Sources of the Sampuṭa/Sampuṭodbhava

I greatly enjoyed the conference at LIRI. Here are some images from my handout.

Musings on a hat (+update)

A ms. now at the British Library (formerly of India Office Library, Thomas 7740) Mss Eur Hodgson vol. 26 (formerly 31/3h) is a comprehensive description of a thang ka (Skt. paṭa, N. paubāhā) from gZhis ka rtse (Shigatse for you and I, Jikhāche for the author). It was compiled by Amṛtānanda for Brian Hodgson, and it lists no less than 95 deities (plus consorts where applicable). This is the pratijñā as it were: uttarāpaṃthe jikhāche nāma pradeśe likhitāyāṃ paṭapratimāyāṃ nepālabhāṣayā paubāhā iti prakhyātāyāṃ likhitānāṃ devadevīgaṇānāṃ mūrtidhyānanāmāni likhyaṃte||

Aside from the intrinsic interest of this work (and indeed, the entire collection of Hodgson's papers) and aside from the fact that this painting seems to have disappeared, there is one small problem I wish to address here. A few of these `deities' are actually lamas (Tib. bla ma, lāmājū for the author) sporting something called an `ūrdhvajñāna...topikā' (p. 4, l. 1: ... ūrddhvajñānābhidhatopikābhṛt ...; l. 34: ... ūrddhvajñānākhyatoṣikayā ... [sic for topikayā, probably just a smudge]). I may be terribly ignorant here, but I'm still puzzled by this word.

Topi - if you learned Hindi or some similar language - is obviously `hat'. Lamas - or at least some of them - wear paṇ zhwas. Hazy memories from my undergraduate days somehow reminded me that Sum pa mkhan po has a story on how these hats came into fashion: de dus Bhaṃ ga la'i Tsa ti gha bo'i grong khyer gyi paṇ ṭi ta Pi ha ra zhes pa'i gtsug lag khang du mu stegs pa'i rgol ba zhig byung ba'i tshe rgan mo zhig gi kha la nyan nas tsher ma lta bu'i rtse can gyi zhwa gyon nas rtsod pas rgyal ba las paṇ zhwa rtse ring dar ro|| (Dpag bsam ljon bzang, p. 109). Das seem to identify Tsa ti gha bo with Cittagong.

Now what if Amṛtānanda somehow knew about this and produced a fake Skt. ūrdhva-jñāna from taking `gong' to be a Tibetan word for `ūrdhva', and `sems' or `tsi tta' a synonym for `jñāna'? For the time being this is the only way around this problem, but it seems almost too funny to be true.

UPDATE: It seems that I was (almost) entirely mislead. In light of MS Eur Hodgson vol. 26, pp. 89-91, another description of a paṭa from Tibet we find more about the puzzling ūrdhvajñāna hat. In this text we have an ūrdhvajñāna-rumuci, which is probably a re-Sanskritization of ye shes bla ma rin po che. For those versed in things rNying ma pa, here is an appetizer: there is a story here which Amṛtānanda claims to be a 'popular myth'. Ūrdhvajñāna-rumuci (who looks like Padmasambhava from the description, except that he is holding a vajra and a kīla) was an incarnation of Gorakṣa, disciple of Matsyendra. He appeared in this form on his master's command in order to defeat Śaṅkara (son of a widow and Viśveśvara-Rudra of Benares), who was rather miffed about losing a debate with Nāgārjuna and started persecuting Buddhism by disposing of their books. Rumuci defeats him repeatedly in debate and magical contests, the final battle taking place in a place called Guru-bharu. Yet another beautiful 'Himalayan encounter'!

A fragment from Vanaratna's Acalābhisamaya

Perhaps some of you will be interested that this work, the ``Acalābhisamayaḥ hṛṣṭābhidhāna'' (obviously not the original title but a Tibetan reconstruction, see Tōh. 1783), survives for the most part (ff. 2-9 out of probably not more than 10) as Göttingen Xc14/40b. Unfortunately the pictures are not very clear.

This completes the identification of works contained in Xc14/40 (40a has long been known as perhaps the oldest ms. of the Kriyāsamuccaya), since Kazuo Kano in 2004 and 2005 has established that 40c is a fragment from the *Suvarṇavarṇāvadāna. You can read about that in the following articles:

• Kazuo Kano, ``Göttingen shozō no Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana satsuei bonbun shahon Xc14/1, Xc14/57 ni tsuite'' (The Photocopies of Sanskrit Manuscripts Photographed by Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana preserved in Göttingen, Xc14/1 and Xc14/57). Mikkyō Bunka 212 (2004) 35-54.

• Kazuo Kano, ``Two folios from Sthiramati's Triṃśikābhāṣya in Sanskrit Photographed by Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana: Diplomatic and Critical Editions of Göttingen Xc14/1e''. WZKS XLIX (2005) 113-149.

For a magnificent painting of the `last pundit in Tibet', see here.

Ārali and Rigi - an odd pair (I)

I spent the last few days inputting the canonical material relating to the Ārali tantras. It's not much: two short tantras in the Bka' 'gyur (Tōh. 426 and 427) and merely one anonymous sādhana in the Bstan 'gyur (Tōh. 1658). The latter was translated by Bu ston and hence predates the first part of the fourteenth century.

According to Bu ston's classification (in the Rgyud sde rnam bzhag rgyas pa) these two tantras form a sub-class of their own under the broader family of the Heruka-tantras, the other sub-classes being the vast corpus of Śamvara-tantras along with those of the Hevajra, Buddhakapāla and Mahāmāyā.

When I first came across these tantras a few years ago, I was under the impression that they were fabricated in Tibet. I have no idea why I thought this, perhaps because of the odd names of the main deities. I should have suspected that there must have been some kind of evidence with Bu ston (since he considers it 'original').

Since then - with the help of Prof. Sanderson - I came across some evidence that at least the Vajrārali was known on the Indian subcontinent. A manuscript fragment from Cambridge (Or. 158, uncatalogued by Bendall) dating from 1162 AD has on its title page "vajrāmṛtatantra || vajrāralitantra || buddhakapālatantra ||". Unfortunately the fragment has bits and pieces of the Vajrāmṛta and the Buddhakapāla only. Since then, at a lecture held in Oxford, Prof. Harunaga Isaacson has signaled the identification of one folio with the actual text, also kept in Cambridge.

The first thing that strikes one as odd about this small corpus are the titles themselves. The expression 'ārali' is seen earliest in the yoginītantras (as far as I know) in a mantra in the Sarvabuddhasamāyoga. In a mahāyoga context, Āryadeva uses it more than once in his Caryāmelāpakapradīpa and all seem to mean a kind of 'play' (rol pa) associated with the Buddhas. Wedemeyer, as far as I can remember, always translates it as 'extensive play'. The etymology remains uncertain, but it is to be noted that all permutations of a/ā and l/ll seem to occur.

It should also be noted that this is not the interpretation that Bu ston seems to have preferred. We may surmise this only indirectly however. In a closing note after his synopsis of the Vajrārali he states that in some Tibetan collections the title is 'Heruka rol pa'i rgyud' (*Herukāralitantra?), but this he considers a total lie: ''dir rgyud 'bum kha cig tu He ru ka rol pa'i rgyud ces bya ba bris pa yod de | de ni rdzun ma yang dag zhig go ||.'

'Rigi' is even stranger. In this corpus the word occurs only in the Rigi-ārali-tantra, there 'Rigi' is the main goddess - far more than a mere consort to the Heruka 'Ārali', she is actually the teacher of the tantra. There seems to be one occurrence where 'rigi' is glossed as simply 'ḍākinī': ri gi mkha' 'gro mar ni gsung (D 179a). As far as I can tell, 'rigi' occurs only once in the yoginītantra corpus as the name of an entity, namely in a nebulous introductory line of the Catuṣpīṭhatantra: 'rigīnāṃ jñānam īśvaram'. However, Bhavabhaṭṭa glosses it not as 'ḍākinī' as we would expect from the line above but as 'buddhas': rigīnāṃ buddhānāṃ jñānam īśvaraś ca.

It is quite evident that the Vajrārali is much earlier that the Rigi-ārali. As I said above, the consort appears only in the second tantra, and this scripture betrays close connections with other yoginītantras. Such Hevajra-specific elements as the 'four blisses' and so on are missing from the Vajrārali but are there in the Rigi-ārali. Sacred places (pīṭha, kṣetra, cchandoha, etc. and their upa- varieties) from the Śamvara-tantras also turn up here. I believe that any future, closer study should take into account the possibility that the Rigi-ārali is a recycled variant of an older cult of Vajrārali.