Humanities & Social Sciences
February 2021
Powers of Protection
The Buddhist Tradition of Spells in the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha Collections
by Gergely Hidas
This volume provides a sourcebook for a largely unresearched Buddhist textual tradition: the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha, or "spell collections," which have been present in South Asia – especially in Nepal – for at least eight hundred years. For modern scholarship, these diverse compendiums are valuable sources of spell texts, many of which survive in Sanskrit only in such manuscripts.
