Mahāvairocana Sūtra — Translation Notes
These notes record recurring translation decisions for the Ru-Yi English translation of the Mahāvairocana Sūtra (大毘盧遮那成佛神變加持經, “Sūtra of Mahāvairocana’s Attainment of Buddhahood, Spiritual Transformation, and Empowerment”), Taishō T0848, translated into Chinese by Śubhakarasiṃha (善無畏) and his scribe Yixing (一行) in 724–725 CE. They exist so that vocabulary stays consistent across all eleven parts, and so that terminology without precedent anywhere else on this site is recorded for any later text to inherit rather than re-coin.
The text, and an unusual translation history
Śubhakarasiṃha (637–735), an Indian prince turned monk who crossed Central Asia by land to reach the Tang capital in 716, orally explained this sūtra section by section as he translated it; Yixing (673–727) — a monk equally renowned as the Tang dynasty’s foremost astronomer and calendar-reformer — took his explanations down and shaped them into the twenty-fascicle commentary this site draws on throughout, the Damoirushana Chengfo Jing Shu (大毘盧遮那成佛經疏, T1796). This makes T1796 unusual among the commentaries this site has used elsewhere: rather than a later exegete returning to a settled text centuries after translation, it preserves something closer to the translator’s own real-time gloss. Yixing records that Śubhakarasiṃha described the full Sanskrit original as running to some 100,000 verses, of which prior generations of teachers had already distilled a working recension of a little over 3,000 verses — the text actually translated here. A Tibetan translation of this same recension survives complete in the Kangyur (āryamahāvairocanābhisaṃbodhi); the Sanskrit original does not survive intact, though scattered fragments — chiefly ritual and mantra portions — have been identified and edited by modern scholars.
The base text runs to roughly 80,000 Chinese characters: thirty-one chapters of core teaching (Parts 1–9 of this collection), followed by a distinct five-chapter ritual manual, 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 (Parts 10–11).
Reading-note sourcing
Per this site’s commentator-vetting convention, reading notes are grounded in a named commentator rather than presented as unattributed analysis. The great majority draw on Yixing’s T1796, cited by chapter and, where useful, by the specific passage his commentary is glossing — his commentary on Chapter 1 alone runs to nearly three of his twenty fascicles, roughly five times the length of the root text it explains, so this collection draws selectively from it rather than translating it end to end, following this site’s standing practice of matching commentary to the passage at hand. A handful of later chapters (roughly Parts 4 and 9 onward) carry reading notes without a specific Yixing citation, where this collection’s own research did not reach commentary that deep into his twenty fascicles within the scope of this project; those notes are marked simply “Reading note” rather than “after Yixing,” and rest on textual features internal to the sūtra itself (cross-references to earlier chapters, recurring structural patterns) rather than an external commentarial source.
Structure
| Part | Base text covers | Approx. Chinese length |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 入真言門住心品第一 (bodhicitta as cause; the sixty minds; six fearlessnesses; ten similes) | 5,290 characters |
| 2 | 入漫荼羅具緣真言品第二之一 (a master’s ten qualities; site selection; the earth ritual; the Womb Maṇḍala’s three courts) | 7,032 characters |
| 3 | 入漫荼羅具緣真言品第二之餘 (the forty-two letter-gates; offerings and the fire rite; initiation) | 5,953 characters |
| 4 | 息障品第三・普通真言藏品第四・世間成就品第五 (obstacles and Acala; a mantra treasury; beginning recitation) | 7,432 characters |
| 5 | 悉地出現品第六・成就悉地品第七・轉字輪漫荼羅行品第八 (the mirror-maṇḍala; the five-syllable body meditation; the wheel of letters) | 9,196 characters |
| 6 | 密印品第九 (over eighty mudrās) | 9,604 characters |
| 7 | 字輪品第十・祕密漫荼羅品第十一・入祕密漫荼羅法品第十二 (the phonetic alphabet wheel; masters, disciples, and siddhi; burning letter with letter) | 7,875 characters |
| 8 | 入祕密漫荼羅位品第十三 through 受方便學處品第十八 (the inner heart maṇḍala; eight secret seals; six months of practice; letters placed on the body; the ten precepts with exceptions) | 5,633 characters |
| 9 | 說百字生品第十九 through 囑累品第三十一 (the hundred syllables; the mirror of the self; forty-four Vedic fires; the closing entrustment) | 7,051 characters |
| 10 | 供養次第法, chapters 1–3 (approaching a master; the seven-limbed liturgy; becoming the deity) | 9,065 characters |
| 11 | 供養次第法, chapters 4–5 (rules of recitation; a day in the life of a practitioner) | 6,192 characters |
Total: roughly 80,000 characters. Parts 1 and 6 are each a single chapter, kept whole given their length and doctrinal weight (the bodhicitta chapter, and the entire chapter of mudrās, respectively); Part 2/3 splits at the exact 之一/之餘 marker the source text itself uses; later parts group between two and six shorter chapters where their content runs continuous, rather than dividing at an even character count.
Core terminology
| Chinese | English | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 毘盧遮那 | Mahāvairocana | Kept as the standard scholarly Sanskritization rather than translated (“Great Sun” or “Great Illuminator”), matching this site’s convention of leaving a buddha’s proper name untranslated. |
| 祕密主 | Lord of Secrets | Vajrapāṇi’s title throughout this sūtra. Kept as a literal English rendering rather than transliterated, since Yixing’s own commentary glosses the name at length in Part 1 — the Tathāgata’s own body, speech, and mind, “secret” in the specific sense that even Maitreya cannot fully fathom them. |
| 金剛手 / 執金剛 | Vajrapāṇi / vajra-holder(s) | Vajrapāṇi kept as his own proper name where the source uses it directly; 執金剛 (literally “vajra-grasper”) rendered generically as “vajra-holder” for the wider class of such beings named throughout the maṇḍala. |
| 加持 | empowerment | Standard scholarly rendering of adhiṣṭhāna, kept distinct from 神變, rendered “spiritual transformation,” wherever the two terms appear paired in the source, as they frequently do in this sūtra’s title and opening chapters. |
| 一切智智 | the wisdom of all-wisdom | A deliberately literal, doubled rendering of sarvajña-jñāna (literally “the wisdom of the all-knowing”), preserving the sūtra’s own repeated wordplay on this term rather than smoothing it into a single English word such as “omniscience.” |
| 阿字門 | the gateway of the letter A | Kept literal throughout (“gateway,” not “meaning” or “significance”), since Part 3’s forty-two-gate teaching depends on treating each letter as an actual entrance into a specific realization, not merely a symbol standing for one. |
| 悉地 | siddhi | Kept as the standard Sanskrit loanword (spiritual accomplishment or attainment) rather than translated, matching broad convention in Buddhist Studies scholarship for this specific technical term. |
| 三密 | the three secrets | Body, speech, and mind — mudrā, mantra, and visualization — kept as a fixed technical set-phrase throughout, matching this tradition’s own standing terminology rather than varied for elegance. |
| 曼荼羅 / 漫荼羅 | maṇḍala | Kept as the standard Sanskrit loanword; the sūtra itself uses both transliterations interchangeably (漫荼羅 predominates), and this translation does not distinguish between them. |
| 阿闍梨 | master, ācārya | Rendered “master” in running prose for readability, with “ācārya” given at first mention per part where useful; kept consistent with this site’s general practice of translating a functional title rather than transliterating it by default. |
What Yixing’s commentary structure contributes
Yixing reads this sūtra as organized around Vajrapāṇi’s nine questions in Part 1’s opening verse exchange, with nearly every subsequent chapter answering one of those nine in turn, often out of the order in which they were originally asked — “the Buddha, observing the assembly at the time, made sure the point was grasped rather than following the questions strictly in order,” as Yixing puts it. He also maintains a running thread, introduced in Part 1 and returned to at several later points, that the sūtra’s reinterpretation of the three incalculable kalpas as depths of practice within a single lifetime is this text’s own doctrinal foundation for what later Japanese Shingon teaching would call sokushin jōbutsu, “attaining buddhahood in this very body” — this collection’s reading notes flag that connection at each of its principal recurrences (Part 1’s sixty-mind catalogue, Part 7’s account of siddhi, Part 8’s identification of “master” with “buddha”) rather than treating each occurrence as an isolated claim.
A note on textual gaps and editorial hands preserved in this translation
Per this site’s general practice of honest annotation over silent smoothing, several places where the received text itself shows its own history are flagged directly in the reading notes rather than passed over: two items in Part 1’s sixty-mind catalogue (the thirty-second, “the singing mind,” and the forty-fifth, “the mud mind”) are marked by Yixing as missing their gloss in the Sanskrit manuscript his teacher worked from, and the sixtieth item is missing outright, reconstructed only from Śubhakarasiṃha’s oral account as “the monkey mind.” Part 10 preserves Buddhaguhya’s own acknowledgment, recorded by his translator, that several verses in his ritual manual were supplied from the transmitter’s own understanding rather than found complete in the received text. This translation records these gaps and editorial hands as the sources themselves record them, rather than silently filling or smoothing them.
A note for future Tang-esoteric and related texts
Several renderings coined here — “the wisdom of all-wisdom” for 一切智智, “the Lord of Secrets” for 祕密主, and the fixed English forms for the five-element seed syllables (A/earth, VA/water, RA/fire, HA or HŪṂ/wind, KHA/space) — have no prior site precedent and were decided with an eye toward reuse in the companion Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha collection, and in any future esoteric-tradition text this site may take up (the Susiddhikara, or later ritual manuals in the same lineage). Future translators working on such texts should check this glossary before coining fresh renderings for the same terms. Note in particular that this sūtra’s own five-element formula is not perfectly uniform even within itself — Part 8 substitutes HŪṂ for the more common HA at the fourth position in one restatement of the sequence — a variation this translation preserves rather than silently harmonizes; a translator working on a later, more systematized text should expect the canonical HA to have displaced this variant by that point in the tradition’s development.