Entering the Gateway of Mantra.
The earlier of the two root scriptures of the systematic Tang esoteric tradition — the other being the Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha. Its opening chapter states, in three lines, what every later esoteric school built upon: bodhicitta as cause, compassion as root, skillful means as ultimate. From there it builds outward into a catalogue of sixty ordinary minds, the full iconography and mudrās of the Womb Maṇḍala, a forty-two-letter alphabet read as forty-two teachings on emptiness, and the five-syllable body meditation — A, VA, RA, HA, KHA — that later became both Japan's five-tiered stone stūpa and the seated "A-syllable contemplation" still practiced in Shingon Buddhism today. Eleven parts, read throughout with the commentary of Yixing, composed as his teacher Śubhakarasiṃha explained the text aloud, section by section, while the translation itself was being made.
How to read this collection
This is a very large text — roughly 57,000 Chinese characters across thirty-one chapters of core teaching plus a five-chapter ritual appendix, the Method of Sequential Offerings (供養次第法) traditionally attributed to the 8th-century commentator Buddhaguhya and printed as this sūtra's own seventh fascicle. Eleven parts split the text at its own chapter and content boundaries rather than at even intervals: Chapter 1, the doctrinal keystone, gets a part to itself; the sūtra's longest chapter, on entering the maṇḍala, spans Parts 2–3 at the exact midpoint marker (之一 / 之餘) the source text itself uses; later parts group two or more shorter chapters together where their content runs continuous.
Each page carries a continuous run of the base text matched against Ru-Yi's English translation, with reading notes drawn from Yixing's commentary (大毘盧遮那成佛經疏, T1796) — an unusually direct source among the commentaries this site has drawn on elsewhere, since Yixing wrote it down as his teacher explained the text aloud during the very act of translating it, rather than returning to a settled text generations later. Where a passage anticipates a later development in the East Asian esoteric tradition — the gorintō stūpa, the four transformations of A, the fourfold classification of ritual purpose — the reading notes trace that connection out explicitly.
What each page includes
- The Chinese source text beside our English translation, including the sūtra's own mantras — kept in phonetic transliteration rather than translated for meaning, per this site's standing dhāraṇī convention, with reconstructed Sanskrit given where the tradition's own scholarship supports it.
- Reading notes — "after Yixing" throughout, drawn from his twenty-fascicle commentary, composed alongside the translation itself.
- Cross-references to this site's Lotus Sūtra, Kṣitigarbha, and Mūlamadhyamakakārikā collections wherever this sūtra's own doctrine directly overlaps with texts already translated here.
- Honest notes on the two or three points where this sūtra's own received text preserves a manuscript gap, a scribal variant, or a commentator's own editorial hand, rather than passed over in silence.
The Sūtra's Own Structure
Thirty-one chapters of core teaching (Parts 1–9), followed by a five-chapter ritual appendix (Parts 10–11). The core teaching moves from doctrine, through the maṇḍala's construction and iconography, to the letter and mudrā systems that underlie every later practice, and closes with ethics and a final entrustment; the appendix turns that doctrine into an actual, performable daily liturgy.
Read by Part
All eleven parts are translated. Each links to the full bilingual text with reading notes after Yixing.
Translation Notes
Recurring terms, kept consistent across all eleven parts. Where a term already has an established rendering elsewhere on this site, we reuse it; where this sūtra's own vocabulary has no site precedent, we coin one here. See the full translation notes for the complete glossary, and also this site's note on translation method.