Vairocana Raksita - The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva

At last he found r Singha, who was a qualified teacher of this transmission, but did not have the books. The King had sealed the volumes that contained this teaching in Bodhgaya, and locked them up. So r Singha and Vairochana snuck in by night, broke the seals, and stole the books, without being noticed. Then, in a place called Dhahena, r Singha taught these texts to Vairochana secretly, in the middle of the night. Vairochanas biography, The Great Image, The other is The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva: Equal to the End of the Sky. The existence of these texts shows us that Vairochana was working very hard as a translator, even while in India, and that he had a least a few translations ready for presentation when he arrived back in Tibet.

It also indicates that the Great Tantra of Vajrasattva may well have been one of the earliest major translations of a Great Perfection Tantra into Tibetan. In Tibet, the Yamantaka Sadhana was preserved in the Tengyur, the official compilation of commentarial texts, but the Great Tantra of Vajrasattva was not included in the Kagyur, the official compilation of the Buddhas own teachings. We may wonder why it was not included. The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva appears to be a Buddhist work. It talks about Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, and enlightenment, in the style of a Sutra or a Tantra, but as we read we will see that it uses language that is unusual for a Buddhist work. It talks about unity in non-duality, oneness, the lack of any need to practice a path, and the irrelevance of cause and result, for example.

It talks about a self-luminescent wisdom that is eternal. The existence of books that resemble the Dharma, but actually contain unorthodox teachings, was noted heavily by the leaders of the reformation movements of the Eleventh Century, collectively known as the New Schools (Sarma). Podrang Zhiwa Od compiled a list of such scriptures in the 11 th century, calling them contrived semblances ( ltar bcos ). The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva is not on his list. I have found no citation of this work as having been deliberately excluded from the Kagyur. Whether it was not available to the compilers or its contents were found objectionable will require further research.

A study of the possible origin of the Great Tantra of Vajrasattva is beyond the scope of this introduction. Readers who are familiar with world literature may well see evidence of Gnostic teachings in reading this. Clear evidence of Gnosis movements along the Silk Route has been documented. Some may see evidence of the Upan i adic thought that informed the Advaita tradition reflected here in Buddhistic terminology. It is possible that some writer had a deliberate intention of subterfuge, intending to trick unwary Buddhists into accepting non-Buddhist views, but it would likely have been disseminated more widely if this were so. Those who seek evidence that Buddhist and non-Buddhist thinking had reached the point, by the Eighth Century, that they were sometimes indistinguishable may find evidence of this in this Tantra.

It may well be that the Great Tantra of Vajrasattva was considered to represent heterodox views by some Tibetans, and therefore excluded from the Kagyur. Many who persevere at maintaining orthodoxy fail to remember that the orthodox can only be understood in its relation to the heterodox. We will better understand Buddhist orthodoxy by reading a text that represents what it tries to guard against. The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva itself claims that a few fortunate people may achieve instantaneous enlightenment by understanding its contents. I hope so. While the Great Tantra of Vajrasattva was not incorporated into the Kagyur, its manuscript was faithfully copied down through the centuries, preserved among the collections called Nyingma Gyubum, or Hundred Thousand Tantras of the Ancients and in the manuscript collection known as the Hundred Thousand Tantras of Vairochana.

The Great Tantra of Vajrasattva is only one of a very many scriptures translated by Vairochana. I hope that this translation will encourage further study of the literature of the Great Perfection tradition, so that these treasures of mankinds literary heritage may be more widely read and appreciated.