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Pacific World
dhas’ names are given separately prior to the text of the “Buddha Names
in Seven Registers.” The names of the twenty-five buddhas are inscribed at
the beginning of the middle register on the cliff face, just above the names of
the fifty-three buddhas. At Mt. Bao anyone reciting this ritual could insert
the names of the fifty-three, thirty-five, or twenty-five buddhas by reading
them into the ritual at the appropriate points in the litany of “registers.”
Whenever the list of twenty-five buddhas is included among the rosters,
in all extant manuscripts it is inserted in the eighth position, after number
7 in our list above.
Finally, the Ji zhujing lichanyi, Beijing 8344/Yu 16, and most Dunhuang
manuscripts insert not only the list of the twenty-five buddhas, but also
the lengthy names of two buddhas taken from the Dvadāśabuddhaka (sūtra)
(Shier foming shenzhou jiaoliang gongde chuzhang miezui jing,
) translated by Jñānagupta in 587. Although the names
of these two buddhas are associated with the late Dilun and early Huayan
lineages, the relatively late date of translation of the Dvadāśabuddhaka (sūtra)
apparently precluded any use of these names in the Mt. Bao inscription (and
in Xinxing’s “Rules for Receiving the Eight Precepts”). 36 In the Ji zhujing
lichanyi and in the relatively numerous Dunhuang manuscripts where these
two names occur they are most commonly inserted after the names of the
twenty-five buddhas, in ninth position.
One of the curiosities of the “Buddha Names of the Seven Registers”
is that there are always at least eight “registers” of buddhas given, even in
our earliest inscription at Mt. Bao. When the names of the twenty-five buddhas
and the names of the two buddhas from the Dvadāśabuddhaka (sūtra)
are added we can have up to ten “registers.” While to date there has been
no satisfactory explanation of this situation, I suspect that, if the number
“seven” actually refers to the total number of rosters of buddhas, the first
seven rosters in the Mt. Bao inscription were probably the original seven
with the eighth roster in the Mt. Bao list 37 and the twenty-five buddhas
being added later.
Let us look briefly at the structure of these arrays and the repentance
prayer a little more closely. I mentioned above that the ritual of the “Buddha
Names in Seven Registers” inscribed at Mt. Bao might be referred to as
a hybrid canonical text. Specifically, this means that it is constructed from
three slightly overlapping sources. The Scripture on the Visualization of the
Two Bodhisattvas, King of Healing and Supreme Healer recommends that the
practitioner reverence or venerate (li, ) six rosters of buddhas, numbers
1–3 and 5–7 of our inscription, as a preliminary to visualizing the two
bodhisattvas, King of Healing and Supreme Healer. 38 The context in this
scripture suggests strongly that these other arrays of buddhas be visualized
also. We have already seen that the title of a Dunhuang manuscript, in
fact, specifically links the “Buddha Names in Seven Registers” ritual to this