Author: I. Sin.

Among the large and largely undocumented collection of Nepalese art at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, is a painting (IS.64-1985) of the environs of the Jaggannātha temple in Puri, Orissa. It records the visit of the Newar king Jagatprakāśamalla in NS 790 (1670 CE).

One of the remarkable things about this painting is that it seems to be completely unknown to Nepalese scholars, despite it presumably having been referred to by Guy (1992)*. That in itself may not be too surprising, given that Nepal’s institutions can afford so few modern publications. What is noteworthy is that much of the collection remains uncatalogued and unavailable to the rest of the scholarly world. Meisezahl, for example, refers to a painting of Samvara that was donated (or dedicated?) to the British royal family in the Victorian era — the first and only time I have heard of such a thing.

I would welcome hearing about experiences with the Nepalese collection at the V & A before going there myself.

* Guy, John. ‘New evidence for the Jagannatha cult in seventeenth century Nepal’. Journal of The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 2, Pt. 2, 1992. [not seen by me.]

HAL (Hyper Articles en Ligne — or lingering French affection for Stanley Kubrick?) is an archive of digital scholarly publications, currently containing over 100,000 items. (Remarkably, they also take unpublished scholarship.) It is a service of the CCSd, and is classified as a Data Provider of the Open Archives Initiative.

Among HAL’s collection one may find articles published in Arts Asiatiques, Central Asian Journal, and others, and in various proceedings volumes, such as the First International Sanskrit Computational Linguistics Symposium (2007). Csernel & Patte’s article on computer assisted critical editions of Sanskrit texts (PDF) is a provocative contribution to the latter.

The University of Tokyo’s journal Death and Life Studies 『死生学研究』 is now available on DSpace. Some readers will already be aware that two rising scholars in tantric studies, namely Drs. Tsunehiko Sugiki 杉木恒彦 and Ryugen Tanemura 種村隆元, are contributors to this journal.

All contents are in Japanese, “for your PDF Library” (your personal one, not the postmodernists’ one).

Among the many unpublished papers of Brian Houghton Hodgson is a short English work on the iconography of a “Dharmacakramaṇḍala”. No such thing is known in the Indic tradition; it was conceived for Hodgson by his teacher and collaborator, the Newar Paṇḍita Amṛtānanda. Hodgson, being the diligent scholar that he was, kept a copy of Amṛtānanda’s original, which is useful for understanding Hodgson’s ‘translation’.

The first thing to notice is that one of the Sanskrit words appearing in transcription in the English text, *vajrāsana (‘Bujer Âsan’), is not in Amṛtānanda’s Sanskrit, which instead uses the term kuliśāsana. It is quite unlikely that Hodgson was responsible for this substitution, in light of his general lack of familiarity with Sanskrit texts. Rather, from the way he transcribes other Sanskrit terms from the same work, transcriptions which in places show obvious traces of Newar accent, Hodgson is echoing someone’s spoken words. That someone was probably Amṛtānanda himself, who knew a bit of English (going all the way back to his role in the first ever recorded transmission of Dharma to a Westerner, some two decades prior to Hodgson’s arrival in Nepal). Hodgson is hardly translating at all; he is taking dictation, maybe while the various parts on a drawing of the maṇḍala (a document also preserved in his papers) are pointed out.

Another point of interest is that internal features of the Sanskrit text confirm that it is a Nepalese composition. The form of Mañjuśrī it describes is unknown in India, where it would moreover be improper for this gentle bodhisattva to be decked out in the yoginītantric human bone ornaments of “Chuckry, Kundall, Kunthi” and so on (MS: cakri-kuṇḍala-kaṇṭhi-rocaka-mekhalānupura). There are similar deviations in the account of the maṇḍala’s superstructure.

Categorical errors of this kind would not have occurred in the early medieval period. Amṛtānanda, erudite and widely read though he was, occasionally betrays serious gaps in his knowledge of Buddhist doctrine. Even in the medieval period it was the case that one could know dozens of major works well and still miss out on important aspects of Buddhism.

Such deficits are typical of the Newar scene, which not only continued the Indian resistance to systematization, but compounded it, by diffusing scripture among many small private collections, rather than transmitting it comprehensively (and expensively) under the auspices of large monastic institutions. This was without doubt a preference, driven by tantric secretiveness, not only in Nepal but in parts of India; but it had its downside. (Today, efforts are underway to improve this state of affairs by constituting a new Sanskrit canon, a task which is for the first time in many centuries feasible for the living tradition. It remains nonetheless a difficult undertaking, predictably hindered, not helped, by the Buddhist Studies establishment’s vocal cretins: ‘how dare they call their collected authoritative works a Canon!’)

Given that Amṛtānanda and Hodgson were working on this piece together, it must predate Amṛtānanda’s passing (c.1829), probably by some years. That places it before Wilson’s article, which contains the first published translations and summaries of basically tantric Buddhist works. It is hard to read much into the fact that Hodgson left it unpublished, because he also did not publish a lot of other material. After his debates with other scholars in the 1830s, he may have concluded that much of what Amṛtānanda left him would not measure up as ‘authentic’ Buddhism, a pseudo-concept which was at that very moment — and forever onwards, to this day — being defined to accord with the whims of Theravādin fanatics and their sympathizers. (You’ve heard it all before: Buddhism Is Pali Texts. Or the derivative and equally unsupportable variant: Buddhism Is Rationality.)

So without further ado, here is the translation, or rather, ‘Description’:

Description of Dharmacakramandala

Manjusry is sitting in the Kornica or centre of a Lotos with Bujer Âsan.¹ His colour is that of Saffron[;] he has one head and four hands, by two of which he is performing Dharma Chackra Moondra[,] putting his hands on his breast[;] and from the other two[,] in one he has a book and in the other a japmala[,] and is² beautified himself by the undermentioned ornaments viz. Chuckry, Kundall (or a large ring worn in the ears)[,] Kunthi (or a short necklace)[,] Rochuck (or stomacher)[,] Makhla (an ornament worn in the waist) and Anapoor.

Out[side] of this Kornica of Kamal or the centre of the lotos[,] there are two circles and [surrounding the] out[side] of that circle³ are eight⁴ Dull or leaves of the lotos and these leaves are without a single mark. Again out[side] of it there [are] two more circles in which [there] are eight Bajars (or thunderbolts).

On the four doors of it there are four Boudhs viz. Amoghasidh Boodh on the northern, Ratna Sambh on the Southern, Ochhobh Boodh on the eastern and Amitab Boodh on the Western doors. After all this there are 3 quadrangular figures[:] in the first there are 16⁵ Bodhisats on all its four sides[,] viz. Lasaya[s], 1st^? who are busy in dancing[;] in the 2nd there are 44 lotos[;] ⁶ in the 3rd are eight Kalas or water filled with amrit or the water of life[;] on all four sides and on the four Corners[,] there are Chāters of three stories together with Patakas and on the four doors are⁷ Torans together with Kinkinijal and the both sides of the Toran are beautified by two Mackers who are standing by their jutting⁸ teeth[.]

in the fourth Then again there are 3 circles[:] the 1st is filled by leaves ×××[,] the 2nd by the lotos[,] and the 3rd by the flames of the fir[e].

References and notes have been omitted here. In the first place, it is not my custom to give such things out online, where they can be (and have been) easily ripped off. Moreover, in Buddhist Studies as currently practiced, it is common to see new ‘contributions’ containing no original research whatsoever, and in which even the recycled material is misunderstood.

I was appalled when Jacob Dalton recently told me that Donald S. Lopez, Jr. was working on a new monograph about Brian Hodgson, given that Lopez’s error-ridden, condescending chapter for The Origins of Himalayan Studies got Hodgson (and Amṛtānanda) so comprehensively wrong. When I reviewed this a few years ago, I lacked access to Hodgson’s papers, and thus missed one particular howler. Lopez accused Hodgson of not ‘recording the activities of pilgrims around the great stupas’ of the Valley. He did not explain why this should have been a research priority for Hodgson, but for some reason considered it a serious omission.

It so happens that in Hodgson’s unpublished papers, we find precisely that: descriptions of pradakṣiṇa, and so on, and descriptions of the stupas. They were in Sanskrit, and so were of course vulnerable to being overlooked by self-appointed chroniclers of ‘Western Buddhism’. Today we do not only lack a proper account of Nepal’s role in Buddhism in South and East Asia; such a thing is missing even from the West’s understanding of its own role.

Zazzle.com offers a lot of stuff for those with a special message to wear; but not diacritics, as yet.

I’ll be away for four days, starting tomorrow.

The First International Workshop on Early Tantra was held in Kathmandu a couple of weeks ago. [ The table wasn’t as kinky as it appears in the picture (of the concluding lecture, given by PDSz): it’s my laziness in stitching the images. ]

Earlier on in the Workshop, while in the thick of some intense reading, Prof. Alexis Sanderson at one point digressed to give an anecdotal (?) account of an “indigenous” (or, for the one or two anthros who may be reading: “emic”) definition of tantra. With all the agonizing about what tantra is or isn’t in the secondary literature, I feel that this cuts to the chase:

YOU GO TO THE GURU AND HE GIVES YOU DIKSHA. YOU RECITE THE MANTRA 10,000 TIMES AND THE GOD APPEARS AND SAYS ‘WHAT DO YOU WANT? GOVERNMENT JOB…? FAST CAR? TAKE IT’.

Facile as this may sound, it nonetheless alludes concisely to some fundamental aspects of the study of tantric literature. First is the point that tantric works are above all prescriptions for action, particularly initiatory, ritualized action in pursuit of worldly gain, before they are anything else. We can find all kinds of astounding things in the tantras, but one never gets completely away from this basic character. A tantric practitioner is of course often a seeker of liberation; but even here it is often the case that liberation is defined in terms of worldly benefit.

The second point, which comes naturally from the first, is that because tantras deal with practical matters, effort must be made to understand their prescriptions within the context of a living tradition. There is not, to my knowledge, such a thing as a tantric practice which is disconnected from some kind of functioning religious milieu, whether existing now or a millenium ago. Although we can consider certain elements within the domain of a pure and timeless theoretical space, others remain firmly grounded. If we lack sufficient familiarity with such an environment, whether through personal contact with its surviving representatives, or immersion in literature, art and history — or through whatever exposure is appropriate — then we must make the effort to acquire it. This seems obvious enough. But how often have we seen self-styled experts delivering verdicts on tantra that are devoid of such necessary background, quite plainly and embarassingly so?

Finally, I am reminded that tantric religion must be studied as it is found. As scholars, we must resist the tendency to jump to conclusions, impose our own views, on a discourse that is often opaque, if not disagreeable. Impartiality is a sword that cuts both ways: just as we should not strive to put a sheen on dull material, so too we should not overlook the fact that tantric literature is in places as sophisticated and erudite as any other branch of classical Indian literature. A scholar of the tantras may equally come across work that is utter rubbish or utterly profound — sometimes in the same sentence. Some topics characteristic of the tantras are still, after several decades of study, quite elusive to any modern understanding, and are resistant to attempts to place ourselves in the authors’ shoes.

One other thing that the Workshop brought home to me, though it had been becoming clear for some time, is that tantric studies is anything but for the credulous and the sub-literate. To get to grips with tantric texts one should ideally develop confidence and think critically in more than one, indeed several, registers and sectarian flavours of Sanskrit — and not just Sanskrit, for that matter, but vernaculars and — if focusing on Buddhism — Tibetan, Chinese, and the languages of a vast secondary literature.

Nor will it do to say ‘I don’t read anything else’ — something that I recently heard more than one Buddhist Studies professor proudly announce in public, with regard to their tiny little corner of Buddhism. In tantric studies that attitude won’t go very far. One needs to know as much as possible about what comes before, because tantric authors certainly did, to varying extents. These were not people who got out of bed one morning, somehow forgot all about their own traditions and just started making it all up again. They were innovators, absolutely; but at the same time, such people were all too well informed, and concerned, about accepted religious and philosophical trends, and we see this everywhere in the tantras.

In short, doing good tantric studies is as challenging as anything else out there in the humanities. And we can be grateful that the field once again has a growing number of people who are willing to face the challenge seriously.