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Liland, ‘The transmission of the Bodhicaryāvatāra’ (2009)

Fredrik Liland. ‘The transmission of the Bodhicaryāvatāra: The history, diffusion, and influence of a Mahāyāna Buddhist text’. M.A. thesis, Universitetet i Oslo, 2009. [official site/PDF] Supervised by Jens E. Braarvig.

From the Abstract

The thesis is concerned with the 7th Century Mahāyāna Buddhist text Bodhicaryāvatāra (BCA) and its significance as a vehicle for cultural exchange. We trace its history in India and beyond, from its proposed author Śāntideva’s hand, its contemporary influence in India, and its impact in the lands—Nepal, Tibet, China, Mongolia, and beyond—and languages—Sanskrit, Newari, Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, and others—where it travelled. The nature of its influence has varied with the times and places where it has found itself, but in all instances it received a prominent place of canonical status, and was mostly revered.
[…]
The BCA has received quite a lot of attention in modern scholarship since the first publication of a critical Sanskrit edition by Minayev in 1889. A large number of new manuscripts of the text have surfaced since then, and a separate chapter is dedicated to philological concerns and the dire need for a new and updated version that will take into account also the new knowledge we now have of the text[‘]s history. A mostly unnoticed commentary, the Bodhicaryāvatāra-ṭippaṇi, also receives i[t]s long overdue attention in this chapter.

Liland’s thesis presents a long over due bibliographically-oriented update to scholarship on the Bodhicaryāvatāra. Two other scholars are said to have been recently working on a critical edition of the text: Daniel Stender and Richard Mahoney. I do not know whether either are proceeding.

One stand-out feature of Liland’s thesis is the attention it pays to Nepalese sources and translations in the Newar (“Newari”) language, which, as regular readers know, are routinely neglected in Buddhist studies, notwithstanding the fact that they originate in direct contact with the Sanskrit original in a South Asian Buddhist setting. Despite this unusual but welcome development, I can point to at least three areas of further improvement:

  1. “Ratna Bahādur Vajrācārya (1893-1955), of whom not much is known” (p.92): in fact, at least four (mostly short) biographies of this outstanding figure are in print, including a dedicated and independently published treatment by Manish Shakya.
  2. No mention of (the many) translations into South Asian vernaculars; here’s one in Nepali. Not all such translations were done from Sanskrit, but some have been.
  3. No reference to manuscripts in private or recently documented collections.

Continue reading “Liland, ‘The transmission of the Bodhicaryāvatāra’ (2009)”

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Mori, ‘The Rituals of Tantric Buddhism in India’ (2011)

The Rituals of Tantric Buddhism in IndiaMori, Masahide. Indo mikkyō no girei sekai (The Rituals of Tantric Buddhism in India). Sekai Shisōsha, 2011, 340pp. ISBN 978-4-7907-1498-9. [official site / amazon.co.jp]

森　雅秀〮著 『インド密教の儀礼世界』 世界思想社 7140円

“The iconology of tantric Buddhist ritual.
[This book] makes the full picture of tantric Buddhist ritual emerge through elucidation of the structure and semiology of ritual in Indian tantric Buddhism. Its illumination of [a previously] unknown ritual world, Buddhist studies and Indology, as well as religious studies, anthropology, history, archaeology and art history and so on will have a wide impact on several areas.” [translated blurb]

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Zotter & Zotter, ‘Initiations in India & Nepal’ (2010)

Hindu and Buddhist Initiations in NepalAstrid Zotter and Christof Zotter (eds). Hindu and Buddhist initiations in India and Nepal. Ethno-Indology, v.10. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010. 380 p. ISBN 9783447063876. [worldcat/Lehmanns]

The contributors to this volume are from different academic disciplines and treat examples of both kinds of rituals in various religious settings. Of special interest in this collection of essays are interrelationships among initiations and their relations to other kinds of rituals. The papers are devoted to the study of minute details and point to the dynamics of initiations. The transfer of ritual elements accompanied by readjustments to new contexts as the modification of procedures or the reassignment of meanings is one of the recurring traits. Other aspects addressed by the authors include the relation of script (ritual handbooks) to performance or various forces of change (e.g. the economics of ritual, gender-related variations, modernization and democratization). Continue reading “Zotter & Zotter, ‘Initiations in India & Nepal’ (2010)”

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Widdess, ‘Rāga Knowledge in the Kathmandu Valley’ (2011)

Widdess, Richard. ‘Implicit Rāga Knowledge in the Kathmandu Valley.’ Analytical Approaches to World Music 1 (1), 2011, pp.73-92. [abstract / PDF (11 MB)]

Abstract extract

The term rāga is current not only in the classical traditions of North and South Indian music, where it is the subject of an extensive written and oral theory, but also in many non-classical traditions especially of religious music in South Asia. For example, devotional songs (dāphā) sung by groups of Newar farmers in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, are regularly attributed to rāgas; but there is little explicit (i.e. verbally expressed) knowledge about rāga among the performers. […] The present study suggests that rāga-preludes sung before each dāphā song constitute melodic models that underlie song melodies. […]

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Weiler, ‘Neoclassical Newar Residences’ (2009)

Katharina Maria Lucia Weiler. ‘The Neoclassical Residences of the Newars in Nepal: Transcultural Flows in the Early 20th century Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley’. PhD diss., Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, 2009. [abstract / PDF (40 MB)]

Almost as good as being there, this lavishly illustrated dissertation treats an important architectural subculture of the Kathmandu Valley. Weiler looks closely at the stylistic origins of buildings built by people who wanted to emulate Europe, while remaining tantric Hindus and Buddhists at heart. This lucid description of a relatively recent strand in the rich tapestry of Newar urban life is commended to aficionados of Nepalese taste.

Nike of Samothrace and Śrī yantra at Ananda Niketan

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Vajracharya & Allen, ‘The Daśakarma Vidhi’ (2010)

Pandit Vaidya Asha Kaji (Ganesh Raj Vajracharya); Michael Allen, ed. The Daśakarma Vidhi: Fundamental Knowledge on Traditional Customs of Ten Rites of Passage Amongst the Buddhist Newars. Kathmandu: Mandala Book Point, 2010. 191 pp. ISBN: 9789994655144. [official site (ordering details)]

From the blurb:

The daśakarma begin with the birth ceremony 
(jaṭābhiṣeka) and end in the ceremonial initiation of the Supreme Seniormost or Head of the Community (cakreśvarābhiṣeka). The system of the daśakarma is so instilled in the life of every Buddhist Newar that the rites have become part and parcel of the life-cycle, thus presenting as inseparable traditional and cultural rites unique among human beings on earth. […]

Asha Kaji Vajracharya (1908–1992) was one of twentieth-century Nepal’s most respected Buddhist figures. Having cultivated the traditional learning of a pandit, he became renowned in his native Lalitpur as an Ayurvedic doctor, tantric practitioner and raconteur of Buddhist lore. He published over thirty books, many of which were translations or commentaries based on Sanskrit originals, and opened up his own manuscript collection to photography by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project. He advised and collaborated with a number of foreign scholars, and became the first Newar master to teach the Buddhist tradition of the Kathmandu Valley outside Asia, touring Japan at his students’ request, and bestowing initiation into the cycle of Cakrasamvara upon a non-Newar couple for the first time in the modern era. […]

Michael Allen was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1928. He received his B.A. degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin in 1950 and his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from the Australian National University in 1965. He was appointed to a lectureship in Anthropology at Sydney University in 1964 and retired as Professor in 1993. ln addition to his extensive fieldwork on Newar society and religion, conducted mainly between 1966 and 1978, Professor Allen has also carried out anthropological research in Vanuatu (1958–82) and in lreland (1988–96).

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Slusser, ‘Antiquity of Nepalese Wood Carving’ (2010)

Antiquity of Nepalese Wood Carving
Slusser (2010)

Mary Slusser. The Antiquity of Nepalese Wood Carving: A Reassessment. Freer/Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution: August 2010. ISBN 9780295990293. 325 pp., 201 illus. [official site]

According to the blurb, the author has carbon-dated certain items to a period as early as the Licchavi era, notably the struts of Uku Bāhā, one of the oldest continuously maintained Buddhist institutions in South Asia. Objects still in situ appear to be of much greater antiquity than previously thought.

A preview of Slusser’s findings was published on asianart.com. Given the author’s impressive contribution, we can perhaps overlook the misplaced horror at the recent painting of those wooden struts, which, incidentally, I witnessed during the Bāhā’s preparatory cleaning for its hosting of the Matayā festival. I am sure Dr. Slusser appreciates that sacred places in the Valley are living entities, subject to periodic renovation, which do not stay frozen in time for the amusement of Westerners with antiquarian fetishes.

It should also be said that “the first to publish an Ukubāhāḥ strut—or for that matter any Nepalese wooden sculpture” was not “Pratapaditya Pal in his 1974 Art of Nepal“. Previously there was Stella Kramrisch, and of course Giuseppe Tucci published many photographs of such items in the course of his career, culminating in his ’69 coffee-table book of erotic Newar temple sculpture, Rati-Līlā — a lyrical and mature statement of Tucci’s thinking, juxtaposed in a slightly tawdry way with photographed wood carvings of human (and other) maithuna scenes of questionable artistic merit.

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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.