Powers of Protection

Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State is a research initiative hosted by the British Museum and the British Library in London. Moving beyond geographical, chronological, disciplinary and historiographical boundaries, the books in this series explore the interactions of India and her neighbors from late antiquity to the close of the medieval.

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This sourcebook explores the most extensive tradition of Buddhist dhāraṇī literature and provides access to the earliest available materials for the first time: a unique palm-leaf bundle from the 12th–13th centuries and a paper manuscript of 1719 CE. The Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha collections have been present in South Asia, and especially in Nepal, for more than eight hundred years and served to supply protection, merit and auspiciousness for those who commissioned their compilation. For modern scholarship, these diverse compendiums are valuable sources of incantations and related texts, many of which survive in Sanskrit only in such manuscripts.