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Läänemets, ‘The Gaṇḍavyūha as Historical Source’ (2009)

Märt Läänemets. ‘Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra kui ajalooallikas (The Gaṇḍavyūha-sūtra as a Historical Source)’. Dissertationes Historiae Universitatis Tartuensis 17. PhD diss., Tartu University, 2009. 281 pp. [abstract / PDF]

Gandavyuha, LACMA
Folios from a Gaṇḍavyuha codex, LACMA.

Läänemets’ dissertation, written in Estonian, also comes with a detailed English summary (pp.263‒274).

Allow me to briefly take up a couple of points mentioned in the summary. Firstly, it is surprising that the writer concludes that the Gv was composed in Central Asia “on the basis of extra-textual historical facts”, even though it is pointed out that the action takes place almost entirely in identifiable sites in South India (p.269).

Secondly, it is stated that the “Gv reached Nepal… no later than the middle of the 12th century, but likely a century or two earlier” (p.268). Here Läänemets refers to an MS dated ~1166 CE, which he describes as the oldest and “only [this must be a typo] extant text”. There is no reason to think that the Gv was not circulating in Nepal in approximately the same period that it began to circulate in the rest of South Asia, even if very few palmleaf MSS have survived. For instance, Kamalaśīla, who prescribes the recitation of the Bhadracārī (which was attached to the Gv by Kamalaśīla’s time, the late eighth century) as part of a bodhisattva’s routine in his first Bhāvanākrama, is said to have resided in Nepal, where such texts were presumably already well known.

One Nepalese MS which is not mentioned is an illustrated palmleaf codex, preserved in just a few folios across two collections in the United States: at LACMA [see right; link], and Brooklyn Museum [link]. Although the folios at LACMA have been studied by the inimitable Dr. Gautam V. Vajracharya, I do not know whether these two remarkable leaves have been identified as constitutents of the same codex, as they manifestly appear to be.

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Ohkado et al, ‘Xenoglossy in Hypnosis’ (2010)

Inexplicable irruptions.
Inexplicable irruptions.
Xenoglossy, ‘speaking in tongues’, a phenomenon considered by some to offer evidence for reincarnation, is not widely discussed — because not widely accepted — in the scientific literature. Nonetheless, articles have recently been published on the case of a Japanese woman who converses in Nepali, a language that she has (apparently) not learned, while under hypnosis. Here’s one:

大門 正幸, 稲垣 勝巳, 末武 信宏, 岡本 聡 「退行催眠時に生じる異言とそれが示唆するもの(第29回生命情報科学シンポジウム」 (OHKADO Masayuki, INAGAKI Katsumi, SUETAKE Nobuhiro, and OKAMOTO Satoshi. On Xenoglossy Occurring in Hypnosis and What It Suggests (The 29th Symposium on Life Information Science).) Journal of International Society of Life Information Science 28 (1), 128–139, 2010.
[link]

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Giuseppe Tucci Symposium, Monash University, 2010

Giuseppe Tucci Symposium, Monash University (Caulfield), 2010

The Giuseppe Tucci Symposium jointly convened in Melbourne by Monash University, IsIAO and the Istituto Italiano di Cultura over September 29 to October 1, 2010 has successfully concluded. In my estimation, the quality of presentations was quite high, with a great deal of new material coming forth regarding Giuseppe Tucci’s life, times and scholarly legacy.

Two volumes of proceedings are planned. In the meantime, a foretaste is available in the booklet of the abstracts in downloadable PDF form.

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Fürer-Haimendorf Collection, SOAS

Saptavidhānottarapūjā performed by Badrīratna Vajrācārya, 1957 CE
A slew of photographs taken by the late anthropologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909–1995) have been placed in an online digital archive hosted by SOAS. Hundreds of these photographs are purposive records of Newar life, taken just after the opening of Nepal to foreign visitors in the late 1950s. Shown here is a worship of Āryatārā performed in Kathmandu by Badrīratna Vajrācārya who, although a well-known figure in Kathmandu, is not identified by name in the archive.

Dozens of other Himalayan and South Asian ethnic groups are represented in the collection, which is a real mine of information for researchers in the field, well worth the cost of digitization. The copyrights — yes, they still matter — are reserved by SOAS and Nicholas Haimendorf.

Link: Fürer-Haimendorf collection, SOAS (at digital.info.soas.ac.uk/).

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McKeown, ‘From Bodhgayā to Lhasa to Beijing’ (2010)

Arthur McKeown. From Bodhgayā to Lhasa to Beijing: The Life and Times of Śāriputra (c.1335–1426), Last Abbot of Bodhgayā. PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010. 570 pp.

According to a note kindly sent by Dr. McKeown, whom I first met in Kathmandu a couple of years ago, the dissertation “includes the transcription and translation of all three biographies of Śāriputra, as well as transcription and translation of the three siddha biographies (Virūpakṣa, Goraknātha, Golenātha) he dictated to Jñānaśrī.”

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Kumari house 250th Anniversary, Sep. 2007

A series of events is being organised to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Kumari-house in Kathmandu. The anniversary will be celebrated with several worship programs, the renovation of a number of items and furnishings, the issue of a commemorative stamp and publication, and of course the iconic rathayātrā.

The festivities last for about a week starting from September 24, 2007. (Thanks to I.T. for the lead.)

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Luczanits’ ITBA

Christian Luczanits. 2014&ndash. ‘Homepage of Christian Luczanits’ [before 2014: Indian and Tibetan Buddhist Art (ITBA) at the University of Vienna]. http://www.luczanits.net.

NB: a large and well-documented collection of photographs from sites in the Himalayas and South Asia including Alchi, Ladakh, Kanganhalli, Kinnaur and Lahaul-Spiti.

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Nepālāvatāra (III): The Paśus that didn’t become Patties

Yesterday, while visiting Kathmandu’s tantric sites with a number of scholars, we ran into a full-scale riot triggered by the cancellation of animal sacrifice. The normal thing to do on this day of the year, the conclusion of Indra Jātrā, is to offer living animals to the Bhairava worshipped in the festival. This year, however, royal patronage has been withdrawn for the first time, so that the government now foots the bill. And the government refused to pay for the traditionally prescribed slaughter. The result: spontaneous rioting, pitched street battles, city-wide disruption and “lockdown” (bandha) now in its second day.

This outcome is not only hard for modern Western minds to comprehend: the Nepalese nouveau elites who incited it had no inkling of what they were stirring up either. Today I heard a non-Newar local sneer, “If the government decided not to kill a chicken, they [Newar traditionalists] would still go crazy!” Actually, what the protesters were objecting to is not so much the loss of animal sacrifice per se, but rather the fact that the festival has not been carried out properly, yathāvidhi.

The fog of misunderstanding is not hard to dispel if one simply recalls how tantric Newar religion is. The idea that bloodthirsty deities must be sated with fresh rakta, found often enough in the tantras and the religious culture of the tantric age, runs particularly deep here. It runs deep enough that one finds it in tantric Buddhist texts too, going back as far as the ‘Indian Period’ of Buddhism.