Powers of Protection: The Buddhist Tradition of Spells in the Dhrasagraha Collections

This sourcebook explores the most extensive tradition of Buddhist dhra literature and provides access to the earliest available materials for the first time: a unique palm-leaf bundle from the 12th13th centuries and a paper manuscript of 1719 CE. The Dhrasagraha 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.