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Dina Bangdel (1965–2017)

Dr Dina Bangdel (5.12.1965–25?.7.2017) is well known among Nepal specialists as a historian of religious art. Her 1999 dissertation, Manifesting the Mandala, and co-authored 2003 exhibition catalogue, Circle of Bliss, emphasised the visual culture of the Cakrasamvara cycle in Newar Buddhism, which is traditionally kept secret. Dr Bangdel had been planning to show a selection of this and related art on a world-travelling exhibition and was scheduled to speak at the “New Research on Newar Buddhism” panel at IABS. This week Dr Bangdel passed away, reportedly after complications following surgery. She is survived by her husband Bibhakar Shakya and two children.

(Added 2018/1/20:) ‘Remembering scholars of Nepalese Art Mary Slusser and Dina Bangdel’ (Rubin Museum of Art)

Aryatara
Tamang, ‘Green Tara’ (Bangdel 2016, fig.6)

Continue reading “Dina Bangdel (1965–2017)”

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Meanwhile, in Seoul

Hwang cut open a female dog’s abdomen and held up its uterus and oviduct, pointing out where the ovarian eggs were. He demonstrated the extraction of 10 eggs from the oviduct, and then let the monks look at the eggs through a microscope.

What’s all this about? Hwang Woo-suk, “disgraced geneticist” and “devout Buddhist”, is still in the lucrative business of cloning puppies.

Bae Ji-sook, ‘Buddhist leader visits disgraced scientist Hwang’, The Korea Herald, March 8, 2012. [link; seen at buddhistchannel.tv]

It’s hard to work Korea out; after just two generations of intensive missionizing, far more South Koreans are now Christian than Buddhist. In Asia, only the Philippines has more Christians. I just hope Hwang draws the line at cloning the people who ran “Buddhist studies” into the ground in the English-speaking world.

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Ramachandran, Lumbini ‘courts controversy’ (2011/11/17)

An article published in the Asia Times this month* reminds us what an awful mess Lumbini is:

Mired in corruption, it evokes despair rather than spiritual upliftment.

[…]

“The monastic zone is dominated by Japanese Mahayana sects. Vajrayana, the Himalaya’s own distinctive contribution to Buddhism, is the most neglected,” Pathak pointed out.

[…]

This has “sparked competition among sects” and encouraged “factionalism – that, too, based on nationality”, Rachana Pathak wrote in Himal magazine.

[…]

But crass commercialization and ostentation evident in new buildings prompted a Western scholar of Himalayan Buddhism to lament that Lumbini was on its way to becoming a “religious Disneyland”.

It’s a little late to complain about that. When you hitch your wagon to globalized culture, which the McBuddhism at Lumbini epitomizes so well, false taste and colonial structure is what you inevitably get. It’s a small world, after all:

Lumbini's Theravadin monastery (this image may be factually inaccurate).

* Sudha Ramachandran. ‘Buddha’s birthplace courts controversy’. Asia Times, November 17, 2011. [link]

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‘Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts’ (2011/11/08)

Someone in England is studying the sources of the South Asian Buddhist mainstream?

“The project, which is led by Sanskrit-specialists Dr Vincenzo Vergiani and Dr Eivind Kahrs, will study and catalogue each of the manuscripts, placing them in their broader historical context, a university release said.

So far, so good.

“In the 1870s, Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the British Residency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts from a disused temple, where they had survived largely by chance.”

Oh dear. Still, this sounds better:

“Most of the holdings will also be digitised by the library and made available through the library’s new online digital library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/).”

Let’s hope the cameras get to those masterpieces of Nepal and the Pāla Dynasty before the local twits [see final sentence], eh?

(‘Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts.’ Deccan Herald, Nov 8, 2011.)

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Unicode Siddham symbol

᠀ नमो वागीश्वराय ।

Indologists still haven’t moved the Devanagari code block much beyond the inadequate ISCII-1988. Meanwhile, Michael Everson’s ill-informed “Newari” (sic) proposal — the only rañjanā-lipi proposal out there — hasn’t gone anywhere since the 1990s. Today, something like the siddham symbol in Unicode 6.0 [test page] has to be found in the Mongolian code block:

U+1800 MONGOLIAN BIRGA

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Muktabodha updated (2011/09/18)

Electronically find in Muktabodha’s latest e-texts gems such as:

pañcarātrādayo mārgāḥ kālenaivopakārakāḥ |
bauddhatantrāṇi deveśi varttante subahūny api ||

tāni proktāni sarvāṇi bauddharūpeṇa viṣṇunā |
na tatra dharmaleśo'sti mohanāni durātmanām ||

(But as the Newars say:)

evaṃ sa vaiṣṇavān sarvān viṣṇurūpeṇa bodhayan |
bodhimārge niyujyāpi cārayati jagaddhite ||

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Some forthcoming e-texts

Input, but not online yet (an incomplete list):

  1. अद्भूतधर्मपर्याय
  2. अभिसमयमञ्जरी
  3. अमृतकणिका आर्यमञ्जुश्रीनामसङ्गीतिटीका
  4. आर्यसत्य
  5. कक्षपुट
  6. कप्फिणाभ्युदय
  7. कुण्डलकेशीप्रभात
  8. गुह्यवज्रविलासिनीसाधन
  9. गुह्यावली
  10. ज्ञानसारसमुच्चयनिबन्ध
  11. तर्कसोपान
  12. धर्मपदव्याख्यान
  13. धर्मोत्तरप्रदीप
  14. नन्दगौतमीय
  15. नलगिरिदमन
  16. नानासिद्धोपदेश
  17. नालन्दादहन
  18. निष्किञ्चनयशोधर
  19. नृत्यप्रसूति
  20. न्यायबिन्दुटीका
  21. पञ्चकन्यातरङ्गिणी
  22. पञ्चकाराभिसम्बोधि
  23. पञ्चविंशतिसाहस्रिका प्रज्ञापारमिता
  24. पञ्चाकार
  25. पद्मचिन्तामणि नाम नागसेनचरीत
  26. मध्यमार्थसङ्ग्रह
  27. मध्यान्तविभागसूत्रभाष्यटीका
  28. महामायातन्त्र
  29. महामायासाधनोपायिका
  30. वीरकन्यावाहिनी
  31. व्यक्तपादटीका
  32. सलामाविनाश प्रतिवर्णरूपनृत्यनाटिका
  33. साधनमाला
  34. सिद्धैकवीरमहातन्त्र
  35. सुधाभोजन
  36. स्वाधिष्ठानप्रभेद
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12th c. Buddhist cave found in East Java

A 12th-century meditation cave with Buddhist sculptures was recently discovered (or rather publicised) near the hamlet of Jireg in East Java. It seems that its contents have already been looted. There is little information about how the dating was reached (the few available images are of the Majapahit style). Offerings appear to have been regularly made by pilgrims.

The Buddhist affiliation of the site is similarly not made clear in news reports. But then there is mention of the “1,500 Buddhists in Bondowoso” — a surviving village of Majapahit Buddhists? Fascinating.

It is predictable that comment on this find fell automatically to Theravādin groups, who of course have no connection whatsoever to the Majapahit era or any other aspect of Indonesia’s Buddhist heritage.

* In other news, Burmese Theravādin monks recently released their hostages.

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Manuscripts vanish from BNF

Some 30,000 books and manuscripts, including nearly 2,000 considered to be of “exceptional historical value”, have gone missing from the Bibliothèque Nationale, France.

The BNF contains important collections of Sanskrit manuscripts, including those gathered in Nepal and originally donated by Brian Houghton Hodgson. So much for the view that priceless South Asian artifacts, including manuscripts, are better off in European hands.


One of the BNF’s Buddhist MSS: the Udānavarga.

– Article: ‘Curator suspected of looting library’, The Guardian, June 28 2005.