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Great mother Prajnaparamita (San. “perfection of knowledge”): As she is the mother of all the buddhas, Prajnaparamita is sometimes, as here, personified as a female deity.

Shatakratu (San. “performer of a hundred sacrifices”): An epithet of Indra, the lord of the gods.

interdependence (San. pratitya-samutpada; Tib. tendrel, “dependent  origination”): The coming together of factors to form a situation; the interweaving of relative cause and effect, in which all phenomena arise as mutually interdependent.

To the one who teaches . . . I prostrate to you: This is a famous dedicatory verse from the beginning of Nagarjuna’s Mula-madhyamaka-karika (Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way).

no cessation . . . not one: These are the eight types of complexity, or conceptual misunder-standings about the nature of reality, which are negated by the Buddha’s teaching of the middle way.