Buddhism, Kingship and the Protection of the State: The Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra and Dhāraṇī Literature

Abstract

This article focuses first on the ritual core of the Suvarṇaprabhāsottamasūtra, which teaches the protection of the state for the mutual benefit of the Buddhist Sangha and the monarch. The essay then explores the ways in which this theme appears in dhāraṇī literature in the first half of the first millennium.1 It is shown that offering safeguard to rulers and their regions is a long-established practice in SouthAsianBuddhism, persisting intomodern times, and that there have been a variety of incantation scriptures available for accomplishing this task.