisons that the Buddha described in the Fire Sermon, when he declared that eye, ear and mind are on fire with passion, aversion and delusion.
Yet the blaze can also be heard in the other direction. The flame of citi, of awareness, is itself a burning that consumes the afflictions. Read with the preceding word, citi jvala can be heard as “O awareness, blaze!", and āpanāya as “take away": let the blaze of awareness take away the fever of suffering. The fire of wisdom burns the fire of affliction, as the Bodhicaryāvatāra says that bodhicitta, like the fire at the end of the aeon, consumes great evils in an instant. The healing and the burning are the same act.
paramaśuddhasattva mahākāruṇika: in Amoghavajra's recension
Amoghavajra's text adds, before the end, a direct vocative: “O being of supreme purity, O great compassionate one." It completes the circle of the dhāraṇī, which began with homage to the Great Compassionate One and now addresses him face to face. The bodhisattva who was honoured in the third person is now called in the second; the distance of homage has become the intimacy of devotion.
svāhā: well said, so be it
Svāhā is the oldest of the ritual exclamations, the auspicious sound with which Vedic priests pour offerings into the fire. Some ancient Indian grammarians derived it from su and √ah, “well spoken."; others as “dissolution of self (sva).” In Buddhist mantra it seals the recitation: may it be so; it is offered; it is established. In the later Secret Mantra it is associated with pacifying activity and with the dissolution of the mantra into its ground. At the end of the Eleven-Faced heart it offers everything back: the homage, the invocation, the healing, the awareness. The fire receives the offering and the offering becomes light.
The heart as a single movement
This is of course just as an interpretation for current practitioners:
Read from beginning to end, the heart is a complete journey. It begins in holding: dhara dhara, the being held by compassion. It deepens through the ladder of vowels into resonance. It begins to turn: iṭṭe vaṭṭe. It moves forth toward beings: cale cale pracale pracale. It flowers: kusume kusumavare. It passes beyond words: ili mili. It recognises itself as awareness: citi. It burns away suffering: jvalam āpanāya. And it is offered: svāhā. The one who recites it is held, moved, opened, awakened and healed, and then, in turn, becomes the holder of others.
From Dhāraṇī to Secret Mantra: The Seed of a Revelatory Tradition
The Ekādaśamukha already contains, in embryonic form, almost every element that would later define Secret Mantra: a deity with a defined iconography, a root-mantra, subsidiary mantras for each ritual act, a protected boundary, offerings, a fire rite, a lineage of revelation from Buddhas of remote aeons, and a retinue of vidyādharas. What it lacks is the identification of the practitioner with the deity and the empowerment that authorises that identification. Watching this text across its witnesses is like watching a bud before it opens.
The long road of protective speech
The Buddha's own teaching already knew protective recitation. The Pāli canon contains the paritta, verses chanted for safety and blessing, such as the Āṭānāṭiya Sutta, in which the four great kings offer the Buddha a protective verse against hostile spirits, and the Mora Paritta, the peacock's protection. The Mahāmāyūrī, the Great Peacock Queen of Vidyās, grows from this same root into one of the earliest Mahāyāna dhāraṇī scriptures. In the Lotus Sūtra an entire chapter is given to dhāraṇīs offered by bodhisattvas, by the heavenly kings, and by the rākṣasī daughters, to protect those who keep the sūtra. The Suvarṇaprabhāsa gives dhāraṇīs of great goddesses. The Prajñāpāramitā itself calls its own truth a great vidyā, a mahāvidyā, and the Heart Sūtra ends with the mantra of the perfection of wisdom.
In all of these, the dhāraṇī is still embedded in the sūtra, spoken in an open assembly and offered to any person of faith. The Ekādaśamukha belongs to this world. Yet it differs in one decisive respect: the whole scripture now exists for the sake of the dhāraṇī. The narrative frame is short, the dhāraṇī is its centre, and around it a ritual has begun to crystallise.
The ritual architecture
Look again at the sequence preserved in the Gilgit manuscript. First the practitioner purifies himself with a mantra for bathing and robing. Then he offers incense and lamps, then perfume and flowers, then the bali, then a fire offering of curd, honey and ghee. He binds the boundary with water, ash or mustard seed. At the end he requests the deity to return to its own abode. This is the outer form of the later Kriyā tantra in its entirety: purification, invitation, offering, recitation, fire rite, protection and dismissal. It is no wonder that the Tibetan editors placed the Ekādaśamukha among the Kriyā tantras even while also keeping it among the dhāraṇīs. In the Collection of Dhāraṇīs translated by Atikūṭa, a generation after Yaśogupta, the ritual has grown into a full altar procedure with image, maṇḍala and the purification of the practitioner. In Amoghavajra's version the material is absorbed into the Yoga tantras, with mudrās, the visualisation of seed-syllables and the identification of practitioner and deity. Within two centuries the same dhāraṇī has passed through every stage from sūtra to tantra.
The vidyādharas
In the Gilgit text Avalokiteśvara approaches the Buddha surrounded by countless vidyādharas; in Xuanzang he is surrounded by vidyā-holding sages, and he himself, in a past life, received the vidyā as a great sage. This detail, easily overlooked, is of the greatest importance. The vidyādhara, the holder of vidyā, of awareness-mantra, is the figure who would become the central ideal of Secret Mantra. In Tibetan the word is rig 'dzin, the awareness-holder: the title of the great masters of the Nyingma lineage, of the eight vidyādharas of India who received the eight Sādhana teachings, of Guru Padmasambhava himself. The Ekādaśamukha thus places its dhāraṇī from the very beginning in the hands of the awareness-holders, and its revealer is the chief of their assembly.
Revelation from beyond history
The dhāraṇī is not presented as the teaching of the historical Buddha alone. Avalokiteśvara received it aeons ago from a Buddha whose name no historical record knows, and before that from another, and it was spoken by Buddhas for eleven koṭis of aeons. The Buddha Śākyamuni does not teach it; he confirms and rejoices in it. This is the same structure of authority that would later govern the tantras: a teaching that flows not from a single historical moment but from the timeless dharmakāya through the sambhogakāya to a nirmāṇakāya revealer who brings it into the world when the time is ripe. The Nyingma tradition would speak of the three transmissions: the mind-to-mind transmission of the Victorious Ones, the symbolic transmission of the vidyādharas, the awareness-holders, and the hearing transmission of persons. In the Ekādaśamukha we already see the Buddha of the past, the bodhisattva surrounded by awareness-holders, and the faithful son or daughter who hears.
It is here, perhaps, that one may glimpse the inner cohesion by which Secret Mantra came to be a tradition of revelation. Mahāyāna had already accepted that bodhisattvas receive teachings in samādhi, in visions and in pure lands, and that such teachings carry the authority of the Buddha's word. Dhāraṇīs, received in this way and spoken by great bodhisattvas, became the first texts in which revelation took the form of a power to be practised rather than a doctrine to be studied. As the ritual around them grew, and as the practitioner's relationship to the deity deepened from supplication to communion and from communion to identity, the dhāraṇī became the mantra, the scripture became the tantra, and the vision of the awareness-holder became the source of new scripture. The treasure tradition of Tibet, in which texts are concealed in the mind of a disciple and later revealed, is the far flowering of this same seed: the conviction that the Buddha's speech is never exhausted, and that it reaches each age through those who hold awareness.
What the dhāraṇī already knows and what it keeps hidden
The Ekādaśamukha already knows the deity's form, the eleven faces with their peaceful, wrathful and laughing expressions, the root mantra, the offering mantras, the boundary and the fire. What it does not yet ask is that the practitioner become Avalokiteśvara. The reciter remains a devotee before a compassionate lord, a child before a parent, a servant before a master. This is precisely the stance of Kriyā tantra, in which the deity is approached as a lord and the practitioner relies on purity, offerings and recitation. The later tantras would progressively close this distance until, in Mahāyoga and Atiyoga, the practitioner recognises that the deity's body, speech and mind were never other than his own awareness. The eleven faces, in the end, are the faces of one's own mind turning toward beings in every mood that compassion requires.
In this sense the dhāraṇī is a slightly earlier and more open form of the very same energy that the tantras would later concentrate and conceal. Its syllables carry the same sound-power; its deity is the same compassion; its ritual is the same architecture. What changes is the depth of the relationship and the degree of secrecy that guards it.
A Mantra Given Freely: Why No Empowerment Is Required
The recitation of this dhāraṇī requires no empowerment, and in the scripture itself no transmission either: the only conditions it names are faith, reverence and an undistracted mind. This is the great beauty of a sūtra dhāraṇī. It carries the same sacred energy of compassion that the tantric mantras of Avalokiteśvara carry, yet the door stands open to anyone who approaches with a sincere heart.
What the scripture itself says
The Gilgit text addresses its instruction to “a faithful son of good family or daughter of good family," śrāddha kulaputra or kuladuhitṛ, who should accomplish the heart with reverence, with an undistracted mind, constantly, rising at dawn and turning it one hundred and eight times. It does not mention an initiation, a maṇḍala entered under a master, or a vow beyond the Mahāyāna aspiration and the fasting of the fortnight. It even declares that merely hearing the dhāraṇī plants roots of virtue under hundreds of thousands of Buddhas, and that merely calling Avalokiteśvara's name brings irreversibility on the path. The dhāraṇī is proclaimed in an open assembly at Śrāvastī, before monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen, gods and nāgas, and confirmed by the Buddha before them all. It is spoken, in other words, in the manner of a sūtra, not in the manner of a secret tantra.
Why the sūtra needs no empowerment
The reason lies in the difference between two relationships to the sacred. In the dhāraṇī, the practitioner relates to Avalokiteśvara as to another: a compassionate lord who hears and responds. The power of the recitation rests on three things that are already complete before the practitioner begins: the vow of the bodhisattva, who has promised to be refuge, protection and shelter for all beings; the blessing of the Buddhas, by whom the dhāraṇī was spoken and who rejoice in it; and the faith of the reciter, which opens the channel through which that vow and blessing flow. Nothing in this relationship requires the practitioner to be introduced into a maṇḍala or empowered to assume the deity's identity, because the practitioner is not asked to assume it.
In Secret Mantra, by contrast, the practitioner envisions himself or herself as the deity, recites the mantra as the deity's own speech, and takes the deity's pride as his own. This is a transformation of identity, and it requires a door. The empowerment is that door: the master, himself an embodiment of the deity, introduces the disciple into the maṇḍala, ripens his body, speech and mind, plants the seeds of the four kāyas, and binds him with samaya so that the power of transformation is held within the container of wisdom and compassion. Without this, the deity yoga of the tantras would be presumption. With it, it is the most rapid of paths.
The dhāraṇī asks nothing of this kind. It is a prayer of the heart in the language of power. That is why it can be given to anyone, and why, in the Gilgit scripture, a single sincere recitation can purify the four root downfalls and greatly diminish the five deeds of immediate retribution.
Some honest qualifications
Three qualifications must be added so that nothing is overstated. First, the Tibetan canon places the Ekādaśamukha among the Kriyā tantras as well as among the dhāraṇīs, and when the dhāraṇī is practised within the full sādhana of the Eleven-Faced, Thousand-Armed Avalokiteśvara, as in the fasting practice of Bhikṣuṇī Lakṣmī with its self-visualisation and its offering rituals, traditional masters normally confer an empowerment, or at least a permission-blessing, before the practice is undertaken. The dhāraṇī as recitation is open; the sādhana built around it belongs to Secret Mantra. Second, Tibetan teachers frequently encourage receiving the reading transmission, the lung, even for dhāraṇīs drawn from sūtras. It is then not a condition of permission but a gift of blessing: the sound passed from mouth to ear through an unbroken line carries a warmth that a printed page cannot. Third, the scripture's own conditions are not nothing. It asks for faith, reverence, purity of conduct and an undistracted mind, and it links its fullest fruits to the fortnightly fast. The door is open, but it is entered with a bow.
With these qualifications, the essential point remains. Anyone, of any tradition or none, who recites namo ratnatrayāya with refuge and dhara dhara with an open heart, is already doing what the sūtra asks. This is the generosity of the Mahāyāna: the compassion that would later be guarded behind the doors of initiation is here offered freely, in the open air of the assembly, to every son and daughter of good family.
Closing: The Ocean That Receives Every River
What the reader should now hold in mind is simple to state. The heart-dhāraṇī of the Eleven-Faced Avalokiteśvara is an Indian text, attested on birch bark at Gilgit and in Sanskrit manuscripts carried to China in the sixth century. It exists in a short recension, which honours Vairocana simply as Tathāgata and ends ili mili viṭi svāhā, and in a long recension, preserved in the Tibetan canon and chanted across the world, which honours the Tathāgata Jñānasāgara-Vairocana-Vyūharāja and ends ili mili citi jvalam āpanāya svāhā. It is distinct from the Nīlakaṇṭha dhāraṇī of the Great Compassion scripture, though the two belong together as the voices of the same Thousand-Armed, Eleven-Faced compassion.
Its homage names, in the order of ocean, light and array, the ground, nature and display of awakened mind. Its heart moves from holding to resonance, from motion to flowering, from wordless sound to awareness, and from awareness to the healing of every fever. Its ritual architecture, its awareness-holders and its revelation from beyond history already contain the seed of Secret Mantra, while the absence of any demand for initiation keeps its door open to all who come with faith.
The practitioner who recites it at dawn, one hundred and eight times, as the scripture asks, is doing what Avalokiteśvara did in the presence of the King of Rays aeons ago. He is receiving a sound that has passed from Buddha to bodhisattva, from bodhisattva to awareness-holding vidyādhara, from awareness-holding vidyādhara to the faithful son or daughter, and from them to us. He is being held, and he is learning to hold. And if, in the words ārya-jñānasāgara, he also hears the name of our Noble Lady Yeshe Tsogyal, the Queen of the Ocean of Wisdom who kept the treasures of the Lotus-Born Padmasambhava for a future age, he will not be wrong. For the Ocean of Wisdom receives every river: the Indian scribe at Gilgit, the Gandhāran monk at the Zhou court, the royal nun of Kashmir in her fasting, the singer in a temple in Nara, and the one who, today, bows and begins:
namo ratnatrayāya,
nama ārya-jñānasāgara-vairocana-vyūharājāya tathāgatāya arhate samyaksaṃbuddhāya,
namaḥ sarvatathāgatebhyo arhatebhyo samyaksaṃbuddhebhyo,
namo āryāvalokiteśvarāya bodhisattvāya mahāsattvāya mahākāruṇikāya,
tadyathā:
oṃ dhara dhara dhiri dhiri dhuru dhuru iṭṭe vaṭṭe
cale cale pracale pracale kusume kusumavare
ili mili citi jvalam āpanāya svāhā.
