Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages
Studies in Manuscript Cultures
Edited by
Michael Friedrich
Harunaga Isaacson
Jörg B. Quenzer
Volume 14
Indic Manuscript
Cultures through
the Ages
Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations
Edited by
Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo,
Camillo Alessio Formigatti
ISBN 978-3-11-054309-4
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-054310-0
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-054312-4
ISSN 2365-9696
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0
License. For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de.
© 2017 Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo, Camillo Alessio Formigatti,
published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.
The book is published with open access at degruyter.com.
Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck
♾ Printed on acid-free paper
Printed in Germany
www.degruyter.com
Contents
Vincenzo Vergiani
Preface | IX
Collections
Camillo A. Formigatti
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library: Three Centuries of
History and Preservation | 3
Nalini Balbir
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 47
Vincenzo Vergiani
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal through the
Manuscript Collections | 77
Dominic Goodall
What Information can be Gleaned from Cambodian Inscriptions about Practices
Relating to the Transmission of Sanskrit Literature? | 131
Codicology (from Orality to Print)
Eva Wilden
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 163
Giovanni Ciotti
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil
Evidence from Manuscripts of the Amarakośa with Tamil Annotations (Studies in
Late Manipravalam Literature 2) | 193
Jürgen Hanneder
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 223
VI | Contents
Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page. Forms and Graphic Artifices of
Early Indic Buddhist Manuscripts in Historical Perspective| 239
Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang
Xylographs| 287
Emmanuel Francis
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript| 319
Palaeography
Kengo Harimoto
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702| 355
Marco Franceschini
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha Be-
longing to the Cambridge University Library (Or.2366) | 377
Textual criticism
Francesco Sferra
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra. A Critical Edition of the Leaves Con-
tained in Cambridge University Library Or.158.1| 409
Gergely Hidas
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 449
Péter-Dániel Szántó
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit Fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 487
Florinda De Simini
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva. Common Errors, Scribal
Interventions, and the Transmission of the Śivadharma Corpus | 505
Contents | VII
Cultural Studies
Daniele Cuneo
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words
UL Add.864, the so-called Cambridge Kalāpustaka Manuscript from Early Modern
Nepal | 551
Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Umā and Śiva’s Playful Talks in Detail (Lalitavistara): On the Production of Śaiva
Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal
Studies on the Śivadharma and the Mahābhārata 1 | 587
Lata Mahesh Deokar
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 655
Mahesh A. Deokar
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: An Important Tool for the Study of the Mogga-
llānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā
A Case Study Based on a Cambridge Fragment of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā
with Special Reference to CV 2.2.1 and MV 3.11 | 695
Hugo David
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya: a Pre-
liminary Report Based on two Cambridge Manuscripts | 727
List of Contributors| 755
Indexes| 761
Preface
This volume reflects and celebrates the work carried out in the frame of the project
‘The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the Sanskrit
manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge’,1 funded by a Stand-
ard Route research grant of the British Arts and Humanities Research Council
(AHRC). The project, which was officially launched in November 2011, had the du-
ration of three years. I served as the Principal Investigator with the assistance of
two research associates, Daniele Cuneo and Camillo A. Formigatti, who are the co-
editors of this volume. The project’s main goal was to create a complete electronic
catalogue of the Sanskrit – and generally South Asian2 – manuscripts held in the
University Library (henceforth UL3) of Cambridge and digitise about one-third of
the collections,4 linking the catalogue entries to the digital images (wherever these
are available).5
Most of the contributions stem from presentations given at two workshops
organised in April 20136 and September 20147 at the Faculty of Asian and Middle
Eastern Studies of the University of Cambridge, while some (including my own)
are independent contributions. However, all of them reflect the diverse efforts of
the authors to engage – each in her or his often very personal way – with various
aspects of the manuscript cultures of pre-modern South Asia. At the origin of this
endeavour there is the shared awareness and recognition that the material fea-
tures of the technology that allowed knowledge to be stored and circulated –
||
1 We used to call it the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project, which is how I will refer to it in the follow-
ing pages.
2 Notably, the UL collections include substantial numbers of manuscripts in Prakrit, Tamil, Mal-
ayalam, and other medieval Indian languages.
3 Note that throughout the volume the acronym UL will refer to the Cambridge University Li-
brary. Similarly, shelf-marks starting with either Add. or Or. identify manuscripts kept in the
Cambridge University Library, unless otherwise specified.
4 Due to the limited budget at our disposal, we could not aim at the complete digitisation of all
the Sanskrit holdings in the UL.
5 The catalogue is now accessible online in the Sanskrit Manuscripts section of the Cambridge
Digital Library: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/sanskrit
As is known, before the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project was launched, the only available print cat-
alogue of the Cambridge collections was Cecil Bendall’s remarkable 1883 Catalogue of the Bud-
dhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge, which – as the title indicates –
only covers the Buddhist manuscripts acquired until that year.
6 ‘Buddhist Manuscript Culture: Textuality and Materiality’, 12–13 April 2013.
7 ‘The South Asian Manuscript Book. Material, Textual and Historical Investigations’, 25–27
September 2014.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-001, © 2017 V. Vergiani, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
X | Vincenzo Vergiani
namely, the manuscript – inevitably affected the ways in which knowledge itself
was produced, organised, and transmitted in that world (and within it, in innu-
merable local variations). Thus, the interest of manuscripts lies not only in their
being the repositories of intellectual, religious, and aesthetic contents, but also
in their being artefacts of a specific culture, each of them the unique outcome of
the convergence of a number of factors: the availability of materials (such as palm
leaf, paper, ink, pigments, etc.), the technical know-hows involved in its produc-
tion (the preparation of the leaves, the scribe’s mastery of one or more scripts, the
artists’ illuminations, etc.), the social conventions and constraints, the laws of
offer and demand for certain works, the existence of formal and informal institu-
tions supporting the cultivation of given systems of knowledge, the individual
passions and beliefs, and so on.
The most innovative aspect of the project, for which there were hardly any
precedents within the field of South Asian studies, was the creation of an elec-
tronic catalogue linking the individual records to digital images, and it posed
some considerable technical challenges that demanded creative solutions. Al-
ready at the application stage, and in consultation with Grant Young, then Head
of Digital Content of the UL (who later acted as Project Manager for all the aspects
that concerned the library), and Burkhard Quessel, Curator of Tibetan Manu-
scripts at the British Library, it was decided that the records would be prepared
in XML using the manuscript description module of TEI P5, an internationally
recognised metadata standard that had been adopted by the UL in 2009. One of
the first tasks that our team had to undertake was the adaptation of the TEI P5
module, mostly developed for Western materials, to the quite different character-
istics of South Asian manuscripts in terms of formats, materials, foliation, etc.8
Our team made the conceptual decisions about the necessary changes to the TEI
module, with the advice of the project’s consultants, Harunaga Isaacson and
Dominic Goodall, renowned Sanskritists with a unique experience of manu-
scripts.9 Luckily, our task was enormously facilitated by the launch of the UL’s
new digital platform, the Cambridge Digital Library, in 2012, during the first year
of the project. For all the technical aspects of the project’s setup we could rely on
the invaluable assistance of Grant Young and his collaborators – in particular
||
8 For a more accurate description of this and other technical/theoretical aspects of the catalogu-
ing, see Formigatti (forthcoming), ‘<title type="alt" xml:lang="eng"> From the Shelves to the
Web: Cataloging Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Digital Era</title>’, in Elena Mucciarelli and Heike
Oberlin (eds), Paper & Pixel: Digital Humanities in Indology, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
9 In particular, Harunaga Isaacson has been for several years the director of the Nepalese-Ger-
man Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) funded by the German Research Foundation
(Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft).
Preface | XI
Huw Jones – with whom we established a fruitful and friendly cooperation that
continued throughout the lifespan of the project and beyond. I take this oppor-
tunity to express our heartfelt gratitude to all of them.
The core of the work consisted in the painstaking and time-consuming direct
inspection of each manuscript, and the careful recording of its physical and co-
dicological features: support material, script, number of folios, number of lines
per folio, foliation, illustrations, hands, etc., but also, as far as possible, type of
layout, graphic and decorative devices, marginal annotations, colophons, scribal
colophons and other paratexts – all features that are frequently neglected and
omitted in conventional printed catalogues.10 Besides, our team inspected the
contents of each manuscript, to confirm or correct its identification as given in
the hand-list(s), or establish it independently, as far as possible, in those (not too
infrequent) cases in which the work was only vaguely identified as falling into a
general category, such as ‘devotional poem’, ‘work on jyotiṣa’, etc., in the existing
hand-list or the partial card catalogue.11 We also tried to retrace and record the
history of each manuscript on the basis of the information contained in sources
as diverse as colophons, cover notes, modern hand-lists, and archives: date of
production and place of copy; names of scribes, owners, patrons, donors, and
other individuals involved in its production and later vicissitudes, up to the time
and circumstances of its acquisition by the UL.12
This was a massive enterprise, equally daunting and exhilarating, not just
because – as I have pointed out above – we often had to start from scratch, but
also because the UL collections of South Asian manuscripts, although relatively
small (if compared for example with those in the British Library or the Bodleian
||
10 The emphasis on the detailed description of minute codicological aspects (such as interlinear
space, writing frames, akṣara height etc.) fulfils a specific aim, namely the creation of a manu-
script description template that could be used for studies in quantitative and comparative codi-
cology. The information gathered and encoded during our cataloguing project can be used to
develop a database to query large amount of data, for instance in order to determine the date or
place of production of a manuscript lacking the colophon. To achieve this goal, we (especially
Camillo Formigatti) collaborated closely with two similar projects, Transforming Tibetan and
Buddhist Book Culture and Tibetan Book Evolution and Technology (TiBET). Both projects were
based at the Mongolian and Inner Asia Studies Unit (MIASU) of the University of Cambridge. For
these collaborations we wish to thank Hildegard Diemberger, Burkhard Quessel, and Michela
Clemente.
11 The latter catalogue was prepared in 1916 by Louis de la Vallée Poussin with the help of Car-
oline Mary Ridding (1862–1942). On the history of the formation and cataloguing of the UL South
Asian collections, see C. A. Formigatti’s article in the present volume.
12 For an overview of the provenance of the UL holdings, see Tables 1–2 in Formigatti’s contri-
bution to this volume.
XII | Vincenzo Vergiani
Library in Oxford), show considerable internal variety in terms of contents and
provenance.13 All the three main Indian religious traditions – Hinduism, Jainism,
and Buddhism, with many of their own internal strands and branches – are well
represented in the Cambridge manuscript collections, and so are some of the tra-
ditional śāstras (intellectual traditions) such as grammar (vyākaraṇa), astron-
omy/astrology (jyotiṣa) and medicine (āyurveda). This (and of course the fact that
historically Sanskrit was written in a wide range of regional scripts) also accounts
for the variety of scripts found in the Cambridge collections: beside Devanāgarī,
one finds Western or Jaina Devanāgarī, Nepālākṣarā (also known as Newari),
Tamil, Grantha, Malayalam, Śāradā and Bengali, just to mention those that are
attested more frequently. Furthermore, a significant number (approximately one
third) of manuscripts come from Nepal, the only region of the subcontinent in
which the climate is temperate enough to allow their survival for several centu-
ries. Thus, the UL South Asian manuscript collections cover a time range of al-
most thirteen centuries, with the oldest dated specimen, Add.1049.1,14 dating
from 828 CE, and several from the early second millennium. Thus, they provide
precious evidence of archaic (and poorly attested) forms of the scripts in which
they are written.15 Similarly well represented are early paper manuscripts (14th–
15th centuries) from the (mostly Jaina) collections of Western India.16
Dealing with such diversity required a variety of expertise, which was se-
cured through the generous collaboration of several colleagues. Many of the au-
thors who have contributed to this volume (and others who for different reasons
have not) collaborated with our team to the study and cataloguing of the UL man-
uscripts, and it is my pleasure here to acknowledge their contribution.
Nalini Balbir, with the assistance of Anett Krause from 2013, was responsible
for the cataloguing of the rich collection of Jaina manuscripts (for the history of
this collection, see Balbir’s contribution to this volume), which – as is typical of
||
13 Incidentally, I should mention that, while the grant application, and the overall architecture
of the project as described therein, were based on the assumption that there were about 1,200
items to be catalogued, the real number turned out to be close to 1,600, partly because some
manuscripts were not recorded in the main hand-list to which I had had access, and partly be-
cause some bundles turned out to contain several independent manuscripts.
14 https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01049-00001/1
15 On the palaeography of some of the earliest manuscripts in Cambridge and in Nepal see
Kengo Harimoto’s contribution to this volume. Among the most remarkable documents kept in
the UL it is worth mentioning a 12th-century manuscript in the extremely rare Bhaikṣukī script;
on this manuscript see Dragomir Dimitrov (2010), The Bhaikṣukī manuscript of the Candrā-
laṃkāra (Harvard Oriental Series 72), Cambridge, Mass.
16 On the Jaina manuscripts in the UL see Nalini Balbir’s contribution to this volume.
Preface | XIII
this religious tradition – includes both texts in Prakrit (mostly canonical) and
Sanskrit, often beautifully illuminated.
Francesco Sferra and Harunaga Isaacson advised us with the cataloguing of
Buddhist Tantric materials. In the same field of studies, Gergely Hidas inspected
the numerous Dhāraṇī manuscripts and prepared most of their catalogue records
as well as other entries on copies of works on Tantric ritual.
Florinda De Simini assisted us with the cataloguing of the manuscripts – of-
ten of considerable antiquity – of the so-called Śivadharma corpus,17 while Nina
Mirnig prepared the records of some manuscripts of Purāṇas and Hindu Tantras.
Giovanni Ciotti assisted us with the cataloguing of works on vedalakṣaṇa (i.e.
śikṣā, Vedic recitation, etc.), Charles Li helped with works on kāvya, grammar
and vāstuśāstra, and Elena Mucciarelli with Vedic works. Hugo David, who spent
two years in Cambridge as a Newton International Fellow, generously devoted
part of his time to the cataloguing of the manuscripts containing works of the
classical philosophical systems (darśanas) in the UL.
The UL manuscript collections also reflect the variety of literary cultures of
pre-modern India. Even though the name of the project contained the phrase
‘Sanskrit manuscripts’, we were aware from the beginning that the collections
also contain a substantial number of manuscripts in other pre-modern South
Asian languages. Over the centuries each of these literary cultures developed its
own particular features, but they existed alongside and within the prevailing cos-
mopolitan Sanskrit tradition, and often overlapped and influenced one another,
participating in the same broader cultural phenomena. Among these regional lit-
erary cultures, the one that is best attested in the UL collections is the Tamil, with
approximately 50 manuscripts. For their inspection and study, the project could
rely on the expertise of Eva Wilden, Emmanuel Francis, and Jean-Luc Chevillard.
Tamil manuscripts were only some of the South Indian manuscripts that
found their way into the UL collections at various times in the history of the li-
brary. In that part of the subcontinent palm leaf remained in use as the main writ-
ing support until the late 19th–early 20th centuries, even after the spread of print-
ing.18 As a consequence, they are all relatively young (less that two hundred years
old), because the hot humid climate causes their rapid deterioration. Neverthe-
less, especially in Kerala the commitment of the local Brahmins to preserve and
hand down the works of the tradition was so strong that they regularly produced
||
17 On this corpus, see the article De Simini and Mirnig have contributed to this volume.
18 See Emmanuel Francis’ contribution to this volume, which looks at some aspects of the tran-
sition from manuscript to printed book (and vice versa!).
XIV | Vincenzo Vergiani
new copies of most works in their possession even when the scholarly and reli-
gious traditions that had originally produced them had died out, thus collectively
making the region a major repository of texts of the pre-modern cultural legacy.
A significant number of the UL South Indian manuscripts were acquired as part
of the so-called Stolper collection in the late 1990’s, and apparently enumerated
in the main hand-list and ostensibly provided with a classmark.19 In fact the bun-
dles bore no labels linking them to the listed classmarks, so it was necessary to
inspect them carefully from scratch. It was Professor Kesavan Veluthat who first
started sorting out the manuscripts by language and script and identifying some
of the works contained in them during a four days’ visit to Cambridge in 2013. But
the great bulk of the work, which took months, was carried out by Marco Fran-
ceschini, a leading expert on the history of the Grantha script used to write San-
skrit in Dravidian South India, and Elisa Ganser, who helped us with the manu-
scripts in Malayalam script,20 with the contribution of Francis and Wilden for the
Tamil manuscripts.
As is evident from the previous pages, the project was an extraordinary op-
portunity to create links with Indologists worldwide, strengthening existing col-
laborations and creating new ones. Besides the collaborative work on the main
project goal, the cataloguing of the UL manuscripts, I would also like to mention
that Camillo A. Formigatti and Daniele Cuneo contributed to the organisation of
the exhibition ‘Buddha’s Word’ curated in 2014 by Hildegard Diemberger with the
collaboration of Michela Clemente at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropol-
ogy in Cambridge, which displayed a range of objects (manuscript and printed
books, writing implements and materials, and inscribed artefacts of various
kinds) produced across Buddhist Asia to disseminate the teaching of Dharma.
Another collaboration with a team of researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum, led
by the Keeper of Manuscripts and Printed Books Stella Panayotova, who work on
the analysis of the pigments used in manuscripts in medieval Europe and Asia,
led to the inclusion of some of the UL illuminated Sanskrit manuscripts into a
sample of books that were examined with experimental non-destructive methods
of analysis.
||
19 Note however that in most cases the list just indicated the script, but gave no indication of
the title or even the language of the work contained in the manuscript. On the Stolper collection,
see Formigatti’s article in this volume.
20 While the majority of manuscripts in the latter set are in Sanskrit, a substantial number are
in Malayalam language, so their proper identification and cataloguing will have to be postponed
until the resources are found to secure the collaboration of an expert on medieval and modern
Malayalam.
Preface | XV
Furthermore, the two project workshops were a forum for the dissemination
of project findings, but also for a broader reflection and debate on the South
Asian manuscript cultures, which covered the whole range of possible ways in
which Indological research can engage with manuscripts and manuscript cul-
ture(s), from textual criticism to palaeography, codicology, and topical or histor-
ical studies.
This diversity is well illustrated in the present volume.21 The collections them-
selves are in the limelight from a variety of angles in a number of contributions.
Camillo A. Formigatti’s paper tells the story of the Cambridge South Asian manu-
script collections, and of the scholars who helped to create them, pointing to the
important role they have played in the history of Indology. The Jaina collection
in the UL is the subject of Nalini Balbir’s article, which looks at its history and
contents and casts light on the ancient Jaina libraries and, generally, the book
culture of this religious group. Vincenzo Vergiani’s contribution surveys the con-
tents of Nepalese collections – a task enormously facilitated by the existence of
online databases such as the descriptive catalogue of the Nepalese-German Man-
uscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP)22 and the Sanskrit Manuscripts section of
the Cambridge Digital Library – in order to attempt a reconstruction of the history
of grammatical traditions in Nepal and reflect upon what they reveal about the
practice of vyākaraṇa in pre-modern South Asia at large. In his article Dominic
Goodall presents fascinating evidence – epigraphic, archaeological, literary, and
iconographic – that points to the existence of manuscript libraries in medieval
Cambodia, one of the most lively centres of the so-called Sanskrit cosmopolis
that, at its zenith, expanded well beyond the sub-continent to include most of
South East Asia.
Several contributions consist in studies of paratexts, layouts, and other codi-
cological features, which draw attention to the wealth of historical information
that can be drawn from these often neglected aspects of manuscript books. Eva
Wilden’s article deals with what she calls ‘satellite stanzas’ in Tamil manuscripts
and explores their multiple functions as well as their role in the emergence of
indigenous literary genres. Paratexts are also the subject of Giovanni Ciotti’s and
Jürgen Hanneder’s papers. The former looks at the annotations in vernacular
(Tamil) composed by teachers, but possibly also students, in south-Indian copies
of a centrepiece of traditional Sanskrit education such as the Amarakośa in order
||
21 I would like to thank the Cambridge University Library for having granted us the permission
to reproduce the images of many of their manuscripts, and the editors of the series Studies in
Manuscript Cultures for having agreed to publish this volume in their prestigious collection.
22 https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/forschung/ngmcp
XVI | Vincenzo Vergiani
to reconstruct practices of teaching and learning in 19th-century Tamil Nadu,
while the latter inspects the traces left by scribes, editors, and proofreaders in
Śāradā manuscripts from Kashmir, challenging widespread but superficial as-
sumptions on the production and transmission of literary texts in pre-modern In-
dia. The spatial arrangement of the written text on the folio is the focus of Cristina
Scherrer-Schaub’s contribution, a masterly reflection on the complex relation be-
tween orality and textuality as mirrored by the layout of early Buddhist manu-
scripts, and their lasting impact on later South Asian manuscripts. Many centu-
ries later, the introduction of printing in Buddhist Tibet ushered in a new era in
the circulation of textual knowledge, but, as Michela Clemente and Filippo Lu-
nardo show in their article, in its early stages the new technology still bore the
visible traces of the craftsmanship of the draftsmen and engravers involved in the
production of xylographs. On the other hand, Emmanuel Francis’ paper ques-
tions simplistic ideas of linear technological progress, presenting the case of
manuscript copies of printed books in early modern Tamil Nadu, in which the
author considers the socio-cultural and economic factors underlying this seem-
ingly odd phenomenon.
The field of palaeographical studies is exemplified by Kengo Harimoto’s con-
tribution, which inspects the evolution of the script in early-medieval (pre-1000
CE) written documents (both manuscripts and inscriptions) from Nepal, and
Marco Franceschini’s article, which examines the unusual system of notation of
grammatical features in a Grantha manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha.
Other contributions are examples of classical textual criticism, namely Fran-
cesco Sferra’s edition of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra, one of the most important and
ancient Buddhist yoginītantras, of which only one other copy – now seemingly in-
accessible – is known to survive; Gergely Hidas’ edition of Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-
Śītavatī, a Mahāyāna apotropaic scripture that is included in the Sanskrit
Pañcarakṣā collection; and Péter-Dániel Szántó’s edition of the Rigyarallitantra, a
Vajrāyāna scripture preserved in two fragments that originally belonged to the
same multiple-text manuscript of the Vajrāmṛta. All of these contributions contain
editions of little known or unpublished works and at the same time relate them to
the history of the tradition in which they originated and the development of the
respective genres. Similarly related to textual criticism is one of Florinda De Si-
mini’s two contributions to the volume, which is a reflection on the pros and cons
of traditional stemmatics in light of the author’s study of the transmission of a par-
ticular corpus, the Śivadharma.
Among the cultural and textual studies one finds Daniele Cuneo’s paper,
which examines the iconographic programme of a manuscript that is full of pic-
tures rather than words – an exquisite illuminated book produced in late medieval
Preface | XVII
Nepal that according to the author may have been conceived at the same time as a
pedagogical tool for princely pupils and as a courtly objet d’art. The article co-au-
thored by Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig compares different manuscript sets
of the Śivadharma corpus and sheds light on its formation and ideological premises
and goals, drawing insightful conclusions about sectarian dynamics in medieval
South Asia. Lata Deokar’s article on an unpublished grammatical work, the Sub-
antaratnākara, based on a study of its manuscript witnesses, brings back to life the
intriguing figure of its author, the Buddhist Subhūticandra (11th–12th centuries),
who composed also the Kavikāmadhenu, a well-known commentary on the Amara-
kośa. Another unpublished work, a commentary on the Cāndravyākaraṇa pre-
served only in a few (mostly Nepalese) manuscripts, is the focus of Mahesh Deo-
kar’s contribution, which points to its importance for the history of the Cāndra
system as well as to its influence on the Pāli grammatical tradition. And in his paper
Hugo David lays the ground for a critical edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘longer’ commentary
(bhāṣya) on the Aitareya Upaniṣad, a copy of which is kept in the Cambridge Uni-
versity Library, oddly neglected both by the indigenous commentarial tradition and
the modern scholarship for reasons still to be ascertained. All these articles are a
reminder that not just individual works but whole vast areas of pre-modern South
Asian literary culture still need to be properly researched, as they are only pre-
served in manuscript form. The risk of this immense legacy being lost forever
looms large if in the next years no adequate measures are taken to protect, repro-
duce and safeguard the manuscript collections, in South Asia and worldwide.
Today, almost 3 years after the end of the project, I am happy to be able to
say that much has been achieved: the project has managed to create a complete
online catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts kept in the UL and digitise a sub-
stantial portion of the collections, which were its main goals. But I am also ready
to admit that much work remains to be done, not only because this is in the nature
of research, but also due to some other factors that I have partly mentioned be-
fore: the manuscripts turned out to be much more numerous than we thought,
and we had to develop and adjust our tools and methods as the project moved
on. And of course we made mistakes, which sometimes it took weeks or months
to rectify. At present, the online catalogue contains two kinds of records: those
that are linked to digital images (almost 600) and the remaining (more than
1,000), without images and ranging in content from basic to very rich and ex-
haustive. This is where some of the advantages of an online electronic catalogue
become apparent. Once the template has been established, enriching or indeed
correcting the existing records is relatively easy. This will be necessary in a num-
ber of cases, not only for the records of digitised manuscripts that, for lack of time
and human resources, could not be adequately catalogued during the lifetime of
XVIII | Vincenzo Vergiani
the project, but also for all those manuscripts the existence of which was un-
known or which the project has made accessible in a way that was unthinkable
before, thus stimulating further research on them. It is hoped that in the future a
new project will complete the digitisation of the South Asian manuscripts in the
Cambridge University Library and integrate and expand the existing catalogue.
Vincenzo Vergiani
Former Director of the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project,
Cambridge University Library
|
Collections
Camillo A. Formigatti
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Cambridge
University Library: Three Centuries of
History and Preservation
Abstract: This article describes the history of the collections of Sanskrit manu-
scripts at the Cambridge University Library over a time-span of three centuries. It
provides detailed descriptions of archival material as well as transcriptions of let-
ters written by 19th-century Indologists in order to delineate the importance and in-
fluence of the manuscript collections in the 19th and 20th century—mainly for Bud-
dhist studies, but also for Jaina and Hindu studies. The last part of the contribution
is dedicated to the fate of the collections in the 21st century and the Sanskrit Manu-
scripts Project. *
The patient work of Sanskrit scholars, tracking manuscripts of old, cata-
loguing them and edit impo[r]tant texts from them may not strike the politi-
cian and the public as spectacular, but slowly and steadily it is contributing
to the proper understanding and adjustment of the ideology of culture for
which India stood, and for which it is hoped she will stand, in and through
the exigencies of historical upheavals.
(V. Raghavan, 1963, 7)
1 Introduction
Manuscripts—and consequently manuscript collections and catalogues—played a
seminal role in the development of South Asian studies in 19th-century Europe.
Many European scholars travelled to the Indian subcontinent in search of manu-
scripts of texts in Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan languages, very often working
with the help of local Pandits. The second half of the 19th century saw a boost of
interest in collecting and cataloguing South Asian manuscripts. In 1853 the German
||
This article is a companion to Formigatti (forthcoming), which provides an explanation of the
theoretical background and the cataloguing practices of the Sanskrit Manuscripts project
(alongside an examination of the history of cataloguing Sanskrit manuscripts). The first two sec-
tions of this article consist partly of a revised version of sections from Formigatti (2014) and
Formigatti (forthcoming). I would like to express my gratitude to Vincenzo Vergiani and Daniele
Cuneo for their insightful comments on a first draft of this article.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-002, © 2017 C.A. Formigatti, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
4 | Camillo A. Formigatti
scholar Albrecht Weber published his Verzeichnisse der Sankrit- und Prâkrit-hand-
schriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin, and in 1864 another German scholar,
Theodor Aufrecht, published a catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts kept in the
Bodleian Library at Oxford. In 1868 the Indian Government began to take an active
role in securing and cataloguing South Asian manuscripts. This new enterprise was
seemingly prompted by the growing demands of European scholars of Indian lan-
guages and literatures for better and more comprehensive tools with which to pur-
sue their research.1 It is thanks to the reports and catalogues written by scholars
who travelled through the whole of South Asia, collecting and buying manuscripts,
and to the catalogues of South Asian manuscripts kept in European libraries, that
in the second half of the 19th century the knowledge of Sanskrit literature made a
huge step forward. Many texts hitherto unknown – and others that had been
deemed lost – were (re)discovered.
The latest remark holds true all the more for the collections of South Asian Man-
uscripts in the Cambridge University Library (hereafter UL).2 The history of Sanskrit
studies at the University of Cambridge goes hand in hand with the history of its
collections of South Asian manuscripts. We speak of ‘collections’ in the plural, ra-
ther than of a single collection, because it is possible to recognize different sections
according to the provenance of the manuscripts. In the first part of this article I de-
lineate a short history of the collections of Sanskrit manuscripts. The central section
is dedicated to the importance and influence of the collections in the 19th and 20th
century—mainly for Buddhist studies, but partly also for Jaina and Hindu studies.
Finally, the last part of this contribution is dedicated to the fate of the collections in
the 21st century and the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project.
2 South Asian manuscripts in the Cambridge
University Library
The origin of the collections of South Asian manuscripts in the Cambridge Uni-
versity Library dates back to the beginning of the 19th century, but most of the
||
1 This is clearly stated in a letter sent by Pandit Rādhākṛṣṇa, Chief Pandit of the late Lahore
Durbar, to His Excellency the Viceroy and Governor-General of India, dated May 10th, 1868
(Gough, 1878, 1). This topic, as well as the history of collecting and cataloguing Sanskrit manu-
scripts in the 18th and 19th century, is dealt with in more detail in § 1 in Formigatti (forthcoming).
2 Unless specifically noted (for instance, as in Bodleian MS Or. Raghavan 3), all shelfmarks be-
ginning with Add. and Or. should be understood as Cambridge University Library manuscript
shelfmarks (i.e. UL MS Add.1711 will be cited as Add.1711 or UL MS Or.2259 as Or.2259.)
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 5
material accessed the library during the last thirty years of that century. Among
the very first written documents from South Asia that arrived in Cambridge is a
set of brass plates reproducing the text of the original Kollam Plates in reverse, to
be used for printing, presented by the Scottish missionary Claudius Buchanan to
the University Library in 1809.3 These plates were commissioned by him in 1805
in Cochin and were later used to produce a set of prints, also held in the Univer-
sity Library.4 These copper plates draw their name from Kollam, an ancient port
town on the coast of Kerala, and are also known as the Sthanu Ravi Plates, after
the local ruler under whom they were issued (c. 849 CE). They award trade privi-
leges to two merchant associations, the Manigramam, an indigenous south In-
dian group, and the Anjuvanam, probably representing West Asian interests,
who were associated to an eastern Christian church at Kollam.
During the 19th and 20th century the collections grew steadily thanks to acqui-
sitions and donations by different individuals. The collections comprise manu-
scripts written in many different languages, ranging from Old and Middle Indo-
Aryan languages like Vedic, Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit to Modern Indo-Aryan lan-
guages like Sinhala, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi and Urdu. Moreover, they include
several manuscripts in Dravidian languages, mostly Tamil and Malayalam, but
also a few in Telugu. The material related to the history of UL South Asian manu-
scripts collections is scattered between various institutions in Cambridge. It con-
sists of both manuscripts (handwritten catalogues, hand-lists, slips of paper kept
with the manuscripts, letters), as well as of printed material (catalogues, reports
and articles).5 According to these sources, I was able to identify at least six differ-
ent homogeneous collections that include Sanskrit manuscripts:
Wright Collection
Daniel Wright (1833–1902) was Surgeon-Major in the Indian Medical Service in
1866–76 and Surgeon to the British Residency, Kathmandu in 1873–76. During
this period, with the help of the Residency Pandit, Guṇānanda, he collected ap-
proximately 450 manuscripts, more than a half of which are Buddhist manu-
scripts. Guṇānanda was the grandson of Amṛtānanda, the Paṇḍit who wrote the
Buddhacarita manuscript Or.342, adding at the end three cantos composed by
||
3 Buchanan provided the library also with South Asian manuscripts (none of them is in San-
skrit; cf. also Dalby 1988, 257–59).
4 The plates are shelved with the class-mark Oo.1.41; prints from the copper plates are shelved
at 899.bb.149 and Buchanan's autograph facsimile of the inscriptions at Or.2259.
5 The most relevant sources I was able to trace are listed in Appendix 1.
6 | Camillo A. Formigatti
himself (cf. Cowell 1893, v–vii and Bendall 1893). Other important sections of this
collection include numerous palm-leaf manuscripts of Śaiva tantric texts, of
kāvya and jyotiṣa texts, and several palm-leaf manuscripts of vyākaraṇa works
belonging to the Cāndra school.
Cowell Collection
Edward Byles Cowell (1826–1903) (Fig. 1) was the first Professor of Sanskrit at
Cambridge from 1867 to 1903. On his behalf, between 1873 and 1878 R. T. H. Grif-
fith, then Principal of the Benares Sanskrit College, procured for the University
Library 77 Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly Vedic and Mīmāṃsā texts). In 1877, at
Cowell’s request 17 more manuscripts were sent to Cambridge by J.C. Nesfield,
again from the Benares Sanskrit College. In 1903, Cowell bequeathed hundreds
of books and manuscripts to the Cambridge University Library, 45 of which are
manuscripts of Sanskrit works.
Fig. 1: Edward Byles Cowell (1826–1903).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 7
Fig. 2: Georg Bühler (1837–98).
Bühler Collection
In 1877, the German Indologist Georg Bühler (1837–98) (Fig. 2) sold to the Library
68 Jaina manuscripts bought by him in Western India during his tour in search of
Sanskrit manuscripts in Kaśmīr, Rājputāna and Central India (on this journey,
see Bühler 1877).
Corpus Christi or Honner Collection
Colonel Augustus Cotgrave Honner of the 1st Bombay Grenadiers collected approx-
imately 300 Indian manuscripts in Lucknow around 1860–1870. The collection
passed to Francis Hodder and was deposited in the Cork Royal Institute, then was
given to Corpus Christi College, and is now on deposit at the University Library.
8 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Fig. 3: Cecil Bendall (1856–1906).
Bendall Collection
The biggest collection (more than 630 manuscripts) has been gathered for the Li-
brary by Cecil Bendall (1856–1906) (Fig. 3), Professor of Sanskrit in Cambridge
from 1903 to 1906, during his two journeys to North India and Nepal in 1884–85
and 1898–9. In his search for manuscripts he was helped by several Pandits, both
in Nepal and India: in Nepal by Indrānanda, the son of Guṇānanda (the Pandit
who helped D. Wright), in India by Bhagvāndās Kevaldās, Ciman Lāl, and
Sudhākara Dube.
Stolper Collection
In 1990–91 the University Library acquired a set of South Indian manuscripts from
the book dealer Robert E. Stolper. This collection includes palm-leaf manuscripts
in Grantha, Malayalam, and Tamil scripts (the latter include texts in both Sanskrit
and Malayalam languages). It is the least documented part of the UL collections as
far as the history of the provenance is concerned.
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 9
A seventh group consists of Sanskrit manuscripts hailing from different regions of
South Asia (for instance, Kashmir, the North Western Provinces and Tamil Nadu)
donated to the UL by various private individuals. Mention should also be made of
the two main collections of Pali manuscripts, the Rhys Davids and the Scott collec-
tions (about these two collections, see Dalby 1988). Some manuscripts included in
the Rhys Davids collection are Sanskrit texts with a commentary in Sinhala (for in-
stance Add.960, a palm-leaf manuscript of the Pratyayaśataka).6
It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of Sanskrit manuscripts in the UL,
for very often what is listed as a single manuscript in the old catalogues and hand-
lists turns out to be a bundle of fragments from different manuscripts, and some-
times two texts originally listed as separate manuscripts turn out to be one manu-
script.7 There is always a certain degree of arbitrariness in decisions such as split-
ting a bundle of folios into more manuscripts, or conversely group together into one
single entry manuscripts previously catalogued separately. It is all the more diffi-
cult to reach a decision in the case of the numerous bundles of fragments, like for
instance for the fragments of manuscripts grouped together under the shelfmarks
Add.1679 and Add.1680. After his tour in Europe for the compilation of the New
Catalogus Catalogurum, in 1963 V. Raghavan counted 1262 manuscripts kept in
three different places in Cambridge: the UL, Trinity College and the private collec-
tion of Prof. H.W. Bailey (Raghavan 1963, 65). At the moment of writing, the total
amount of Sanskrit manuscripts in the UL is estimated to be between 1600 and 1700
(due to the numerous still unidentified fragments, it is very difficult to provide an
exact figure). We might add to this figure the Sanskrit manuscripts kept in Trinity
College,8 in Christ’s College,9 in the Ancient India and Iran Trust, as well as some
Sanskrit manuscripts in the Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology.10
||
6 The Pali manuscripts of the Rhys Davids collection in the UL are listed in Rhys Davids 1883,
145–46 (see also Appendix 1, List Add.; on the role of Rhys Davids in the acquisition of Pali manu-
scripts in general and the impact on Pali studies in the 19th century, see Gornall 2015, 478–79).
7 For instance, Add.1380 and Add.1381 are listed as separate manuscripts in Bendall’s catalogue
(Bendall 1883, 80–81).
8 Catalogued by Theodor Aufrecht 1869.
9 Eight manuscripts, described by D. Cuneo in a tabular e-catalogue available on the college web-
site: https://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.christs.cam.ac.uk/files/Library/Catalogues/Sanskrit-
catalogue.pdf.
10 These last two small collections are still uncatalogued. The author of this article has started
cataloguing the AIIT Sanskrit manuscripts, but the project has been put on hold for the time
being.
10 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Until very recently, only two printed catalogues describing the Sanskrit manu-
scripts kept in the UL were available: the Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manu-
scripts in the University Library, Cambridge, prepared by C. Bendall in 1883, which
contains descriptions of 248 manuscripts in the Wright collection, and the list of
South Asian manuscripts belonging to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, com-
piled by Grahame Niemann in 1980. Strictly speaking, the latter is a catalogue of
manuscripts belonging to a college and not to the UL, but since the manuscripts are
kept in the UL, it has been mentioned alongside Bendall’s catalogue. Moreover, two
other catalogues of South Asian manuscripts in Cambridge ought to be remem-
bered: T. Aufrecht’s A Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity Col-
lege Cambridge (1869, mentioned above), and T.W. Rhys Davids’ List of Pāli Manu-
scripts in the Cambridge University Library (1883).
An integral part of the cataloguing process consisted of tracing the provenance
of the manuscripts. While pursuing this task, I soon realized that it is possible to
reconstruct the history that lies behind the transfer of the manuscripts from South
Asia to Cambridge. The reconstruction of this history provides a means for a better
understanding not only of the scholarly/academic and intellectual milieu that
shaped South Asian studies in Europe in the 19th century, but occasionally also of
the reception of South Asian religions and culture in the West. In the following sec-
tions (§ 3 and § 4), hopefully it will become clear that the publication of catalogues
is of utter importance for at least two correlated reasons: as they are the main gate-
ways to access collections, they also have a direct impact and influence on schol-
arly research.
3 The collections in the 19th century: Laying the
foundations
Most of the South Asian manuscripts reached the UL in the 19th century. Five of
the six major collections listed above were acquired before 1900: the Wright, the
Cowell, the Bühler, the Bendall,11 and the Honner collections. Together they in-
clude more than 1400 manuscripts. In terms both of the numbers as well as of the
importance of the manuscripts, it is this century that indelibly shaped the char-
acter of the Cambridge collections of Sanskrit manuscripts.
||
11 With the exception of very few manuscripts that were bequeathed after Bendall’s death in
1906 or were found in his papers and thus reached the UL in the first decades of the 20th century
(cf. Appendix 2).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 11
3.1 The ‘Cambridge Buddhist Manuscripts’, or the collections
as they are
Buddhist Sanskrit literature has been my special
study, and for it materials exist nowhere in Europe
comparable to those of Cambridge.
(Bendall 1903, 8)
These words, used by Cecil Bendall in his application for the professorship of
Sanskrit, were surely not a hyperbole—in fact, to a certain extent they still hold
true. Before the 19th century, due to the fragmentary character of the primary
sources, the knowledge of Buddhism in the West was full of misconceptions—to
say the least. In his book The Awakening of the West, Stephen Batchelor devotes
part four to the history of Buddhist studies in 18th- and 19th-century Europe. This
passage from the fourteenth chapter provides a lively description of what, at the
end of the 18th century, Westerners thought Buddhism was:
With no Buddhists to consult, no Sanskrit Buddhist texts to read, and in a climate of brah-
manical anti-Buddhist prejudice, these pioneers of Indian studies [i.e. Sir William Jones,
Charles Wilkins, and other members of the Asiatic Society of Bengal at the end of the 18th
century] gave little attention to the obscure figure they knew as Boudh. Jones believed that
Buddha was the teutonic god Wotan or Odin. The clan name ‘Shakya’ reminded him of that
of the ancient Egyptian king Shishac. In the statues of the Buddha he noted strikingly Ethi-
opic features. The ‘mild heresy of the ancient Bauddhas’, he concluded, must have been
imported to India from north Africa.
(Batchelor 1994, 233)
This situation started to change during the first half of the 19th century, when
Western scholars gained access to the primary sources in Sanskrit and Pali. 12 The
two central figures of this period are Brian Houghton Hodgson and the French
scholar Eugène Burnouf. From 1820 onwards, Hodgson held different posts for
the British civil service in the Nepalese capital Kathmandu (Assistant Resident,
Resident Postmaster and finally, in 1833, Resident). He was also a keen collector
of Sanskrit manuscripts and Tibetan block prints of Buddhist texts, which he sent
to various institutions around the world (for instance the libraries of the College
of Fort William and of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, the Royal Asiatic Soci-
||
12 For practical reasons, I do not dwell here on the great influence of T. W. Rhys Davids in the
field of Pali and Theravāda Buddhist studies; suffice it here to mention again the fact that he was
the founder of the Pali Text Society.
12 | Camillo A. Formigatti
ety, the India Office and the Bodleian Library). In 1837 he sent a total of 147 Nep-
alese manuscripts of Buddhist texts to the Société asiatique in Paris and to
Burnouf personally, and ‘[s]uddenly Burnouf had before him more Buddhist San-
skrit manuscripts than had been available to any previous European scholar,
with the obvious exception of Brian Hodgson in Kathmandu. But unlike Hodgson,
Burnouf was able to read them.’13 It is on these manuscripts that Burnouf based
his seminal study Introduction à l’histoire du Buddhisme indien, published in
1844. The importance of this work for the understanding and the reception of
Buddhism in Western culture cannot be overestimated, for Burnouf managed to
‘construct from this fresh field of unexamined documents an intelligible scheme
of ideas which would henceforth be the prototype of the European concept of
Buddhism’ [Batchelor 1994, 239].
Like the Hodgson collection in Paris used by Burnouf, the Wright and Bendall
collections of Sanskrit manuscripts played a pivotal role in the spread of
knowledge about Buddhism in the West. While the manuscripts sent to Europe
by Hodgson were mostly modern copies on paper copied for him by Nepalese
scribes, Daniel Wright was able to procure original palm-leaf manuscripts of most
of the works studied by Burnouf. Among these palm-leaf manuscripts one can
find manuscripts that are interesting from many points of view in various disci-
plines (literature, palaeography, codicology, art history, etc.), as Bendall aptly
pointed out in the introduction to his 1883 catalogue:
The first discovery of a large unexplored literature in Nepal was due to Mr Brian Houghton
Hodgson, whose untiring zeal and well-used opportunities have enabled him to supply a
greater quantity of material for the study of the literature and natural history of India and
Tibet than any person before or since. After such achievements, immortalized by the great
work of Burnouf, it was but natural to hope that further material for research might still be
forthcoming in the same country. Accordingly on the suggestion of Professor Cowell, Dr
Wright was requested by Professor W. Wright to procure specimens of such copies as could
be made to order from works still extant in Nepal. These specimens were sent, and form
Add. 1042 […] in our collection. Dr Wright however soon found that originals were procura-
ble, and the result of his energetic and persevering negotiation and the well-timed liberality
of the University has been the acquisition of a series of works which, apart from their literary
interest, will be seen from the following pages to be from a merely antiquarian and palaeo-
graphical point of view, the most important collection of Indian MSS. that has come into the
hands of scholars.
(Bendall 1883, VII-VIII)
||
13 Introduction by D. S. Lopez Junior to the English translation of Burnouf’s Histoire (Burnouf
2010, 11).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 13
I have included this long quotation because it contains fundamental observations
on which I would like to expand. Bendall mentions Add.1042, four loose paper fo-
lios ‘sent over from Nepal by Dr D. Wright in 1873, when it was proposed to obtain
copies of various Sanskrit manuscripts existing in Nepal, for the University Library’
(Bendall 1883, 26–27). They contain part of the Maitrakanyakāvadāna and part of
the Laṅkāvatāra. Although at least one other Sanskrit manuscript had already
reached the UL before 1873,14 Add.1042 can be considered the foundation stone of
the Cambridge collections. Unlike in the case of the Nepalese manuscripts sent to
Europe by Hodgson, up to now the historical impact of the Cambridge collections
of Sanskrit manuscripts on 19th century Buddhist studies has not always been ade-
quately recognized. For instance, in the book by S. Batchelor mentioned above
there is no mention of the importance of these collections or of Cowell’s and Ben-
dall’s scholarly achievements in the field of Buddhist studies. This is particularly
regrettable, since both scholars managed to create an international scholarly net-
work centred around the manuscript collections.
A good example is Or.1290, which contains a series of letters sent by the Tibet-
ologist H. Wenzel to Cowell in 1891 and 1892, at a time when Cowell was preparing
his critical edition of Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita (published in 1893). This work was
translated into Tibetan in the 7th or 8th century, and in order to improve his edition
Cowell asked Wenzel to check the Tibetan translation. These and similar letters sent
to Cowell by other Indologists allow us to get a glimpse in the workshop of a 19th
century Indologist and philologist and to reconstruct his editorial methods. Cow-
ell’s editio princeps of the Buddhacarita, based on two manuscripts in the UL,15
made available to scholars for the first time the oldest known mahākāvya, dated
between the first century and the second quarter of the second century CE. His edi-
tion was used and commented by several scholars for around forty years and was
replaced only in 1936 by E. Johnston’s edition. Cowell’s contribution to the field of
Buddhist studies16 includes also another milestone, the editio princeps of the
||
14 Add. 572, a modern manuscript of the first chapter (Mitralābha) of the Hitopadeśa, donated
by Robert Cotton Mather in 1868. It is in the format of a Western notebook and most probably
was written for didactic purposes for Western scholars. (Add.285.67 entered the UL most proba-
bly before or around the 1860s, but no precise information is available.)
15 Cowell 1893, iv. The manuscript labelled C is Add.1387 (the UL copy), while manuscript D is
Or.342 (Cowell’s private copy, bequeathed to the UL after his death).
16 Cowell’s contribution to Buddhist studies includes also his editorship of the English transla-
tion of the Pali jātakas prepared by various scholars and published in six volumes from 1895 to
1907 (vol. I translated by Robert Chalmers, 1895; vol. II by W.H.D. Rouse, 1895; vol. III by H.T.
Francis and R.A. Neil, 1897; vol. IV by W.H.D. Rouse, 1901; vol. V by H.T. Francis, 1905; finally,
vol. VI by E.B. Cowell and W.H.D. Rouse, 1907).
14 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Divyāvadāna in collaboration with R. A. Neil, published in 1886. Again based
mostly on the manuscripts kept in the UL,17 this contribution endured the time bet-
ter and it is still the reference edition used nowadays.18
Scholars from all over the world (for instance, Nepal, India, Europe, the United
States and Japan) were in regular correspondence with Bendall—not only Indolo-
gists, but also Sinologists, Semitists, and many others. The wide range of Bendall’s
academic contacts is clearly seen in the testimonials to his application for the pro-
fessorship of Sanskrit in 1903.19 Even more than in the case of Cowell, his research
interests were deeply influenced by the UL Sanskrit collections. Although based on
limited manuscript evidence and inevitably dated, Bendall’s editions and studies
of the Meghasūtra (1880) and Śāntideva’s Śikṣāsamuccaya (1902) have stood the
test of time well. It is however with his pioneering work in the field of the history of
Nepal and of palaeography of Nepalese scripts that Bendall left an indelible mark
in Sanskrit studies. As soon as he started cataloguing the manuscripts in the Wright
collection, he recognized immediately their importance as historical documents. In
1881, two years before the publication of his Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit Manu-
scripts, he published an article in which he draws attention to the manuscript col-
ophons as sources for the reconstruction of Nepalese history. Moreover, he ad-
dresses the doubts about the antiquity of the manuscripts raised by other scholars
who were sceptical evidently because they had not yet seen similarly ancient man-
uscripts before.20 Bendall’s discoveries about Nepalese history and his palaeo-
graphical acumen allowed him to enrich his 1883 Catalogue with an Historical and
||
17 Cowell 1886, vi; manuscript A in the edition is Add.865, manuscript B is untraced, manu-
script C is Add.2598, and manuscript F is Add.1680.3.
18 P. L. Vaidya’s 1959 edition is basically a reprint of Cowell’s and Neil’s edition. Among the
numerous publications about the Divyāvadāna still based on Cowell’s and Neil’s edition, see for
instance the recent translations by Rotman (2008) and Tatelman (2000 and 2005); a discussion
and preliminary analysis of the manuscript tradition of the Divyāvadāna and its position in the
avadānamālā literature is provided by Formigatti (2016a).
19 The list includes scholars based in India (G.A. Grierson), Germany (J. Jolly, F. Kielhorn, H.
Oldenberg, P. Deussen, E. Leumann—professor in Strasbourg, at that time part of the German
Empire), France (E. Senart), Italy (A. de Gubernatis), England (T. W. Rhys Davids), and Scotland
(J. Eggeling) (Bendall 1903).
20 ‘The early dates of some of these MSS. have been, indeed, received in some quarters with
certain incredulity; but for myself, I must testify that, after about two years study, both of the
great Cambridge collection, of which I have been during this time engaged in preparing a cata-
logue, and of various Buddhistic MSS. in other libraries, the truthfulness and genuineness of the
colophons is placed in almost every case beyond a doubt by evidence both varied and conclu-
sive’ (Bendall 1882, 190). Bendall then lists the varied and conclusive evidence: the climate and
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 15
a Palaeographical Introduction of such importance that the latter is still used as a
reference work for the palaeography of Nepalese scripts. His work on the history of
Nepal culminated in the publication of a revised and enlarged version as a Histori-
cal Introduction to Haraprasad Shastri’s 1905 catalogue of manuscripts in the Dur-
bar Library, Nepal, with the title The History of Nepal and Surrounding Kingdoms
(1000-1600 A.D.) compiled chiefly from MSS. lately discovered. Finally, Bendall’s
1883 Catalogue as whole is such a fundamental piece of scholarship that it was re-
printed in 1992 in the VOHD series as Supplementband 33.21 Another palaeograph-
ical endeavour of this untiring scholar worth mentioning is his discovery and study
of the Bhaikṣukī/Sindhu(ra) script22 (Bendall 1886b and 1890). For 120 years, his
articles were the primary studies available on this subject, until the recent contri-
butions by A. Hanisch (2009) and D. Dimitrov (2010). Even though Bendall died at
the young age of 50, his list of publications is long and includes several important
works. I hope these few examples suffice to bring to light both his scholarly stature
as well as the importance of the UL collections of Sanskrit manuscripts for Buddhist
and Sanskrit studies in the 19th century.
3.2 Interlude: Manuscripts of Jaina, Hindu, and secular works
In the 19th and 20th century, the UL collections of Sanskrit manuscripts were known
and tapped into mostly by scholars of Buddhism precisely thanks to Bendall’s cat-
alogue. However, in terms of sheer number the Jaina manuscripts in the UL almost
match the Buddhist manuscripts: the former amount to 324, while the latter to 381.
The figure for the Jaina manuscript is provided in N. Balbir’s article in this volume
and refers to ‘manuscripts where a Jain work is copied. This means religious scrip-
tures of all kinds (‘canon’, liturgy, ritual, narratives, stotras, etc.) and contributions
||
remoteness of Nepal, the physical features of the manuscripts, the comparison of the scripts with
inscriptions.
21 ‘The reason for making it available again lies firstly in the fact that the information contained
in the colophons of the MSS. belonging to this collection, viz. the Daniel Wright Collection, still
retains the importance it had for the historian and philologist when it first appeared […]; sec-
ondly, what justifies the reprint of the latter is simply that descriptions – of the high standard of
Bendall’s – of manuscripts like those of the collection at Cambridge, are now attracting more
and more attention, and a major reason for this is the very activity of the NGMPP’ (Wezler in
Bendall 1992, v).
22 Also known as ‘arrow-headed’ or ‘nail-headed’ script; the original name of this script is dis-
cussed in Dimitrov 2010, 6–9.
16 | Camillo A. Formigatti
by Jain authors to disciplines of knowledge such as grammar, lexicography, astron-
omy, mathematics, etc’ (Balbir, p. 54). Consequently, our definition of ‘Buddhist
manuscript’ is also broad enough to include manuscripts of works composed by
Buddhist authors but belonging to various disciplines of knowledge.23 Since in her
article in this volume N. Balbir masterly describes and analyses the UL collection of
Jaina manuscripts,24 we can turn directly to the manuscripts of Hindu and secular
works. It would be beyond the scope of this article, to provide a full account even
of selected manuscripts belonging to these two groups and of their importance for
Sanskrit studies. I will therefore limit myself to the description of a specific category
of manuscripts, in order to elucidate how E. B. Cowell made use of a particular sec-
tion of the collections. Finally, I will introduce three instances of circulation of man-
uscripts among 19th-century European scholars as examples of the network of
scholars with which Bendall was in contact.
Cowell was elected the first Professor of Sanskrit at the University of Cambridge
in 1867.25 We have already mentioned his achievements in the field of Buddhist
studies. However, Cowell’s scholarly interests were very wide, and very often the
only testimony of them is preserved in his unpublished papers. In 1873, he in-
structed Ralph T. H. Griffith of the Benares Sanskrit College to procure manuscripts
of texts belonging to specific literary genres for his personal study, as well as for the
Cambridge University Library.26 Until 1878 Griffith continued to send manuscripts
to Cambridge. After Cowell’s death in 1903 they were bequeathed to the UL. It is not
by chance that the great majority of the manuscripts sent to Cambridge by Griffith
consist of Vedic and Mīmāṃsā works. Cowell’s interest in this branch of Indian
knowledge is testified by a series of twelve manuscripts containing his notes and
an unpublished translation of the Ṛgveda (Or.372 to Or.383). The following note on
folio 1r of Or.372 provides an insight into his scholarly attitude and his care for the
interests of his pupils:
||
23 In our count we have included nine manuscripts of grammatical texts of the Cāndra school,
seventeen manuscripts of the Amarakośa, and eight manuscripts of Buddhist kāvya works (three
of Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita, three of Āryaśūra’s Jātakamālā, and two of Kṣemendra’s Bodhi-
sattvāvadānakalpalatā).
24 On the role of G. Bühler in building the UL collection of Jaina manuscripts see also Formigatti
forthcoming, § 1.1 and Appendix 1.
25 It is interesting to note that the contest was between Cowell and Theodore Aufrecht. Cowell
was elected with a great majority of votes, as he ‘was warmly supported by Max Müller and many
eminent scholars and friends’ (Oxford DNB, s.v. Cowell, Edward Byles).
26 To these manuscripts we should add also Add.1934–50, bought in 1878 from J.C. Nesfield,
who was also based at the Benares Sanskrit College.
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 17
N.B. This translation of the Ṛig Veda is not intended for publication. It was prepared for my
own use, as I have several years past been reading the R.V. with various classes + I never knew
at the beginning of a term which book my pupils might want to read. My authorities have been
mainly Grassmann (Lexicon + transl.), Ludwig (vols. i. ii. iv. v.) with continual reference to
Sāyaṇa. Mar. 23. 1899. E.B.C.
Cowell’s interest in Vedic knowledge was not limited to the Ṛgveda, and in fact a
series of 22 manuscripts of texts belonging to the Vedalakṣaṇa branch of knowledge
are a good example of manuscripts commissioned by him to be copied for the pur-
pose of his own study.27 Ten manuscripts contain Śikṣā texts, works on phonetics
and phonology dealing with the pronunciation and recitation of both Vedic and
Classical Sanskrit, and other theoretical topics such as the accent-bearing unit, or
providing list of Vedic words to be memorised on account of the ambiguity of their
articulatory features.28 Another class of Vedalakṣaṇa texts, represented by four
manuscripts, are the Anukramaṇīs, lists of various features of the Vedic saṃhitās,
for instance number and attribution of meters to different deities, indexes of titles
of works about the Vedas etc.29 Furthermore, we can add a smaller group of three
manuscripts of Pariśiṣṭa texts,30 as well as one manuscript of a text on Vedavikṛti,
the Jaṭāpaṭaladīpikā.31 Many of these manuscripts are modern copies commis-
sioned by Griffith to scribes, and thus they share many common features. For in-
stance, it is possible to distinguish a series of three manuscripts all written in 1877:
one manuscript of the Lomaśīśikṣā (Add.1709), one of the Keśavīśikṣā (Add.1710)
and one of the Laghvamoghanandinīśikṣā (Add.1711). Although only the first man-
uscript is dated, it is clear from the script that all three have been written by the
same scribe. Most probably they were conceived as a single collection of śikṣā texts,
as they share many common features: paper and layout are identical, and at the
end of Add.1709 the catch number 18 is written, which is repeated on the first folio
of Add.1710 and on the verso of Add.1711 (which consists of a single folio).
||
27 Add.879, Add.907, Add.1709–11, Add.1720, Add.1909–10, Add.1914, Add.1920–21, Add.1923–
25, Add.1934–38, Add.1944, Add.1946–47 (Add.1934–38 were bought from J.C. Nesfield in Bena-
res in 1877, see Appendix 2, Table 1; other manuscripts of Vedalakṣaṇa works—not listed here—
were acquired by Bendall). We would like to acknowledge the fundamental help provided by our
collaborator Giovanni Ciotti for the cataloguing of these manuscripts.
28 Add.1709–11, Add.1923–25, Add.1934, Add.1936–38, (Add.1936–38 were bought from J.C.
Nesfield Benares in 1877, see Appendix 2, Table 1).
29 Add.879, Add.1909, Add.1914, Add.1920.
30 Add.1944, Add.1946, Add.1947.
31 Add.1910; Vedavikṛti means literally ‘[textual] modifications of the Vedic texts’, i.e. recombi-
nations of words for mnemonic purposes.
18 | Camillo A. Formigatti
The centrality of manuscripts for research in 19th century is confirmed by the
information we can gather from the correspondence of scholars. At a time when
many texts had yet to be edited, scholars often had to rely directly on manuscripts
for their research. They were even willing to send manuscripts all over Europe—
sometimes, even precious palm-leaf manuscripts. Add.7603/18 is a letter sent by
the Russian Indologist Ivan P. Minayev to Cecil Bendall in 1887. At that time, Ben-
dall was working on an article about the Tantrākhyāna, the Nepalese recension of
the Pañcatantra (Bendall 1888b). According to this letter, Minayev provided Ben-
dall with one manuscript of the Tantrākhyāna from the library of the University of
St Petersburg. I provide here a diplomatic transcription of this very short letter:
University of St Petersburg, 9 Oct 87
Dear Bendall,
I hope the Tantrākhyāna is now with you. I am very sorry for the delay. It took some time to
find out the Ms., and to get the necessary permission for the loan. The translation is not
Newari, but Gorkhali. I do not think the Ms. will be of great use to you, however. Your edition,
I hope, will be soon out
Sincerely Yours
I Minayeff
This is a case in which a manuscript was sent to Cambridge, but we know of manu-
scripts in the UL collections that Bendall sent to other scholars. In this case, our
source is not a letter, but the original envelopes with which the manuscripts were
wrapped when they were sent back to Cambridge. A first example is Add.2137, a
unique manuscript of the Nyāyavikāsinī, a Newārī commentary/translation on the
Nāradasmṛti by the Nepalese author Maṇika, dated 1407 CE.32 In 1885 the manu-
script was sent to J. Jolly, professor in Würzburg, who was preparing a critical edi-
tion of the Nāradasmṛti.33 The manuscript is still wrapped in the cardboard cover
used by J. Jolly to ship the manuscript back to C. Bendall (after the loan mentioned
in both Bendall 1886a and Jolly 1885). On the front cover of the box we read in pencil
in Latin characters ‘Naradasmṛti Bendall,’ and on the back cover, written in pen in
Latin characters: ‘Professor C. Bendall British Museum London W.C.’ and ‘Ges-
chaeftspapiere. einschreiben.’ On the side of the box, the sender’s name is written
||
32 On the importance of this commentary for the cultural history of 14th-century Nepal and
Maṇika, the author of the commentary, see Formigatti 2016b, 56–63; on the manuscript and its
importance for the textual tradition of the Nāradasmṛti, see also Jolly 1885, passim, Bendall
1886a, 56–9, and Lariviere 1989: ix–xxx.
33 Although the volume is dated 1885, at the end of the introduction Jolly reports the place and
date of completion as ‘Würzburg, February 16th, 1886’ (Jolly 1885, 16).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 19
in pen in Latin characters: ‘From Prof. J. Jolly Wuerzburg.’ Unfortunately, the stamp
is illegible, so that we don’t know the exact date when it was posted. Interestingly,
the manuscript was sent back to Bendall’s office at the British Museum in London
and not to Cambridge.
In 1902, Bendall sent another manuscript (Or.1279) to Jolly requesting him to iden-
tify the work, as the latter was an expert on Indian medicine. It is an old Nepalese palm-
leaf manuscript containing Vaṅgasena’s Cikitsāsārasaṅgraha, a long treatise on
Āyurveda. In this case, not only the top of the original wrapping box34 was preserved
together with the manuscript, but also the letter dated 21 May 1902, in which Jolly iden-
tifies the work and provides a first evaluation of its philological importance.35
Several other letters kept in the UL archives further confirm how well con-
nected Bendall was with the most important Sanskrit scholars of his time.36 These
letters are clear evidence that his work on the palaeography of Nepalese scripts and
his expertise in Buddhist Sanskrit texts, acquired thanks to his untiring work on the
UL Buddhist manuscripts, was widely recognized.
3.3 A notable absence, or the collections as they could have been
As we have seen, the UL collections of Sanskrit manuscripts are particularly im-
portant for their high number of old Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts. If you are in-
terested in Buddhist Sanskrit texts or the study of Nepalese medieval culture, you
might probably think to pay a visit to Cambridge and consult the UL collections. On
the other hand, if you are interested in the Sanskrit tradition and the history of
Kashmir, you would probably want to travel to Oxford and consult the manuscripts
of the Stein collection. In the Bodleian Library there is however another collection
that features Kashmirian manuscripts: the Hultzsch collection. Usually, it is not re-
ferred to as a homogenous collection because—unlike for instance the Stein manu-
scripts—it was not kept as such under the name of their former owner. The manu-
scripts are described in the 1905 catalogue by M. Winternitz and A. B Keith together
with manuscripts from other collections. In the preface, E. W. B. Nicholson summa-
rizes the circumstances of the acquisition as follows:
||
34 The name of the sender (‘Jolly Würzburg’) is recognizable on the box, as well as partially the
name and address of the addressee (‘[Pro]fessor Bendall [?] Castle Str. Cambridge’).
35 The letter is partially transcribed in the description of the manuscript on the Cambridge Dig-
ital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-01279/1).
36 They are kept in the UL as Add.7603.
20 | Camillo A. Formigatti
On Oct. 22, 1884 Dr. Eugen Hultzsch, afterwards epigraphist on the Madras Archaeological
Survey, had landed in Bombay from Trieste, and on May 2, 1885, he had re-embarked at
Bombay: in the interval he had obtained 483 vols. of MSS., a list of which, and of the chief
places he visited, will be found in an article by him […] Of these 483 he offered 465 to the
Bodleian for a sum of £225, which, in view of the financial condition of the library and the
heavy cost involved in binding and repairing, was reduced to £200, and for this sum the
collection was purchased, in 1887, under the advice of Prof. Max Müller. In extent it out-
numbered the Mill, Walker, Hodgson, and Fraser MSS. combined, and it distinctly improved
the average antiquity of the Bodleian Sanskrit collection.
(Winternitz 1905, iii)
In reality, the story behind this acquisition is much more interesting and involves
many people and institutions between England, Germany, and India. It can be
reconstructed by means of the correspondence of the people involved (preserved
in the Bodleian Library at Library Records d.1088). On 19 October 1886 Reinhold
Rost, the India Office librarian, sends a letter to the Principal Librarian of the Bod-
leian Library, writing that he has been ‘requested by Dr. E. Hultzsch, of Dresden,
to send you the enclosed list of Sanskrit MSS. He proposes to sell 465 out of the
483 numbers of which the collection consists for £225’. Rost then suggests to con-
sult Prof. Max Müller on this matter, who promptly replies two days after. Obvi-
ously, the Bodley’s Librarian E. W. B. Nicholson must also be involved, and an
arrangement is made to send the manuscripts to the Bodleian for inspection. At
that time, E. Hultzsch is in India, holding the post of epigraphist at the Madras
Presidency. It is therefore Hultzsch’s father who sends the manuscripts from
Dresden to Oxford in November of the same year. In a letter dated 22 November,
Max Müller suggests that it would be better to ask the ‘Professor of Sanskrit’ to
write a report on them—that is, the Boden Professor for Sanskrit, M. Monier-Wil-
liams. Four days pass after M. Monier-Williams’s reply, in which he writes that he
regrets that the request came too late, as he now has ‘only a few days left before
starting for the South of France’ and he is ‘utterly overwhelmed with work.’37 At
this point, R. Rost steps in again and on the 8 December writes a letter in which
he kindly requests Monier-Williams to ask either E. W. B. Nicholson or A. A. Mac-
donnell for their opinion on the manuscripts, for otherwise everything would
have to wait ‘till end of February.’ Moreover, he adds the following suggestion:
||
37 Any resemblance of this account with contemporary persons or real events is purely acci-
dental.
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 21
‘The work of assessing the value of the MSS. will be greatly facilitated by the de-
scriptive catalogue which has been conscientiously made.38 Would you allow
Prof. Cowell, of Cambridge, or anyone whom he may depute, to inspect the MSS.
in the course of the ensuing recess?’ With the Christmas break approaching, all
the persons involved in this delicate matter would probably like to pass the re-
sponsibility to somebody else. At this point, Max Müller comes into play again,
writing the following letter:
12 Dec. 86
Dear Mr. Nicholson,
I have carefully gone through the titles of the MSS. Offered to us by Dr. Hultzsch, and I quite
approve of Dr. Rost’s suggestion that they should go to Cambridge. We possess MSS. of
nearly all the texts, excepting the Jaina texts, which the collection contains while Cam-
bridge does not. As long as the Collection is kept in England, the MSS will be accessible to
scholars at Cambridge as at Oxford. I shall be sorry if they went to the British Museum, still
even there they might be consulted. If Cambridge shall decline to buy them, the matter
might be reconsidered, but I will strongly advise the Bodleian not to compete with Cam-
bridge.
The price is not too high, but I am afraid the expense of binding, and still more of carefully
mending the MSS, will be considerable.
Yours very truly
F. Max Müller
A few days later, Cowell sends a short reply directly to Rost (as a reply to a letter
now probably kept in his correspondence in the UL):
Cambridge
Dec. 16. 86.
My dear Rost
I fear there is no chance of our buying any of the MSS. The Library is very poor and they
cant [sic] afford it. Most of the MSS, are, I fear, in Southern alphabets, so that I feel less keen
for them.
Yours sincerely,
EB. Cowell
Rost’s reply to this letter is not included in Library Records d.1088 (as it was sent
to Cowell, it must be in the UL archives). Cowell’s reply to Rost transcribed above
||
38 To my knowledge, the only catalogue to which Rost could have referred is the list of the man-
uscripts compiled by Hultzsch and published in the same year, which however is not a descrip-
tive catalogue, but a mere list of titles (Hultzsch 1886, 11–26). Was this a sly attempt by Rost to
settle the matter as quickly as possible?
22 | Camillo A. Formigatti
is in the Bodleian archives because Rost enclosed it in a letter he sent to Max Mül-
ler on 17 December,39 in which he suggests that the two libraries should purchase
Hultzsch’s collection in a shared effort. Still, Cowell’s argument about the manu-
scripts being in South Indian alphabets and therefore not interesting to him
sounded legitimate and for this reason on the 19th December Max Müller writes to
Nicholson, clarifying that no manuscript in Hultzsch’s list is in a South Indian
alphabet. Nevertheless, even this last attempt fails, as it is clear from this last
letter that Cowell sent a few days after Christmas:
Cambridge
Dec. 28. 1886
My dear Sir
Every body has been away from Cambridge lately, but I saw Prof. Wright the other day and
had some talk with him. I fear the Library has no money at present; so that we cannot in-
dulge in MSS. just now.
I suppose there is no list of the MSS. which the Bodleian would not take. I cannot get away
from Cambridge at present, so cannot come to examine them. Thanking you for your letter
I remain
Yours faithfully
Edw. B. Cowell
After this letter, it is clear that the Hultzsch collection wouldn’t have gone to Cam-
bridge. (The rest of the letters deals with the negotiations about the price between
the Bodleian and Hultzsch’s father, as well as with some missing manuscripts
which were on loan to European scholars when the manuscripts were first sent to
the Bodleian for inspection.) It is interesting to reflect closely about how the
whole story evolved and ended. First of all, the picture that emerges from the let-
ters is that of a close collaboration between Sanskrit scholars at Oxford and Cam-
bridge. Secondly, it is clear that to the scholars involved the manuscripts were
interesting mainly for their textual content and not for their antiquity or any other
feature. Max Müller’s letter is particularly instructive in both these aspects, as are
Cowell’s replies. Also, we see that apparently the financial situation of the Bod-
leian and the UL was very different: Max Müller’s remark that ‘the price is not too
high’ is in sharp contrast with Cowell’s statements that ‘the Library is very poor
and they can’t afford it’ and ‘the Library has no money at present.’ We have to
remember that just one year before, in 1884–5, Bendall had gone on his first tour
in search of manuscripts in Nepal and Northern India, where he had purchased
manuscripts for the UL and for his own personal library. It is possible that in 1886
the UL financial situation could have been dire because of this expenditure (and
||
39 As a reply to a letter by Max Müller dated 14 December, but again not included in this record.
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 23
surely others) in the previous year. On the other hand, Bendall had bought the
manuscripts with a special grant from the Worts Fund, so we could also imagine
that there was simply no interest in buying another large collection of Sanskrit
manuscript after Bendall’s tour. Either way, the failed purchase of Hultzsch’s
manuscript was a loss for the UL. In his journey, Bendall personally collected 212
manuscripts, to which we have to add 294 collected by Bhagvāndās Kevaldās. If
we sum up these manuscripts to the c. 450 in the Wright collection, we come to a
total of around 950 manuscripts. Not only Hultzsch’s collection of 465 manu-
scripts would have considerably bolstered the UL collections from the point of
view of quantity, but also of quality. There are only three birch-bark manuscripts
in the UL collections,40 but with the acquisition of the Hultzsch’s manuscripts it
would have gained 26 Kashmirian birch-bark manuscripts,41 not to speak of the
other Śāradā manuscripts on paper. If we think that the Stein collection in the
Bodleian comprises around 30 birch-bark manuscripts, we can better understand
how important this acquisition was for the Bodleian—and could have been for the
UL. As we have seen, C. Bendall’s research interests focused on Sanskrit Buddhist
texts and the history of Nepal due to the character of the UL manuscript collec-
tions: what if the UL would have bought these Kashmirian manuscripts? Would
Bendall have edited for instance Jonarāja’s Kirātārjunīyaṭīkā or Śrīkaṇṭha-
caritaṭīkā42 instead of the Śikṣāsamuccaya? Would have he written an article on
the palaeography of the Śāradā script as influential as his work on the palaeo-
graphy of Nepalese scripts?
||
40 Two of them are in such an extremely bad physical condition that no proper examination
was possible. Both are Kashmirian codices: Or.948 contains Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha, Bhāravi’s
Kirātārjunīya and Bhavabhūti’s Mālatimādhava, while Or.2264 is a manuscript of an unidentified
Naiṣadhacaritaṭīkā. The third birch-bark manuscript is Add.1578, a single birch bark sheet in
excellent condition, containing a Devīkavaca. It was written in Devanāgarī in Nepal, most prob-
ably in the 19th century.
41 This figure refers to the manuscripts as listed in Hultzsch’s 1886 article. Several manuscripts
have been bound together and are now found under one single shelfmark.
42 Hultzsch’s manuscript 53 and 88 respectively, now bound together and shelved in the Bod-
leian at MS Sansk.d.65.
24 | Camillo A. Formigatti
4 The collections in the 20th century: on
handwritten catalogues and more critical
editions
The history of the collections in the 20th century is marked by a continuing—albeit
little known—cataloguing activity, as well as by an increased awareness of its im-
portance within the international scholarly community. In 1916, the manuscripts
of the Bühler, the Cowell and part of the Bendall collections were described by
Louis de la Vallée Poussin (1869–1938) (Fig. 4) with the help of Caroline Mary
Ridding (1862–1942).43 They recorded on paper index cards the basic features of
some of the still uncatalogued manuscripts: title, writing material, number and
dimensions of folios (Figs. 6–8). Occasionally, they transcribed some excerpts
from the manuscripts and provided bibliographical references. Their card cata-
logue includes all Sanskrit manuscripts in the Add. series44 and two manuscripts
in the Or. series (Or.407 and Or.722). The catalogue is kept in a wooden box (Figs.
5a and 5b; it is described in Appendix 1). The box has two compartments: in the
right-hand side compartment, the cards with the manuscript description are ar-
ranged according to the increasing shelfmark, while on the left-hand side there
are reference cards arranged according to the titles of the work, provided with the
shelfmark for the consultation of the descriptive card on the right-hand side. In-
side the box there is a letter by de la Vallée Poussin about the completion of the
card catalogue:
||
43 On the life and work this (unfortunately neglected) scholar, see Diemberger 2012 and Huett
2012.
44 It does not include Add.2396–2405, Add.2408, Add.2458, Add.2841, and Add.3437.
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 25
Fig. 4: Louis de la Vallée Poussin (1869–1938).
Sir
I think I have now completed the catalogue of the Sanskrit and Jain Sanskrit MSS. in the
Library.
(1) Short notices of the MSS.: titles of the works, author, material, writing, date, size (with
occasional additional notes, references to Catalogues or to editions, data useful for identi-
fication, etc.)
(2) Index of the titles.
(3) Index of the authors.
According to the instructions I had received, I have only been concerned with the MSS. that
had not been hitherto studied. The work proved to be more complicated than I had expected
it to be.
There remains a small number of MSS., chiefly fragments, which I have not been able to
identify. I shall spare us pain in order to ascertain what they are. But, as further progress
depends largely on chance, as the number of the MSS. is small, I believe that I may honestly
state that ‘I have accomplished what I had to do’, as the Buddhist Saints are accustomed to
say, at death.
I beg to remain,
Sir,
Your most obedient servant,
Louis de la Vallée Poussin
To the Librarian of the Cambridge University Library
1ere juin [1]916
26 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Actually, the ‘small number’ of manuscript still left to be catalogued consisted of
more than 200 manuscripts, for all other manuscripts in the Or. series acquired
until 1916 (i.e. those in the Cowell and in the Bendall collections) were not cata-
logued.45 Moreover, after de la Vallée Poussin and Ridding completed their cata-
logue, several individuals donated or bequeathed manuscripts to the UL (includ-
ing Cowell and Bendall), and single manuscripts were bought from different
sources (see Appendix 2, Table 1). All these manuscripts were left uncatalogued
until the Digital Catalogue was launched. However, they were examined by V.
Raghavan in his 1954 tour and are included in the New Catalogus Catalogorum. In
some of the Or. manuscripts it is still possible to find notes by Raghavan, who
identified many hitherto unidentified texts. His notes on the UL Sanskrit collec-
tions are now kept in the Bodleian Library (Or. Raghavan 3; see Appendix 1).46
After Raghavan’s visit to the UL, the library acquired more manuscripts,
which consequently are not in included in the NCC. Apart from a series of small
acquisitions from different sources,47 the only fairly big and homogenous collec-
tion acquired by the UL in this century is the Stolper collection. In 1990–91 the
UL bought from the art dealer Robert E. Stolper hundreds of South and South-
East Asian manuscripts. The South Asian manuscripts are all palm-leaf manu-
scripts of texts in Sanskrit and Malayalam. Around 100 manuscripts contain San-
skrit texts written in Grantha or Malayalam script. They were hardly known out-
side the UL and no information was available until they were catalogued for the
first time by the project team. 48
The UL South Asian manuscript collections continued to provide research
material for scholars all around the world throughout the 20th century. Several
seminal studies on and editions of Buddhist texts based on UL manuscripts were
published. A full list would probably cover several pages, therefore I will provide
here just a few, representative examples. Continuing the tradition started by Cow-
ell and Neil with their edition of the Divyāvadāna, numerous scholars exploited
the UL collections and consulted manuscripts of jātakas and avadānas to prepare
critical editions of unpublished texts. In 1902, J. S. Speyer published his editio
||
45 Dalby (1988, 278–279) states that ‘descriptions of the other Sanskrit manuscripts [i.e. not de-
scribed in Bendall 1883] by Aufrecht, Bendall and la Vallée-Poussin remain unpublished.’ De-
spite great efforts by the UL staff, we were not able to trace any other handwritten catalogue,
apart those listed in Appendix 1.
46 On the UL manuscripts examined by Raghavan, see also Formigatti forthcoming.
47 As shown in Appendix 2, Table 1, a total of 26 manuscripts were acquired between 1954 and
1990.
48 Some of the Sanskrit manuscripts in Malayalam were examined by Gavin Flood in 1999 (per-
sonal e-mail communication on 5 July 2014).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 27
princeps of the Avadānaśataka, which is mainly based on Add.1611, the oldest
complete witness of this text, dated 1645 CE. Even though this text belongs to the
sūtra genre, it is worth mentioning L. Finot’s 1901 edition of the Rāṣṭrapāla-
paripṛcchā, in fact based solely on Add.1586, a manuscript dated 1661.49 Most
probably, these two manuscripts were copied by the same scribe, Jayamuni, who
was also responsible for copying a manuscript of the Sumāgadhāvadāna
(Add.1585) and of Yaśomitra’s Sphuṭārthā Abhidharmakoṣavyākhyā (Add.1041).50
We now jump to the second half of this century. Among the Cambridge Indol-
ogists who continued to study material in the collections special mention should
be made of Prof. John Brough (1917-84), who devoted part of his scholarly efforts
to the study of important Nepalese Buddhist manuscripts in the Cambridge Uni-
versity Library. His correspondence and papers are stored in the archives of the
Library of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies of the University of
Cambridge, and include unpublished editions of texts and numerous notes on
Nepalese Buddhism. R. Handurukande published two editiones principes of
avadānas in which she made extensive use of UL manuscripts. The first one is the
edition of the Maṇicūḍāvadāna (1967), a revised version of her PhD thesis, for
which she collated Add.874, Add.1375, Add.1398, and Add.1680.4. In 1984 she
used Add.1598 in her edition of the first five chapters of the Avadānasāra-
samuccaya, a unique collection of jātakas and avadānas of heterogeneous char-
acter. Finally, I would like to mention one last important manuscript, Add.1306,
dated 1302 CE. It is the oldest and arguably most reliable witness of Kṣemendra’s
Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā, very recently used by M. Straube for his editions of
selected avadānas from Kṣemendra’s Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā (Straube 2006
and 2010).
The UL boasts also several finely illuminated manuscripts, among which
there are some of the oldest specimens of Buddhist illuminated manuscripts.51
||
49 ‘Cette édition a été faite d'après un Ms. unique conservé à la Bibliothèque de l'Université de
Cambridge sous la cote Add. 1586, et décrit dans le Catalogue de M. Bendall, p. 130 et 206. Le Ms.
de la Bibliothèque Nationale Devanagari 83 n'étant manifestement qu'une copie du premier, je
n'avais pas à en tenir compte’ (Finot 1901, xv).
50 On the role of Jayamuni in shaping the avadānamālā genre in 17th century Nepal, see Formi-
gatti 2016a.
51 ‘The collection has contributed to studies of Indian art: see A. Foucher, Etude sur L’icono-
graphice bouddhique de I'Inde, 2 vols, Paris 1900–1905 on Add.1595 and Add.1643; J. P. Losty,
The art of the book in India, London 1982 including Add.1364, Add.1464, Add.1643, Add.1688; P.
Pal, The arts of Nepal. Painting, Leiden 1978, on Add.864, Add.1464, Add.1643, Add.1645. The
Library copy of Pal's book at S849.c.1.12 has been annotated to show class-marks, which Pal
omits; his Cambridge thesis (Ph.D. 5275-5276) is also relevant’ (Dalby 1988, 279).
28 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Several other editions and studies featuring UL manuscripts have been pub-
lished, not only in the field of Buddhist studies. The modest aim of this admittedly
short and incomplete list is to highlight once again how influential the UL collec-
tions have been, and continue to be, even in a specific field of study. The main
reason why I focused on the UL Buddhist manuscripts is that they were more
widely known and more accessible precisely thanks to Bendall’s catalogue of the
Buddhist manuscripts in the Wright collection. Luckily, the wider scholarly com-
munity was made aware of the existence of the other manuscripts thanks to V.
Raghavan’s work and the inclusion of the UL Sanskrit manuscripts in the NCC. I
believe that we could repeat this exercise for other fields of Sanskrit literature and
reach quite similar results.
5 The collections in the 21st century: on the
digital catalogue and beyond
Among libraries outside South Asia, the Cambridge collections can be considered
mid-sized, yet their Sanskrit (c. 1450) and Prakrit (c. 150) manuscripts are aston-
ishing under many aspects. Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism, as well as all ma-
jor literary genres (Veda, Śāstra, Kāvya, Purāṇa, Tantra, Jyotiṣa, the Darśanas,
Vyākaraṇa etc.) are represented with manuscripts important from many points of
view (such as antiquity, textual and historical significance, artistic value). The
collections include manuscripts in the three most widespread South Asian writ-
ing materials: palm leaf, paper, and birch-bark (the former two include two of the
oldest Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts,52 as well as one of the oldest dated Nepa-
lese paper manuscripts53). Furthermore, the manuscripts are written in a wide ar-
ray of South Asian scripts (the full range of Nepalese scripts, various kinds of
Nāgarī, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Grantha, Śāradā). Finally, the
geographical areas of provenance cover virtually the whole Indian subcontinent
and the time span ranges from the 8th century to the 20th century. After a very long
way from South Asia to Europe (and in some cases, again within Europe) in the
19th and 20th century, these manuscripts in the UL collections now enjoy a de-
served rest on the shelves. However, they could have undertaken all their travels
in vain, for they cannot speak to the scholarly community as long as they remain
uncatalogued. As we have seen, the only catalogue printed in the 19th century was
||
52 Add.1049 (dated 828 CE) and Add.1702 (dated to the 8th century).
53 MS Add.1412 (dated 1278 CE).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 29
Bendall’s (1883), and the only one printed in the 20th century was Niemann’s
(1980). Together, they cover less than one fourth of the collections. The Sanskrit
Manuscripts Project, Cambridge made available on the Cambridge Digital Library
platform the descriptions of more than 1600 South Asian manuscripts, covering
the totality of the Sanskrit and Prakrit manuscripts (and some Tamil manuscripts
as well). Approximately one third has been digitized and the images are now ac-
cessible online. As in the case of printed catalogues, some descriptions are very
exhaustive and include excerpts of the texts as well as a full codicological analy-
sis, while others provide only basic information (such as author, title, writing ma-
terial, number of folios etc., like in a tabular catalogue).54 Regardless of the type
of description, it is now possible to navigate the totality of the collections. The
impact of the digital catalogue on research is yet to be assessed, but it has surely
made available to the scholarly community manuscripts that otherwise would
have been accessible with more difficulty—if at all.
Catalogues give manuscripts a voice, but the language in which they speak
varies according to the interests and priorities of the scholars who catalogue
them. For instance, in a masterpiece of scholarship such as A. Weber’s Die Hand-
schriften-Verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliotheken (compiled in 1853), the man-
uscripts are classified under a textual criterion, i.e. all manuscripts of one work
are grouped together. This criterion is a clear hint of the priority assigned to the
textual element over the physical features of manuscripts, and indeed the de-
scription of the codicological aspects of the manuscripts is kept to a minimum.55
This methodological approach was adopted also by V. Raghavan during his work
for the compilation and supervision of the NCC, with the consequence that ‘cata-
logues of Indian manuscripts normally present lists of works as if they were lists
of manuscripts, silently asserting a false identity between work and manuscript’
(Wujastyk 2014, 180). In the case of the Cambridge Digital Library, as the readers
have access to images of the manuscripts their physical aspect gains more prom-
inence and can be more easily exploited for research purposes. We obviously kept
the description of the textual elements in the foreground. On the other hand, we
devoted particular attention precisely to codicological aspects (like layout and
binding) often barely included—or even neglected—in catalogues.56 The tendency
||
54 The reasons for this choice are explained in Formigatti forthcoming, § 2.1.
55 On this aspect and the history of cataloguing of Sanskrit manuscripts, see Formigatti forth-
coming, § 1.2 and § 2; see also Wujastyk 2014, 179–181.
56 This aspect of our cataloguing methodology is partly explained in Formigatti forthcoming, §
3.2.1 and § 3.2.2.
30 | Camillo A. Formigatti
to give more importance to the text is seen also in more recent digital catalogues.57
In contrast with the common idea that manuscripts are mainly carrier of texts
significant only from a literary or philological point of view, we decided also to
transcribe precisely those textual elements that are usually left out of descrip-
tions of manuscripts, i.e. the ‘written materials that are not classical works as
such, for example scribal comments, marginal glosses, ownership notes’ (Wuja-
styk 2014, 180). This obviously does not mean that we were able to follow through
this plan in all cases. For instance, we certainly could not provide transcriptions
or even full assessments of the characters of the marginal annotations found in
several manuscripts. Yet we strove to provide as many complete transcriptions of
this type of textual material as possible. Our hope is that the digital catalogue will
not only be the means for the navigation of the collections, but also a useful tool
for researchers interested in the materiality of the South Asian manuscripts.
||
57 See for instance Scharf 2015, 243–264.
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 31
6 Appendices
6.1 Sources for the history of the UL collections of Sanskrit
manuscripts
6.1.1 Manuscript sources
Besides information about the provenance of the manuscripts, the first seven
handlists provide only shelfmark and title of manuscripts.
List Add. = List of Additional Manuscripts 923-1827
Handwritten list compiled by various authors, kept in the Cambridge University
Library. It contains following lists of South Asian manuscripts:
– List of the Pāli and Sinhalese manuscripts acquired by T.W. Rhys Davids,
compiled by him on the 31 March 1874 (Add. 923–998, 76 manuscripts sold to
the Library on 30 March 1874, plus an addition of two manuscripts under the
shelfmark Add.999);
– List of the manuscripts bought in Nepal by Dr. D. Wright in 1873–76 (includ-
ing the Tibetan manuscripts and blockprints);
– List of Sanskrit manuscripts bought in Benares on behalf of Prof. E. B. Cowell
(‘Sanskrit MSS recd. [received] from Benares, sanctioned May 8, 1878’ =
Add.1709-1725);
– List of the Jaina manuscripts acquired by the University Library from Prof. G.
Bühler (‘Jaina MSS recd. from Dr. G. Bühler sanctioned by the Syndicat March
22, 1876’ = Add. 1755–1822; ‘Jaina MSS recd. from Dr. G. Bühler sanctioned by
the Syndicat May 2, 1877’);
– List of five manuscripts of other provenance bought through Prof. E. B. Cow-
ell and sanctioned on January 31, 1877.
Handlist = List of Oriental MSS. Class Catalogue of Oriental MSS
Handwritten list of all Oriental manuscripts acquired up to September 1900, fur-
ther inspected on September 1913 (‘Inspected, September 1913, by W.J. Dunn and
A. Anable, and all accounted for, except: […]’ a list of missing manuscripts fol-
lows, but the Sanskrit manuscripts allegedly missing have been struck through,
since they have been found; only a Tamil manuscript, Add.1579, seems to be miss-
ing since 1900).
32 | Camillo A. Formigatti
ULIB 7/1/4 = Assorted Lists of Manuscripts and Books, Chiefly Oriental, Ac-
quired by the Library, with Related Papers
Handwritten list and notes by Ralph T. H. Griffith and Daniel Wright of Sanskrit
manuscripts acquired by the UL in 1873.
ULIB 7/3/55 = Notes on the Collections of Oriental, Thibetan and ‘Additional’
Manuscripts
Handwritten list by Henry Bradshaw, providing the year of acquisition of the
manuscripts of the Wright collections for the years 1870–80.
Oriental MSS: Shelf List 1
Handwritten list of all Oriental manuscripts compiled according to their size.
Oriental MSS: Language List 2
Handwritten list of all Oriental manuscripts compiled according to their lan-
guage.
List of Printed Books Notebooks Portraits m.s.s. in the Cowell Collection
The handwritten list of the manuscripts bequeathed by Prof. E. B. Cowell to the
University Library is found on folio 29.
Or. 345 = Sanskrit MSS in the Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Handwritten short catalogue of the manuscripts belonging to Corpus Christi Col-
lege. Each entry usually contains the title and a very brief description of the man-
uscript.
LVP = U. L. C. Catalogue of Sanskrit MSS by Miss C. M. Ridding and Louis de la
Vallée Poussin
Card catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts in the Add. class not catalogued by
Bendall. The descriptions are written on index cards by Prof. L. de la Vallée Pous-
sin and C.M. Ridding. The catalogue was completed in 1916. The cards are kept in
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 33
Figs 5a and b: ‘Colman’s’ wooden box containing the card catalogue by L. de la Vallée Poussin
and C.M. Ridding.
a picturesque wooden box with advertisements for Colman’s products such as
mustard oil, corn flour, and starch impressed on the sides (Figs. 5a and 5b).
Raghavan = Bodleian MS Or. Raghavan 3.
MS Or. Raghavan consists of three boxes containing the notes taken by Raghavan
during his European tour for the compilation of the New Catalogus Catalogorum.
The UL collections are described in the notes in box 3. The boxes include also
letters by Raghavan to various individuals, all relating to his European tour.
6.1.2 Printed sources
(1) Bendall’s Catalogue of Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts (1883);
(2) Bendall’s reports and articles (Bendall 1882, 1886, 1888a, 1899 [1900]);
(3) Grahame Niemann’s article on the Corpus Christi College South Asian
manuscripts (Niemann 1980);
(4) Andrew Dalby’s article on the Oriental Collections in the UL (Dalby
1988).
34 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Fig. 6: Catalogue card of MS Add.1694, recto.
Fig. 7: Catalogue card of MS Add.1694, verso.
Fig. 8: Catalogue card of MS Add.1936, recto (verso blank).
6.2 Tables of Manuscripts Provenance
Tab. 1: Manuscripts Provenance. General Table
Shelfmark Collection Provenance Date of Acquisition Sources
th
Add.285.67 Miscellanea Unknown 19 century Handlist
Add.572 Miscellanea Cotton Mather 1868 (donated) Handlist
Add.960, 994 Miscellanea Rhys Davids 1873–76 (bought) List Add., Handlist, ULIB
7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
Add.1033 Miscellanea Unknown After 1873 List Add., Handlist, ULIB
7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
Add.864–875, 899–901, 912– Wright D. Wright (bought) 1873–76 List Add., Handlist, ULIB
918, 1032, 1041, 1049, 1108, 7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
1160–1164, 1267–1415, 1464–
1488, 1533–1545, 1585–1708
Add.1039, 1040, 1042, 1050, Wright W. Wright and D. Wright (donated) 1873–76 List Add., Handlist, ULIB
1104–1107, 1156, 1416–1463, 7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
1546–1557, 1576–1581, 1952
Add.1157–59 Miscellanea Fischl Hirsch (bought) 1875 List Add., Handlist, ULIB
7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
Add.1266.01 Miscellanea Reinhold Rost (bought) 1875 List Add., Handlist, ULIB
7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
Add.1755–1822 Bü hler G. Bü hler (bought in Bikaner? See the 1875 List Add., Handlist, ULIB
envelopes) 7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55, origi-
nal envelopes wrapping
the manuscripts
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 35
Shelfmark Collection Provenance Date of Acquisition Sources
th
Add.1853 Miscellanea Pots 19 century Handlist, ULIB 7/1/4, ULIB
7/3/55
Add.876–885, 889–898, 902– Cowell R. Griffith, bought in Benares 1873–78 (Add.876– List Add., Handlist, ULIB
911, 1034–1038, 1709–1725, 885, Add.889–898, 7/1/4, ULIB 7/3/55
1824–1827, and 1908–1927 Add.902–909
bought in 1873, see
ULIB; Add.1024 and
36 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Add.1025 in 1875;
Add.1826 and
Add.1827 in 1876)
Add.1934–1951 Cowell E. B. Cowell; ‘Copied at 1877 in Benares 1877 Handlist, ULIB 7/3/55,
[…] bought from J.C. Nesfield Benares Skt note in Add.1934
College’ (note in Add.1934)
Add.2185 Miscellanea Unknown 19th century Handlist
Add.2079–2251 Bendall C. Bendall; ‘MSS 2079–2250 were col- 1884–85 Handlist, Bendall’s Jour-
lected by me in Northern and Western ney
India, as shown in my “Journey in Nepal
etc” especially pp. 41–49. CBendall’
(note in the Handlist of Oriental MSS)
Add.2252–2545 Bendall C. Bendall; ‘MSS 2252–2545 were bought 1885 Handlist, Bendall’s Jour-
by me from Bhagvan Dās Kevaldas at ney
Bombay in 1885 CBendall’ (note in the
Handlist of Oriental MSS)
Add.2574 Miscellanea Unknown 19th century Handlist
Shelfmark Collection Provenance Date of Acquisition Sources
Add.2598 Cowell Cowell (bequeathed after his death?) 1903 (?) Cowell 1886, vi: ‘Our own
MS. [of the Divyāvadāna],
274 leaves, 14–15 lines)’;
this description corre-
sponds to this manuscript
Add.2800 Miscellanea Sotheby’s 1887 Handlist
Add.2831–2838 Bendall C. Bendall; received from Dr G. H. D. 1887 Handlist, Bendall 1888a
Gimlette of Kathmandu
Add.2840–41 Bendall C. Bendall; received from Dr G. H. D. 19th century Handlist
Gimlette of Kathmandu
Add.3437 Miscellanea Doughby 19th century Handlist
CC.31.B.08.1–3, CC.31.B.47.1, Corpus Christi A.C. Honner 1860–1870 Or.345, Niemann
CC.32.Add.B.01, CC.32.B.06,
CC.32.B.29, CC.32.B.30,
CC.33.B.04.1–2, CC.33.B.5,
CC.33.B.9, CC.33.B.11–15,
CC.33.B.25.1–5, CC.33.B.25.7,
CC.33.B.26, CC.33.B.27.1,
CC.33.B.27.2, CC.33.B.28,
CC.34.B.7.1, CC.34.B.17–24,
CC.37.Add.B.5
Nn.3.59–70 Miscellanea Robert Lubbock Bensly 1890s Handlist
Or.72–162 Bendall C. Bendall (bought); Or.72–83 received 1898–9 Handlist; Bendall 1899
from Pandit Ciman Lāl; Or.85–92 received
from Syed 'Aii Bilgrami of Hyderabad
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 37
Shelfmark Collection Provenance Date of Acquisition Sources
Or.235–383, 407 (Or.344–383 Cowell E.B. Cowell (bequeathed); 1903 Handlist
are handwritten notes on
various topics and translations
by Cowell)
Or.462 Miscellanea H. Bradshaw 1887 Handlist
Or.679, 713–732, 810–822, Bendall C. Bendall (bequeathed); ‘1906 March 1906–1934 Handlist
Or.838, 845, 1278–1279 Bequeathed by Professor Cecil Bendall
38 | Camillo A. Formigatti
See also Or.810–822’ (handwritten note
in pencil in the List of Oriental MSS)
Or.688–89 Miscellanea Bought from Mrs Gwendolen Crosse 1906 Handlist
(formerly belonged to General Willough-
by Osborne, Advocate general of India,
her grandfather)
Or.1372–73 Miscellanea Walter Sibbald Adie (donated) 24 January 1924 (?) Handlist
Or.845 Miscellanea Guignard 1911 Handlist
Or.860 Miscellanea A.S.B. Miller, library assistant (donated) 1911 Handlist
Or.905 Miscellanea C. J. Sawyer (bought) 1914 Handlist
Or.948 Miscellanea A.E. Wade (gift in memory of her hus- 20th century Handlist
band, the reverend T. Russell Wade)
Or.975 Miscellanea A.G.W. Murray 1919 Handlist
Or.1040 Miscellanea John Whitaker (bought) 1924 Handlist
Or.1085 Miscellanea B.F.C. Atkinson (donated) 1926 Handlist
Shelfmark Collection Provenance Date of Acquisition Sources
Or.1278–79 Bendall Bendall; ‘Found among C Bendall's pa- 1884–85 Handlist; handwritten note
pers. Dec. 1934. AFSchofield Librarian’ on the box lid of Or.1278
on the envelope of Or.1279
Or.1372–73 Miscellanea W.S. Adie (donated) ‘Presented by W.S. 1943 Handwritten note on folio
Adie, Trinity College, in 3 February 1943’ 1r of Or.1372
Or.1730 Miscellanea Faculty of Oriental Languages (donated) 20th century Handlist
Or.1743.8 Miscellanea Faculty of Oriental Languages (bought) 1954 Handlist
Or.1743.20 Cowell Presented by A.N.L. Munby, Esq. Librari- 1948 Handlist
an of King’s College. From the M.R. James
collection, Cowell Collection
Or.1748.1 Miscellanea W.S. Adie (donated); ‘Presented by W.S. Handlist
Adie, formerly Fellow of Trinity College in
3 February 1943’
Or.1810–20 Miscellanea E.K. Waterhouse 1957 Handlist
Or.1932–35 Transferred from the Faculty of Oriental 1959 Handlist
Studies in 4 December 1959
Or.2025–30 Miscellanea W.H.D. Rouse (bequeathed) 1961 Handlist
Or.2031 Miscellanea Mrs Dorothy B. G. Line and Lt.-Col. Dim- 1961 Handlist
mock (donated)
Or.2258, 2262–64 Miscellanea Sotheby’s (bought) 1982 Handlist and label at-
tached to Or.2258
Or.2260 Miscellanea Harding (bought) 1982 Handlist
Or.2338–69, 2380–2435, 2471 Stolper Robert E. Stolper (bought) 1991 Handlist
Or.2555–73 Griffiths Arlo Griffiths (donated) 2013
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 39
40 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Tab.2: Manuscript Provenance. MSS Add.2079–2250, Bendall’s Manuscripts from the 1884–85
Journey.
Shelfmark Provenance Additional Notes
Add.2079–85, 2087–98 Benares and the North-West
[2098(?)], 2101–02, 2107, Provinces
2110–11, 2113, 2115, 2120,
2123–24, 2126–27, 2129,
2131, 2133, 2136, 2138,
2142–43, 2145– 55 [2147?],
2157, 2159–60, 2165–70,
2172–85 [2176?]
Add.2086, 2099–2100, Nepal ‘With Add. 2112 were formerly
2103–06, 21089, 2112, preserved 4 leaves not iden-
2116, 2121, 2137, 2194–99, tified. In 1903 I recognized
2248–51 these as forming part of Or.
137 (bought by me in my late
journey (1898) in Nepal, at
Bhatgaon. I transferred them to
this MS. accordingly C.B. 4 Sp.
1903’ (Handlist, s.v. Add.2112)
Add.2117, 2128, 2130, 2132, Rājputāna
2134–5, 2140–1, 2156,
2158, 2200–2247, 2394
Add.2118, 2252–2545 Bombay ‘MSS 2252–2545 were bought
by me from Bhagvan Dās Keval-
das at Bombay in 1885 CBen-
dall’ (note in the Handlist)
Or.116, 811, 817–9, Rājputāna
Or.727 Nepal
Or.730, 822 Benares and the North-West
Provinces
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 41
6.2 Manuscripts listed in Bendall’s Journey but not found in
the lists or on the shelves
The titles and the notes before the page number are quoted directly as they ap-
pear in Bendall 1886a. The letters following the title refers to the provenance of
the manuscript: B. = Benares and the North-West Provinces, N. = Nepal, R. =
Rājputāna. The final bracketed figures provide the reference to the page in Ben-
dall 1886a in which the manuscript is mentioned. Manuscripts marked with *
were ‘reserved and not sent to the University Library’ (Bendall 1886a, 41). Most
probably, these were manuscripts that Bendall kept at home for his own research
(like Or.727, a manuscript of the Tantrākhyāna, a work of which Bendall pub-
lished a partial edition in 1888b). In his Application for the Professorship of San-
skrit, Bendall states that ‘of about 500 Sanskrit MSS.’ acquired by him ‘487 are
now in the Library (Add. 2079–2845)’ (Bendall 1903, 6). Some of Bendall’s private
manuscripts were subsequently acquired by the UL after his death (like Or.727),
some were later found in his papers (like Or.1278, a manuscript of the Can-
drālaṃkāra in the Bhaikṣukī script), but some are still missing (for instance, the
Kārakakaumudī manuscript listed below as 6).
1. Vṛishasārasaṅgraha. B. (?) (42)
2. Meghadūta with anonymous commentary. Kashmiri-Nāgari writing.
3. Sāraṅgasāratattva, circa 1690. B. (42)
4. Damayantīkathāvṛtti (comm.), begun by Candrapāla and finished by
Guṇavinayagaṇi. 1853. R. (43)
5. *Mādhavānalopākhyāna. 1751. N. Paper. (43)
6. *Kāraka-kaumudī. R. (43)
7. *Sūtras with comm. not identified. N. (43) (= Or. 729?)
8. *Tājikasāra by Haribhadra Sūri. 1404. R. (43) (= Add.2394? The date does
not correspond)
9. Bhīmavinoda (?). Imperfect. N. (44)
10. *‘Gaurīkantī’ (another copy)? complete. B. (44)
11. Māthurī. Comm. by Mathuranātha on Tattvacintāmaṇi. (Part of Khaṇḍa
1 only). Beng. hand xvii—xviii cent. B. Imperf. (44)
12. Nyāyasiddhāntamañjarī 1760. (44)
13. Advaitasiddhi by Madhusūdana Sūri. B. (45)
14. Advaitasiddhi, commentary by Brahmānanda. B. (45); in the Handlist,
between Add. 2162 (Laukikaviṣayavicāra) and Add.2165 (Aparokṣānu-
bhūti) a blank space has been left for Add.2163 and Add.2164 and accord-
ingly there are no paper slips in LVP; has the place been left for these
42 | Camillo A. Formigatti
two manuscripts of the Advaitasiddhi (see Bendall 1886a, 45 for this sec-
tion of the 1884–5 manuscripts)?
15. *Aparokṣānubhūti (another copy). B. (45); in the Handlist, between
Add.2170 (Jñānasvaprakāśa) and Add.2172 (Praśnāvalī by Jaḍubharata)
a blank space has been left for Add.2171, and accordingly there is no pa-
per slip in LVP; has the place been left for this manuscript (see Bendall
1886a, 45 for this section of the 1884–5 manuscripts)?
16. Kaivalyakalpadruma by Gaṅgādhara Sarasvatī. B. (45)
17. *Nyāya-makaranda and its ṭīkā (or vivṛiti) by Citsukha Muni. Text by
Anandabodha. Kashmiri-Nāgarī character. 184⒈ B. (45)
18. Siddhāntaleśasaṅgraha. (End of last chapter wanting). B. (45)
19. Siddhāntaleśasaṅgraha. (commentary) defective at end. B. (45)
20. Svarūpanirṇaya by Sadānanda. B. (45)
21. *[Vākyavṛitti-prakāśikā, comm. on Śaṅkara's Vākya-vṛitti. B] (another
copy). B. (45)
22. Vedānta-kalpataru. B. (46)
23. *Pañcarakshā. Palm-leaf (modified Kuṭila writing) with modern paper
supply. Dated in reign of Vigrahapāla of Bengal (c. 1080). (46)
24. *Daśavaikālikā (text only). 1469. (47)
25. *Śāntināthacaritra. (47)
26. Śrāvakāṇām mukhavastrikārajohāraṇavicāra. 1597. (47)
27. Chandonuśāsana. (47)
28. *Harivaṃśa-purāṇa. (47)
29. Several Paṭṭāvalīs. (48)
30. A treatise by Somasundara, ff. 4, 64 verses. (48)
31. Padyosavaṇa with ṭippaṇi (49)
32. Kalpāntarvācyānī (A.D. 1457). (50)
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 43
References
Aufrecht, Theodor (1869), A Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College,
Cambridge, Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, & co.
Batchelor, Stephen (1994), The Awakening of the West. The Encounter of Buddhism and West-
ern Culture: 543 BCE-1992, London: Aquarian.
Bendall, Cecil (1882), On European Collections of Sanskrit Manuscripts from Nepal: Their Antiq-
uity and Bearing on Chronology, History and Literature, Berlin: A. Asher & Co.,
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.
Bendall, Cecil (1883), Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge: With Introductory Notices and Illustrations of the Palæography and Chronol-
ogy of Nepal and Bengal, Cambridge: University Press.
Bendall, Cecil (1886a), A Journey of Literary and Archæological Research in Nepal and Northern
India, during the Winter of 1884-5 / by Cecil Bendall, Cambridge: University Press.
Bendall, Cecil (1886b), ‘On a Newly Discovered form of Indian Character’, in International Con-
gress of Orientalists, 7, 1886, Wien [Congrès International des Orientalistes]. Nendeln,
1886, 111–125; 1 pl.
Bendall, Cecil (1888a), ‘Notes on a Collection of MSS. Obtained by Dr. Gimlette, of the Bengal
Medical Service, at Kathmandu, and Now Deposited in the Cambridge University Library,
and in the British Museum’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ire-
land, New Series, 20, no. 4 (1888): 549–554.
Bendall, Cecil (1888b), ‘The Tantrākhyāna: A Collection of Indian Folklore, from a Unique San-
skrit Ms Discovered in Nepal’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (20 (N.S.)), 1888,
465–501.
Bendall, Cecil (1890), ‘An Inscription in a Buddhistic Variety of Nail-headed Characters’, in The
Indian antiquary, 19, 1890, 77–78, 1 pl.
Bendall, Cecil (1903), Application and Testimonials for the Professorship of Sanskrit. Cam-
bridge.
Bendall, Cecil (1899), ‘Outline-Report On a Tour in Northern India in the Winter 1898–9’, in
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1900, 162–64 [originally
published in Cambridge University Reporter, 5th December, 1899].
Bendall, Cecil (1902), Çikshāsamuccaya: a Compendium of Buddhistic Teaching Compiled by
Çāntideva Chiefly from Earlier Mahāyāna-sūtras. Edited by Cecil Bendall, M.A., Biblio-
theca Buddhica, vol. I. St. Pétersbourg: Commissionnaires de l'Académie Impériale des
Sciences.
Bendall, Cecil (1992). Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge. Publications of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project; 2.
Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Bühler, Georg (1877), Detailed Report of a Tour in Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts Made in
Kaśmîr, Rajputana, and Central India. Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic
Society, vol. 12, extra number no. 34A. Bombay: Society's Library.
Burnouf, Eugène (2010), Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (English translation of
Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme indien, Paris, 1844), Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
44 | Camillo A. Formigatti
Clemente, Michela, Hildegard Diemberger, and Mark Elliott (eds) (2014), Buddha's Word: The
Life of Books in Tibet and Beyond. Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
University of Cambridge.
Cowell, E.B. (1893), The Buddha-Karita of Asvaghosha. Edited from Three Manuscripts. Anec-
dota Oxoniensia, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Cowell, E. B. and R. A. Neil (eds) (1886), The Divyâvadâna: A Collection of Early Buddhist Leg-
ends. Cambridge: The University Press.
Dalby, Andrew (1988), A Dictionary of Oriental Collections in Cambridge University Library.
Cambridge: Cambridge Bibliographical Society.
Diemberger, Hildegard (2012), ‘The Younghusband-Waddell Collection and Its People: The So-
cial Life of Tibetan Books Gathered in a Late-colonial Enterprise’, in Inner Asia vol. 14, is-
sue 1 (2012): 131–171.
Dimitrov, Dragomir (2010), The Bhaikṣukī Manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra: Study, Script Ta-
bles, and Facsimile Edition. Harvard Oriental Series 72. Cambridge: Department of San-
skrit and Indian Studies, Harvard University.
Formigatti, Camillo A. (2014), ‘The South Asian Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Li-
brary’, in Clemente, M., H. Diemberger, and M. Elliott (eds), Buddha's Word. The Life of
Books in Tibet and Beyond, Cambridge: Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology Univer-
sity of Cambridge, 127–130.
Formigatti, Camillo A. (2016a), ‘Walking the Deckle Edge: Scribe or Author? Jayamuni and the
Creation of the Nepalese Avadānamālā Literature’, in Buddhist Studies Review, 33.1–2:
101–140.
Formigatti, Camillo A. (2016b), ‘Towards a Cultural History of Nepal, 14th-17th Century. A Nepa-
lese Renaissance?’, in Supplemento numero 1 alla Rivista degli Studi Orientali. Studies in
Honour of Luciano Petech. A Commemoration volume, 1914-2014, Nuova Serie, vol. LXXXIX,
51–66.
Formigatti, Camillo A. (forthcoming), ‘<title type="alt" xml:lang="eng"> From the Shelves to the
Web: Cataloging Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Digital Era</title>’, in Elena Mucciarelli and
Heike Oberlin (eds), Paper & Pixel: Digital Humanities in Indology, Wiesbaden: Harrasso-
witz.
Gornall, Alastair (2015), ‘Fame and Philology: R.C. Childers and the Beginnings of Pāli and Bud-
dhist Studies in Britain’, in Contemporary Buddhism, 16:2: 462–489. DOI:
10.1080/14639947.2015.1031930
Gough, Archibald Edward (1878), Papers Relating to the Collection and Preservation of the Rec-
ords of Ancient Sanskrit Literature in India, Calcutta: Office of Superintendent of Govern-
ment Printing.
Hanisch, Albrecht (2009), ‘Sarvarakṣita’s Maṇicūḍajātaka. Reproduction of the Codex Unicus
with Diplomatic Transcript and Palaeographic Introduction to the Bhaikṣukī Script’, in
Sanskrit Texts from Giuseppe Tucci’s Collection, Part I. Manuscripta Buddhica, I, 195–342.
Edited by Harunaga Isaacson and Francesco Sferra. Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e
l’Oriente.
Huett, Bruce (2012), ‘A Woman of Books: Miss C.M. Ridding and the Younghusband-Waddell
Collection’, in Inner Asia vol. 14, issue 1: 173–188.
Hultzsch, Eugen (1886), ‘Ueber eine Sammlung indischer Handschriften und Inschriften’, in
Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 40, 1886, S. 1–80, 2 pls. (Cor-
rections p. 188).
Sanskrit Manuscripts in the UL: Three Centuries of History and Preservation | 45
Jolly, J. (1885), Nāradasmṛti. The Institutes of Nārada together with copious notes from the
Nāradabhāshya of Asahāya and other standard commentaries, Calcutta: Bibliotheca In-
dica.
Lariviere, Richard W (1989), The Nāradasmṛti. University of Pennsylvania Studies on South Asia
vol. 4-5. Philadelphia: Department of South Asia Regional Studies, University of Pennsyl-
vania.
Martin, Dan (2015). Tibskrit Philology: April 21, 2014. A Bio-bibliographical Resource Work.
Compiled by Dan Martin, edited by Alexander Cherniak.
Niemann, Grahame (1980), ‘Uncatalogued Indian manuscripts of Corpus Christi College, Cam-
bridge: the Honner collection’, in IAVRI Bulletin, 9 Vrindaban, 3–15.
ODNB = Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography, s.v. Griffith, Ralph Thomas Hotchkin
(1826–1906), online version (http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33580).
Quenzer, Jörg B., Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds) (2014), Manuscript Cultures:
Mapping the Field (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 1). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Raghavan, V.(1963), Manuscripts, Catalogues, Editions: Steps Taken for the Collection, Preser-
vation and Utilisation of Manuscripts. Madras: Bharati Vijayam Press.
Rotman, A. (2008), Divine Stories: Divyāvadāna, Part I. Boston, MA: Wisdom Publications.
Rhys Davids, T. W. (1883), ‘List of Pāli Manuscripts in the Cambridge University Library’, in
Journal of the Pali Text Society, 145–151.
Scharf, Peter M. (2015), ‘Providing Access to Manuscripts in the Digital Age’, in McDaniel, Jus-
tin, and Lynn Ransom (eds), From Mulberry Leaves to Silk Scrolls: New Approaches to the
Study of Asian Manuscript Traditions. Philadelphia.
Tatelman, J. (2000), The Glorious Deeds of Pūrṇa: A Translation and Study of the Pūrṇāvadāna.
Curzon critical studies in Buddhism. Richmond: Curzon.
Tatelman, J. (2005), The Heavenly Exploits: Buddhist Biographies from the Divyāvadāna. Vol-
ume One. Edited and Translated by Joel Tatelman. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York: New
York University Press: JJC Foundation.
Waterhouse, David M. (2004), The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in
Nepal and Darjeeling 1820-1858. Royal Asiatic Society Books. London: Routledge Curzon.
Weber, Albrecht (1853). Verzeichnisse der Sankrit- und Prâkrit-handschriften der Königlichen
Bibliothek zu Berlin. Die Handschriften-verzeichnisse der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Ber-
lin, Berlin: A. W. Schade.
Winternitz, Moriz (1905), Catalogue of Sanscrit Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, vol. 2 of
Aufrecht – Winternitz – Keith 1864.
Wujastyk, Dominik (2014), ‘Indian Manuscripts’, in Jörg B. Quenzer, Dmitry Bondarev and Jan-
Ulrich Sobisch (eds), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping the Field (Studies in Manuscript Cul-
tures 1), Berlin: De Gruyter.
Nalini Balbir
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts:
Provenances, Highlights, Colophons
Abstract: This paper deals with the history of the Jain manuscript collection at the
Cambridge University Library. It focuses on the actors who were involved in selling
and buying manuscripts in Western India at the end of the 19th and the beginning of
the 20th century. Among them the Gujarati Bhagvāndās Kevaldās and the British Cecil
Bendall feature as prominent figures. The contents of the collection are then de-
scribed, including the few illustrated manuscripts. The final section of the paper is
devoted to the examination of some significant colophons. A group of them shows
how manuscripts of Jain texts in Gujarati current in the 1820s were sponsored by the
British Lieutenant Colonel William Miles (1780–1860) who then restituted their con-
tents in his own study of the Jains. Thus the Cambridge Jain collection gives valuable
insights into manuscript circulation among Jains or between India and the West, and
into the modes of transmission of knowledge through Prakrit and Sanskrit as schol-
arly languages, or Gujarati as the language of oral informants.
1 Introduction
From the start, manuscripts produced among Jains, whether they are in Sanskrit or
in other languages Jains used, have been an integral part of the digitization project of
Sanskrit manuscripts initiated and supervised by Vincenzo Vergiani with the most
efficient concourse of Daniele Cuneo and Camillo A. Formigatti. Several of them are
visible on the website either as brief records (yet to be completed) or as detailed no-
tices, often accompanied with images of their original pages. But, given the con-
straints of a website, the focus is on individual items. The present paper is intended
as a way to contextualize the manuscripts within a broader perspective and could
serve hopefully as a kind of introduction to the Jain manuscripts in the Cambridge
University Library, addressing questions such as: how was the collection built up?
What does it contain and how does this content feature compared to other European
collections of Jain manuscripts? What do some of the colophons teach us about the
actors involved in the production process?
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-003, © 2017 N. Balbir, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
48 | Nalini Balbir
2 How did Jain manuscripts enter the Cambridge
University Library?
The majority of Jain manuscripts entered the Cambridge University Library at a time
when the search for manuscripts in Western India, which largely meant Jain manu-
scripts, developed rapidly. It started in 1869–70 thanks to a systematic organization
in the Bombay Presidency.1 European scholars were on the lead, surrounded by an
array of ‘natives’, whose assistance was recognized in varying degrees (see Balbir in
the press with full bibliography). One of these members of the Indian staff was Bha-
gvāndās Kevaldās, a Jain from Surat. Born in 1850, he was recruited in his early twen-
ties by Georg Bühler as an ‘agent’ and worked continuously for supplying manu-
scripts both to the Bombay Presidency and to individual libraries or scholars in the
West until his death in 1900, at the age of 50. In the service of Bühler, Kielhorn and
Peterson successively, he was at the interface of these scholars and of the Jain owners
of manuscripts in temple libraries, being a native speaker of Gujarati and mastering
English as well. He became instrumental in supplying manuscripts to all European
libraries: Berlin, Vienna, Leipzig, London, Strasbourg, Paris, and Florence. When the
search started, G. Bühler was on the lead and numerous copies of the same texts came
to light. These duplicates started to be sent to European libraries, the first of which
were Berlin and Cambridge (see below Bendall 1886, 34). A first batch of Jain manu-
scripts (Add.1755 to 1822), which entered the Cambridge University Library (UL) in
1878 (stamp dated 6 August 1878), reached Cambridge in this way, through the good
offices of G. Bühler. On their paper envelopes one can read written in Devanāgarī
script jainīyam Kembridjasya followed by the title of the work and sequences of num-
bers such as ’16–13–1637’ (Add.1766), meaning a manuscript with 16 folios, 13 lines
per page, dated V.S. 1637 (= 1580 CE).2 Sometimes we have indications on when and
where the manuscript was acquired. The envelope of Add.1812, which has Bikānera
tā. 2-jā. sa.-1875,3 shows that this was part of what Bühler acquired during his tours in
Rajputana (Bühler 1874, 1875, 1877).
||
1 Before this peak period, the only notable collection of Jain manuscripts in the West was that gath-
ered by Colonel James Tod (1782–1835) during his appointment in India between 1799 and 1823. The
Tod collection is kept in the Royal Asiatic Society, London (see Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1940:
129–178).
2 V.S. = Vikrama samvat, year in the Vikrama era, which is one of the main chronological system used
in Indian manuscripts. Remove 57 in order to get the date in the Common Era, thus here = 1580 CE.
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01766/33 (Fig. 1); other examples would be Add.1783 (http://cudl.
lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01783/1), Add.1800 (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01800/11)
3 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01812/1
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 49
Fig. 1: Envelope of a manuscript bought from Bhagvāndās Kevaldās (Add.1766). © All images in
this article are reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Now, for scholars visiting India in the 1880s and having an interest in Sanskrit
manuscripts, meeting with Bhagvāndās Kevaldās in Bombay became a must, a
necessary stop in their journey. Cecil Bendall (1856–1906) undertook a first tour
in India and Nepal from 22nd October 1884 to 1st May 1885. Bombay was his port of
disembarkation and embarkation. On his way back, he reports in A Journey of
Literary and Archaeological Research:
I met by appointment Pandit Bhagvān Dās, who has long been the energetic agent of the Bom-
bay Government for the collection of Sanskrit MSS. By a minute of this Government the agent
is allowed to sell duplicates of works in the Government collections for the use of certain insti-
tutions in this country, of which our University Library is one (Bendall 1886, 34).
The ‘Rough list of MSS. purchased at Bombay’ published in Bendall’s Journey
(1886, 49–51) is the fruitful outcome of the first meeting. It has 140 Jain manu-
scripts and 153 ‘Brahmanical and general MSS.’, now kept in the Library of the
University of Cambridge where Bendall taught from 1903 to 1906. These Jain man-
uscripts correspond to shelfmarks Add. 2252 to 2389. Bhagvāndās Kevaldās’s
handnotes are seen on some of the modern paper manuscript covers. Information
useful for calculating the manuscript selling price is often summed up on their
last pages, from his hand as well. Thus for instance ‘206–11–40 ślo. 5200’ means
206 folios, 11 lines per page, 40 akṣaras per line. The last number is the total ob-
tained through the following operation: number of folios x 2 (recto and verso) x
number of lines x number of syllables divided by 32 (the grantha unit). Here 206
x 2 x 11 x 40: 32 = 5665; 5200 is an estimate, which could be deliberately less in
order to take into account the variations in the number of akṣaras, which are
counted on the basis of a sample. Beside this number, the material quality of the
50 | Nalini Balbir
Fig. 2: Example of grantha calculation (Add.2258).
manuscript or the rarity of the text copied are other elements which come into
consideration for determining the price (see Balbir in the press).
During his second tour, in the winter of 1898, Bendall again met the Indian
agent:
I landed at Bombay on 23rd November 1898, and commenced search for MSS. by conferring
with Bhagran [sic; read Bhagvān] Dās of Surat (Bendall 1900, 162).
In addition, Bendall’s classified list of manuscripts personally collected also in-
cludes 74 Jain items marked as ‘all from Rājputānā’ (1886, 46), which entered the
Cambridge collection as well. These are shelfmarks Add.2200 to 2247 and a num-
ber of manuscripts marked as ‘Or.’, which include some Digambara works Ben-
dall had managed to get:
At Jeypore the Digambara Jain pandit, Cimanlāl, not only gave me a full list of his valuable
MS. library, from which copies can be made, but also presented me with several MSS. I fur-
ther succeeded in obtaining some Digambara MSS. through my old friends amongst the
brahmans of the city. (Bendall 1900, 162).
So a large number of the Cambridge Jain manuscripts were ultimately acquired
through the offices of Bühler and then Bendall with Bhagvāndās Kevaldās as the
common source in the background or the foreground. Yet there were a few iso-
lated items that had entered earlier from other provenances; those which came
later ultimately went back to Bendall’s legacy. This is summed up in the following
table arranged chronologically:
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 51
Add.1266 see below (W. Miles; bought by Reinhold Rost,
entered UL on 15.10.1875)
Add.1755 to Add.1822 entered 1878, bought by G. Bühler in 1876–77
Add.2252 to 2389 ; Add.2558 to 2563 Bought by Bendall from Bhagvāndās Kevaldās,
1885
Add.2200 to Add.2247 Bought by Bendall ‘from Rajputana’
Or.73 to Or.80, Or.83 ; Or.106 to129 Bought by Bendall in 1898–1899 from Bha-
gvāndās Kevaldās in Bombay or Paṇḍit Ciman
Lāl in Jaipur
Or.810–811, 813–820, 845 Presented by Mrs. C. Bendall in 1909
Or.812 Bought by Dr D. Wright in 1873–76 (according
to the provenance indicated in the individual
record, Or.812)
Bendall spent most of his career in London, where he was senior assistant in the
department of oriental manuscripts and printed books in the British Museum
from 1882 to 1898, and held the chair of Sanskrit at University College London
from 1885 to 1903. It was only in 1901 that he returned to Cambridge where he was
appointed university lecturer. In 1902 he became curator of oriental literature in
the university library. Finally, in 1903 he was elected professor of Sanskrit as
Cowell’s successor. Yet, he was instrumental in getting most of the manuscripts
kept in Cambridge University Library. The Jain manuscripts coming from him in
London are only a handful (Balbir, Sheth, Tripathi 2006, I, 32–34).
3 Users of the Cambridge Jain manuscripts
The first user was Ernst Leumann (1859–1931). At a time when so few editions of
Jain texts existed or were available, this pioneer in many areas of Indology, espe-
cially Jain studies, worked only on manuscripts and, with his very characteristic
long-distance sight, was always keen on acquiring manuscripts of rare texts,
which he felt were crucial for the history of Jain scriptures. For instance, he built
the full edifice of what he termed ‘Āvaśyaka literature’ on texts that could be read
only in this form. In a febrile quest for manuscripts, he used to borrow them from
India, especially Poona, and managed to buy a lot for the Strasbourg University
Library through Bhagvāndās Kevaldās. We have a direct testimony of their inter-
action in a person to person relation thanks to traces of the regular correspond-
ence they had during seven years (Balbir in the press). Bhagvāndās Kevaldās’s
52 | Nalini Balbir
letters are preserved at the Institut für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets,
Hamburg, accompanied by handwritten notes of the contents of Leumann’s an-
swers attached to them (Leumann’s original letters sent to India, however, could
not be traced so far). Having never gone to India, Leumann had to do all this
through letters, and could not let his Indian correspondent in peace! These letters
are valuable documents on the mechanisms of manuscript search, discovery, ac-
quisition and supply in a dual relation. We see from Leumann’s correspondence
that he did not always take for granted Bhagvāndās Kevaldās’s prices and some-
times disputed his grantha calculation (see above).
But wherever Leumann could travel, he did so. Thus he used to tour the librar-
ies of Europe in order to explore their new manuscript acquisitions and treasures.
At that time this meant mainly libraries in England. So Leumann was a visitor of
the then British Museum where he read several of the Jain manuscripts (Balbir,
Sheth, Tripathi 2006, I, 40–42), of the Royal Asiatic Society, the Bodleian Library,
and the Cambridge University Library. Leumann took notes of excerpts in more or
less details in a large number of blue-covered notebooks kept at the Institut für Kul-
tur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets, Hamburg (see Plutat 1998). The large ma-
jority of these notes have remained unpublished. They were preparatory.
Add.2203 Municandra Āvaśyaka-saptatikā Plutat 1998 No. 51
mit Auszügen aus Maheśvara’s
Commentar. Nach d. Cambridge
Ms. Add. No.2203
Add.2350 Munipati-carita. Auszüge d. Plutat 1998 No. 124
Cambridge-Ms.
Add.2378 Āvaśyaka-vṛtti III, 128,1– Plutat 1998 No. 49 and No.
XX,18/19,1: Cambridge Ms. No. 49/1
2378 and Āvaśyaka-vṛtti: Cam-
bridge Ms.
Add.2385 Sāmāyārī-vidhi in Bhāṣā Cam- Plutat 1998 No. 109
bridge Coll. 136 (Add. 2385)
Or.820 Kathākośa. Bendall’s Ms. pre- Plutat 1998 No. 944
sented to him by Rāja Si-
vaprasād N.I.E. of Benares. – 9.
||
4 Leumann’s pioneering work also extended to Buddhist literature in Sanskrit and central Asian
languages. Thus he also left notes about Cambridge University Library Add. 1598, a manuscript
of the Avadānasārasamuccaya (Plutat 1998, No. 388).
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 53
In addition, the symbol ‘C’ in his Übersicht über die Āvaśyaka-Literatur (1934) refers
to the Jain manuscripts that had been bought by Bendall in 1885.
Otherwise, the Cambridge Jain manuscripts have hardly been known outside. Ex-
ceptions are very few. One of the illustrated manuscripts of the Kālakācārya-kathā
(Or.845) was used by the American scholar W. Norman Brown for his celebrated mono-
graph on the topic (1933). Two manuscripts of the Catuḥśaraṇa-prakīrṇaka (Add.1774
and Add.1816) were used by K.R. Norman, a specialist of Middle Indian philology who
taught for many years in Cambridge, for his critical edition of the text (1974).
4 What are the contents of the Cambridge Jain
manuscripts?
As is well-known, the oldest Jain manuscripts in Western India were first written on
palm leaf, between the 11th and the beginning of the 14th century, when it was progres-
sively replaced by paper. The libraries of Jaisalmer, Patan and Cambay, in particular,
are famous for the large number of palm-leaf Jain manuscripts they keep, whether
they are Jain or non-Jain works. Outside India, Western Indian palm-leaf manuscripts
are exceptions – there are three of them in the British Library (Balbir, Sheth, Tripathi
2006, I, 31–32), for instance, which entered there just by chance, one in the Göttingen
University Library, which came there through Kielhorn – but none in Cambridge.
According to my count, Jain manuscripts in Cambridge number 324.
Śvetāmbara literature works 260
Śvetāmbara canonical works 111
Other Śvetāmbara doctrinal works 89
Polemic works 7
Philosophy 2
Śvetāmbara narratives 30
Śvetāmbara hymns (stotras), pilgrimage places 19
(tīrthas), rituals
Monastic lineages (paṭṭāvalis) 2
Digambara literature (all categories) 21
Belles-lettres and śāstric (scientific) disci- 38
plines
Varia 5
Total 324
54 | Nalini Balbir
I understand the phrase ‘Jain manuscript’ as referring to manuscripts where a
Jain work is copied. This means religious scriptures of all kinds (‘canon’, liturgy,
ritual, narratives, stotras, etc.) and contributions by Jain authors to disciplines of
knowledge such as grammar, lexicography, astronomy, mathematics, etc. In
Cambridge, the works written by the 12th century polymath, the famous Hemacan-
dra, feature well.5 But in a broader meaning, Jain manuscripts also mean manu-
scripts of non-Jain works produced among Jains: the Cambridge collection has
examples of śāstric works (grammar and science, for instance) and of commen-
taries of Sanskrit classics written or copied by Jain monks which testify to the
wide intellectual range of Jain scholarship.6
The Cambridge collection is a typical European collection with a prevalence
of copies of manuscripts containing works representing the Śvetāmbara tradi-
tion. This is the case in all libraries outside India, except Strasbourg where, as
mentioned earlier, the collection was built with precise purposes in mind by Ernst
Leumann. One of these purposes was to explore the points of contact between the
Śvetāmbara and the Digambara traditions in the areas of ritual and liturgy. Hence
Leumann made all efforts to diversify the sources from where he could get the
relevant material (Balbir 2015b).
Within Śvetāmbara manuscripts, copies of canonical scriptures are prevalent
in Cambridge: they were the first to attract the attention of scholars in search of
the ‘old’ Jain doctrine, whose primary aim was to get at least one exemplar of
each of the Āgamas in their various groupings (Aṅgas, Upāṅgas, Mūlasūtras,
Chedasūtras, Prakīrṇakas). This was an obvious priority stated by Bühler right at
the first stage of the search:
Copies of all the forty five sacred works of the Jainas with the exception of three very small
treatises have now been obtained and Sanskrit commentaries on most of them (Bühler
1872–73, 6).
Manuscripts acquired in Berlin and catalogued by Albrecht Weber (Verzeichnis) and
Hermann Jacobi’s collection (bought in 1897 by the then British Museum, today
housed in the British Library, see Balbir, Sheth, Tripathi 2006, I, 34–37) show this fo-
cus as well. Forming one third of the whole in Cambridge, manuscripts of Śvetāmbara
Āgamas are sometimes represented by more than one copy of the same text in
||
5 For example, portions of the Śabdānuśāsana (Add.2313, 2318, 2319, 2325, 2331), and copies of
the Abhidhānacintāmaṇi (Add.2289, 2302).
6 For example, Add.2266 and 2296 (Kumārasambhava).
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 55
Ardhamāgadhī, and, usually, for each scripture a manuscript with one of the stand-
ard Sanskrit commentaries by Śīlāṅka, Abhayadeva or Malayagiri is available.7 For
us, in 2017, these copies are not necessarily crucial: the texts are available in print and
well known, if not always critically edited. And for a critical edition, paper manu-
scripts such as the Cambridge ones could be useful, but not as much priorities as
palm-leaf manuscripts would be. Nevertheless they are often interesting as objects,
because they are rather old, or testify to sustained continuity in copying and collect-
ing these texts through informative colophons. Late manuscripts of Gujarati com-
mentaries, not absent from Cambridge either, are also significant in the transmission
of scriptural knowledge through the vernaculars, which became the main current me-
dium in the 17th–18th centuries onward (for example Add.1776, Bālāvabodha on the
Aupapātikasūtra). The Ṭabo format where the Gujarati rendering is placed below the
relevant Sanskrit or Prakrit phrases is close to a translation or paraphrase. 8
The layout often takes the shape of compartments clearly delineated by red
lines and then assists the reader visually.9
Fig. 3: Instance of a bilingual manuscript: Prakrit root-text and Gujarati quasi-translation as in-
terlinear (Add.1779).
||
7 For example, Add.2355 or 1799, 1791 or 1808, 1820, 2254, 1801 or 2297, 2282, 2252 or 1813, 1773
or 2275, 1770 or 2255, 1797 or 2259, 2281 or 1817, 1805 or 1818, 1757 or 2232.
8 For example, Add.1779 Antagaḍadasāo with interlinear Gujarati commentary, dated V.S. 1801
(= 1744 CE), see Fig. 3; Add.1787 Laghuniśīthaśāstra dated V.S. 1794 (= 1737 CE); Add.1811
Daśaśrutaskandha with interlinear Gujarati commentary dated V.S. 1830 (= 1773 CE).
9 For example, Add.2209 Vyavahārasūtra with Ṭabo dated V.S. 1765 (= 1708 CE), see Fig. 4.
56 | Nalini Balbir
Fig. 4: Instance of an interlinear Gujarati quasi-translation in compartments (Add.2209, fol. 3v).
All major genres of Śvetāmbara extra-canonical literature are present in the collec-
tion. At least a few treasures deserve a special mention. The first two are treasures 1)
because they contain Sanskrit commentaries of considerable size and importance
that have never been published, even in India, and 2) because the Cambridge manu-
scripts seem to be the only ones available outside India. Today travels and digitisation
have made access to manuscripts easier, independently from the location where they
are housed. Thanks to improvement in management and new understanding of the
advantages of communication in matter of manuscripts of which one may get photo-
graphs easily (like in exemplary Jain institutions such as the Koba Institute), knowing
that a given unpublished text is available in western libraries may seem somewhat
irrelevant, except when these manuscripts are of such a quality that they cannot be
ignored. This is the case with the instances mentioned below.
Add.1775 contains the Āvaśyaka-laghuvr̥ tti by Tilakācārya, a massive Sanskrit
commentary on the Āvaśyaka-niryukti written in the 13th century (V.S. 1296 = 1239
CE).10 The commentator, whose works remain little explored so far, is a specialist
of technical Jain scriptures on monastic life (Balbir 2015a, 74–77). This specific
commentary is valuable, in particular, for the Sanskrit verse rewritings of several
illustrative stories that had first been transmitted in Prakrit commentaries (see
Balbir 1993, 441–467). Leumann used the London manuscript (Or.2102) and does
not seem to mention the Cambridge one. However, he used Add.2283 (Leumann
1934, 15), a manuscript of a still later Sanskrit commentary by Jñānasāgarasūri
||
10 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01775/2
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 57
that is the last noteworthy landmark in the long exegetical process centering
around the Āvaśyaka corpus. For Leumann’s ambitious project on the history of
the Āvaśyaka literature and his investigation of the textual development of com-
mentaries and subcommentaries, it was indeed an important witness.
Add.1758 relates to the category of Chedasūtras, or books on monastic discipline.
In this category, the Jītakalpa, composed in Prakrit by Jinabhadragaṇi in the 6th cen-
tury, more specifically deals with monastic atonements, a highly technical topic.
Among the rewritings it generated there is a Yatijītakalpa by Somaprabha. The Cam-
bridge manuscript is a bulky Sanskrit commentary on this latter work, composed at
the end of the 14th century (V.S. 1456 = 1399 CE) by Sādhuratna of the Tapāgaccha.11
Add.2223 has Haribhadra's Sanskrit commentary, written in V.S. 1185 = 1128 CE,
on the Samayakhettasamāsa, a cosmological text in Prakrit. Manuscripts of this text
are rare in India, even rarer outside India. The Cambridge copy is dated and old, V.S.
1491 = 1434 CE. This commentary is unpublished, and was analysed only by Leumann
in an unpublished notebook.12
Add.2304 is another noteworthy manuscript of a cosmological work. The Narak-
hittaviyāra, ‘Reflection about the area of humans’ (in the Jain universe) by Somatil-
akasūri, is written in Jaina Māhārāṣṭrī Prakrit and has 388 verses. It was composed
around 1340 CE and belongs to the intermediate phase of Jain cosmological writings
(compared to the earlier one represented by Jinabhadragaṇi, 6th century, and the later
one represented by Vinayavijaya in the 17th century). The Cambridge manuscript is
very significant because of its relatively old age (V.S. 1474 = 1427 CE),13 and because
outside India manuscripts having the Prakrit text of Somatilakasūri without commen-
tary, thus the verses in their full form, are relatively rare.
Debates between Jain monastic groups have been very lively since the emergence
of different gacchas from the 12th century onwards. The Cambridge collection can
boast of a text that would deserve further exploration. It is the Lumpākamatakuṭṭana
(Add.2224, shortly described in Bendall 1886, 63).14 The main tenet of the Lumpakas
is the rejection of image-worship. This apparently unpublished work makes use of
Prakrit quotations from canonical texts, which are then explained and discussed in
Gujarati, in order to show that image-worship is canon-based. Written in V.S. 1687
(saṃvati muni-siddhi-rasa-śvetāśva-mite = 1630 CE), it makes use of what had been
transmitted by teachers of the Kharataragaccha such as Ratnaharṣa or Ratnasāra.
||
11 Final page of the manuscript.
12 Final page of the manuscript; Plutat 1998, No. 204 Kṣetrasamāsa (Kṣ1) mit Haribhadra’s Comm.
13 Final page of the manuscript.
14 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02224/2
58 | Nalini Balbir
Among the few and rare Digambara texts preserved in Cambridge is a modern
manuscript of the Indranandi-saṃhitā (Or.2030), a work that has never really been
investigated. Partly written in Jaina Śaurasenī Prakrit, it deals both with monastic life
and with topics relating to daily practice, such as bath, worship, etc. in a style cognate
to Dharmaśāstra literature.
Generally speaking, manuscripts in Prakrit and Sanskrit form the great majority,
in contrast with vernacular commentaries (i.e. Gujarati), stories or hymns.15
5 Illustrated manuscripts
Illustrated manuscripts form a group usually attracting attention in collections of
Jain manuscripts. The Cambridge collection cannot boast of any exceptional item.
The classical themes and trends of Jain manuscript painting are very well repre-
sented though.
Indeed, the most often illustrated Jain work is the Kalpasūtra. This can be ex-
plained by its contents: the first part deals at length with the careers of four Jinas,
in reverse order (Mahāvīra, Pārśva, Nemi, and Ṛṣabha), in tabular form for the re-
maining twenty, the second part praises the first Jain teachers and their lineages,
the third one is devoted to specific monastic rules to be observed during the rainy
season. But, even more, this work owes its popularity to its growing public use from
the 14th century onwards. During the August-September festival of Paryushan,
which centres around the notion of forgiving (kṣamā), manuscripts, and today
printed editions of the Kalpasūtra, where this notion is central, are displayed in
temples by monks who read the original text or narrate from it in the vernaculars.
It became a prestige act for wealthy Jain families to commission new copies of the
Kalpasūtra for this occasion, as we know from often detailed colophons (Balbir
2014). This might have been the case of the Cambridge manuscript Add.1765, but
the last folio is a replacement. This undated manuscript could go back to the 15th or
early 16th century on the basis of the script and style of paintings. It has a total of 47
illustrations, some of them accompanied by a short caption. The manuscript has a
fairly developed iconographic programme covering all the text sections. The last
||
15 See below Add.1266 among notable exceptions. Other instances would be Add.2233, 2561,
Or.818.
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 59
Fig. 5: Attacks on Mahāvīra’s asceticism, caption Ma° upasarga, from a Kalpasūtra manuscript
(Add.1765, fol. 52r).
one is depicted through stereotyped paintings of preaching monks or the fourfold
Jain community. For their illustrations the painters draw inclusively on all available
textual sources, the Prakrit text of the mūla, but also the commentaries that devel-
oped around it and contain a number of stories. Thus there is ample scope for variety
in the paintings found in Kalpasūtra manuscripts. Cambridge Add.1765 thus has two
scenes showing attacks on Mahāvīra before he reached Omniscience that are not de-
picted in all manuscripts (fol. 52r) (Fig. 5): he remains fast and steady while spikes are
put into his ears by two malignant cowherds, or when lions threaten him. The section
on early teachers is illustrated through one of his famous representatives, the monk
Sthūlabhadra who had miraculously changed himself into a lion and was found in
this shape by his frightened sisters as nuns (fol. 85v) (Fig. 6).
A sort of supplement to the Kalpasūtra, the Kālakācāryakathā narrates how the
religious teacher Kālaka took the help of the Sāhis to recover the nun, his sister, who
had been abducted by the malevolent king Gardabhilla (Add.2377, fol. 5v).16 The story
is connected to the Kalpasūtra, because Kālaka is given a role in fixing the date of the
Paryushan festival. The eventful story has generated numerous versions in Prakrit,
Sanskrit or Gujarati, and numerous illustrated manuscripts. Cambridge Add.2377 and
Cambridge Or.845 are both an anonymous Sanskrit verse version widely circulated
(Norman Brown 1933, 98–102), with respectively three and seven paintings. The pag-
ination of the second one (fol. 145 to 156) strongly suggests that it came after a Kal-
pasūtra as the second text in the manuscript, as it often happens.17
||
16 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02377/10.
17 See http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00845/1 for more details.
60 | Nalini Balbir
Fig. 6: The Sthūlabhadra story, caption Sthūlabhadra, from a Kalpasūtra manuscript
(Add.1765, fol. 85v).
Another common corpus of illustrated Jain manuscripts is formed by those of works
on cosmology. A noteworthy item is Add.1766 where the famous classic on the sub-
ject, Ratnaśekharasūri’s Laghukṣetrasamāsa composed in the 14th century, was cop-
ied in V.S. 1637 (= 1580) by the nice hand of a Śvetāmbara monk (Harṣasiṃgha,
disciple of Harṣakulagaṇi). Several outward signs point to the plan of making of
this manuscript a distinctive object: red ink is used for verse numbers and daṇḍas,
ornamental designs are formed with akṣaras and margins are carefully drawn. It
opens with a bright picture of the Jambūdvīpa (fol. 1v)18 and has a number of other
illustrations of smaller size (folios 3v, 6r, 7v, 8r, 13r and 16v). Although there are
many manuscripts of this work with many more illustrations, often occupying the
full page, this one is striking by the extremely large number of charts and diagrams
it includes. The verses of the text are often sequences of lists of items which have to
be put in correspondence with each other, for instance, lists of the names of moun-
tains and their respective number of summits, size, etc. (fol. 4v). They are thus ap-
propriate for visualization in tabular form. This mode of transmission of knowledge
finds its full development in the Cambridge manuscript.
||
18 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01766/2.
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 61
Fig. 7: The fourfold community as auspicious beginning of an Uvāsagadasāo manuscript
(Add.1781, fol. 1r).
Finally, isolated illustrations at the outset of a manuscript tend to function as a
maṅgala. They are generally non-narrative scenes emphasising the ideas of wor-
ship or teaching. The manuscript of the Uvāsagadasāo dated V.S. 1579 (= 1522 CE,
Add.1781) has a beautiful painting in the classical style with blue background and
use of gold pigment (Fig. 7).
On the upper register a Śvetāmbara Jain monk, clearly identified as such
through his white-dotted monastic robe, is teaching seated in front of the
sthāpanācārya, which is a symbol of the revered teacher and of the doctrine itself.
In front of him a man, a Jain śrāvaka, is listening with cupped hands in a gesture
of respect. On the second and third registers, other Jain laymen and laywomen as
well as nuns similarly listen carefully. This is a common way to depict the four-
fold community (caturvidha saṅgha) and a translation into images of the facing
words where the teaching to come is staged: Sudharmasvāmin preaches the sev-
enth Aṅga as answer to Jambūsvāmin’s question. Right at the start, the undated
manuscript of the Vivāga-suya (Vipāka-sūtra, °śruta) shows a brightly coloured
scene where a man and a lady are shown in a temple pavilion paying homage to
a Jina seated in padmāsana (Fig. 8). He can be identified as the sixteenth,
Śāntinātha, through his lāñchana, the antelope shown on the pedestal. The
Vipāka-sūtra is a narrative scripture, depicting in a lively mode first the result of
good deeds, then the result of bad deeds, staging a lot of characters from different
social strata who wander through the cycle of rebirths and the Jain universe. Thus
the text has an important visual potential. Illustrated manuscripts of it are rare,
though. Here, the image of a Jina is peripheral to the text and functions as an
62 | Nalini Balbir
Fig. 8: The sixteenth Jina Śāntinātha as auspicious beginning of a Vivāgasuya manuscript
(Add.2376, fol 1v).
auspicious beginning embodying respect to the teaching and supporting the tra-
ditional fivefold homage (pañcanamaskāra) to teachers facing the image. The
decorative ornamented red border of the folio underlines the wish to make of this
manuscript a distinctive object.
The Cambridge collection has a good number of manuscripts that are en-
hanced by the presence of citrapr̥ ṣṭhikās. These ‘illustrated pages’ may be found
as openings and closings, functioning like covers. Their origin is not known, and
they are largely unexplored.19 They show intricate geometric or floral motifs in-
tertwined with each other. In contrast with wooden or cloth book-covers that may
depict any type of scene or motif, these illustrated pages are always non-figura-
tive (Figs. 9a and b). In Add.1812 or Add.1781, there is a red geometric motif of a
simple type as opening that occupies a limited space on the page. In the Vipāka-
sūtra manuscript just mentioned (Add.2376), both the opening and the closing
illustrated pages occupy the full page. Both are bright red but use different deco-
rative motives. Red, a colour viewed as auspicious, is the most frequently used,
but there is no rule. On the contrary, this seems to be an area with freedom. The
closing illustrated page of Add.2225 (Fig. 10) strikes the viewer by its elegant so-
phistication in the floral composition where yellow, blue and pink are used in
addition to red. The finish of the painting almost gives it the texture of a soft cloth.
Pink, brown and green, which are more unusual, are employed in the two citra-
pr̥ ṣṭhikās opening and closing the Jñātadharmakathā manuscript Add.225820 to
||
19 See Balbir, Sheth, Tripathi 2006, plate I for examples.
20 and http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02258/417
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 63
Fig. 9a: Instances of opening and closing illustrated pages in Jain manuscripts: Opening
page of Add.2376.
Fig. 9b: Closing page of Add.2376.
produce slightly different shapes (Figs. 11 and 2). The recurrence of colours gives
unity and consistency to the whole object.21 Add.2252 and 2286, which are related
through their colophons (see below), have opening or closing pages of similar
types but in different colours.
||
21 Other examples would be the opening page of Add.1792 (Uttarādhyayanasūtra) or of
Add.1805 (Jīvājīvābhigama).
64 | Nalini Balbir
Fig. 10: Closing page of Add.2225.
Fig. 11: Opening page of Add.2258.
6 What do some Cambridge colophons teach us?
Jain manuscripts have the overall reputation of often providing informative colo-
phons. The simplest cases are those that are restricted to giving a date: saṃvat 1662
Phālguṇa-vāda 5 soma-vasare ‘In V.S. 1662 (= 1605 CE) on Monday, the fifth day of
the dark fortnight of Phālguṇa’,22 or saṃvat 1665 varṣe Kārttika sudi 14 gurau
laṣitaṃ / śrīr astu ‘Copied in V.S. 1665 (= 1608 CE) on Thursday, the fourteenth day
||
22 Add.1793, fol. 416r.
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 65
of the bright fortnight of Kārttika. May there be prosperity!’23 The good reputation
of Jain manuscripts in this respect is deserved, but this information has been made
use of too less so far. I would like to give some examples of what colophons can
teach us on the production process of manuscripts and social networks it involves.
The Cambridge collection has some interesting cases.
Colophons may help documenting the history of Śvetāmbara Jain monastic
groups and of their actors. Those of Add. 1800 belong to the Ancalagaccha:
saṃvat 1619 varṣe Caitra śudi 5 some śrīMevāta-maṃḍale Alavaragaḍha-mahādurgge
śrīAṃcalagacche śrīDharmamūrttisūri-vijaya-rājye vā° śrīVelarāja-gaṇi-śiṣya-śrīPuṇyalabdhi-
pāṭhaka-tat-śiṣya-śrīBhānulabdhi-pāṭhakena liṣāpitā sva-vācanāya ciraṃ naṃdatu // śubhaṃ
bhavatu kalyāṇa-prāpti li° Garīvābīṇāpu° (?) (fol. 5v).24
Bhānulabdhi, the instigator of the copying, is paid respect in the opening formula
of the manuscript as well (mahopādhyāya-śrīBhānulabdhigurubhyo namaḥ). His
name and the other ones as well recur in colophons of other manuscripts dating
back to the same year or surrounding years (see ‘Pārśva’ 1968, 366–368) that were
also produced in the same region of Rajasthan (Mewar) and feature in identical con-
nections to each other. Dharmamūrti, the then head of the group, was born in V.S.
1585 and died in V.S. 1670 (= 1528 – 1613 CE). Nothing is known about the teacher
Velarāja except for the group of his disciples, as mentioned here. They also appear
in inscriptions found on the pedestals of Jina images consecrated through their
good offices.
As they contain information about who gets a manuscript sponsored and for
whom, colophons obviously throw light on the readership of some works. Add.2345
contains Yogīndu’s Paramātmaprakāśa, an Apabhraṃśa verse text about the Ab-
solute, in the tradition of mystical Digambara literature also showing common
points with the Upanishadic tradition. This does not mean that it was a Digambara
property. The Cambridge manuscript features the text circulating among Śvetām-
bara monks belonging to the Kharataragaccha in 1630, renewing, if necessary, any
misconception about sectarian boundaries.25 It was copied by a monk in order to be
read by his own disciple. The 17th century seems to have been a period of intense
debates about the tension between ritual or external forms of religion and notions
||
23 Add.2268, fol. 81.
24 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01800/10
25 saṃvata 1687 varṣe Caitra śudi 5 ravau śrīBṛhatkharataragacche / vācaka śrīVaralābhagaṇi-
śiṣya-paṃ° śrīRājahaṃsagaṇi-śiṣya paṃ° śrīKhemakalaśa-gaṇi-śiṣya vā° Mahimāsāgareṇālekhi:/
śiṣyaŚivavijayamuni-vācanāya // śreyo stu // // śrīArggalapure lekhi: // śubhaṃ bhavatu lekhaka-
pāṭhakayoś ca //. See http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02345/23
66 | Nalini Balbir
such as the Absolute, real truth, etc. Especially Agra, where this manuscript was
copied, was a buzzing centre of discussion and brainstorming. The example of the
merchant Banarsidas, who was born in a Śvetāmbara family affiliated to the Kha-
rataragaccha and later rejected ritual practices in favour of inner contemplation, is
the most famous case in point. Since the Śvetāmbara tradition is rather poor in texts
of mystic or spiritual inspiration, interested readers would have to turn to other cir-
cles in order to satisfy their curiosity. We can also note that the actors involved in
the Cambridge manuscript are vācakas, so mendicants specialized in reading and
study, and that the name of the then leader of the Kharataragaccha is not men-
tioned. Could this suggest that they read and copied this work without having re-
ceived the caution of their hierarchy? Even asking the question, though, might be
rightly regarded as overinterpretation.
Among the numerous manuscripts that were meant to be read by women
stands Add.2225 which contains the Navatattva with an interlinear Gujarati com-
mentary and was copied in V.S. 1753 (= 1696 CE). This is a basic work on the princi-
pal categories of Jain doctrine, which is thus available in a bilingual version.26 The
copyist is the monk Jinavijayagaṇi, whose details of spiritual lineage as given here
are supported by other evidence as well.27
Manuscripts circulated and changed hands. Colophons occasionally testify to
this broad phenomenon. Add.1812 has two successive colophons. The original one,
written in red ink by the same hand as the rest of the text, is dated V.S. 1581 (= 1524
CE) and says that the manuscript of the Samavāyāṅgasūtra was handed over (vi-
hāritam) by a pious laywoman (suśrāvikayā) named Meghū to the monastic precep-
tor Cāritrasāra, a member of the Kharataragaccha, whose spiritual genealogy is de-
tailed. This is followed by a second colophon, written in black ink from another
hand. It reports that 24 years later (in V.S. 1605) this manuscript (prati) was handed
over by a certain Khara for the benefit of a monk named Amaramāṇikya.28
||
26 likhitaṃ ca saṃvat 1753 varṣe Aśvina vadi 11 ravau sakalavācakāvataṃsa-mahopādhyāya-śrī-
105-śrī-śrī-Devavijayagaṇi-śiṣya-paṃḍita-śrī19śrīJasavijayagaṇi-caraṇāṃbhoja-caṃcarīka-tul-
yaiḥ paṃḍita-śrīJinavijayagaṇibhiḥ // śrīSūratibaṃdira-vāstavya Prāgvāṭa-jñātīya-vṛddha-
śākhīya Dośī Premajī bhāryā śīlālaṃkāradhāriṇībāī Vayajabāī putra Dośī Vimaladāsa bhāryā //
dānāvahelita-kalpalatābāī Gorībāī paṭhanārthaṃ // śubhaṃ bhavatu śrīmal-lekhaka-pāṭhakayoḥ
// śrīr astu. See http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02225/21
27 It is detailed in the colophon to the commentary part of the manuscript as: Vijayarāja – Vi-
jayamāna – Yaśovijaya (or Jasavijaya). Jinavijaya is the author of several compositions, see JGK
vol. 4, pp. 378-380.
28 saṃvata 1581 varṣe śrīKharataragacche / śrīJayasāgara-mahopādhyāya-śiṣya-śrīRatna-
caṃdra-mahopādhyāya-śiṣya-śrīBhaktilābhopādhyāya-śiṣya-śrīCāritrasāropādhyāyānāṃ / paṃ°
Cārucaṃdragaṇapādi-parivārasārāṇāṃ Meghū suśrāvikayā śrīSamavāyāṃga-sūtraṃ vihāritaṃ
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 67
Mostly we lack any information regarding the cost involved in having a manu-
script copied. But the fact that it was high could be one explanation why colophons
testify to collective undertakings. Beside sharing expenses, the advantage would
be to extend the prestige to a network. The Cambridge collection of Jain manu-
scripts has several noteworthy instances showing how such group sponsorship
could take place.
As usual, the copying of the Candraprajñapti manuscript copied in V.S. 1571 (=
1514 CE ; Add.2338)29 was done at the instigation of a monk, here Vivekaratnasūri,
the then leader of the Āgamagaccha, one of the Śvetāmbara monastic orders that
was particularly committed to spreading the scriptures. The commissioners were
Parbata and Kānha, two businessmen (vyavahārin) brothers resident in the Gujarat
coastal town of Gandhāra. So they could have been involved in sea-trade. They got
the manuscript copied to commemorate another businessman named Dūmgara.
What is noteworthy is that their names recur at several other places. So far, seven
other manuscripts commissioned by them could be traced either in the same year
or in surrounding years (see Balbir, Sheth, Tripathi 2006, vol. 1, 144–146 for a de-
tailed analysis).30 The Cambridge manuscript contains one of the Upāṅgas of the
Śvetāmbara canon. The other known ones have commentaries of canonical scrip-
tures or Prakrit treatises. Hence they represent the ‘higher’ kind of knowledge ra-
ther than texts connected with daily practice. Indeed, one of the detailed verse col-
ophons states that, following the advice of the religious teacher, they had decided
to get all the scriptures copied.31 Here, Parbata and Kānha are described as ‘doers
of several meritorious acts such as pilgrimage’ (tīrthayātrādi aneka-puṇya-
karaṇīya-kārakābhyāṃ). This is not a vague ornamental phrase, as this and various
pious acts (such as organizing ceremonies for the promotion of religious teachers)
they performed are praised in other colophons as well.
Modes of manuscript transmission of Śvetāmbara canonical texts can be ap-
proached through the examination of colophons. One should bear in mind that
there is no manuscript that would contain the 45 scriptures comprising the Jain
Āgamas as they are recognized by the Śvetāmbara Mūrtipūjaks, the prevalent sec-
tion among the Jains. What we have are mostly individual manuscripts for each
||
// śrīḥ // saṃvat 1605 varṣe sā Ṣarahathena vihāritā prati // vā° Amaramāṇikyasya puṇyārthaṃ.
See http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01812/76
29 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02338/1
30 There the equivalent date of 1494 CE should be corrected to 1514.
31 Āgamagaccha-bibhratāṃ sūri-Jayānanda-sadguroḥ kramataḥśrīmadVivekaratnaprabha-
sūrīṇāṃ sad-upadeśāt śaśi-muni-tithi (1571)-mita-varṣe samagra-siddhānta-lekhana-parābhyāṃ
vyavahāri-Parvata-Kānhābhyāṁ sukṛta-rasikābhyāṃ ... (verses 32-33 in the praśasti of the two
Ahmedabad and the Pune manuscripts, see Balbir, Sheth, Tripathi 2006).
68 | Nalini Balbir
text, or instances of 4 to 6 texts that are found together because they are related.
This is the case with Aṅgas No. 6 to 11 which are predominantly narrative. But this
situation is not that common either. Mostly, the texts have been copied individually
– some available in numerous copies, others in fewer. In manuscript colophons,
however, laypeople do claim their intention to form larger projects where one cate-
gory of scriptures or all of them would be collected. Unfortunately, since the indi-
vidual manuscripts have circulated in all directions, in India and outside, and are
no longer in situ, we have access to them only in very partial form, as the scattered
pieces of a jigsaw that we can try to collect without being able to assemble them all.
The actors involved in the production of Add.1781, a manuscript of the
Uvāsagadasāo, the seventh Aṅga, copied in V.S. 1579 (= 1522 CE), clearly regard it
as belonging to the set of 11 Aṅgas (śrī-ekādaśāṃgī-sūtra-pustakaṃ likhitaṃ):
saṃvat 1579 varṣe śrīKharataragacche śrīJinavallabhasūri-saṃtāna-śrīJinabhadrasūri-śrīJina-
candrasūri 1 śrīJinasamudrasūri-paṭṭa-pūrvācala-sahasrakarāyamāna-bhaṭṭāraka-prabhu-śrīJi-
nahaṃsasūri-vijaya-rājye śrīUsavaṃsa-śraṃgāra-Āvavāḍīya (sometimes read as Ācavāḍīya)-
gotra-labdhāvatāra maṃ. Nāgadeva, maṃ. Mūṃjāla, maṃ. Dharmmā, maṃ. Śivarāja, bhāryā
Varaṇū, putra maṃ. Harṣā, bhāryā suśrāvikā Kīkī, putra maṃ. Mahipāla, bhāryayā Iṃdrāṇī
suśrāvikayā śrī-ekādaśāṃgī-sūtra-pustakaṃ likhitaṃ vihāritaṃ ca śrīpūjebhya ciraṃ naṃditu //
//32
The lay sponsors are followers of the Kharataragaccha who have an elite social sta-
tus. The syllable maṃ° prefixed to the names of the male members of the family
stands for mantrin and suggests that they were, for several generations, something
like political advisors or persons close to the ruling political power (unspecified,
though). They got the manuscript copied to give it to the head of the monastic group
(this is the meaning of the term śrīpūjya), not to an ordinary monk, which also
points to their social importance. The sustained involvement of the family in getting
the 11 Aṅgas copied is supported by another manuscript, four years before this one
(V.S. 1575 = 1518 CE), which contains the fifth Aṅga, the Bhagavatīsūtra and its San-
skrit commentary by Abhayadeva (Punyavijayaji 1972, No. 1365). In this colophon,
emphasis is on the first son of Śivarāja and Varaṇu, Dhaṇapati and his descend-
ants, and we come to know that Harṣā, who is in focus in the Cambridge manuscript
as the father of the main donor, Mahipāla, was the second son of the couple.33 An
additional sign of their multifarious investment in pious activities is provided by
the fact that, a few years later, in V.S. 1584 (= 1527 CE), some of the family members
||
32 For another 11 Aṅga project as palm-leaf manuscript see Balbir 2006, 333 and 342–343.
33 They also recur in the colophon of a manuscript dated V.S. 1606 = 1549 CE; L.D. manuscript
catalogue, Muni Punyavijaya’s collection, Ahmedabad, 1968, No. 265, shelfmark 8784.
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 69
(Harṣā, his wife Kīkī, their son Mahipāla and the latter’s wife Indrāṇī, now along
with younger generations too) are involved in the donation of an inscribed Jina im-
age of Sumatinātha (Vinayasāgar 2005, No. 1090).
In the 16th–17th centuries, the number of books considered as ‘canonical’ be-
comes a sign of sectarian identity among Śvetāmbaras. Mūrtipūjaks recognize 45 of
them as authoritative, when Sthānakvāsins, the protestant Jains, recognize 32.
Mūrtipūjaks are prevalent, and there are three signs showing their desire to pro-
mote their position:
1) There are more and more manuscripts in the form of lists, where the titles of
the 45 books are just noted one after the other, or in the form of stotras where they
are celebrated. These are two efficient means to underline their cohesion as a to-
tality.
2) At the instigation of some religious teachers, these 45 books are collectively the
center of a pūjā, the 45-Āgama-pūjan, where each of them is praised in the form
of a short poem.
3) Finally, and this is the main point here, colophons of manuscripts produced in
Gujarat have the recurring names of some individuals, inserted within a family
lineage, who are said to have commissioned the copying of this or that book
among the 45 with the plan to produce a complete collection. Ideally, we should
be able to lay hands on such collections. But manuscripts have been sold or
given, in India or abroad, with the result that pieces originally belonging together
have been scattered. Reading manuscripts and their colophons, however, makes
it possible to put at least some of them together again. One Jayakaraṇa, from Cam-
bay in Gujarat, with his brother Kānajī and the rest of his family, from the Śrīmālī
caste, commissioned in 1637 CE (V.S. 1694) such a collection of these 45 books
that he meant as complete. Each colophon where these men occur, with the ge-
nealogical tree on two generations, has a precise date, with year, month and day.
The same formula is used in each of the manuscripts, and the existence of this
systematic project is mentioned in identical terms. The coherence is underlined
by the mention of the serial number of the given text in the category (Aṅgas,
Upāṅgas) where it belongs. So far, I had been able to trace five manuscripts com-
missioned by the Jayakaraṇa family, three of which have been examined directly;
for the remaining two, only the colophons have been read, in a precious book
where a lot of them are collected (Balbir 2006 and 2013, 307–311).
Now, the examination of the Cambridge collection has brought to light two
more items:
– Add.2286: Jnātādharmakathā, 6th Aṅga, 133 folios.34
||
34 See cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02286/1 for the transliteration.
70 | Nalini Balbir
– Add.2252: Antakr̥ ddaśā, 8th Aṅga, 33 folios.35
All these manuscripts are objects of good quality. The two Cambridge items are
highlighted by elegant citra-pr̥ ṣṭhikās (see above). Further, it is also clear that all
the seven manuscripts traced so far have distinct layouts and are from distinct
hands. It thus seems that the family could have hired a team of scribes who were
working simultaneously on the different texts, or they may have bought copies that
were ready-made. The colophons indicate when the work was completed and when
the manuscript was acquired (gr̥ hītam) in order to join and increase the family col-
lection. This explains why the three Aṅga manuscripts are dated on the same day,
the second day of the bright fortnight in Kārttika. The project was achieved progres-
sively: the tenth Aṅga and the first Upāṅga are dated on the 5th day of the bright
fortnight in Kārttika, and the Nandīsūtra, which comes at the end in the traditional
classification of the 45 canonical scriptures, is from the full moon of Poṣa, so about
one month and a half or two months later.
Further, the last page of Jain manuscripts often has a kind of library number
that gives their reference in situ. There are two problems with these numbers: they
do not supply the library name (bhaṇḍāra). So they are meaningful only when they
are found in their original location. Once they pass from hand to hand, sold and
bought, as it was often the case,36 and are transferred to another place, there is no
means to know from where they come.
These indications are never reproduced in manuscript catalogues. I started in-
troducing this practice for the British Library collections and, of course, in the Cam-
bridge manuscript notices.
Four out of the seven Jayakaraṇa manuscripts that could be inspected directly
have such library numbers:
– Add.2286, Jnātādharmakathā, 6th Aṅga : ‘73 po° 1 pra° 10’
– Add.2252, Antakr̥ ddaśā, 8th Aṅga : ‘73 po° 1 pra° 13’
– Berlin, Aupapātika, 1st Upāṅga. ‘73 po° 1 pra° 17’
– Berlin, Rājapraśnīya, 2nd Upāṅga, ‘73 po° 1 pra° 18’.
‘73’ is likely to refer to the large manuscript box number where manuscripts are
traditionally piled up one another. Even if this is relevant internally only, it shows
that these manuscripts were once together at the same place. This seems logical,
and would support the colophon references to the same family sponsors. ‘Po°’ is
the usual abbreviation for poṭalī ‘bundle’ and ‘pra°’ for prati ‘manuscript’. ‘Po’ nor-
mally refers to the larger container (cotton envelope) in which several ‘pra’ could
||
35 See http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02252/1 for the transliteration.
36 E.g. Add.1765 Kalpasūtra: gr̥ hītā pustikā vikrītā.
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 71
be put together. So ‘po’ would refer to the bundle of the 45 Āgamas, and ‘pra’ to
each individual manuscript. This would explain why one of the numbers, 1, is iden-
tical, and why the other one varies as it is a serial number. These serial numbers
follow each other when the texts follow in the traditional classification, for example
the first and second Upāṅgas. If the sequence is fully consistent, it could be recon-
structed as follows:
– (Aṅga 1 to 5 : prati 5 to 9; prati 1 to 4 would then have contained non-canonical
texts)
– Aṅga 6 : prati 10
– (Aṅga 7 : prati 11 ?)
– Aṅga 8 : prati 13 (reading clear but problematic – why not 12?)
– (Aṅga 9 to 11 : prati 14 to 16)
– Upāṅga 1: prati 17
– Upāṅga 2 : prati 18
– (Upāṅga 3 and foll.: prati 19 and foll.).
The future examination of other Jain manuscript collections either in India or out-
side could provide missing items in the chain, in the same way the examination of
Cambridge manuscripts brought to light two of them.
Finally, I turn to a group of manuscripts commissioned by a British officer cum
intellectual as a source for his 19th-century exposition of the Jains. Their colophons
are related. Each manuscript contains a text in Gujarati:
– Add.1266.6 Jambūdvīpa no vicāra, remarks on Jain cosmology in Gujarati prose;
– Add.1266.7 Pancakāraṇa-bola-stavana, a famous philosophical verse hymn in
Gujarati;
– Add.1266.8 Hemrāj Pande’s 84 bol, a discussion on 84 points of contention be-
tween Śvetāmbaras and Digambaras in Gujarati prose;
– Add.1266.9 Cauvīsadaṇḍa and Guj. comm., a short and famous treatise on Jain
cosmology and karma with a Gujarati prose commentary.
Each of them ends with a colophon that makes them connected at a first level:
they were all copied in V.S. 1879 = 1822 CE, in the same place, the town of Palan-
pur in northern Gujarat. Two of them (Add.1266.6 and Add.1266.9) were copied
by the same scribe, a Jain monk called Bhaktivijayagaṇi. Two (Add.1266.7 and
Add.1266.9) were copied exactly on the same day, one by Bhaktivijayagaṇi, the
second one by Paṃ Vīravijayagaṇi, the disciple of Rūpavijayagaṇi, but both for
the same person. In one manuscript (1266.7) he is said to be the intended reader,
in the other one (Add.1266.9) the sponsor of the copy. This person’s name, written
as Mehala in the first case and Mahila in the second, is followed by the title sāhiba
(Add.1266.7; see Fig. 12).
72 | Nalini Balbir
Fig. 12: Last page of the Pancakāraṇabola-stavana manuscript copied for Colonel W. Miles in
V.S. 1879 = 1822 CE).
This would point to him as a British, as would the mention kapatāṃna mehajara
(Add.1266.9), which is likely to stand for ‘Captain Major’. This British sponsorship
would be in accordance with the fact that the manuscripts are copied on Euro-
pean paper, although in the pothī format. I would strongly suggest that the per-
son in point could be Lieutenant Colonel William Miles (1780–1860), although,
admittedly, one would have rather expected something else than Mehala or Ma-
hila as the Indian rendering of his name. William Miles had become captain in
1815 and major in 1821. He had captured the fortified town of Palanpur in 1817 and
became the representative of British authority, the resident also known as politi-
cal agent, in the Palanpur Agency created in 1819 and depending on the Bombay
Presidency. When James Tod visited Palanpur (Palhanpoor, his spelling) in June
1822, thus one month after the two manuscripts mentioned were copied, ‘Major
Miles’ as he calls him was ‘the resident agent, through whose judicious superin-
tendence the town was rapidly rising to prosperity’ (Tod 1839, 139). Tod’s account
continues:
I remained all this day and the next with Major Miles, and have seldom passed eight and
forty hours more agreeable; for in him I not only found a courteous and friendly brother-
officer, but one whose mind was imbued with the same taste and pursuits as my own. We
had much to talk over and to compare, and our general conclusions as to the character of
the dynasties of ancient days were the same (Tod 1839, 140).
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 73
Indeed, Lieutenant-Colonel William Miles also followed intellectual pursuits,
with an interest both in Indian history and in Jainism. On the latter, he contrib-
uted one lengthy article ‘On the Jainas of Gujerat and Marwar’, read on 7 January
1832 at the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and published in the
Transactions vol. 3 (Miles 1833). This study provides a translation of sections of
the Mirāt i Ahmadī, an 18th century Persian work by ʿAli-Moḥam-mad Khan ‘a part
of which is devoted to a description of the religion and customs of the Jainas’.37
For the rest, it is based on observations he could make during his fairly long stay
in Gujarat, or, through the phrase ‘I am told’, on oral information he got from the
Jains themselves, although no detail is given as to the identity of any informant.
In the course of his contribution, Miles gives the number of Jain ‘priests’, as he
calls them, in various towns of Gujarat and Rajasthan. Significantly he specifies
that all are estimates, with the exception of Palanpur – the place he knew best
because of his official function. Without any title and with approximate translit-
eration, as the editor of the journal notes, he refers to ‘Jain books’ and gives gist
of their contents. He writes, for instance:
The (Jaina) priests appear fond of controversy, and I have often heard of books written by
them exposing the absurdity of Hindu doctrines (Miles 1833, 346).38
He also broadly draws on the Jain lineage histories (paṭtāvalīs), stating that he is
acquainted with the various sects. It is difficult to know for sure the extent of Wil-
liam Miles’s knowledge of languages and his ability to consult the sources on his
own. Yet, his only published contribution on the Jains shows that he did not ig-
nore their existence. Even more: one of the Cambridge manuscripts that was cop-
ied for him to read is the Pañcakāraṇa-bola-stavana (Add.1266.7), a polemic
hymn in Gujarati discussing five emblematic notions along with their respective
followers. Unable to solve their dispute as to which one is more important, the
five go to Mahāvīra who explains that they are all crucial together. In Miles’s con-
tribution on the Jains, no title of original work is mentioned. But it is interesting
to see that a detailed and reliable description of what corresponds to the contents
of this stavana is given in his article. Thus, whether he had read the Gujarati
||
37 I am not able to assess the quality of this translation myself but I am told by Dr. Pegah
Shahbaz and PhD. student Jean Arzoumanov, whom I thank for their help, that it is rather accu-
rate.
38 See also: ‘Each of the above has its Sri Puja or Acharya. The following account of the period
and cause of the secession of the Gujerati Luncas from the other Jainas, is translated from a paper
given to me by a priest of that sect’ (p. 363) about the origin of the Lonkagaccha’.
74 | Nalini Balbir
hymn himself or, more likely, had it explained to him orally, he made use of the
manuscript which was copied for him in his exposition:
They maintain that there are five cáranas [= kāraṇas], or causes, which unite in the produc-
tion of all events. The 1st of these is Cála [= kāla] or time. 2d. Swabháva [= svabhāva] or
nature. 3d. Nínt [= niyati], or Bhavitevitá [= bhavitavyatā], fate, necessity. 4th. Carma, works
or the principle of retributive justice. 5th. Udyama, strength and exertion of mind, or perse-
verance. They say that the learned were originally divided into five schools or sects, bearing
the above titles, as Cála-vádí, Swabháva-vádí, &c, each of which maintained the supremacy
of its favourite cause or principle; those of the first referring to the evident effects of time in
the production and reproduction of all things. The second holding that the world and all it
contains is derived solely from nature. The third, or those who adopted fate as their princi-
ple, maintaining that neither time nor nature have any control whatever in the occurrence
of events, all being pre-ordained from eternity and immutable, and that no efforts can avert
the decrees of fate. The fourth, or those who considered retributive justice as supreme, say
that life revolves eternally through the four orders of beings before described, and that its
transmigrations will be high or low, evil or good, in proportion to the worthiness or un-
worthiness of its actions; that life wanders through all the mutations of existence in con-
junction with the eight carma, between which and the soul there is a secret but almost in-
dissoluble connexion; and by their operation the most exalted being, as the Chacravartís,
may be degraded to the infernal regions; and the dévatás, or divinities, become animals,
insects, or even particles of matter; that this is effected by carma, to which all but the im-
mortal Sidd'ha are subject The fifth sect are those who refer all to energy of mind. The ad-
vocates for the supremacy of this faculty as influencing: the condition of mankind, say that
all motion and exertion, the asi, masi, and crishi, or, the arts of civilized life, all result from
the strength of the mind: there is therefore, they say, no necessity for the intervention of the
deity, time, carma, &c. It is related that the supporters of these doctrines all came before the
Jinéśwara or Tírthancara of the age, and after respectively stating their arguments in sup-
port of their favourite principle, requested him to decide on their validity. The Jinéśwara
after hearing all they had to say, desired them to forego their prejudices, and exert their
understanding: he then explained to them that neither of these principles can do any thing
of itself; but as the five fingers perform the work of the hand, so do these unite in the com-
pletion or perfection of all events, and that their influence may be traced in the production
of every thing existing. This is the Jaina opinion on the subject (Miles 1833, 340–341).
Add.1266.8, another of the group copied in Palanpur in 1822, which provides a
detailed account of 84 points of contention between Śvetāmbaras and Digamba-
ras, does not have the name of Miles in the colophon. Yet, it would not be surpris-
ing that it was meant for him. A section of his printed account on the Jains is de-
voted to sketch some of the differences between the Tapāgaccha, the prevalent
Śvetāmbara monastic order, and the Digambaras. The contents and the wording
both betray a recourse to this manuscript as the source of information. Similar
connections could be detailed between other manuscripts of this group and
Miles’s published account.
The Cambridge Jain Manuscripts: Provenances, Highlights, Colophons | 75
Thus we can assume that the following process took place. Miles had a func-
tion of authority in Palanpur, where the Jains, according to his own statistics,
made a quarter of the whole population. He was in contact with representatives
of the faith and, having taken interest in the topic, he was keen on giving an ex-
position of its tenets. Following the lead of Colebrooke, who, in 1807, had given
his ‘Observations on the sect of the Jains’ on the basis of manuscripts that had
been put at his disposal by a Jain turned Vaishnava, Miles also wanted to draw
on textual sources. The texts that were copied for Miles were probably chosen by
the ‘Jain priests’ with whom he was acquainted. This group of manuscripts forms
a selection of works that present the basic Jain tenets either in themselves, or in
relation with other creeds so as to problematize them and underline the points of
contention and distinctive features. It is thus a valuable link between traditional
Jain knowledge and its transmission by a British in the 19th century.
In short, the Cambridge Jain collection gives valuable insights into manu-
script circulation among Jains and between India and the West, as well as into
the modes of transmission of knowledge through Prakrit and Sanskrit as schol-
arly languages, or Gujarati as the language of oral informants.
References
Balbir, Nalini (1993), Āvaśyaka Studien. Introduction générale et traductions. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag (Alt- und Neu-Indische Studien an der Universität Hamburg, Band 45,1).
Balbir, Nalini (2006), ‘Sur les traces de deux bibliothèques familiales au Gujarat (XVe–XVIIe
siècles)’, in Anamorphoses. Hommage à Jacques Dumarçay. Textes réunis par Henri Cham-
bert-Loir et Bruno Dagens. Paris: Les Indes Savantes: 325–352.
Balbir, Nalini, Sheth, Kalpana K., Sheth, Kanubhai V., Tripathi, Candrabhal Bh. (2006), Cata-
logue of the Jain Manuscripts in the British Library, the Victoria and Albert Museum and
the British Museum, 3 vols. London: British Library & Institute of Jainology.
Balbir, Nalini (2013), Commanditaires jaina des XVIe–XVIIe siècles : Addenda : in BEI 28–29
(2010–2011 ; published 2013): 307–321.
Balbir, Nalini (2014), ‘Réseaux religieux et familiaux dans les colophons des manuscrits jaina
de l’Inde occidentale’, in Lecteurs et copistes dans les traditions manuscrites iraniennes,
indiennes et centrasiatiques – Scribes and Readers in Iranian, Indian and Central Asian
Manuscript Traditions. Textes réunis par Nalini Balbir – Maria Szuppe, Eurasian Studies
XII (2014): 217–256.
Balbir, Nalini (2015a), ‘Lay atonements. Investigation into the Śvetāmbara textual tradition’, in
Peter Flügel and Olle Qvarnström (eds), Jain Scriptures and Philosophy. Routledge: Lon-
don and New York (Routledge advances in Jaina studies 4): 68–129.
Balbir, Nalini (2015b), ‘From Strassburg to Shravana Belgola. Ernst Leumann and Brahmasūri
Śāstrī’, in Luitgard Soni and Jayandra Soni (eds), Sanmati. Essays Felicitating Professor
76 | Nalini Balbir
Hampa Nagarajaiah on the Occasion of his 80th Birthday. Bengaluru, Sapna Book House,
1–15 (incl. 4 figs.).
Balbir, Nalini (in the press), ‘Owners, Suppliers, Scholars. Jains and Europeans in the 19th Cen-
tury Search for Manuscripts (Eastern India, Bombay Presidency)’, in John E. Cort, Andrea
Luithle-Hardenberg, Leslie Orr (eds), Co-operation and Competition, Conflict and Contribu-
tion : The Jaina Community, British Rule and Occidental Scholarship from 18th to 20th Cen-
tury.
Bendall, Cecil (1886), A Journey of Literary and Archaeological Research in Nepal and Northern
India during the winter of 1884–5, Cambridge, At the University Press.
Bendall, Cecil (1900), ‘Outline-Report on a Tour in Northern India in the Winter 1898–9 (dated
November, 1899)’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1900): 162–164.
Bühler, Georg (1872–73), Report on Sanskrit MSS. 1872–73, Bombay: Indu Prakash Press.
Bühler, Georg (1874), Report (dated 29th January 1874), in The Indian Antiquary, March 1874:
89–90.
Bühler, Georg (1875), Dr. Bühler on the celebrated Bhaṇḍâr of Sanskrit MSS. at Jessalmir.
Translated from the Transactions of the Berlin Academy, March 1874, in The Indian Anti-
quary, March 1875: 81–83.
JGK = Desai, Mohanlal Dalichand, Jain Gūrjar Kavio, vol. 4, Bombay, Mahavir Jain Vidyalay,
1988.
Leumann, Ernst (1934), Übersicht über die Āvaśyaka-Literatur, Hamburg (Alt- und Neu-Indische
Studien herausgegeben vom Institut für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens und Tibets an der
Universität Hamburg 4). See also Ernst Leumann, An outline of the Āvaśyaka Literature.
Translated from the German by George Baumann with an introductory essay by Nalini Balbir.
Ahmedabad, L.D. Institute of Indology, 2010 (L. D. Series No. 150).
Miles, Lieutenant Colonel Williams (1833), ‘On the Jainas of Gujerat and Marwar’. Part I. Trans-
actions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 3, No. 2: 335–371.
Norman, K.R. (1974), ‘Causaraṇa-Paiṇṇaya. An edition and translation’, in Adyar Library Bulle-
tin 1974: 44–59 reprinted in K.R. Norman, Collected Papers vol. 1, Pali Text Society, 1990:
187–199.
Norman Brown, William (1933), The story of Kālaka. Text, history, legends and miniature paint-
ings of the Śvetāmbara Jain hagiographical work, the Kālakācāryakathā, Washington
(Smithsonian Institution Freer Gallery of Art Oriental Studies, No. 1).
‘Pārśva’, 1968, Aṃcalagaccha Digdarśan (sacitra). Śrī Mulund Aṃcalagaccha Jaina Samāj,
Mulund, Mumbai.
Plutat, Birte (1998), Catalogue of the Papers of Ernst Leumann in the Institute for the Culture
and History of India and Tibet, University of Hamburg, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag (Alt-
und Neu-Indische Studien herausgegeben vom Institut für Kultur und Geschichte Indiens
und Tibets an der Universität Hamburg 49).
Punyavijayaji, Muni Shri (1972), Catalogue of Sanskrit and Prakrit Manuscripts. Jesalmer Col-
lection, Ahmedabad, L.D. Institute of Indology (L.D. Series 36).
Tod, James (1839), Travels in Western India Embracing a Visit to the Sacred Mounts of the Jains,
and the Most Celebrated Shrines of Hindu Faith between Rajpootana and the Indus with an
Account of the Ancient City of Nehrwalla, London: Wm. H. Allen and Co. (reprinted Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal 1997).
Vinayasāgar, Mahopādhyāy (2005), Kharataragaccha Pratiṣṭhā Lekha Saṃgraha, Prākṛt
Bhāratī Akādamī, Jaypur.
Vincenzo Vergiani
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit
Grammatical Traditions in Nepal through
the Manuscript Collections
Abstract: Despite the recognised centrality of grammar in South Asian intellec-
tual history, much of the existing scholarship on the history of the various gram-
matical traditions consists of lists of names, works and relative, approximate
chronologies. Little is known of how their fortunes related to the socio-political
changes that affected a given region in the course of time, and even less about
the social history of grammar. This article is an attempt at reconstructing the his-
tory of the three main schools of Sanskrit grammar – Pāṇinīya, Cāndra and Kātan-
tra – in medieval Nepal through the survey of the grammatical works listed in the
catalogues of the Nepalese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP)
and the small but important Cambridge collections. The study of the colophons
(where available), as well as the assessment of other indicators of age and prov-
enance such as the material (palm leaf/paper) and the script, can throw light on
the social and cultural conditions that made the various systems flourish or de-
cline at different times.
1 Introduction
In this article I will present a preliminary attempt to flesh out the history of gram-
matical traditions in medieval (and to a lesser extent early modern) Nepal on the
basis of the data one can glean from the catalogues of the manuscript collections.1
||
I wish to thank my former project collaborator Camillo A. Formigatti, who first gave me the idea
of developing the type of methodological approach implemented here, and Daniele Cuneo and
Victor D’Avella, who read and commented on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to
Dominic Goodall for his invaluable help with the interpretation and translation of the scribal
colophons, and Alessandra Petrocchi for the information about the astronomical details of the
dates. I alone am responsible for all remaining faults.
1 Here I will mostly rely on the Descriptive Catalogue (wiki) of the Nepalese-German Manuscript
Cataloguing Project (http://134.100.29.17/wiki/Main_Page) and the Sanskrit Manuscripts cata-
logue in the Cambridge Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/sanskrit).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-004, © 2017 V. Vergiani, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
78 | Vincenzo Vergiani
It is generally taken for granted, and for reasons that are self-evident to any In-
dologist, that grammar played a central role in the literary cultures of pre-modern
South Asia, and it is well-known that this holds true for the dominant pan-Indian
Sanskritic culture as much as for many of the regional vernacular traditions, and
for Pāli, the language medium of Theravāda Buddhism. The Pāṇinian system was
the first to achieve a mature textual form already a few centuries before the Com-
mon Era and to spawn a rich speculative and commentarial tradition, and to this
day it has remained the most influential school in the intellectual history of South
Asia. However, from the first centuries of the Common Era other systems of San-
skrit grammar were born, which mostly modelled themselves to varying extents
after the Pāṇinian system. Some of these (just to mention the most ancient), such
as the Kātantra, were apparently stimulated by the need for a more pragmatic,
teaching-oriented approach, others, such as the Cāndravyākaraṇa and the
Jainendravyākaraṇa, originated within particular religious groups (the Bud-
dhists and the Jains, respectively), even though, as far as we can tell, Pāṇinian
grammar had from the start been non-sectarian and counts some Buddhists
among its exponents. The historical development of each of these systems has on
the whole been sketched out, even though the modern Indological scholarship,
especially in recent decades, has mostly focused on the Pāṇinian tradition. We
know the names and the relative chronology of the main authors, and the titles
and contents of dozens of works produced in medieval times. However, despite
the consensus on the centrality of the linguistic speculation in the Indic intellec-
tual universe, so far there has been little research and reflection on how the for-
tunes of the various grammatical traditions relate to the bigger historical picture,
the socio-political changes that affected this or that region of South Asia in the
course of more than two millennia. Similarly, very little is known about the social
history of grammar in South Asia: how it was produced, practised, taught and
transmitted; who were the scholars who engaged in this discipline, who were
their patrons, and what were the institutional contexts – formal and/or informal
– in which they operated; and, most relevant to the topic of this volume, how
their works were composed, circulated, preserved and handed down in book for-
mat, namely, in what ways the specific features of the South Asian manuscript
culture at different times and in various places across the subcontinent and be-
yond affected and reflected the history of the various grammatical traditions.
The notorious almost complete lack of an indigenous historiographical tradi-
tion, as well as the scarcity of diaries, letters, autobiographies, and other first-hand
||
For a similar approach, in which catalogues of Sanskrit manuscripts are used as sources for the
intellectual history of South Asia, cf. Zysk 2012.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 79
accounts of daily life in pre-modern South Asia undoubtedly make this a daunting
task, especially for the earliest period roughly up to the end of the first millennium
CE. And it would be futile, I believe, to attempt to engage in this kind of historio-
graphical enterprise on a large scale, namely embracing the whole temporal arc of
the Sanskritic civilisation across the entire region, as this would inevitably lead at
best to sweeping generalisations and platitudes. One should rather direct the atten-
tion to particular places and times, and collect the relevant data to build up a cred-
ible picture of the vicissitudes of grammatical studies in a given historical and geo-
graphical context. This entails the careful perusal of literary and epigraphic
sources, which can shed light on the practices and movements of the people who
engaged in grammar, the foundation and endowment of educational institutions,
the circulation of books, and so forth. Gradually, through the accumulation of such
case studies, we will eventually get a clearer historical picture of grammar in pre-
modern South Asia.
2 Nepal as a case study
The idea to investigate this aspect of ancient Nepalese literary culture was born
during the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project at the Cambridge University Library. The
Nepalese holdings there contain a fair number of grammatical works, as can be
expected in any generalist South Asian manuscript collection, and some of them
are remarkably old and rare. Moreover, the requirements of cataloguing drew my
attention to the colophons, which often provide a fascinating and rare insight
into the circumstances that led to the copy of a work. As Eva Wilden writes in her
contribution to this volume, this kind of paratext is a threshold that allows us to
enter the text and at the same time to go out ‘into the community and culture that
produced the manuscript… our only way back into that world’ (see Wilden, be-
low, p. 164). In other words, colophons (and other similar paratexts: introductory
verses, marginal annotations, etc.) give us access – especially rare for pre-mod-
ern South Asia – to a first-hand account of the social dynamics surrounding the
production and transmission of knowledge.
In many ways Nepal offers a unique opportunity for such a case study. It has
often been remarked that its temperate climate has allowed the preservation of
manuscripts for much longer than in any other region of South Asia, with the ear-
liest exemplars going back to the second half of the first millennium CE, so that
one can form a relatively accurate idea of the works that were read and copied in
80 | Vincenzo Vergiani
the country at a certain time starting from a quite early age.2 Moreover, the Nepa-
lese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (henceforth, NGMCP) has produced
a large and easily accessible database of the manuscripts microfilmed by its pre-
decessor, the Nepalese-German Manuscript Preservation Project (NGMPP), which
between 1970 and 2001 reproduced virtually all the manuscripts (around
190,000) held in Nepalese collections.
Therefore, it should be possible to retrace the history of grammatical tradi-
tions in Nepal by looking at the texts that are preserved in the collections, the
number of extant witnesses for a given tradition in general and for specific texts,
and their distribution over the span of several centuries – from the central middle
ages to the early modern period. And possibly, through the study of colophons,
it should also be possible to relate it to political and social events or specific cen-
tres of learning (monasteries, temple schools, pāṭhaśālās, courtly circles), or even
to the role played by particular individuals (authors, sponsors, scribes) in the cul-
tural dynamics of a certain period. Even if we allow for the losses that must have
certainly occurred over time, as is inevitable, the abundance of materials in the
existing manuscript collections should make the survey sufficiently reliable from
a statistical point of view and allow a coherent historical picture to emerge from
their analysis, as I hope I will be able to show here.
In this article I apply the method briefly outlined above to provide what is a
still provisional, bird’s-eye view of the history of grammatical traditions in Nepal.
To get an accurate picture, a more in-depth study will be required, based on the
direct inspection of the relevant manuscripts, as well as of other potentially avail-
able sources.3 Given the centrality of grammar in pre-modern South Asia, such a
survey will certainly prove relevant to the intellectual and social history not only
of Nepal, but of the whole subcontinent and beyond.4
||
2 Regmi (1960, 1965) and Petech (1984) have put manuscript colophons to good use (along with
more common sources such as inscriptions and chronicles) in their historiographical works on
early to late medieval Nepal.
3 I have not managed to have access to the colophons of all the manuscripts that should have
been included into my survey. All extant Nepalese manuscripts are listed in the NGMCP online
catalogue, but some only have minimal entries with no excerpts.
Note that here, when I mention a manuscript kept in a Nepalese collection, I refer to it with its
library classmark (whenever available), followed by the number of the reel in which it has been
reproduced by the NGMPP between brackets, because in the NGMCP catalogue the manuscripts
are listed under the reel number. Cambridge manuscripts are named by their shelf-marks, start-
ing with either Add. or Or.
4 See e.g. some recent works by Mahesh Deokar (2008) and Dragomir Dimitrov (2016), which
throw light on some important but until now virtually unknown works in the Cāndra tradition,
and their influence on the Pāli grammatical tradition of Sri Lanka. For a recent, brilliant example
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 81
3 General features of Nepalese grammatical
manuscripts
Some of the considerations in this paragraph may apply not just to grammatical
manuscripts, but to all Nepalese manuscripts. First of all, I should clarify that
here by ‘Nepalese manuscripts’ I intend not only the manuscripts that were cop-
ied in Nepal, but also those written elsewhere but kept there in pre-modern times5
after being imported into the country at some point in its history, presumably be-
cause there was a demand for that particular work or class of works.
Regarding the manuscripts copied locally, the place of production of the copy
is sometimes explicitly stated in the colophon and/or, more frequently, the year
is given in the Nepāla Era. But even when the colophon is not available, the par-
ticular variety of north-Indian script6 used in the country has distinctive features
that are a reliable indicator of the provenance. The other most common script
found in the manuscripts taken into consideration here is Maithili, which was
used in the region of Mithilā (present-day Tirhut in north Bihar) that lies immedi-
ately to the south of the Kathmandu Valley and in ancient times provided the only
relatively easy access to the latter. The large number of manuscripts in this script
found in Nepalese collections testifies to the historic links between these two re-
gions throughout the Middle Ages, with phases of intensified exchange due to the
social and political circumstances of either region.
When the colophon is not available or does not contain a date, the manu-
script can be tentatively dated not only on palaeographic grounds, but also on
the basis of the material. While in the earliest period palm leaf alone was used,
starting from the 15th century paper gradually became more and more common,7
therefore its use can be taken as a quite reliable pointer to the relative lateness of
the copy. On the other hand, one should keep in mind that palm leaf remained in
use for a rather long time after the use of paper became widespread. For example,
among the manuscripts I have taken into consideration there are palm-leaf copies
||
of the kind of historiography of grammar I have in mind, see also Alastair Gornall’s unpublished
PhD thesis (2013), which also deals with the Pāli grammatical tradition of Sri Lanka; and outside
South Asia, for the influence of Sanskrit grammar in Tibet, see Verhagen (1994, 2001).
5 Starting with the colonial period, many Nepalese manuscripts have been acquired by Western
libraries, including the University Library in Cambridge.
6 This script has been variously called in the secondary literature: Newari is the term used in
the NGMCP catalogue. In the online catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project we have opted
for the descriptive term Nepālākṣara, which I use also in this article.
7 On the production and availability of paper in late medieval Nepal see Formigatti 2016, 64.
82 | Vincenzo Vergiani
of the Aṣṭādhyāyī and the Siddhāntakaumudī dating to the second half of the 17th
century.8 Therefore, one cannot assume that a given manuscript is old, namely
pre-15th century, simply because it is made of palm leaf. Nevertheless, for the bulk
of the collections the palm leaf/paper divide does indeed roughly distinguish the
older manuscripts from younger ones. Thus, under the subject heading
vyākaraṇa the NGMCP website lists over 2300 manuscripts,9 but only 143 of them
are made of palm leaf and therefore can be assumed, in principle, to go back to
earlier times. It is mostly on this latter older set that I direct my attention in this
article.
Keeping these considerations in mind, I will now proceed to present the data
I have collected about Nepalese grammatical manuscripts, devoting one section
each to the three main traditions found in the region – the Cāndra, the Kātantra
and the Pāṇinīya10 – and one more paragraph to miscellaneous works.
4 The Cāndra school
The Cāndra school of grammar,11 established by the Buddhist Candragomin (c. 4th
century CE) with his Cāndravyākaraṇa,12 a sūtra work in six chapters, is repre-
sented by a fairly large number of manuscripts in the earliest period, more than
any other grammatical system.
Under the title Cāndravyākaraṇa the NGMCP catalogue title list13 enumerates
36 items, 33 of which are palm-leaf manuscripts (26 of them in Nepālākṣara
||
8 The former is National Archives of Kathmandu (henceforth NAK) 1/468 (A 1162/12), dated
Lakṣmaṇa Saṃvat (LS) 541, corresponding to 1661 CE; the latter is NAK 4/40 (B 35/6), dated LS
532 = 1652 CE. Both are mentioned below, § 5.
9 All the figures given in this article need to be taken with a pinch of salt because the lists on
the NGMCP web pages are not entirely consistent as they are based on the microfilm reels pre-
pared by the NGMPP. However, occasionally the same manuscript has been microfilmed twice
(or more) under different reel numbers, and therefore it is listed twice. Moreover, the pioneering
work carried out by the two projects on tens of thousands of manuscripts has inevitably been
uneven in terms of accuracy, so some works have been wrongly identified and many texts con-
tained in multi-part bundles have been missed altogether.
10 The data concerning these traditions are summarised in three tables appended to the article.
11 On the Cāndra system, see Scharfe 1977, 162 ff.; Saini 1999, 45–50. Oberlies (2012) contains a
survey of the unpublished works of this school.
12 First published in Liebich 1902, 1–139, without Dharmadāsa’s Vṛtti; again in Chatterji 1953,
with the Vṛtti.
13 http://mycms-vs04.rrz.uni-hamburg.de/sfb950/, last accessed 18/12/2016.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 83
script). However, the search for Cāndravyākaraṇa in the NGMCP descriptive cat-
alogue14 returns 65 results (many of them duplicates), among which one finds
more than a dozen palm-leaf manuscripts that are not included in the previous
list. Moreover, the name Cāndravyākaraṇa seems to have been used in the
NGMCP catalogue as a blanket term to refer generically to works belonging to the
Cāndra tradition because the corresponding records often show that in fact the
manuscripts contain other works than the Cāndra sūtrapāṭha15 (including the
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā of Ratnamati, the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā of
Pūrṇacandra, the Sumatipañjikā of Sumati, etc., for all of which see below).
Among the manuscripts not included in the title list, two – NAK 4/26 (A 53/1)
and NAK 1/1692 (A 53/3), containing the Cāndravyākaraṇa (sūtrapāṭha) and Dhar-
madāsa’s Vṛtti, respectively – are said to be in ‘Transitional Gupta’ script, and
thus they are presumably very old, possibly from the first millennium CE.16 An-
other set of three – NAK 4/311 (A 38/4 1, 2, 3), the first containing the Śabdala-
kṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā, the other two the complex sūtrapāṭha plus Vṛtti – are part
of the same bundle, in which one colophon, now apparently lost, bore the date
samvat 2005, probably to be understood as Nepāla Samvat (henceforth, NS) 205
(= 1085 CE).17 Clearly, these fragments need to be carefully inspected and dated
as precisely as possible on palaeographic grounds.
Of the remaining palm-leaf manuscripts, 15 are said to contain the sūtrapāṭha
with the Vṛtti, while five contain the sūtras alone, and in the remaining four the
exact content is unspecified. Similarly, in the collections of the Cambridge Uni-
versity Library there are 14 palm-leaf manuscripts of Cāndra works: six are copies
of the Cāndravyākaraṇa, three of them with the sūtrapāṭha alone, the other three
including the Vṛtti. Throughout the medieval period one finds manuscripts in
which the sūtrapāṭha is transmitted either with or without Dharmadāsa’s Vṛtti,
which suggests that the two works were not regarded as a single inseparable com-
plex. It is worth recalling that the name of Dharmadāsa, an author of whom noth-
ing else is known, has been handed down in the colophons or internal rubrics of
||
14 http://134.100.29.17/wiki/Main_Page, last accessed 18/12/2016.
15 Not all of these are even affiliated to the Cāndra system. For instance, one manuscript, NAK
1/1697 (A 51/15), contains an unpublished Pāṇinian work, possibly called Sambandhaprakaraṇa
(see below).
16 Unfortunately, I did not have access to the images of the microfilms of these ancient manu-
scripts.
17 The catalogue entry for A 38/4 (1) remarks that ‘it is not uncommon that scribes write “1001”
instead of “101” (or likewise “2005” instead of “205”)’, and ‘(t)hese figures, then, must be inter-
preted as “100 + 1” and “200 + 5” respectively’. It also notes that the year 1085 CE looks like a
‘reasonable time for the copying of this MS’.
84 | Vincenzo Vergiani
(at least) four Nepalese manuscripts18 of the Cāndravyākaraṇa – an important
piece of evidence in the debate on the authorship of the Vṛtti, which for a long
time has been considered the work of Candragomin himself by some scholars.19
Besides the (probably older) manuscripts mentioned above, the earliest
dated manuscripts are from the 12th century. One is a Cāndravyākaraṇavṛtti man-
uscript from NS 254 (= 1134 CE), written during the reign of Indradeva.20 The other
is NAK 3/379 (A 53/2; also A 1279/8), a copy of Cāndravyākaraṇa dated NS 276 (=
1155 CE21), during the reign of Ānandadeva (1147–1167 CE), whose colophon
reads22:
samvat 276 prathamapauṣakṛṣṇadivā caturthyāṃ śryānandadevasya vijayarājye likhitam
idaṃ pustakaṃ || || yaṃṭākudumbajakulaputraśrīmanaharṣavarmasya pustako ʼyaṃ ||
This book has been copied in the year 276, on the fourth [lunar day] of the dark fortnight of
the first [intercalary] month of Pauṣa, during the victorious reign of Ānandadeva.23 This
book belongs to Manaharṣavarma, the scion of the northern24 family.
Both these kings, whose mutual relationship is uncertain, belong to the so-called
Transitional Period.25 Judging from the way his name is mentioned, the owner of
the latter manuscript, Manaharṣavarman, may have been a layman, possibly an
aristocrat from an illustrious family. Further below one finds some lines by a later
||
18 NAK 1/1558 (A 52/14), NAK 5/736 (A 54/7, B 173/21), NAK 1/1608 (B 35/13), and NAK 1/1697 (B
35/20).
19 On Dharmadāsa’s authorship of the Vṛtti, see Dash (1986, 8–21) and Oberlies (1989, 2 ff.; 1992,
162 ff.); for a survey of the controversy, and further proof of Dharmadāsa’s authorship, see Ver-
giani 2011.
20 Sāṅkṛtyāyana (1937, 43) records it among the holdings of a Tibetan monastery. Petech (1984,
57) quotes it among the documents of king Indradeva (c. 1126–1136) and reports the colophon as
follows: samvat 200-50-4 caitra-śukla-saptamyām śrīmat rājādhirāja-parameśvara-para-
mabhaṭṭāraka-paramaśaiva indradevasya śrī-indradevasya vijayarājye likhitam idam.
21 Petech (1984, 62) writes that the date is verified for 14 December 1155.
22 For manuscripts other than those held in Cambridge, I rely on the transcripts found in the
NGMCP catalogue entries (with minor adjustments), unless otherwise stated.
23 Throughout this article, when a proper name in a colophon is preceded by the single honor-
ific śrī I will leave it untranslated.
24 yaṃtā is a Newari word meaning ‘northern’ (see Malla 2000, s.v.). The confusion between
dental and retroflex consonants is not unusual in the transcription of Newari names.
25 The history of the Kathmandu Valley until the early modern period is usually divided for
convenience into five political ages (see Slusser 1982, 18): the Licchavis (c. 300 to 879 CE); the
Transitional Period (c. 879–1200); the Early Malla (1200 to 1382); the Late Malla (1382 to 1769);
and the Shah (from 1769). For the purposes of this article, the earliest available documents go
back to the Transitional Period.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 85
hand, among which the following passage that mentions the purchase of the
manuscript in NS 473 (= 1353 CE) by a certain Buddharakṣita:
samvat 473 pauṣaśuklapūrṇṇamāyā [!] cālīsadammena krītaṃ śrībuddharakṣitena 〇
atyaṃtabhaktiyuktena vyākaraṇaṃ sākhidṛṣṭa26 saṃchaṃveje bhāsa27 śubhaḥ ||
Bought in the year 473 on the day of full moon of the bright fortnight of [the month of]
Pauṣa, for [the price of] 40 dammas28 by Buddharakṣita who has extraordinary devotion,
[this] grammar is a bright light appearing like a friend … [saṃchaṃveje29?].
It is impossible to determine what prompted Buddharakṣita’s purchase of this
manuscript for what appears to be a considerable sum two centuries after its pro-
duction – whether it was for study reasons or as a gesture of devotion30 (the word-
ing of the passage does not clearly point to a scholarly interest, as might be ex-
pressed through a common phrase such as svapāṭhārtham). But the existence of
several copies of Cāndra works produced in the three centuries after this manu-
script was copied shows that at the time of the purchase there was a lively interest
in the Cāndra grammatical tradition.
Confining ourselves to copies of the sūtrapāṭha (with or without Vṛtti), the
next dated manuscript is NAK 5/729 (B 35/24), dated NS 345 (= 1225 CE), which
contains the sūtrapāṭha with the Vṛtti. Its short colophon is followed by a partially
corrupt quotation of verse 60 from the Saptakumārikāvadāna of Gopadatta’s
Jātakamālā31:
samvatsa⁅re⁆ 345 kārttikaśuddhi 5 ādityavāsare likhitim [!] idaṃ pustako yaṃ śubhaḥ || * yaḥ
satvānām avi|| * || ratasaṅkleśanāśārthaśāntaḥ santaptānām adhi-
gatayathābhūta[dha]rmādhirājaḥ | hlāda32 [!] cakre prakṛtiśiśirai33 [!] dharmavāgam-
bukumbhaiḥ śāstre tasmai paramabhiṣaje sarvakālaṃ namo stu ||34 (fol. 62v6–8)
||
26 Possibly emend to sakhidṛṣṭaḥ.
27 Possibly emend to read bhāsaḥ.
28 The term damma – from the Greek drachmē – is the name of a coin used in medieval Nepal,
also called karṣa. Four karṣas were equivalent to one pala (see Kölver and Shakya 1985, 85).
29 Possibly a toponym.
30 Or perhaps as a collectible? We do not know if there were collectors of ‘rare’ books in the pre-
modern Indic world, but there is no reason to assume there were not.
31 I am grateful to Dominic Goodall for pointing this out to me.
32 Emend to hlādaṃ.
33 Emend to prakṛtiśiśirair.
34 The verse in the edition by Michael Hahn (1992, 58–72) reads: yaḥ sattvānām aviratarasa-
kleśanāḍīvraṇāntaḥ saṃtaptānām adhigatayathābhūtadharmādhirājaḥ | hlādaṃ cakre
prakṛtiśiśirair dharmavāgambukumbhaiḥ śāstre tasmai paramabhiṣaje sarvakāle namo ’stu. I am
grateful to Mahesh Deokar for his comments on the interpretation of this verse.
86 | Vincenzo Vergiani
This brilliant book has been copied in the year 345 on Sunday the fifth day of the bright
fortnight of [the month of] Kārttika [= October/November]. May there be reverence in all
times for that teacher (śāstre), the supreme physician, who is the destroyer of ulcers and
sores in the form of the defilements [caused] by the incessant enjoyment [of the sense ob-
jects], the great king of the acquired real dharma, who pleased the scorched beings with
naturally cool jugfuls of the water [that is] the words of dharma.
This colophon provides no information besides the date of completion of the
copy, but the following verse unmistakably shows that the scribe was active in a
Buddhist milieu.
The colophons of the next two dated manuscripts of Cāndravyākaraṇa (both
without the Vṛtti), namely NAK 1/1583 (A 52/1), dated NS 377 (= 1257 CE),35 and
NAK 5/724 (B 34/15), dated NS 379 (= 1259 CE),36 just give the year of copy without
making any mention of the ruling king or the scribe. It may not be a coincidence
that they were produced during or soon after the short and troubled reign of Ja-
yadeva, the last of the so-called Early Mallas (see Petech 1984, 89 ff.).
Approximately one century younger is a copy of the Cāndravyākaraṇa kept
in the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, no. 3823, dated NS 476 (= 1356 CE),37 prepared by
(or possibly for) the vajrācārya38 Kṣemendra in a vihāra in Patan. To the end of
the same century should tentatively39 be assigned NAK 5/727 (A 53/8), a palm-leaf
||
35 The colophon (fol. 33r5) reads: śreyo ʼstu samvat 377 kārttikakṛṣṇacaturthasyāṃ [!] || maṅgal-
avāśare || ‘May there be bliss. Tuesday, the fourth [day] of the dark fortnight of [the month of]
Kārttika, in the year 377’.
36 The partially legible colophon (fol. 40r7) reads: samvat 379 poṣaśu⁅di.. .. ..⁆bda ‘The bright
fortnight of [the month of] Pauṣa, in the year 379’. As noted in the NGMCP catalogue entry, the
exact date of this manuscript is uncertain because the colophon is written in a different hand
from the rest.
37 The colophon reads: samvat 476 phālgunaśukladaśamyām śukravāsare ādrānakṣatre |
rājādhirājaparameśvaraparamabhaṭṭārakaśrīśrījayarājadevavijayarājye | … śrīyokhācchavi-
hāravajrācāryaśrīkṣemendrasya likhitam (quoted in Petech 1984, 123, among the four documents
of the reign of king Jayarājadeva).
38 The term vajrācārya designates a Buddhist tantric priest, but as Slusser (1982, 287–288)
points out, from the 12th century onward, as the vihāras became increasingly secularised, it grad-
ually evolved into a caste and family name, conferred by heredity: ‘Even vajrācāryas who no
longer chose to function as priests automatically belonged to a religious aristocracy if they con-
firmed their status by the observance of proper initiation rites. Literally, they became “Buddhist
Brahmans”’.
39 The NGMCP catalogue entry reports that the colophon with the date is probably a later addi-
tion, which ‘seems to be not very reliable’. Indeed the colophon, which includes some Newari
words (here in bold), seems to confuse the Cāndravyākaraṇa with the Kālāpavyākaraṇa, i.e. the
Kātantra: samvat 517 kārtikṛṣṇadasamyāyā titho vṛrsapavāre śrīrathahemavyākrana seṅā juroḥ
kalāpavyākrnasūtraḥ [!] || (fol. 25r).
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 87
manuscript of the Cāndravyākaraṇavṛtti, dated NS 517 (= 1397). In the early 15th
century we find two more dated palm-leaf manuscripts of the Cāndra sūtrapāṭha
without commentary, both in Nepālākṣara. The first is NAK 5/730 (B 34/25),40
dated NS 531 (= 1411 CE), bearing the following colophon that gives the scribe’s
name, Manikarāja41:
samvat 531 phālguṇaśuklacaturddaśyāṃ bṛṣpa〇tivāsare42 [!] || śrīśrījayajotimalladevasya
[sic!] vijayarāje [!] || likhitim [!] iti manikarājena śubham astu || (fol. 112v2–4)
[This book] has been written by Manikarāja in the year 531, on Thursday the fourteenth [lu-
nar day] of the bright fortnight of [the month] Phālguṇa [February–March] during the vic-
torious reign of the glorious king Jayajyotirmalla. May there be bliss.
The second manuscript, Add.1691.4,43 held in the Cambridge University Library,
was copied just one year later, in 1412. The colophon on fol. 44r gives the date
with some unusual astronomical details:
samvat 532 āṣāḍhakṛṣṇa | ekadaśyāṃ tithau | kṛrttika(!) ghaṭi 20 rohiṇīnakṣatre || gaṇḍaghaṭi
9 vṛddhiyoge | somavāsare | likhitam idaṃ ||
This [book] has been written in the year 532, on Monday the eleventh lunar day of the dark
fortnight of [the month of] Āṣāḍha [June–July], when there are 20 ghaṭis44 [left] in the lunar
mansion Kṛttikā before the asterism Rohiṇī, [and] there are nine ghaṭis [left] in [the yoga]
Gaṇḍa before [the yoga] Vṛddhi. 45
Next comes NAK 5/731 (A 52/3), a manuscript of Cāndravyākaraṇa dated NS 561
(= 1441 CE), which is part of a bundle that also contains a copy of the Cāndra
Uṇādisūtra46 by the same hand. The colophon gives the name of the scribe and
owner of the manuscript, a certain Abhayarāja, who declares to have copied the
work in order to teach his son Akṣayarāja and other pupils:
||
40 This manuscript is not listed in Petech 1984.
41 The same name appears in a colophon of an almost contemporary copy of the Subanta-
ratnākara (see below, p. 97).
42 Emend to bṛhaspativāsare.
43 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01691-00004/1.
44 A measure of time, consisting of 24 minutes.
45 I am not entirely sure about the translation of the final part of the colophon that mentions
ghaṭis. One would expect the scribe to refer to the ‘hours’ that have lapsed rather than those that
are left, but then there would be no need to mention Rohiṇī, which is the lunar mansion follow-
ing Kṛttikā, or Vṛddhi, which is the next yoga after Gaṇḍa.
46 Published in Liebich 1902, 140–171.
88 | Vincenzo Vergiani
kṛtir iyan tribhūmīśvarabodhisatvaśrīcandragomipādānāṃ [...] || naipālābdagate
mṛgāṅkarasayucchrīpañcabāṇayudhe47 māse kṛṣṇaśucau divākaratithau ṛṣyeva48
puṣṇābhidhe49 | ṣaṣṭhāʼdhyāyasasūtrakaṃ [!] likhitikaṃ50 [!] śubhrāṃśuvāre śubhe tasmād
dharṣasutena niṣṭhimanasā51 [!] putrārthahetos tv alaṃ || nāmnā abhayarājena
cāndrasūtram akhaṇḍitaṃ | putrāyākṣayarājāya śiṣyārthena [[ca]] li○khyate || (fol. 45r4–
45v2)
This is the composition of the feet of the Bodhisattva Candragomin, the lord of the three
worlds [..].The sūtra in six chapters has been copied in the year 56152 of the Nepāla Era, on
Monday53 the lunar day [presided] by the Sun54 in the dark fortnight of the month of Śuci55
and in the lunar mansion called Puṣyā, thus the son of Harṣa, called Abhayarāja, has
thoroughly (alam) copied the entire Cāndrasūtra with a firm mind for the sake of [his] son
(putrārthahetoḥ), with the purpose of [teaching his] son Akṣayarāja as well as [other] pupils
[śiṣyārthena].
The Cambridge University Library has five more undated manuscripts – the first
three of Cāndravyākaraṇavṛtti, the last two of the Cāndra sūtrapāṭha alone – that
can be tentatively assigned to the 14th–15th centuries on palaeographic grounds:
Add.2192,56 Add.1657.3,57 Add.1691.5,58 Add.1660.2,59 and Add.1691.7.60 Several un-
dated manuscripts of the Cāndravyākaraṇa, with or without Dharmadāsa’s Vṛtti, on
||
47 Emend to °bāṇāyudhe.
48 Emend to ṛkṣe ca, where ṛkṣa means ‘lunar mansion’ (cf. the colophon of NAK 3/685 below).
I am grateful to Nirajan Kafle for suggesting this emendation.
49 Emend to puṣyābhidhe.
50 Clearly a mistake for likhitaṃ.
51 Possibly emend to niṣṭhimanasā.
52 The year is written in bhūtasaṃkhyās (i.e. common nouns having a conventional numerical
value), starting with the unit, followed by tens and hundreds: one = mṛgāṅka, ‘moon’; six = rasa,
‘flavour’, because there were six basic flavours; added to = yut; five = śrīpañcabāṇāyudha, lit.
‘the weapon of the venerable one with the five arrows’, namely the five arrows of Kāma. Cf.
Petrocchi 2016.
53 śubhrāṃśuvāre. The compound śubhrāṃśu ‘having white rays’ is an epithet of the moon.
54 Namely, the seventh lunar day (cf. Einoo 2005, 106).
55 śuci is another name for the hot summer month of Āṣāḍha. Cf. the following versified list of
alternative names for some months found in Jayasiṃhakalpadruma (kindly brought to my atten-
tion by Dominic Goodall): caitro māso madhuḥ prokto vaiśākho mādhavo bhavet | jyeṣṭhamāsas
tu śukraḥ syād āṣāḍhaḥ śucir ucyate | nabhomāsaḥ śrāvaṇaḥ syān nabhasyo bhādra ucyate |.
56 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02192.
57 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01657-00003.
58 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01691-00005.
59 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01660-00002.
60 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01691-00007.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 89
palm leaf and in Nepālākṣara, which may be from the same period, are also rec-
orded in the NGMCP catalogue.61
But, even more interesting, the manuscript collections in Nepal and, on a
smaller but significant scale, in Cambridge also preserve the evidence of a rich com-
mentarial tradition on the Cāndravyākaraṇa comprised of several works that in
their Sanskrit version have been preserved only in Nepal.62 Among these there are
three unpublished commentaries on the Cāndravyākaraṇa with Dharmadāsa’s
Vṛtti, namely the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā of Ratnamati,63 with some sub-commen-
taries, the Ratnamatipaddhati of Ānandadatta, the Nibandha of Ratnadatta, and
Sāriputta’s Candrālaṃkāra; the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā of Pūrṇacandra;
and the Sumatipanjikā.64 Moreover, one finds works on the verbal system, such as
the Dhātupārāyaṇa, possibly composed by the same Pūrṇacandra who authored
one of the three Pañjikās, and the Ākhyātaratnakośa, and others on the nominal
declension, in particular the Subantaratnākara of Subhūticandra65 (with some later
works based on it), and the Uṇādisūtra with the anonymous Uṇādisūtravṛtti. All of
these are preserved in Nepalese manuscripts that are dated or datable between the
10th and the 15th century CE.
||
61 The NGMCP catalogue also records a single palm-leaf manuscript of Cāndravyākaraṇa in
Maithili script (NAK 5/6209, reel A 54/2). Unfortunately, the entry for this item is very limited;
the only additional piece of information given is the number of folios, 23, with the measures.
62 Many of these works were translated into Tibetan in medieval times (see Verhagen 1994,
2001, passim). In the 1930’s Sāṅkṛtyāyana recorded several Sanskrit manuscripts of works be-
longing to the Cāndra system as well as to other grammatical schools held in the libraries of
Tibetan monasteries (see Sāṅkṛtyāyana 1935, 1937).
63 On this work, see now Dimitrov 2016, 599 ff. According to Dimitrov (2016, 557), the grammar-
ian Ratnamati is the same as Ratnaśrījñāna, a Sinhalese Buddhist monk who composed a com-
mentary on Daṇḍin's Kāvyādarśa in the first half of the 10th c. CE and also wrote works in Sinha-
lese and Pāli under the name of Upatissa.
64 On these works, their dates, and their mutual relationships, see Oberlies 2012; Dimitrov 2016,
599–706; and Mahesh Deokar’s contribution to this volume.
65 On this work and its author, better known for the Kavikāmadhenu, a commentary on the Am-
arakośa, see Lata Deokar (2014) and her contribution to this volume.
90 | Vincenzo Vergiani
For Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, probably composed in Sri Lanka
around 930 CE (Dimitrov 2016, 599), one can rely on a handful of witnesses, includ-
ing three fragments kept in Nepal, and one in Cambridge.66 In the Kathmandu set
one finds Kaiser 17 (C 2/9),67 dated NS 363 (= 1243 CE), the colophon of which reads:
iti […]karaṇe ratna[[ma]]tikṛtāyām pañjikāyāṃ pañcamasyādhyāyasya prathamaḥ pādaḥ
samāpta [!] || gra[ntha]pramāṇam asya dvādaśottaranavaśatam || saṃ 363 pauṣa budha 10 śub-
ham ○
Thus the first quarter of the fifth chapter of the Pañjikā composed by Ratna[ma]ti on [the
Cāndravyā]karaṇa has been completed. It measures 912 gra[nthas68]. In the year 363, on
Wednesday the tenth of the month of Pauṣa. Fortune!
The Cambridge manuscript, Add.1657.1,69 is incomplete and has no colophon, but
it can be dated to the 12th–13th century.
To the same author Dimitrov (2016, 565 ff.) attributes a treatise on semantics
called Śabdārthacintā and the auto-commentary Vivṛti thereon (Dimitrov 2011, 43,
n. 86). The former is preserved in a single palm-leaf manuscript that was brought
from Nepal to Calcutta, where it is now kept in the Asiatic Society, by Haraprasāda
Śāstrī. The latter is preserved in NAK 1/1697,70 a palm-leaf copy in Nepālākṣara that
Dimitrov tentatively dates to the 12th–13th centuries.
As mentioned above, three sub-commentaries on Ratnamati’s Pañjikā are ex-
tant. The Ratnamatipaddhati of Ānandadatta71 survives in three fragments pre-
served in Cambridge, namely Add.1657.2, Add.1691.6, and Add.1705, and in five
more fragments identified by Dimitrov, namely NAK 5 /456 A, B, C, D, and E (A
57/31).72 According to Dimitrov, all the Kathmandu fragments can be dated to the
||
66 See Oberlies 2012, 145–148, which does not mention the Cambridge copy. One palm-leaf copy
of this work ‘in Proto-Bengali script of the eleventh century’ (Dimitrov 2010, 50), photographed
by Sāṅkṛtyāyana in 1937, is known to exist in Tibet; and another is found in the Asiatic Society
of Bengal, Calcutta.
67 The NGMCP entry is very pithy. The NGMCP catalogue also lists NAK 4/247, a modern paper
copy in Devanāgarī of this manuscript, made in Vikrama Samvat 1989 (= 1933 CE).
68 A unit of measure of the length of a manuscripts consisting of 32 akṣaras (syllables).
69 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01657-00001.
70 NGMCP catalogue http://134.100.29.17/wiki/A_54-1_%C5%9Aabd%C4%81rthacint%C4%
81viv%E1%B9%9Bti. Retrieved 18 December 2016. Dragomir Dimitrov and Mahesh Deokar are
preparing a critical edition and translation of the Śabdārthacintā with the commentary (personal
communication, September 2016).
71 Already mentioned with the title Sūtrapaddhati in Liebich 1896.
72 On the Ratnamatipaddhati and, in particular, its Kathmandu copies, see Dimitrov 2016, 624 ff.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 91
12th–13th centuries. Three of them (A, B, and E) look very similar, and the handwrit-
ing is possibly the same, therefore ‘it may be assumed that they were prepared …
possibly by one and the same scribe or at least in the same scriptorium’. Nothing is
known with certainty about Ānandadatta, who according to Dimitrov (2016, 676)
may have been affiliated to one of the Buddhist universities in eastern India. If
Ratnamati’s Pañjikā was composed in the first half of the 10th century CE, as argued
by Dimitrov, Ānandadatta must have flourished some time between the second half
of the 10th c. and 1199 CE, corresponding to NS 319, which is the date recorded in the
colophon of Add.1657.2:
[...]raṇe mahopādhyāyaśrīānandadattavirācitāyāṃ rannamatipaddhatau dvitīyādhyāyasya
prathamaḥ pādaḥ samāptaḥ || ○ || samvat 319 jaiṣṭhakṛṣṇa amāvāsyāṃ tithau subha | (fol. 31r1–
2).
The first quarter section (pāda) of the second chapter of the Ratnamatipaddhati composed by
the great teacher Ānandadatta on the [Cāndravyāka]raṇa has been completed, in the year 319,
on the lunar day of the New Moon in the dark fortnight of [the month of] Jyaiṣṭha.73
The Nibandha74 of Ratnadatta is preserved in fragmentary form in two manuscripts
identified by Dimitrov (2014; 2016, 691 ff.), one kept in Kathmandu (NAK 5 /456 F,
A 57/31) and comprised of just three palm leaves, which preserves the author’s
name and the title;75 the other, slightly bigger (11 folios), kept in Cambridge
(Or.71476). The two fragments are so similar that, according to Dimitrov (2016, 691)
‘originally [they] might have even belonged together’. If the Pañjikā was composed
in the first half of the 10th century CE, as argued by Dimitrov (2014), Ratnadatta
would have flourished some time between the mid-10th century and the 13th century,
the likely date of the Cambridge manuscript.
The University Library in Cambridge also holds Or.1278,77 the only known copy
of the Candrālaṃkāra78 composed by the 12th-century Sinhalese Buddhist monk and
scholar Sāriputta (in Sanskrit, Śāriputra).79 This manuscript is written in the rare
Bhaikṣukī script, mostly used by Buddhists in eastern India. On the basis of the
||
73 The year is written in letter-numerals, namely āu = 3, a = 1, o = 9.
74 This is certainly an abridged form of a longer title that probably contained a clear reference
to the commented text.
75 mahopādhyāyarannadattakṛte [!] nibandhe prathamasyādhyāyasya tṛtīyaḥ pādaḥ (quoted in
Dimitrov 2016, 691).
76 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00714.
77 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-01278.
78 Already mentioned as of unknown author in Liebich 1896.
79 On this work and its codex unicus, see Dimitrov 2010.
92 | Vincenzo Vergiani
colophon found in the Kathmandu portion Dimitrov (2010, 42–46) surmises that
the manuscript may have been copied in the 12th century CE at the great Buddhist
monastery (mahāvihāra) of Somapura (modern Paharpur, in Bangladesh).
Pūrṇacandra’s Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā, another independent commen-
tary on the Cāndravyākaraṇa, has been transmitted in three palm-leaf manuscripts,
all of them in Nepālākṣara. The oldest copy is possibly NAK 4/311, mentioned
above, which may date to the late 11th century. Both the name of the author and the
title of the work are attested there in a rubric.80 Roughly one century younger is
Kaiser 9/27 (C 82/7), dated NS 314 (= 1194 CE), the colophon of which reads:
[…]gomipraṇīta sabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikāyām ācāryapūrṇṇacandraviracitāyāḥ ṣaṣṭhyo
’dhyāyaḥ samāptaḥ || * || samvat 31481 […] || [so]madine | punarvasunakṣatre || rājādhirājapa-
rameśvariparamabhaṭṭārakaḥ [sic!] | śrīlakṣmīkāmadevasya vijayarājyeḥ | śrīkothavulaṅkhu ||
somacandrena likhita[m i]da[ṃ] pustakam || lekhikena likhitan iti || (fol. 59v1–3)
The sixth chapter of the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā composed by the teacher Pūrṇacandra
on the [Cāndravyākaraṇa] composed by [Candra]gomin has been concluded. This book has
been copied by Somacandra in the year 314, on Monday […],82 under the asterism of Punar-
vasu, during the victorious reign of the king of kings, the highest sovereign, the supreme lord
Lakṣmīkāmadeva, … [kothavulaṅkhu83?]. Written by the scribe.
The third extant copy of Pūrṇacandra’s commentary is NAK 5/735 (A 53/15), un-
dated, where a sub-colophon gives the name of the scribe, a Buddhist layman
(upāsaka) called Mādhava.84 Pūrṇacandra is also mentioned as the author of a com-
mentary on the Cāndra dhātupāṭha called Dhātupārāyaṇa in the rubrics of the co-
dex unicus Add.2121,85 kept in Cambridge.86 Liebich (1902, IX) used this manuscript
||
80 candragomipraṇītaśabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā○yām ācāryapūrṇṇacandrakṛtāyāṃ prath-
amasyādhyāyasya prathamaḥ pādaḥ samāptaḥ.
81 The year is written in letter numerals: āu= 3, ḍo = 10, pka = 4.
82 Month and lunar day are not legible. But on the basis of the coincidence of the nakṣatra with
the day of the week, Petech (1984, 77) conjectures that the month may be Caitra, and the full date
likely correspond to Monday, March 20, 1194.
83 Possibly a toponym: in classical Newari kotha/kvāṭha means ‘fort’, laṃkhu ‘river’ or ‘road’;
for vu cf. the sociative suffixes u, vo (Malla 2000, all s.v.).
84 paramopāsakacandragomipraṇītaśabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapaṃjikāyām ācāryapūrṇṇacandra-
kṛtāyām prathamo dhyāye dvitīyaḥ pādaḥ samāptaḥ ||*|| śubham astu || * || sarvvajagatām iti || ○
|| paramopāsakamādhavena likhitam idam iti || (fol. 241//82v6–7). Note that Candragomin him-
self is called upāsaka here.
85 The work and the Cambridge manuscript were already listed in Liebich 1896; see also Liebich
1902, IX–X.
86 See for example the rubric of the section on roots of the second class (adādi):
ācāryapūrṇṇacandraracite dhātupārāyaṇe adādilaṭ parisamāptaḥ || (fol. 48r3–4).
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 93
for his edition of the Cāndra Dhātupāṭha. According to Verhagen (1994, 110),
Pūrṇacandra’s work was known to the Tibetan grammatical tradition and was used
by native translators of the Cāndra dhātupāṭha. The manuscript does not have a
colophon, but it can be dated to the 13th–14th centuries CE on palaeographic
grounds.
The third commentary on the Cāndravyākaraṇa, the Sumatipañjikā,87 is par-
tially preserved in two undated palm-leaf manuscripts in Nepālākṣara both kept in
Kathmandu, namely NAK 5/734 (B 34/29), consisting of 107 folios, and NAK 5/732
(B 35/31), 101 folios, both containing portions of the commentary on the first chap-
ter. The two copies have a very similar colophon in verse.88 The following is from
NAK 5/734 as quoted by Dimitrov (2016, 690, n. 247):
rājñā śrīguṇakāmadevavibhunā svasyaikarājye kṛte |
varṣe ’smin diśamuttare śatatame − − ⌣ (māse)⌣ (te) |
(gaṅgāmārga)[tithau bṛhaspati]dine tārādhaniṣṭhānvite |
nāmneyaṃ sumatir yathābhilikhitā (se) − ⌣ (syai śāśvate) || (fol. 91v1–2)89
This [commentary] named the ‘Correct Doctrine’ (sumati) … as it was written in the year 110 on
Thursday the third lunar day associated with the asterism Dhaniṣṭha of the month … …,90 in
which the powerful king Guṇakāmadeva has established his own sole reign.91
||
87 On the Sumatipañjikā see Oberlies (2012, 152) and Dimitrov (2016, 688–690), who has identi-
fied another fragment of this work in the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Calcutta (ibidem: 629).
88 Here is the colophon of NAK 5/732 as given in the NGMCP catalogue:
rājñā śrīguṇakāmadevavibhunā svasyaikarājye kṛte
varṣe smin diśam uttare śatatame − − ⌣ − − ⌣ − |
− − − ⌣ ⌣ − ⌣ − ⌣ ⌣ (6) dine tārādhaniṣṭhānvite
nāmneyaṃ sumatir yathābhilitā (!) − − ⌣ − − ⌣ − ||.
89 This is followed by a verse that, as Dimitrov (2016, 690, n. 248) notes, is badly corrupt: ra-
vikaviśaśisomyā vyomni sambhānti yāvat | sumatir api maneṣāvad atra prātisasya |
subhadinakarajīvo jīvako nandako ʼpi | bhavatu vabhubhṛtāṃ śrīmañjughoṣānubhāvāt.
90 The year is expressed partly with a word numeral (śatatama ‘hundredth’), partly with a
bhūtasaṃkhyā (diś, diśā = 10, like the ten directions of space). Unusually, the lunar day (tithi) is
also expressed with a bhūtasaṃkhyā, i.e. gaṅgāmārga = 3. Regmi (1965, 110) quotes this colo-
phon reading the year as 104. However, although the basic cardinal points are four, the usual
value of dīś as a bhūtasaṃkhyā is 10 since the four intermediate directions (south-east, north-
west, etc.) are also counted, plus above and below.
91 For the import of the expression svasyaikarājye kṛte, and the Nepalese political institution
known as dvairājya (roughly ‘shared kingdom’), see Petech 1984, 33.
94 | Vincenzo Vergiani
The year is NS 110, corresponding to 990 CE, which makes this copy of the Su-
matipañjikā one of the oldest dated grammatical manuscripts of Nepal. Its au-
thor, possibly named Sumati,92 should therefore be assigned to the mid 10th cen-
tury at the latest.93 The colophon of the other copy, NAK 5/732, is one of three
documents listed in Petech (1984, 32–33) on the basis of which the historian ten-
tatively dates Guṇakāmadeva’s reign to c. 980–998 CE.
Two more works should be mentioned here, both of which are preserved in a
few palm-leaf manuscripts in Nepālākṣara. The first is the Ākhyataratnakoṣa, of
an unknown author,94 which survives in three copies. According to the NGMCP
catalogue entry, the work ‘enumerates and exemplifies a great deal of roots, but
not all, from the Dhātupāṭha, giving the individual forms arising after the substi-
tution of the lakāras such as laṭ, luṭ, liṭ, etc. has taken place’. The following intro-
ductory verse found in one of its witnesses, NAK 1/1152 (A 52/5), seems to allude
to the Dhātupārāyaṇa, Pūrṇacandra’s commentary on the Dhātupāṭha mentioned
above:
dhātupārāyaṇaṃ samyak nirūpya vyavahāriṇāṃ | koṣa ākhyātaratnānāṃ svābhogāya kari-
ṣyate ||
Having given careful consideration to the complete list of verbal roots (dhātupārāyaṇa), a
treasury of the verb-gems [used] by ordinary speakers will be compiled for my own use.
One copy of this work, NAK 3/685 (B 23/36), is dated NS 537 (= 1417 CE), and bears
this quite long and elaborate colophon:
ākhyātaratnakoṣaḥ samāptaḥ || * ||
śrīraghuvaṃsāravinda†juṇḍa† prakāśanekamārttaṇḍasya95
||
92 The name appears in the verse following the colophon (see n. 87), but, as Dimitrov (2016,
690) remarks, ‘it is difficult to decide whether this is again the name of the work or perhaps a
personal name’.
93 Dimitrov (2016, 690) remarks that these stanzas are ‘placed, strangely enough, before the
subcolophon of the commentary on Cān. 1.1’ and ‘were written possibly by the commentator
himself or by the scribe who prepared the master copy’. On their basis, he conjectures that ‘this
commentary was composed by a scholar from the Kathmandu Valley’. It seems to me that this
conclusion is only warranted if these verses can be attributed with certainty to the author rather
than the scribe.
94 The NGMCP catalogue entry of one of its copies, NAK 1/1152 (A 52/5), tentatively attributes it
to Pūrṇacandra, but as far as I can tell this is not supported by any colophon or textual tradition.
The issue of the authorship of this work can only be settled by the edition and study of the work,
which is unpublished.
95 Emend to prakāśanaikamārttaṇḍasya.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 95
rājādhirājaparameśvarasya paramamāheśvaraparamabhaṭṭārakasya
sakalaguṇakalānidhāna[sakhi]vatpratipālanekanipunasya96
sakalahimabho97bhāgadhavalabahalakīrttiparipūritasya
sakalajā†jācakajana†98cintāmaṇikalpavṛkṣasya
śrīśrījayajyoti[r]malladevasya vijayarājye ||
cāturbrahmavihāracāraṇapaṭuḥ sannītiratnārṇṇavaḥ
śrīmatpuṇyakadambakeśarinibhaḥ pratyakṣaviśvambharaḥ |
sarvveṣām pratipālanekanipunaḥ99 sarvveṇa māheśvaro
jīyāj jaṅgamakalpavṛkṣasukṛtī śrījyoti[r]mallaprabhuḥ || ○ ||
śrīmadyaśoʼ†ccha†lalitaṃ haritāsthitānāṃ
saṅkhāvatāṃ100 śravaṇayor api maṇḍano vai |
brāhmīn dadhāti suratāṃ varakaṇṭhalagne101
śrīmān guṇajñajayabhairavamalladevaḥ || ○ ||
sārottamam idaṃ ratnam ākhyātadhātusambhavaṃ |
likhyate tejarāmeṇa kramācāryeṇa dhīmatā ||
abde śailakṛsānubāṇasahite māsāsite māghake
cāturthītithisa[ṃjña]ke bhṛgudine ṛṣe102 ca barhisthite |
yoge maṇḍavare ghaṭe ravigate candre ca kanya(!)sthite
hy etasmin samaye samāptasakalaṃ ā[khyā]taratnottamaṃ ||
devaśrījayabhairavamallasyārthe likhitam iti ||
udakānalacaurebhyo mūṣikebhyas tathaiva ca |
rakṣitavyam prayatnena mayā kaṣṭena likhyate || || (fol. 172r5–v6)
The Ākhyātaratnakoṣa has been completed during the victorious reign of the glorious
Jayajyotirmalla, who is the one sun serving to illuminate … [juṇḍa?], the lotus of Raghu’s
race, the king of kings, the highest sovereign entirely devoted to the great Lord [Śiva] (par-
amamāheśvara), the supreme lord who is alone adroit in protecting like a [true] friend the
treasure of all virtues and arts, full of copious fame that is as resplendent as all the parts of
the moon, a wish-fulfilling tree bearing wish-fulfilling gems for all suppliant folk (sa-
kalayācakajana?).
May the glorious king Jayajyotirmalla, who is generous like a moving wish-fulfilling tree,
triumph, he who has sharpened [his intellect] by attending the Cāturbrahma Vihāra,103 [and
is] an ocean of gems of statecraft (saṃnīti), similar to a lion with a multitude of fortunate
||
96 Emend to °pratipālanaikanipuṇasya.
97 Possibly emend to °himabhānu°, literally ‘having cool lustre’, namely the moon.
98 Possibly emend to °yācakajana ‘suppliant people’.
99 Emend to °pratipālanaikanipuṇaḥ.
100 Possibly emend to saṅkhyāvatāṃ.
101 Possibly emend to varakaṇṭhalagnāṃ.
102 Emend to ṛkṣe.
103 As the four brahmavihāras are the four noble Buddhist virtues (sympathy, compassion, joy
and equanimity), Dominic Goodall (personal communication) suggests that some pun may be
intended here, implying that the king was ‘skilled in practising the whole group of Buddhist
virtues’.
96 | Vincenzo Vergiani
merits, a directly visible all-sustainer,104 the follower of Maheśvara (māheśvara) who is
alone adroit in protecting all [beings] with all [means].
[…],105 he [because of what he says] is verily an ornament (maṇḍanaḥ) to the ears of people
of intellect (śaṅkhyavatāṃ?), the honourable Jayabhairavamalla, a connoisseur of virtues,
[who] wears the goddess (suratām) Brāhmī fixed to his excellent throat (vara-
kaṇṭhalagnāṃ?).
The learned Tejarāma Kramācārya has copied this jewel of the finest nature that collects the
roots of verb forms in the year 537,106 on Friday the fourth lunar day of the month of Māgha
and in the lunar mansion of Kṛttikā,107 since the best of the jewels of verbs (ākhyātaratnot-
tamam) has been entirely completed at the time when the yoga is Maṇḍavara,108 Aquarius
is in the sun, and the moon is in Virgo.
This has been copied for Jayabhairavamalla. One should make an effort to protect it from
water, fire, and thieves, as well as from mice – I toiled to copy it.
This is one of the thirty-five documents listed by Petech (1984, 163–164) for the
reign of Jayajyotirmalla, who ruled between 1408 and 1428. The colophon is sim-
ilar to a royal eulogy (praśāsti), ornately extolling the king’s manifold virtues –
his Śaiva faith, his statesmanship, his commitment to the protection of the arts,
and his intellectual achievements109 – and linking his name to the Cāturbrahma
Vihāra (located in Bhatgaon according to Petech), possibly the institution where
the sovereign had received his education or a centre of scholarly activity that he
sponsored. It also mentions the names of the scribe, Tejarāma Kramācārya, and
the person who commissioned the copy, the aristocrat Jayabhairavamalla, the
husband of Jayajyotirmalla’s daughter Jīvarakṣā, who is described as wearing
Brāhmī, that is Sarasvatī, as an ornament around his neck.
The other independent treatise is the Subantaratnākara,110 which survives in
six palm-leaf manuscripts, all in Nepālākṣara, five of them kept in Nepal and one
||
104 Unlike gods, who are invisible to ordinary mortals.
105 At present I am not able to offer a plausibile interpretation of the first pāda of this verse
(śrīmadyaśoʼ†ccha†lalitaṃ haritāsthitānāṃ).
106 The year is given in bhūtasaṃkhyās, starting from the units: 5 like the arrows (bāṇa) of
Kāma; 3 like the fires (kṛśānu = agni); 7 like the mountain (śaila) ranges (aśva) of the earth. Petech
says that ‘the date is verified in all elements for Friday, February 5th, 1417’.
107 barhisthita, literally ‘the one placed on the peacock (barhin)’, namely Kārttikeya.
108 The name maṇḍavara does not appear in the usual list of 27 yogas.
109 There may be more in this than the usual hyperbolic adulation found in this kind of text,
since Jayajyotirmalla is allegedly the author of the Siddhisāra, a treatise on jyotiṣa preserved in
a Cambridge manuscript, Add.1649 (see incipit: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-
01649/4; also Regmi 1965, 638).
110 On this and other works by the same author see Lata Deokar’s contribution to this volume,
in which she also gives the full text of the manuscript colophons mentioned below (below, pp.
663–664).
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 97
in Cambridge.111 Two of these, Kesar 582 and Cambridge Or.148, have colophons
showing that they were also produced during Jayajyotirmalla’s reign. The former
was copied in NS 533112 (= 1413 CE) by Māṇikarāja (almost certainly the same as
the scribe of NAK 5-730, a Cāndravyākaraṇa manuscript mentioned above, p. 87),
probably active at court, who praises the sovereign’s learning and statesmanship
at length.113 The latter was copied just a few years later in NS 540 (= 1420 CE) by a
Buddhist monk called Dharmarasika, in the Śrīṣaḍakṣarīmahāvihāra in the town
of Gaṅgūlapatana, for his personal use.114 Another work also attributed to Su-
bhūticandra and called Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama, dealing with nomi-
nal declensions, is preserved in NAK 5/416 (B 34/16), a palm-leaf manuscript in
Nepālākṣara from NS 560 (= 1440 CE).
The manuscript collections in Nepal and in Cambridge also preserve a few
palm-leaf copies of other works that can be assigned to the Cāndra tradition –
mostly smaller tracts on specific topics, perhaps composed for didactic purposes.
Among them one finds the Uṇādisūtra with its Vṛtti, the Prādivṛtti, the Kṛdbhāṣya,
the Tiṅbheda, the Viṃśatyupasargavṛtti, and the (Bālavallabhā) Prakriyā.
Four of these manuscripts have colophons with dates. The earliest is NAK
5/410 (A 53/16), a copy of the Uṇādi(sūtra)vṛtti115 in Nepālākṣara dated NS 489 (=
1369 CE).116 Next is a NAK 3/361 (B 35/33), a copy of the Tiṅbheda (also bearing the
alternative title Ākhyātavicāra), with a colophon that just gives the date saṃvat
||
111 This is Or.148 (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00148).
112 The year is written with bhūtasaṃkhyās. The relevant part of the colophon reads: vahnau
vahnau … vānābde ‘in the year (abda) vāna = arrow = 5, vahni (= agni) = 3, vahni = 3’.
113 One should of course compare the handwriting in the two manuscripts to be absolutely
sure. It would be interesting to investigate if the name of Mānikarāja (or Manikarāja, as it is
spelled in the other manuscript) appears also in manuscripts of works on other subjects than
grammar.
114 Gaṅgūla(patana) is another name of Kathmandu, according to Petech (1984, 164), who
quotes this document but misreads the name of the vihāra as Śrī-Yatradevī.
115 The NGMCP records two more palm-leaf copies of this work: NAK 5/409 (B 34/18), in
Nepālākṣara, and NAK 5/733 (B 35/16), in a hybrid form of Nepālākṣara with some features of
Maithili. This work is already mentioned in Liebich 1896 and 1902: VIII–IX, and it was known to
the Tibetan tradition (see Verhagen 1994, 113–114, 121–122).
116 Or possibly 479 = 1359 CE. The uncertainty stems from the fact the year is expressed in
bhūtasaṃkhyās, unusually starting with the hundreds: veda = 4 like the 4 Vedas, nāga ‘snake’,
which can stand for either 7 or 8, and graha ‘planet’ = 9 because Indian astronomy counted nine
planets. The colophon reads: samvatasarā [sic!] ⟪..⟫ vedanāgagraha || āṣāḍhaśuklapratīpadāḥ
[sic!] mṛgaśiri-ṇakṣatra [sic!] | vṛddhiyoga | magalavāra [sic!] | leṣijaśu [sic!] ||. The catalogue en-
try notes that the manuscript contains many scribal mistakes, possibly because it was copied
from a manuscript in a different script.
98 | Vincenzo Vergiani
540 (= 1420 CE). Another is NAK 5/407 (B 34/24), a copy of the Prādivṛtti, a short
work on preverbs (upasarga) from NS 574 (= 1454 CE), whose colophon reads:
brahmānanāśvabāṇe ʼbde mārggakṛṣṇe ti○thau yame | ṛkṣahastārkkavāre ca prādiḥ saṃli||
* ||khitaṃ mayā || (fol. 7r2–3)
I have copied this work [called] Prādi in the year 574,117 on Sunday the second (yame) lunar
day of the dark fortnight in the month of Mārga(śirṣa), under [the lunar mansion] Hasta and
the Great Bear [constellation].118
The fourth is NAK 5/6210 (B 460/15), a paper manuscript of the Upasargavṛtti (or
Viṃśatyupasargavṛtti, as the Tibetan translation suggests119) traditionally at-
tributed to Candragomin himself, dated NS 774 (= 1654 CE).120 This is among the
very few Cāndra works copied after 1600.121 The search for paper manuscripts of
the Cāndravyākaraṇa in the NGMCP online catalogue returns not more than a
dozen hits, and only two of these are said to be in Nepālākṣara (NAK 5/2591 and
4/247). Three more manuscripts (reels B 460/16, 17 and 18) are 20th-century copies
of old manuscripts, as is stated in the colophon of one of them.122 This clearly sug-
gests that after the 16th century the Cāndra tradition in Nepal underwent a dra-
matic decline. (For a synopsis of Cāndra manuscripts, see Tab. 1)
||
117 The year is given in bhūtasaṃkhyās, starting from the units: 4 like Brahma’s faces (brahmā-
nana); 7 like the horses (aśva) of the Sun; 5 like the arrows (bāṇa) of Kāma.
118 Another possible interpretation of the compound ṛkṣahastārkkavāra is ‘Sunday (arka-vāra)
under the lunar mansion (= rkṣa) Hasta’, although in this case one would rather expect the ex-
pression hastarkṣa.
119 Verhagen 1994, 55; cf. also Dimitrov 2011, 14.
120 The colophon simply reads iti cāndravyākaraṇasya upasarggavṛttiḥ samāptiḥ [!] || || saṃ 774
|| (fol. 5r5).
121 The manuscript of another work, partly based on the Subantaratnākara and partly on the
Rūpāvatāra, a Pāṇinian work, is dated NS 737 (= 1617 CE). The scribe, a certain Kāśirāma, copied
it for his son (see below L. Deokar, p. 683).
122 1989 mite vikramasamvatsare śrāvaṇamāsasya viṃśatītamadivase guruvāsare divyaratnav-
ajrācāryyeṇa prācīnapustakataḥ pratilipi samāptīkṛtvā śubham rāmacandraśarmaṇā śo-
dhitā (fol. 40r1–5). The date given in the colophon is 1989 of the Vikrama Era, corresponding to
1933 CE.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 99
5 The Kātantra school
The NGMCP catalogue lists more than 40 manuscripts of works belonging to the
Kātantra school,123 a dozen of which are on palm leaf, most of them in Nepālākṣara.
The earliest of these is NAK 3/397 (A 52/12), an incomplete copy of Trilocanadāsa’s
Kātantravṛttivivaraṇapañjikā, the most widespread sub-commentary on Dur-
gasiṃha's commentary on the Kātantra sūtrapāṭha, covering pādas 1–4 of chap-
ter 4, the section on primary suffixes (kṛt). According to the catalogue entry, this
quite ancient witness is in Devanāgarī (presumably an early form of the script)
and bears the date of LS 156 (= 1286 CE), two elements indicating that it was prob-
ably produced in northern India124 and then brought to Nepal, or perhaps pro-
duced there by a scribe who had moved to the Kathmandu Valley. The colophon,
which is followed by an apotropaic verse praising the scribe’s painstaking la-
bour,125 reads:
la saṃ 156 phālgunavadi 2 ravau || ṭhakkuraśrīprajñāpatinālekhi yathā dṛṣṭaṃ tathā ti (!)
likhitaṃ l⁅e⁆khako nāsti doṣaḥ || bhagnapṛṣṭi126-kaṭi-gr⁅ī⁆va- s⁅t⁆a⁅b⁆⟨a⟩dha⁅dṛṣṭir
a⁆dhomukha⁅ṃ⁆ [|] duḥkhe⁅na li⁆(2)khitaṃ sāstraṃ ⁅putravat prati⁆pālayet || (fols 79r4–79v2)
[This] has been written in the year 156 of the Lakṣmaṇa Era, on Sunday the second [day] of
the dark half of the month of Phālguna [February–March], by Ṭhakkura127 Prajñāpati. As it
was seen so it was written, the scribe has no fault. Painfully written, with aching128 back,
loins [and] neck, the gaze fixed, the head downcast, this book should be protected like a
son.
The next dated manuscript is Kesar 14 (C 2/6), a palm-leaf copy in Nepālākṣara
script of a work called Padarohaṇa, according to the NGMCP catalogue a treatise
||
123 On the history of Kātantra see Belvalkar 1915, 68 ff., Saini 1999, 15–44, and Shen forthcoming.
124 The use of the Lakṣmaṇa Era was confined to a region that corresponds to today’s northern Bihar.
125 The same verse, with minimal variation, is also found in other colophons, including that of
Or.148, a later manuscript of the Subantaratnākara mentioned above and discussed in L. Deo-
kar’s contribution: bhagnapṛṣṭ(h)akatigrīvaṃ (!) taptadṛstir adhomukhaṃ | kastena (!) likhitaṃ
śāstraṃ jīvavat pratipālayet |.
126 Emend to bhagnapṛṣṭha°.
127 This title suggests that the copyist was a man of some social standing.
128 Sanskrit bhagna, lit. ‘broken’.
100 | Vincenzo Vergiani
(prakriyā) dealing with the derivation of nouns and verbs,129 composed by a cer-
tain Utsavakīrti. According to the colophon, the manuscript was copied in NS 513
(= 1393 CE):
ity upādhyāyotsava[k]īrttikṛto[!] padarohana[!] samāptaḥ || --- || śreyo ’stu nepālo ’bdo
tridaśapañcagate | māghakṛṣṇa daśāyāṃ tithau[vāre] || [rā]jādhirājaparamabhaṭṭārakapa-
rameśvaraśrīśrījaya[sthiti]ma[l]ladevasya vijayarāje [!] | śrīśrīsuvarṇṇapanārīḥ na[garyāṃ]
samavasthitapātraśrī […] (fols 98v5–99r1)130
Thus the Padarohaṇa composed by the teacher Utsavakīrti is completed. May there be bliss.
In the year 513 of the Nepali Era, on the tenth lunar day of the dark fortnight of the month
of Māgha [January–February], during the victorious reign of the king of kings, the supreme
lord, the highest sovereign, the glorious Jayasthitimalla,131 [for the dignitary … estab-
lished132] in the city of Suvarṇapanārī133…
Only a few years younger than the manuscript of the Padarohaṇa, NAK 5/418 (A
54/3) contains another minor work in the Kātantra tradition, the Syādyantakoṣa,
the title of which clearly identifies it as a treatise on nominal declension.134 The
manuscript, on palm leaf, is dated NS 516 (= 1396 CE) and is written in
Nepālākṣara. Its quite detailed colophon135 reads:
||
129 The NGMCP catalogue quotes at least two more copies of this work, undated but most probably
later since they are on paper. This work was probably known to the Tibetan tradition (see Verha-
gen 1994, 59–61).
130 The NGMCP catalogue entry does not give any excerpt for this manuscript. I have tran-
scribed this colophon from a copy of the microfilm.
131 The two akṣaras giving the name of the king are barely legible, but the vowels are almost
certainly i’s, and the year falls within Jayasthitimalla’s reign. Petech 1984 does not list this colo-
phon among the documents of this king.
132 This is a tentative translation, based on the meaning ‘court dignitary, official’ for the term
(mahā-)pātra in medieval Nepal (see Regmi 1965, 498 ff.), an interpretation that seems to be cor-
roborated by the following word, śrī, commonly prefixed to proper names in such documents.
My conjecture is that this line of the scribal colophon may have mentioned the name of the per-
son who commissioned the copy (or – less likely – who prepared it). Unfortunately the rest of the
line is almost completely effaced.
133 Another name of Kathmandu.
134 In the Kātantra system sI is the technical term for the first ending – nominative, singular,
masculine –, corresponding to Pāṇinian sU. There is a Tibetan translation of a text called
Syādyantaprakriyā, attributed to Mañju(śrī)kīrti and affiliated to Kātantra (Verhagen 1994, 70–
72). Cf. also L. Deokar in this volume (below, p. 671).
135 Partially quoted in Petech (1984, 147). He specifies that the date is verified for Wednesday 7
June 1396. Note that Petech’s readings occasionally differ from those found in the NGMCP cata-
logue entry. Here I am relying on the latter.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 101
samvat 516 ākhā[ḍha]136śuklapratipadyāyā [!] tithau buddhavāsare137 purnavasunakṣatre138 ||
juva139rājaśrīśrīdharmamalladevasya vijayarājyasamaye || 〇 śrīvyanāpyānā[[ma]]deśanag-
napatanavare ||| brahmakulendravipraśrījivasarmaṇasya [!] yathābhilikhitaṃ manorathaṃ
pustakam idaṃ sapūrṇṇam [!] astu || 〇viprendraśrījīvasarmeṇa satvārthapratihetunāṃ140 |
anena puṇyamārggena nīpatan141 [!] sarvvasukhāspadaṃ || likhitaḥ śrī amarendracandreṇa |
(fol. 74r2–5)
May this book, a desire of the mind, be entirely completed as it was written [in the original
document?] for the brahmin Jīvaśarmaṇa, the chief of the Brahma lineage, in the year 516,
on Wednesday the first lunar day of the bright fortnight of [the month of] Āṣāḍha under the
asterism Punarvasu, during the victorious reign of the crown prince (yuvarāja) the glorious
Dharmamalla, in the city of Nagna-Patanavara in the country called Vyanāpyā.142 [This
work,] the seat of all happiness, proceeding by this meritorious road the cause of which is
the pursuit of truth by the chief of brahmins (viprendra) Jīvaśarma, has been copied by
Amarendracandra.
If my understanding of the colophon is correct, a high-ranking brahmin called
Jīvaśarma(ṇa), possibly living in a town of the Banepa region, commissioned the
manuscript to the copyist Amarendracandra during the reign of Jayadharma-
malla, the eldest son of Jayasthitimalla and Rājalladevī, born in 1367.143 Here Ja-
yadharmamalla is given the title yuvarāja because, after his father’s death in Sep-
tember 1395, he shared the kingdom with his brothers Jayajyotirmalla and
Jayakīrtimalla for a number of years (Petech 1984, 143, 151), in keeping with the
established practice of dvairājya mentioned above.
In the early 15th century we find a copy of the Kātantra sūtrapāṭha, NAK 5/417
(B 35/19), copied in NS 531 (= 1411 CE) during the reign of king Jayajyotirmalla
(who was by then ruling alone since both his brothers had died). The book be-
longed to a minister (amātya) called Jayabrahma, as specified in the colophon:144
||
136 Emend to āṣāḍha = June/July.
137 Emend to budha°.
138 Emend to punarvasu°, which is the name of a lunar mansion.
139 Emend to yuva°.
140 Possibly emend to °hetunā.
141 Possibly emend to nipatat.
142 According to Petech, who reads Byanappāna, this may be identified with present-day
Banepa, to the east of Kathmandu.
143 See Petech 1984, Appendix Genealogy C, p. 231.
144 The NGMCP entry gives the final rubric but not the scribal colophon, which I quote from
Petech 1984, 162. According to him, the date is verified for 9 April 1411.
102 | Vincenzo Vergiani
śreyo ’stu samvat 531 caitrakṛṣṇapratipadyāṃ tithau svātinakṣatre siddhiyoge yathākaraṇa[ṃ]
muhūrte bṛhaspativāsare meṣarāśigate savitari tulārāśigate candramasi rājādhirājapa-
rameśvaraparamabhaṭṭārakaśrīśrījayajyotirmmalladevasyavjayarājye amātyajayabrahma-
kasya pustako ’yam…
May there be bliss! This book belongs to the minister Jayabrahma, [having been copied] in
the year 531, on Thursday the first lunar day of the dark fortnight of [the month of] Caitra
[April] under the asterism Svāti [and] the yoga Siddhi at the time [established] in accordance
with the astrological calculation (yathākaraṇam) when the Sun is in the sign of the Aries
and the Moon is in the sign of the Libra during the victorious reign of the king of kings, the
highest sovereign, the supreme lord, the glorious Jayajyotirmalla…
A few years later, in NS 536 (1415 CE) another manuscript, NAK 1/1078 (B 34/17),
also on palm leaf and in Nepālākṣara, containing the entire Kātantra Dhātupāṭha,
may have been copied for an unnamed young royal prince (rājakumāraka), pos-
sibly a son or nephew145 of Jayajyotirmalla:146
ṛtu⁅rā⁆maśare yāte māse mārggaśire ʼśite147 |
susaṃpūṛṇṇaṃ kṛtaṃ lekhaṃ su○pañcamyāṃ tithau vare || rājādhirāja[[ḥ]]parameśvara-
paramabhaṭṭārakaśrīśrījayajyotirmmalla-devasya vijayarājye || ○ vidyāvilāsaraghurāja-
kumārakasya cintāmaṇidrumasamārthijanasya tasya | śrīśrīsubhairavamal[l]asya
parājayasya kālāpadhātuvarapuṣṭakam eva yasya || (fol. 33v1–4)
The copy [of this book] has been entirely completed in the year 536,148 in the dark [fortnight
of the] month of Mārggaśira [November], in the auspicious (vare149) fifth lunar day, during
the victorious reign of the king of kings, the highest sovereign, the supreme lord, the glori-
ous Jayajyotirmalla. This excellent book [containing] the verbal roots of Kālāpa150 belongs
to the prince of the solar dynasty (°raghu°) who has playful ease with learning
||
145 Possibly Jayayakṣamalla, Jayadharmamalla’s son, who succeeded his uncle to the throne.
146 The final portion of the colophon is not entirely clear and lends itself to multiple interpre-
tations. The colophon is partially quoted in Petech (1984, 163), which on the last line reads
śrīśrīśrībhairavamal(l)asya ya rājā yasya for śrīśrīsubhairavamal[l]asya parājayasya. According
to him, the date corresponds to 21 November 1415.
147 Probably a mispelling for asita ‘dark’.
148 The year is expressed in bhūtasaṃkhyas: starting from the units, ṛtu ‘season’ stands for 6,
rāma stands for 3, and śara ‘arrow’ for 5.
149 Alternatively, one may conjecture that this is to be emended to vāre. We have seen the ex-
pression tithau vāre, in which the two words – essentially synonyms meaning ‘lunar day’ – ap-
parently reinforce each other, in other colophons quoted above.
150 Kālāpavyākaraṇa was another name for the Kātantra.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 103
(vidyāvilāsa°), [and is] like (°sama-) a wish-fulfilling tree for the suppliants (-arthija-
nasya),151 who is victory (parājaya) [incarnated] [and bears the biruda] Subhairavamalla.
The next dated manuscript, NAK 3/383 (A 53/9), dated Nepāla Samvat 545 (1425
CE) is a copy of Durgasiṃha’s Paribhāṣāvṛtti, a work on the metarules (paribhāṣā)
of Kātantra, also on palm leaf and in Nepālākṣara, suggesting that the interest in
this grammatical tradition was not purely practical but embraced its theoretical
aspects. Besides the date, the colophon gives the name of the scribe, once again
a brahmin named Gayāpati:
samvat 545 āṣāḍhaśuklapūrṇṇamāsyāṃ tithau | pūrva⁅phālguni⁆nakṣatre | ⁅vai⁆dhṛtiyoge |
śanidine | vipraśrīgayāpatinā likhito (2) yam | yathā dṛṣṭe sati tathā likhitā na doṣaṃ
lekhakasya ||
This has been copied by the brahmin Gayāpati in the year 545, on Saturday the day of full
moon of the bright fortnight of [the month of] Āṣāḍha, under the asterism of Phālguni,152
under the yoga Vaidhṛti. As it was seen so it was written: the scribe has no fault.
Around the mid-15th century, another palm-leaf manuscript in Nepālākṣara
script, NAK 9/589 (C 55/7), contains the Kātantra sūtrapāṭha with Durgasiṃha’s
Vṛtti and Trilocanadāsa’s Vivaraṇapañjikā. The colophon gives the year as NS 567
(= 1447 CE), when the ruling monarch was Jayayakṣamalla.153 It also mentions the
name of the scribe, the brahmin Śivaharideva:
samvat 567 śrāvaṇakṛṣṇadaśamyāṃ tithau ādityavāsare saṃpūrṇṇaṃ kṛtam idaṃ
pusṭa[!]kaṃ | rājādhirājayameśvara154paramabhaṭṭārakaśrīśrījayayakṣamalladevavi-
jayarāje [!] || śubham astu sarvvajagatām iti || likhitam idaṃ dvijavaraśrīśivaharīdevena idaṃ
pusṭa[!]kaṃ || (fol. 27r1–3)
||
151 This is a tentative translation based on the conjecture that the members of the compound
are clumsily inverted: one would rather expect arthijana-cintāmaṇidrumasamasya.
152 According to the NGMCP the date corresponds to 30 June 1425 CE, but the correct asterism
for that date should have been pūrvāṣāḍha instead of pūrvaphālguni. It is possible that the scribe
confused the names of the two nakṣatras.
153 Jayayakṣamalla (1408–1482) ruled from 1428 to the year of his death, an exceptionally long
reign attested by numerous manuscript colophons (including this one) and inscriptions (Petech
1984, 176).
154 The epithet yameśvara is unusual. Considering the similarity between the akṣaras ya and
pa in Nepālākṣara, I suspect the correct reading is °pameśvara°, in turn probably a simple scribal
mistake that should be emended to parameśvara, one of the titles commonly adopted by the
Malla kings.
104 | Vincenzo Vergiani
This book has been completed in the year 567, on Sunday the tenth lunar day of the dark
fortnight of [the month of] Śrāvaṇa,155 during the victorious reign of the king of kings, the
highest sovereign, the supreme lord, the glorious Jayayakṣamalla. May there be fortune for
all the worlds. This book has been copied by the best of the twice-born Śivaharideva.
Among the remaining undated palm-leaf manuscripts of Kātantra works one finds
copies of the sūtrapāṭha, alone or with Durgasiṃha’s Vṛtti, the Dhātupāṭha, the
Paribhāṣāvṛtti ascribed to Durgasiṃha and a commentary on this called
Paribhāṣāvṛttiṭīkā, a Kātantravṛttipañjikā by Udayaśramaṇa (apparently different
from Trilocanadāsa’s commentary), and some minor works such as the
Prajñāvistārikā (NAK 1/1152, B 35–15) of Billeśvara (also known to have composed
a Ṭīkā on the Kātantravyākaraṇa) and a Dhātusaṃgraha, these last two in Maithili
script.
The Kātantra tradition continues to be well attested in several paper manu-
scripts from the late medieval and early modern period.156 Quite a few of them are
in Devanāgarī or Maithili script. Among the dated ones, the earliest appear to be a
copy of Triliṅgaprakaraṇa, a section of Syādyantakoṣa (NAK 5/5496 = A 1212/23),
written in NS 600 (= 1480 CE) or 620 (= 1500 CE) by the scribe Śubharāja in De-
vanāgarī;157 and NAK 1/1406 (A 1309/4), simply listed as Kātantra, in Devanāgarī,
from the year 1554 of the Vikrama Era, i.e. 1497 CE.158 This is followed by NAK 5/4274
(A 552/7), a copy of Trilocanadāsa’s Kātantravṛttivivaraṇapañjikā, in Devanāgarī,
dated 1632 of an unspecified era (probably Vikrama, corresponding to 1575–76).159
NAK 1/1528 (A 552/11; also A 1302/8) is a copy of the section on sandhi of the
Kātantra sūtrapāṭha in Nepālākṣara, dated NS 705 (= 1585 CE). The pithy colophon
||
155 The date is verified for 10 August 1447 (Petech 1984, 171).
156 Unfortunately, many of these have not been properly catalogued yet, and their entries con-
tain only a very basic physical description. In most cases the title is simply given as Kātantra,
without any further specification.
157 Another entry in the NGMCP catalogue, for Kesar 234 (C 26/7-1), the copy of a clearly related
work called Syādyantakoṣasāra, said to be on palm leaf and in Nepālākṣara, records a very sim-
ilar colophon and was written by the same scribe in NS 620 (= 1500 CE). It is possible either that
the script of these two manuscripts is Devanāgarī with some features of Nepālākṣara (or vice
versa), or that one of the two records is not correct. In any case, the relation between these two
manuscripts needs to be investigated further.
158 The very pithy entry in the NGMCP catalogue just gives the title as Kātantra.
159 The colophon, in ungrammatical and badly spelled Sanskrit, reads: saṃvat 1632 samaye
vaiśāṣa śudi 6 sanivāsare || || pāṭhārthaṃ liṣāpitaṃ pāṭhakam itā[!]nandasutap-
admanābhaliṣyāpitaṃ pāṭhārthaṃ liṣitaṃ pustaka śrīvāstavyaṃ pāṃḍe madanaputra gosāi
dāsena || viśvanāṭhasaranaṃ || (fol. 115v5–8).
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 105
also contains an invocation to the goddess Durgā.160 Another manuscript, NAK
1/1388 (B 458/19), also simply listed as Kātantra, is in Nepālākṣara and dated NS
707 (= 1587). Among the dated manuscripts from the 17th century one finds Kesar
191 (C 20/8; also C 21/1), also in Nepālākṣara, a copy of the Kātantravṛtti from NS
755 (= 1635 CE) written by a certain Sūryarāma for his personal use (svārthe);161 E
1707/10 (no accession number) is a copy of Dhātuvṛttimanoramā, most probably a
commentary on the Kātantra dhātupāṭha, in Nepālākṣara, dated Nepāla Samvat
802 (= 1682); and NAK 1/1351 (B 462–17) is a copy of Durgasiṃhavṛtti, also in
Nepālākṣara, from Nepāla Samvat 812 (= 1692), with a colophon in heavily San-
skritised Newari apparently stating that the copy was prepared for king
Bhūpatīndramalla.162 The production of manuscripts of Kātantra works continued
well into the 19th century. (For a synopsis of Kātantra manuscripts, see Tab. 2).
6 The Pāṇinian school
When we turn to the Pāṇīnian school, we get a very different picture from the
fervour of activity that is testified by the surviving manuscripts of the Cāndra
grammar since the early medieval period. On the basis of the data available in the
NGMCP online catalogue,163 it appears that among the major works of this school
composed in the first millennium CE – the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the Mahābhāṣya, the
Vākyapadīya, and the Kāśikavṛtti with its subcommentary Vivaraṇapañjikā (also
known as Nyāsa) –, only the Nyāsa of Jinendrabuddhi has been preserved in a
manuscript that is earlier than the late 15th century. The manuscript in question,
NAK 4/216 (A 52/13), in Nepālākṣara, is comprised of more than 400 folios and
covers the first four adhyāyas. The copy is likely to be incomplete, since it ends
||
160 iti sandhau pañcamaḥ pādaḥ samāpta || me mahyaṃ durggāprītir astu || 7 || sambat 705
śrāvaṇaśuklapañcamyā.
161 samvat 755 āṣāḍhakṛṣṇatrayodaśi sampūrṇam iti likhitaṃ śrīsūryyarāmeṇa svārthe || (fol.
77v9).
162 Colophon: samvat 812 vaiśāṣavadi thva kuhnu śrībhūpatīndramalladeva na dayakā
dina || śubham astu || (fol. 18r5) (Newari words in bold: thva kuhnu ‘on this day’; na ‘genitive case
marker’; dayakā ‘which was made’ [Malla 2000: all s.v.]). However, note that Bhūpatīndramalla
reigned in Bhaktapur from 1696, when he succeded his father Jitamitramalla (see Slusser 1982,
205–206), therefore the date in the colophon may be wrong.
163 The University Library in Cambridge holds no manuscripts of Pāṇinian works from Nepal.
106 | Vincenzo Vergiani
on fol. 423r with the rubric to the fourth chapter rather than a proper colophon.164
Despite the absence of a date, according to the catalogue entry it can be ascribed
to the beginning of the 11th century on palaeographic grounds.
The first – but seemingly isolated – dated specimen of a Pāṇinīya manuscript
is NAK 4/755 (B 35/34), a palm-leaf copy in Nepālākṣara of the Sambandhasiddhi,
written in Nepāla Samvat 329 (= 1209 CE).165 This work is an obscure (and as far
as I know unpublished) commentary on the Kārakacakra or Vārarucasaṃgraha
traditionally attributed to the mythical Vararuci, of uncertain date (probably sec-
ond half of the first millennium CE), itself somewhat on the periphery of the
Pāṇinian tradition despite its popularity (on Nepalese copies of the Kārakacakra,
see below).
Particularly striking is the absence of early manuscripts of the Mahābhāṣya.
A search on the NGMCP catalogue returns about 120 hits, but all the copies are on
paper, and thus presumably later than 1500, and most of them are in Devanāgarī.
Some also contain the subcommentary Pradīpa of Kaiyaṭa, and a few Nāgeśa’s
Uddyota. Only a few copies happen to be dated, the oldest in Devanāgarī appar-
ently from c. 1790.166 As for Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya, another major work in the
early Pāṇinian tradition, not a single manuscript is recorded in the NGMCP cata-
logue.
The search for copies of the Aṣṭādhyāyī itself returns around 90 hits, but only
one of these is in Nepālākṣara script, undated and (probably) on paper, so pre-
sumably late (see below). Significantly, the earliest surviving copy of Pāṇini’s
sūtra in Nepal, NAK 4/326,167 is a palm-leaf manuscript in Maithili script, dated LS
374, corresponding to 1494 CE. The colophon (fol. 82v4–5) suggests that it was
produced in eastern India (and later brought to Nepal):
||
164 bodhisatvadeśīyācāryajinendrabuddhiviracitāyāṃ kāśikāvivaraṇapaṃjikāyāṃ caturtho
dhyāyaḥ samāptaḥ || ‘The fourth book of the Kāśikāvivaraṇapañjikā composed by the teacher
Jinendrabuddhi, who is like a bodhisattva, has been completed.’
165 The colophon (not transcribed in the NGMCP catalogue entry) is hardly legible from the im-
age of the microfilm, but fortunately the year (written in numerals) is very clear.
166 NAK 5/3832 (B 472/1) is dated Samvat 1847 of an unspecified era. If it were the Vikrama Era,
the year would be 1790–1791 CE.
167 The same manuscript has been microfilmed twice (reels A 1311/19 and A 1162/13), which is
not unusual, but in this case there is also some uncertainty in the catalogue about the library
classmark, which is given as NAK 5/4481 in one place. There is one more record, of reel A 52/4,
by a different author, describing an Aṣṭādhyāyī manuscript that is suspiciously similar to the
former in terms of number of folios, with an almost identical colophon and yet another class-
mark. Only the direct inspection of the manuscript(s) in Kathmandu will clarify this confusion.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 107
la saṃ 374 śrāvaṇabadi 13 ravau cāuṇṇitapāsaṃlagnadalakaulīgrāme
pāṇḍavagrāmīyapaṭhatā śrīvarddhamānena svapāṭhārthaṃ ṭhakukesārddhaṃ likhitaiṣā
pustīti || pustakalikhanapariśramavettā vidyujjano168 nānyaḥ | sāgaralaṃghanakhedaṃ
hanūmān ekaḥ paraṃ veda |
This book has been copied in the year 374 of the Lakṣmaṇa Era, on Sunday 13, in the dark
half (badi) of the month of Śrāvaṇa [= July–August], by Vardhamāna, the reciter/preceptor
(paṭhatā) from [the village known as] Pāṇḍavagrāma, in the village of Dalakaulī attached
to Cāuṇṇitapā, for his personal study, together with [i.e. with the help of?] Ṭhakuke.169 Only
someone who is learned (vidvajjano?) knows the fatigue of copying a book, no one else;
only Hanūmān knows the formidable effort of jumping across the ocean.
This late 15th-century Maithili copy of a Pāṇinīya work is far from being excep-
tional. In fact, the NGMCP lists at least half a dozen manuscripts in the same script
and from approximately the same period, containing the Kāśikāvṛtti, the Nyāsa,
and other works. The oldest appears to be NAK 1/464 (A 52/8 = A 1171/4), from LS
358 (= 1478 CE), containing Kāśikāvṛtti on adhyāya 7, pāda 2, of Aṣṭādhyāyi. Its
colophon reads:
la saṃ 358 āśvinavadi dvādaśyāṃ bhaume jamugāma-braṃhāpure
sadupādhyāyaśrīvāsudevacaraṇāravindebhyaḥ paṭhatā śrīguṇapatinā svapāṭhārthaṃ likh-
itam idaṃ pustakam iti || (fol. 32r4–5)
This book has been copied for his personal study by Guṇapati, reading at the lotus-feet of
the virtuous teacher Vāsudeva, in the year 358 of the Lakṣmaṇa Era, on Tuesday (bhauma)
the twelfth [lunar day] in the dark fortnight of the month of Āśvina in [the town of]
Jamugāma-Brahmapura (?).
By a curious coincidence, the next two manuscripts (both on palm leaf) are dated
to the same year, LS 376 (= 1496 CE). They are NAK 1/1537 (A 53/7) and NAK 1/468
(A 1171/2). The former is a copy of the Nyāsa, covering just the second pāda of
adhyāya 1, and its colophon specifies the name of the scribe, Jagāditya, who cop-
ied the manuscripts for his personal use:
la saṃ 376 māghaśudi ⁅pū⁆rṇṇimāyāṃ kuje udyānagrāme śrījagādityena svapāṭhārthaṃ likh-
itam idaṃ pustakam iti | 〇 ti || || || * || * || makarāhīsaṃ śrīraghuśarmmaṇā śrīramānandeṣu
dattā | (fol. 63r1–2)
||
168 Possibly emend to vidvajjano.
169 Possibly emend to ṭhakure.
108 | Vincenzo Vergiani
This book has been copied in the year 376 of the Lakṣmaṇa Era, on Tuesday (kuje, i.e. the
day of Mars) the day of full moon of the bright fortnight of the month of Māgha [January–
February], in the village of Udyāna, by Jagāditya for his personal study.
Donated … [makarāhīsaṃ?] by Raghuśarman to Ramānanda.170
The latter is a copy of the Kāśikāvṛtti alone containing pāda 2, adhyāya 1, com-
missioned by a certain Rāmanātha, bearing the title of ṭhakkura, and copied by
the scribe Buddhinātha:
śubham astu lasaṃ 376 āśvinaśudi 5 śukre śrīcaraṇadharanagare | ṭhakkuraśrīrāmanātha-
mahāśayānā[m ā]jñayā śrībuddhināthena likhitam idaṃ pustakam iti || (fol. 17v4–5)
May there be fortune. This book has been copied by Buddhinātha by order of Sir (mahāśaya)
Ṭhakkura Rāmanātha in the year 376 of the Lakṣmaṇa Era, on Friday (śukre, i.e. the day of
Venus) the 5th [day] of the bright fortnight (śudi) of the month of Āśvina, in the town of
Śrīcaraṇadhara.
The colophon of another palm-leaf manuscript of Kāśikāvṛtti in Maithili script,
NAK 1/468 (A 1171/3), is even more concise, with no date:
iti kāśikāyāṃ vṛttau tṛtīyasyādhyāyasya prathamaḥ pādaḥ samāptaḥ || || śubham astu || oṃ
namo gopālāya || sarasvatyai namaḥ || śrīnaraharer llipir iyaṃ (†mariyaḥ†) || (fol. 35v4)
The second quarter of the first book of the Kāśikāvṛtti has been completed. May there be
fortune. Oṃ, homage to Gopāla. Homage to Sarasvatī. This is the copy [made] by Narahari
… [mariyaḥ?]
It is difficult to draw any historical information from these colophons, or even
identify the places they mention, but it is clear that these copies were originally
made for the personal use of individual scholars, possibly in eastern India, and
then later presumably sold and brought to Nepal.
Another early Pāṇinīya work that – like several texts of the Cāndra tradition –
made its way into Nepal from eastern India, having been originally composed by a
Southern author, is the little-studied Rūpāvatāra171 of the Srilankan Buddhist monk
Dharmakīrti (probably 10th century), the first known attempt at rearranging
Pāṇini’s sūtras according to topic, a few centuries before Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita’s Sid-
dhānta Kaumudī. It is plausible that, like Ratnamati’s Cāndravivaraṇapañjikā and,
possibly, its sub-commentaries, Dharmakīrti’s work was studied in the Buddhist
||
170 The catalogue entry points out that the final sentence is probably a later addition.
171 The only study devoted to this work that I am aware of is Lalithambal’s 1995 monograph.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 109
universities of eastern India, but unlike those, it was preserved even after their de-
cline, certainly because it was kept alive in brahmanical circles thanks to its affili-
ation to the Pāṇinian grammatical tradition. The Nepalese collections hold three
palm-leaf copies of Rūpāvatāra, all of them in Maithili script, two of which are dated
(for the third manuscript, NAK 1/1559 = A 1162/5, see Śāstrī 1905, 70). The oldest
is from LS 367 (= 1487 CE),172 the other, NAK 4/764 (A 52/11) is a few years younger,
from LS 383 (= 1503 CE), and was prepared by a certain Śaṅkara:
ity ācāryyadharmma〇kīrttiviracite rūpāvatāre tiṅantākhyaḥ samāptaḥ || || la saṃ 383
āśvinakṛṣṇadvādaśyāṃ śukre ajinaulīśrāmavāstavyena śrīśaṅkareṇa likhitaiṣā 〇 pustiketi ||
Thus, the Section on Finite Verbs in the Rūpāvatāra composed by the Teacher Dharmakīrti
has been completed. This book has been copied by Śaṅkara, a resident of Ajinaulīśrāma, in
the year 383 of the Lakṣmaṇa Era, on Friday the 12th [lunar day] in the dark fortnight of the
month of Āśvina.
The Rūpāvatāra seems to have enjoyed a continued popularity in later centuries,
because there are several paper copies of it, some of them in Nepālākṣara – one
from NS 697 (= 1577)173 – while others are in Maithili or Devanāgarī. The most re-
cent is a Devanāgarī copy dated Nepāla Samvat 1001 (= 1881).174
Among the kaumudī-type works, a search for the Prakriyākaumudī of
Rāmacandra returns no less than 32 hits.175 At least six of these are dated. NAK
1/446 (A 556/6), in Nepālākṣara, bears the year 601 of an unspecified era. If this
belonged to the Nepāli Era, it would correspond to 1481 CE,176 which means it
would have been copied only a few decades after the work was composed in the
||
172 This is reel A 1162/4, for which no proper record exists in the NGMCP catalogue. However,
the manuscript is described in Śāstrī 1905, 60-61, among those then held in the Durbar Library
of Kathmandu.
173 This is NAK 5-5497 (A 567/8), for which only a minimal record exists in the NGMCP cata-
logue.
174 This is NAK 5-5498 (A 555/2), whose colophon reads: ity ācāryyaśrīdharmmakīrttiviracite
rūpāvatāre subaṃtāvatāraḥ samāptaḥ śubham śrīsamvat 1938 śrīnepālasaṃvat 1001 sāla miti
śrāvaṇava vadi 6 ro 1 etad dine idaṃ pustaka likhitaṃ samāptam likhitam idaṃ pustaka
śrīlalitāpūranagarasya śrīmahābauddhopāśakācāryyaśrījitānandena śubham (fol. 89v3–5). The
year is given both in the Vikrama and the Nepāli Eras. The scribe was a lay (upāsaka) Buddhist
scholar called Jitānanda from the town of Lalitāpūra, i.e. Patan.
175 Interestingly, this work was also known to the Tibetan tradition (see Verhagen 1994, 135–
137, 317–320).
176 Unfortunately the colophon is very short and does not indicate the day of the week, so the
date cannot be verified: saṃvat 601 phālguṇa śukla dvitīyā likhitam idaṃ pustakaṃ (fol. 110v8–
9). Only the direct inspection of the manuscript will be able to tell.
110 | Vincenzo Vergiani
first half of the 15th century. Furthermore, if the catalogue entry is correct, the
copy is on paper, which would make this a relatively early specimen of paper
manuscript in Nepal. If, on the other hand, the date is given in the Lakṣmaṇa Era,
which – as mentioned above – had some currency in Nepal, it would correspond
to 1721 CE. The other dated copies are all from the 17th century onwards, some in
Nepālākṣara, some in Maithili, and some in Devanāgarī. Among those in Maithili,
NAK 1/309 (A 555/1) and NAK 5/3559 (A 555/12) give the year 792 according to the
Nepāla Era (= 1672 CE). The colophon of the former explicitly indicates Kāṣṭha-
maṇḍapanagara, that is Kathmandu, as the place of copying.177 In the latter, the
scribe, a certain Gaṅgādhara, calls himself a mahāmantrin, which suggests he
may have been a high-ranking official at court.178 Another, NAK 1/1076 (A 53/13),
on palm leaf, is dated LS 558 (= 1678 CE), and the scribe’s name is given as Dāmo-
dara Śarmā. The colophon of yet another copy, NAK 1/313 (A 555/9), in
Nepālākṣara and on paper, from the same year expresses the date as NS 798 (=
1678 CE), again in Sanskritised Newari.179
Another Pāṇinīya work composed by a Buddhist author, the Bhāṣāvṛtti of
Puruṣottamadeva (12th century), is also preserved in both palm-leaf and paper
manuscripts, either in Maithili or Nepālākṣara scripts, but none of them is
dated.180 Another work found in the Nepalese manuscript collections is the
Kārakacakra or Vārarucasaṃgraha,181 already mentioned above. It is a short trea-
tise in verse on Sanskrit syntax and word formation, comprised of five sections
(paṭalas), dealing with kārakas, samāsas, taddhitas, tiṅantas and kṛdantas, usu-
ally accompanied by a commentary that was possibly called Prayogamukha and
is sometimes attributed to Dharmakīrti, who might be the same as the author of
the Rūpāvatāra.182 The Nepalese collections hold several copies of the
||
177 It reads: oṃ || oṃ || oṃ || 792 || pauṣe māsi śukle pakṣe navamyāṃ tithau kāṣṭhamaṇḍapa-
nagare yo …
178 nepālasaṃmat [!] 792 || * || * || [-9-] daśamyāṃ bṛhaspatau keva mahāmaṃtrī gaṅgādhareṇa
likhitaiṣā prakriyā || nama kṛṣṇāya || (fol. 97v4–6). There is some uncertainty in the interpretation
because the sentence is clearly ungrammatical, as frequently happens with scribal colophons.
179 sambat 798 pauṣa kṛṣṇa pañcami kuhnu sampūrṇṇa yāṅā || (fol. 129r2–3) (kuhnu ‘on the
day’; yāṅā: past form of yāca ‘to do’).
180 NAK 1/425 (A 52–7) is a palm-leaf copy in Maithili script of the Bhāṣāvṛttipañjikā of
Viśvarūpa, a sub-commentary on Puruṣottamadeva’s Vṛtti.
181 There is some uncertainty about the title: alternative names are Kārakasaṅgraha, Pray-
ogamukha(maṇḍana) and Prayoga(viveka)saṅgraha (cf. the remarks in the catalogue entry of
NAK 4/798 [A 51/14]).
182 The catalogue entry of NAK 4/798 (see previous note), an undated palm-leaf copy in Maith-
ili, remarks that in the work the ‘ślokas of Vararuci's Prayogamukha or Kārakacakra are given
and commented upon. […] In two sub-colophons (as in other MS) the Prayogamukha itself is
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 111
Vārarucasaṃgraha, mostly on paper, often with the commentary. An undated
palm-leaf specimen, NAK 4/798 (A 51/14), is in Maithili script, suggesting perhaps
that this work too may have been brought into Nepal from eastern India. The ear-
liest dated copy is NAK 1/1490 (A 557/8), on paper, in Nepālākṣara, from NS 750
(= 1630 CE), copied by a scholar/teacher (upādhyāya) called Mahādeva.183
Roughly half a century later, in NS 805 (= 1685 CE), another copy, NAK 6/495 (A
1108/06), also on paper and in Nepālākṣara, was prepared by a brahmin called
Cakrarāja, who proudly claims to be ‘the excellent pandit, the sovereign among
the twice-born’ (dvijātīnāṃ cakravarttisupaṇḍitaḥ). In NS 883 (= 1763 CE), the col-
ophon of another Nepālākṣara copy, NAK 4/151 (A 557/7), informs us in a mixture
of Sanskrit and Newari that the scribe Bhāju Dhana had written it for the ‘sole
purpose of study’ (adhyayanārtham eva), surely implying that this was not a copy
made for sale by a professional scribe.184 Another paper manuscript of the Pray-
ogamukha, NAK 1/1590 (A 557/3), undated, is remarkable in that, according to the
catalogue entry, it is written in Maithili script on folios 1v–34v, and in
Nepālākṣara script from fol. 35r to fol. 56v, even though the text is continuous –
further evidence of the close and persisting links between Nepal and Mithilā.
The importation of manuscripts of Pāṇinian works from the Mithilā region of
eastern India appears in fact to have continued in the late medieval-early modern
period. NAK 4/257 (A 53/14), a palm-leaf copy of Aṣṭādhyāyī prepared by a scribe
called Harīśvara for a certain Kṛṣṇānanda, dates from LS 437 (= 1567 CE).185
Slightly younger is NAK 1/1114 (B 35/22), Ṣaṭkārakabālabodhinī, a didactic work
on kārakas ascribed in the NGMCP catalogue entry to Prabhudāsa, from LS 475 (=
1595).186 The 17th century saw the production of a manuscript such as NAK 4/40 (B
35/6), a copy of the Siddhāntakaumudī, on palm leaf, dated LS 532 (= 1652 CE),
||
attributed to Dharmakīrti. However, there seems to be a tradition to refer both to Vararuci’s
verses and Dharmakīrti’s commentary thereon as Prayogamukha’.
183 Colophon: saṃvat 750 āśvinakṛṣṇapratipadyāditye śrīmahādevopādhyāyena likhitam idaṃ
pustakaṃ || (fol. 73r5).
184 Colophon (with Newari words in bold): saṃ 883 jyeṣṭhaśuklayā ekāśi [!] somavāra thva
kuhnu saṃpūrṇṇa yāṅā julo || lekhakāya śubhaṃ bhavatu sarvvadā || śrī 3 madekajaṭāyai prītir
astuḥ [!] || guṇāhimātaṃgagate ca varṣe, jeṣṭhe śucau candradine hares tithau | bhāju dhana
vyākaraṇaṃ prayogamukhaṃ lilekhādhyayanārtham eva || (fol. 50v2–5).
185 See the colophon: la. saṃ. 437 phālgunaśuklasaptamyāṃ candravāsare śrīkṛṣṇānandasya
pāṭhārthaṃ śrīharīśvareṇa 〇 li⁅khi⁆… (fol. 65r2).
186 Colophon: iti ṣaṭkārakapustakaṃ samāptam iti || * || la saṃ 475 pauṣaśudi 12 budhe bhau
ā(dra)grāme śrīmurāriśarmmaṇā likhiteṣā pustakīti ||. This manuscript is mentioned in Śāstrī
1905, vii-viii, where the work is said to belong to the Kātantra school.
112 | Vincenzo Vergiani
copied by a certain Cūḍāmaṇi for his son in a place called Taraunī,187 and NAK
1/468 (A 1162/12), yet another copy of Aṣṭādhyāyī, dated LS 541 (= 1660 CE), which
the scribe, boasting of his ‘clear and graceful handwriting’ (prakaṭacārulekhā),
dedicates to Bhāratī (i.e. Sarasvatī).188 Like the Siddhāntakaumudī, most works of
later Pāṇinīyas – such as Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita, Kauṇḍabhaṭṭa, and Nāgeśa, just to
name some of its major representatives – are well attested in the Nepalese collec-
tions with several modern copies listed in the NGMCP catalogue. (For a synopsis
of Pāṇinīya manuscripts, see Tab. 3)
7 Miscellaneous grammatical manuscripts
While in the previous paragraphs I have focused on the three grammatical sys-
tems that are arguably the oldest and most influential in the intellectual history
of South Asia, here I will look at some of the other grammatical works that are
found in the Nepalese collections. The sheer number and variety of manuscripts
of grammatical works (even outside the main traditions) confirms that vyākaraṇa
played a key role in the literary culture of medieval and early modern Nepal like
in the rest of the subcontinent. Other schools are also represented – in particular,
a search for Sārasvatavyākaraṇa returns more than 200 hits, mostly paper man-
uscripts, with one possibly quite old palm-leaf manuscript189 –, as well as several
works of a didactic nature, or of uncertain affiliation (sometimes mixing elements
of different schools), or smaller tracts on specific topics, or even works dealing
with languages other than Sanskrit. Without any ambition to be in any way ex-
haustive, I will present some of these manuscripts, once again focusing on the
most ancient items.
||
187 Colophon: dviragnīśavakttrāṅkite lakṣmaṇābde śucau kāmatithyāṃ śucau jīvavāre | vyale-
khīd idaṃ pustakaṃ puttrapāṭhe prayatnena cūḍāmaṇiḥ saṁs [sic!] taraunyām || (fol. 158r6). The
name Taraunī recurs several times among the localities of the Mithilā region mentioned in the
table found in Zysk 2012, p. 276 ff.
188 Colophon: la saṃ 541 kārttikaśu pañca[mī] yadartham iha me śramaḥ prakaṭacārulekhānvite
[for °ānvitaḥ?] sa eṣa laṣitānvito bhavatu bhāratītatparaḥ || (fol. 12r3–4).
189 This is NAK 3/686 (B 35/8), in Nepālākṣara, dated Samvat 457 of an unspecified era (no
proper catalogue entry is available): if it were in the Nepāli Era, the year would correspond to
1337 CE, quite an early date for a copy of Sārasvatavyākaraṇa, which was composed around the
mid 13th century; if it were in the Lakṣmaṇa Era, it would be 1577. The latter date seems much
more likely.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 113
The NGMCP catalogue lists a 14th-century manuscript of a work that it calls
(Bhū-)Padagahana. I would tentatively emend the title to Padagrahaṇa on the ba-
sis of the colophon as I could read it in the microfilm (which also reproduces the
initial card with a partial transcription of the same). This work of uncertain affil-
iation and subject is contained in NAK 1-468 (A 1161/12), a palm-leaf manuscript
in Nepālākṣara copied in NS 484 (= 1364 CE), consisting of 13 leaves. The cata-
logue entry provides only very basic physical information and no excerpt. The
colophon (fol. 13v, l. 3) reads:
ity upadhyāyotsavakīrttikṛtaṃ pada[gra]hanaṃ [sic!] samāptam || * || śreyo ’stu || samvat 484
kārttikaśuklaḥ paurṇṇamā[syāṃ ti]tho bharini[!]na¦
[13v4][kṣa]tre | somavāsare || rājādhirājaprameśvara[!]-śrīśrījayārjju○nadevasya vijayarāje
[!] || śrīkāstamaṇḍapa[-2-]na [-1-] likhitā śrī [-13-][13v5][-7-] idam | [-22-]va ca | rakṣatavyaṃ [!]
prayatnena mayā [kaṣṭeṇa] likhitam | śubham astu sarvvajagatām ||
Thus the Padagrahaṇa composed by the Teacher Utsavakīrti has been completed. May there
be bliss. This has been copied in the year 484, on Monday, the lunar day of full moon in the
bright fortnight of [the month of] Kārttika, under the asterism Bharaṇī, during the victorious
reign of the king of kings, the highest sovereign, the glorious Jayārjunadeva, in
Kāṣṭhamaṇḍapa190 … One should make the effort to protect it as I have toiled to write it. May
there be fortune for all worlds.
According to Petech (1984, 130 ff.;191 see also Genealogical Table B) king Jayār-
junadeva of the Bhonta family, born in 1338, ascended to the throne in 1360 in
association with his father Jayarājadeva and reigned alone after the latter’s death
in 1361. Thus the present manuscript belongs to the early years of his rule, which
was later challenged and effectively overturned by Jayasthitimalla in the 1370’s,
although Jayārjunadeva remained nominally in power until his death in 1382. On
the basis of the author’s name, Utsavakīrti, and the similarity of the titles, one
may suspect this to be the same as the Padarohaṇa (see above, § 2), a work be-
longing to the Kātantra school. Only the inspection and comparison of the two
manuscripts will make it possible to establish whether they contain the same
work or two different works by the same author.
||
190 The Kāṣṭhamaṇḍapa was a well-known public rest-house that gave its name to the city of
Kathmandu (see Petech 1984, 187). It is difficult to decide whether here the name refers to the
building or already to the city.
191 However, note that Petech 1984 does not list this colophon among the 16 documents of
Jayārjunadeva’s reign.
114 | Vincenzo Vergiani
A few decades younger is NAK 1/1076 (A 18/6), a fragmentary palm-leaf man-
uscript in Nepālākṣara script of a tract called Ūṣmabheda attributed to Mahe-
śvara, which according to the catalogue deals with the spelling and pronuncia-
tion of words containing the sibilants (ūṣman) śa, ṣa and sa (for an edition of this
work, see Hahn 2006 and 2007). The short colophon bears the year NS 541 (= 1421
CE):
samvat 541 dvirāṣāḍhaśuddhi192 15 tad eva tithau sampūrṇṇaṃ yathā dṛṣṭaṃ tathā likhitaṃ
lekhako [!] nāsti doṣaḥ || (fol. 6v5)
This has been completed in the year 541, the 15th lunar day of the bright fortnight of the
intercalary Āṣāḍha month. As it was seen so it was written, the scribe has no fault.
A few surviving manuscripts indicate that the interest in grammatical works was
not confined to those dealing with Sanskrit, but also embraced grammars of Pra-
krit, which – as is known – was an integral part of the classical Sanskritic literary
culture. Among these the following, kept in the Cambridge University Library, is
especially noteworthy. The manuscript, Or.84,193 is in fact the oldest known
surviving copy of the Prākṛtasañjivanī of Vasantarāja, a commentary on the
Prākṛtaprakāśa traditionally ascribed to Vararuci, by far the most popular gram-
mar of Mahārāṣṭrī Prakrit. Even though incomplete (it ends on fol. 48v with the
final lines of the commentary on the first sūtra of chapter 4, sandhāv acām
aḍlopaviśeṣā bahulam, on fol. 45r, l. 1), it is a generally correct and reliable wit-
ness for the surviving portion. The colophon is missing, but the manuscript can
be dated on palaeographic grounds to the 15th century at the very latest. Moreover,
the verses found at the beginning of the manuscript,194 which are not found in the
printed edition of the Prākṛtasañjivanī, provide some information on its author:
hṛtpadmasadmodaravartti rūpaṃ
dhyātaṃ sudhāsyandi sadaiva yasyāḥ |
prakalpate vāṅmayatatvasiddhyai
devīn namasyāmi sarasvatīṃ tām ||195
manthakṣobhitaduḥkhasindhu196vilasaḍḍiṇḍīrapiṇḍopamaḥ
||
192 Probably to be emended to śudi.
193 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00084/1.
194 The verses are preceded by a short invocation – ≀ oṃ namaḥ sarvvajñāya || – suggesting that
the unknown scribe was a Buddhist. I wish to thank Emmanuel Francis, Andrew Ollet and, es-
pecially, Dominic Goodall for their comments on the readings and the interpretation of these
verses.
195 The first verse is in upajāti metre, the second in śārdūlavikrīḍita, and the last three in āryā.
196 Probably to be emended to °dugdhasindhu° ‘ocean of milk’.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 115
saṃmūrcchatghanaghoraghoṣaghaṭanāvyāghūrṇṇitāśāgajaḥ |
stikṣat197kajjalapūñjasecakarucau kṛṣṇasya pāṇau sthite198 |
yuṣmākaṃ śaradabhrakhaṇḍakacakhes199 tatpāñcajano200 mude ||
bhaṭṭaśrīśivarājāṅgatadoṣaḥ201 prasamitā202nyatejasvī
sūrya iva satyavatyā samajani ○ sūnur vvijayarājaḥ203 ||
pūrṇṇakalo [’]py akalaṃko jāttā204 vasudhātale sūdhakiraṇaḥ205 |
tatpādasamupajīvi206 vasantarājānujas tasya |
suvyaktarūpasiddhiṃ so [’]natisaṃkṣepavistarā○m akarot ||
vararucisūtreṣv etāṃ prākṛtasaṃjīvanīvṛttim || (fol. 1v1–4)
I pay respects to the goddess Sarasvatī, [having] constantly meditated upon her form, ooz-
ing with nectar (sudhāsyandi) inside her abode [that is] the lotus of my heart, so that I may
attain [mastery over] the truths expressed through language/literature.
May the Pāñcajanya conch, whose complexion is like the whisps of [white] autumn clouds,
lying in Kṛṣṇa’s hand that looks [as black] as a cloud [that is] like a heap of wet collyrium –
[the conch] which is like a fragment of cuttle-fish-bone that has flashed [into view] from the
ocean of milk when it was stirred up by the churning, and which makes the elephants of the
directions roll about because it produces a terrible roar so dense that it congeals – be for
your joy.
Bhaṭṭaśrī Śivarāja, flawless and possessed with an energy that eclipsed that of others like
the sun [by which the night is dispelled and which has a radiance that puts all else in the
shade], was born of Satyavatī as the son of Vijayarāja. Even though he has become full [like
the moon/mastered all the arts] (pūrṇṇakalo), his limbs have no marks (akalaṃko) [unlike
the moon’s face], [and] his rays are like nectar on the surface of the earth. His younger
brother and devoted servant is Vasantarāja. He [Vasantarāja] has composed this commen-
tary, the Prākṛtasaṃjīvanī, on the sūtras of Vararuci, neither too short nor too long, in which
the derivation of [speech] forms is perfectly clear.
Vasantarāja is certainly the same as the author of the Vasantarājaśākuna, a work
on divination based on the observation of the flights of birds, which has the fol-
lowing very similar, if less elaborate, set of initial verses that among other things
||
197 Probably to be emended to stimyat°.
198 Emend to sthito.
199 Probably to be emended to śaradabhrakhaṇḍakachavis.
200 Emend to tatpāñcajanyo.
201 Emend to °rājo gata°. gatadoṣaḥ is likely meant to be a pun meaning both ‘flawless’ and ‘by
which the night (doṣa = pradoṣa) is dispelled’.
202 Emend to praśamitā°.
203 Emend to °rājñaḥ.
204 Emend to jāto.
205 Emend to sudhā°.
206 Emend to °jīvī.
116 | Vincenzo Vergiani
detail his genealogy and mention the name of Candradeva who commissioned
the work:
bhaṭṭaḥ śrīśivarājo ’doṣorjitamūrtir atitejasvī |
sūrya iva satyavatyāṃ samajani sūnur207 vijayarājāt ||
pūrṇakalo ’py akalaṃko jāto vasudhātāle sudhākiraṇaḥ |
tatpādasamupajīvī vasantarājo ’nujas tasya ||
abhyarthito ’bhiyatnāt kṛtabahumānena candradevena |
vyaracayad asau tadarthaṃ śākunam anyopakṛtaye ca ||208
This Candradeva is identified as a king of Mithilā by the commentator Bhānu-
candragaṇi (a Jaina pandit at Akbar’s court).209 The Cambridge manuscript con-
firms that Vasantarāja was the son of Vijayarāja and Satyavatī, and Śivarāja’s
younger brother, and it gives credibility to Bhānucandragaṇi’s assertion that
Vasantarāja hailed from Mithilā, given the historical ties between this city and
Nepal. The Vasantarājaśākuna is frequently quoted in king Ballālasena’s Adbhu-
tasāgara, which was begun in 1169 CE (he ruled until 1179 CE), as Kane notes,
while the Prākṛtasañjivanī is quoted in the Kavikāmadhenu of Subhūticandra (c.
1060–1140 CE; see L. Deokar in this volume, p. 673), therefore Vasantarāja cannot
be dated later than the early 12th century.
In Nepal the Prākṛtaprakāśa itself only survives in (presumably younger) pa-
per copies. But another Prakrit grammar, the Prākṛtānuśāsana ascribed to the
Buddhist Pāṇinian grammarian Puruṣottamadeva (early 12th c.), is preserved in
NAK 4–150 (A 53/17[1]), a palm-leaf manuscript in Nepālākṣara, together with the
Apabhraṃśānuśāsana of the same author. Its colophon reads:
iti puruṣottamadevasya paiśācikaṃ sūtraṃ samāptaṃ || saṃ 385 jeṣṭhe likhitam ut-
tamaśrījñānena saptativarṣavayasā || (fol. 16v)
As the era is not specified, we cannot be sure about the exact year in which the
manuscript was copied. The NGMCP catalogue entry gives LS (i.e. Lakṣmaṇa
Samvat) in square brackets, which would correspond to 1515 CE, but it does not
explain on what basis; if it were Nepāla Samvat, the manuscript would be much
older, as the year would correspond to 1265 CE. Once again, only the direct in-
spection of the manuscript (or at least the microfilm) will make it possible to es-
tablish the date more securely on palaeographic grounds.
||
207 The edition reads sanur, certainly a misprint.
208 Vasantarājaśākuna vv. 3–5 (Jaṭāśaṅkara 1997, 4–5).
209 Bhānucandragaṇi’s Ṭīkā: … kena candradeveneti mithilādhīśenety arthaṃ (Jaṭāśaṅkara
1997, 5). Cf. Kane (1977, 805–806 and n. 1309); and Śāstrī (1905, 7).
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 117
8 Conclusions
The data presented in the previous pages – albeit limited and incomplete – allow
us, I believe, to draw a sufficiently clear and intriguing picture of the history of
vyākaraṇa in medieval and early modern Nepal.
The Cāndra system appears to have been predominant in the early medieval
period since virtually all the (admittedly few) grammatical manuscripts from the
first millennium CE contain works of this school. While the presence of both Hin-
duism and Buddhism is attested in the Kathmandu Valley since the early centuries
of the Common Era in inscriptions, sculptures, and architecture (temples, stūpas,
caityas), it appears that, as far as grammar is concerned, the latter prevailed in the
process of acculturation of the local population, predominantly of Newar stock and
language. There is of course nothing intrinsically ‘Buddhist’ in the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇa, but there is little doubt that due to its origin the system thrived mainly
in Buddhist circles and educational institutions. The Buddhist vihāras of the Kath-
mandu Valley must have been responsible for the importation and flourishing of
the Cāndra grammar. They were part of an international network of religious and
educational organisations that extended from Sri Lanka and southeast Asia to cen-
tral and east Asia, with a hub in the great ‘universities’ located in eastern India
(modern Bengal and Bihar), a region that was relatively close and accessible
through the Nepalese Tarai. Moreover, the valley was a major stopover on the most
direct route connecting Tibet to India. Nepalese monks must have travelled to the
centres of learning of eastern India to pursue their education and returned to their
homeland with manuscripts of the works they had studied, which were later copied
again in the local script. All of the most ancient copies of Cāndra works appear to
be in the ‘Transitional Gupta’ or old Nepālākṣara scripts, and thus they already rep-
resent an advanced stage in the process of circulation of these works.
Some of the Nepalese mahāvihāras certainly provided not only instruction to
the local novices but also higher education, thus functioning as centres of intellec-
tual and scholarly debate and production.210 This is confirmed by the presence in
the collections not only of copies of the basic texts (the Cāndra sūtrapāṭha with the
Vṛtti) or the didactic manuals, but also of the sophisticated later commentaries and
treatises, such as Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā and Śabdārthacintāvivṛti.
The accounts of Tibetan monks sojourning in the Valley, and the collaboration of
Nepalese pandits to the translation of Sanskrit works into Tibetan that is attested
||
210 See Dimitrov’s conjecture that the author of the Sumatipañjikā may have been active in the
Kathmandu Valley.
118 | Vincenzo Vergiani
in Tibetan sources, are further proof of the scholarly fervour in medieval Nepal.211
For example, according to Verhagen (1994, 89, 98) Dpaṅ Blo-gros-brtan-pa (1276–
1342), ‘indubitably one of the main exponents of Sanskrit linguistics in Tibet’, is
known to have ‘made several visits to Nepal’, and two of his translations of gram-
matical treatises, namely the Adhikārasaṃgraha and the Vibhaktikārikā, both as-
sociated with the Cāndra school, were produced in Patan; and Yar-kluṅgs-lo-tsā-ba
(‘the translator from Yar-kluṅgs’) Grags-pa-rgyal-mtshan (c. 1285/1295-died after
1378), who produced translations of the Kātantra sūtrapāṭha and Durgasiṃha’s
Vṛtti, was active both in Nepal and his homeland. Around the same time (13th–14th
centuries) we learn from Tibetan colophons that a Nepalese Brahmin grammarian
named Jetakarṇa ‘served as an informant’ for the translator Ñi-ma-rgyal-mtshan,
who studied with him near Kathmandu and produced Tibetan renderings of Cāndra
works (including the sūtrapāṭha); and another, called Śrīmaṇika or Maṇika,212 is
mentioned as the supervisor/tutor of the Tibetan translator of two Kātantra works,
the Tyādyantasya Prakriyā-vicārita and the Uṇādivṛtti (Verhagen 1994, 85–86).
Despite the association of Cāndra grammar with Buddhism, the Nepalese and
Tibetan sources do not seem to indicate that in the Kathmandu Valley its study was
exclusively confined to Buddhist circles.213 The number of extant copies of the vari-
ous works is small, as may be expected after so many centuries, but they are nu-
merous enough to suggest that these books were not meant just for a few erudite
clerics, and that just like elsewhere in the subcontinent, grammar – in one or the
other of its scholastic branches – was a key component of the education and culture
of the local elites, as confirmed for example in the 15th century by the Ākhyata-
ratnakoṣa commissioned by Jayabhairavamalla, the king’s son-in-law, or the copy
of the Kātantravyākaraṇa belonging to the minister Jayabrahma.
The decline of the Buddhist centres of learning of eastern India brought about
by the Muslim invasions in the late 12th century may have initially given an even
stronger impulse to the cultivation of the Cāndra system in the Kathmandu Valley,
as a number of monks/scholars sought refuge there. Approximately one century
later, in the late 13th/early 14th centuries, the core texts (sūtra and vṛtti) of both
||
211 On the regular contacts of Tibetans with Nepal, see e.g. Regmi (1965, 629–631).
212 His provenance is unspecified but the name (or some variant of it) was clearly popular in
medieval Nepal: above we have met an early-15th-century scribe called Maṇika(or Māṇika-)raja
(see above pp. 89 and 98); and the 14th-century court intellectual and polymath who composed
the Abhinavarāghavānandanāṭaka (Cambridge Add. 1658.1), as well as works in Newari on lexi-
cography and dharmaśāstra, was called Maṇika (Māṇikya) (see Formigatti 2016, 56 ff.).
213 See for example the abovementioned role of the brahmin Jetakarṇa in the Tibetan transla-
tion of Cāndra works.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 119
Kātantra and Cāndra were translated into Tibetan (Verhagen 2001, 210), often rely-
ing, as was mentioned above, on the collaboration of Nepalese scholars.214 And the
continued copying of many Cāndra works well into the 15th century shows that the
scholarly community of the Kathmandu Valley, probably strengthened by the con-
tribution of the north-Indian refugees, certainly sustained the tradition for a few
more centuries. However, the drying-up of its original fountainhead, the Buddhist
universities where it had flourished in the first millennium CE, combined with the
changes Newar Buddhism underwent approximately at the same time, with the in-
creasing secularisation of the vihāras and the virtual end of monasticism,215 gradu-
ally caused the system to wither and eventually die out, as evidenced by the sharp
decline in the production of new copies of Cāndra works after 1500.216
Moreover, another factor may have concurred to the decline of the Cāndra
school, namely the Brahmanical bias of the religious and cultural policy initiated
in the late 14th century by king Jayasthitimalla, the founder of the late Malla dyn-
asty, who was possibly of Maithili origins. Mithilā, the immediate southern neigh-
bour to the Kathmandu Valley and a celebrated centre of Brahmanical learning,
had always played a role in shaping the culture of the region, but after its conquest
by the Muslims in 1324–1325 CE a new wave of Maithili refugees, including mem-
bers of the aristocracy and the ‘Brahman intelligentsia’, as Slusser puts it, settled
in the valley. Among them was the former queen Devaladevī, the wife of Harisiṃha
of Tirhut (who died in early 1326 during the northbound journey), with her son
||
214 In this respect E. Gene Smith (1968, 5) notes that ‘[t]he second and greatest transmission of
Indic civilization to Tibet (11th–14th centuries) resulted from a coincidence. Hindu civilization was
faced with a monumental crisis at a time when Tibet was at the beginning of a period of maxi-
mum cultural receptivity. It was this fortunate accident that produced modern Tibetan civiliza-
tion.’
215 On this phenomenon Slusser (1975, 286–287) writes: ‘By the end of the 12th century, a change
had come about in Nepalese Buddhist practice that would at length mean the end of monasticism
and entrain the decline and virtual dissolution of Buddhism in the Kathmandu Valley. […] Ap-
parently, the principal catalyst that propelled the monks and nuns out of their saṃghas and back
into the familiar and nearby secular milieu was the doctrine and practice of Vajrayāna. The con-
ventual, celibate community ceased to have the same value it had as one of the Three Jewels,
Dharma-Saṃgha-Buddha. Celibacy was nullified by the ritualistic practices associated with the
female principles, prajñā […]. The physical conditions and the doctrinal and social climate pre-
vailing by the end of the Transitional Period provided almost irresistible conditions for channel-
ing the monks and nuns back into the secular community.’
216 Something similar seems to have happened at the southern end of the subcontinent, in Sri
Lanka. Like in Nepal, Buddhism kept thriving there, albeit in its Theravāda Pāli-medium form,
but in modern times manuscripts of Cāndra works, which had originally nourished the local Pāli
grammatical tradition, could no longer be found on the island, a clear sign that any active inter-
est in the speculations of the ancient Buddhist Sanskrit grammarians had ceased.
120 | Vincenzo Vergiani
Jagatsiṃha. After they settled in Nepal, Jagatsiṃha married Nāyakadevī, the last
issue of the royal family of Bhatgaon. In 1347 a baby girl, named Rājalladevī, was
born to them, but soon after her mother died, while her father was taken to prison
and nothing more is heard of him.217 Devaladevī assumed regency and somehow
managed to assert herself as the protagonist of Nepalese politics in the following
decades until her death in 1366, through troubled times marked by foreign inva-
sions and unrest among the local nobility. She was instrumental in arranging the
marriage in 1355 of her granddaughter Rājalladevī with the newcomer Jayas-
thitimalla, who acted as the de facto ruler during the reign of the ineffectual Jayār-
junadeva, until after the latter’s death in 1382 he was officially enthroned. Petech
(1984, 127–128) notes that Jayasthitimalla’s ‘lineage was surprisingly obscure’ and
conjectures that he may have come from an aristocratic family of Tirhut, on the ba-
sis of an old chronicle that claims he hailed from the south. He further remarks that
‘the political career of Jayasthitimalla was accompanied by a certain measure of
immigration from Tirhut; in the years after 1380 we find repeated mention in the
chronicle of Ḍoya (Maithilī) residents in Nepal. And the rule of Jayasthitimalla cer-
tainly marked a strong revival of that kind of rigid brahmanical orthodoxy, which
was always typical of Mithilā’.
If we turn now at the history of the other two main grammatical systems con-
sidered in the previous pages, the Kātantra and the Pāṇinīya, the data gleaned from
the survey of the manuscript collections and the study of the colophons largely ap-
pear to confirm the broader historical picture, but at the same time raise further
questions that for now cannot be easily answered. In the earliest period the two
systems do not seem to have made significant inroads into Nepal, a fact which is in
itself surprising. It is of course possible that the absence of early documents, and
particularly of dated colophons, is the result of random loss. And there are undated
palm-leaf manuscripts that should be inspected and dated as accurately as possible
on palaeographic grounds, although overall their number is quite small. However,
especially in comparison with the manuscripts of Cāndra works, it is indeed strik-
ing that there is only one single copy of a Pāṇinīya text that can be dated to the early
second millennium (NAK 4/216, see above p. 105). And it may not be by chance that
this happens to be a copy of the Nyāsa, Jinendrabuddhi’s sub-commentary on the
Kāśikāvṛtti, namely a work that was composed by a Buddhist author who was pos-
||
217 On this complex and somewhat obscure chain of events see Regmi 1965, 288–293; Slusser
1982, 55–56; and Petech 1984, 115–121.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 121
sibly active in the 8th century CE in one of the Buddhist universities of eastern In-
dia.218 The odd copy of this or that Pāṇinīya work may well have made its way into
Nepal in the earlier period, as there was no doctrinal bias against the system itself,
but as far as we can tell this does not seem to have led to a sustained and wide-
spread interest in Pāṇini’s grammar.
The earliest dated manuscript of a Kātantra work is even younger than the
Nyāsa manuscript, as it dates from the end of the 13th century. It is said to be in
Nāgarī script, which suggests a foreign origin. But then, starting with two late-14th
century manuscripts, a continuous and substantial number of manuscripts, mostly
in Nepālākṣara, testify to the successful establishment of the Kātantra tradition in
the region. It is noteworthy that from the colophons its followers appear to have
been mostly high-ranking brahmins. Some of these may have been related to the
court as the recurring references to the ruling kings (less frequent in Cāndra manu-
scripts) seem to suggest, and we saw above that in one case (NAK 1/1078) the copy
is explicitly said to have belonged to a prince (rājakumāra). These few data cast an
interesting light on the history of this tradition, which has received little scholarly
attention after the early 20th century, despite its antiquity and the ubiquitous refer-
ences to it in Sanskrit literature.219 The Kātantra system was supposedly established
as an alternative to Pāṇini and is believed to have been less interested in rigorous
linguistic theory and more in the actual teaching of Sanskrit,220 and purportedly ad-
dressed to a socially broader readership.221 Initially this grammar, ascribed to Śar-
vavarman (of whom nothing is known, but who is generally assumed to have been
||
218 On the likely identity of Jinendrabuddhi the author of the Nyāsa with Jinendrabuddhi the
commentator of Diṅnāga’s Pramāṇasamuccaya, see Steinkellner’s Introduction in Steinkellner,
Krasser and Lasic 2005, xl ff. Note that one of the pieces of evidence that are used to support this
identification is that in the internal rubrics of both works the author is referred to as bodhi-
satvadeśīyācāryajinendrabuddhi (cf. the rubric in NAK 4/216, quoted above, n. 164). Steinkellner
thinks that Jinendrabuddhi may have been active at Nālandā (or a similar centre) c. 710–770 CE.
219 The oldest known fragments of the Kātantra sūtrapāṭha, from central Asia, date from
around the 5th century CE (Scharfe 1977, 162). On the significance of Kātantra in the history of
medieval India, see Pollock 2006, 169 ff.
220 Nevertheless, I suspect the Kātantravyākaraṇa was conceived not so much as a language
primer but rather as a grammar handbook, meant to give a smattering of this all-important sub-
ject to anyone who – for a variety of reasons – did not wish to or could not embark in a full-blown
brahmanical education, which implied studying Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī.
221 Cf. the following verses, said to be from Śaśideva’s Vyākhyānaprakriyā: chāndasāḥ svalpa-
matayaḥ śāstrāntararatāś ca ye | īśvarā vācyaniratās tathālasyayutāś ca ye | vaṇik-
sasyādisaṃsaktā lokayātrādiṣu sthitāḥ | teṣāṃ kṣipraṃ prabodhārtham anekārthaṃ kalāpakam
|| ‘The Kalāpa has various purposes: it is aimed at teaching Sanskrit quickly to those who study
the Vedic texts, those who are slow-witted, those who take delight in other śāstras, as well as to
122 | Vincenzo Vergiani
a brahmin), must have been popular with the Buddhists, and through them propa-
gated to central Asia, but later they seem to have preferred the Cāndravyākaraṇa
composed by their coreligionist Candragomin. As far as I know, no study exists of
the later history of the Kātantra tradition, but we know that over the centuries the
system spread across the subcontinent and further beyond, and its literature kept
expanding. The evidence drawn from the Nepalese manuscript collections suggest
that, in the wake of the historical events briefly outlined above – in short, the de-
cline of the Cāndra school and the rise to power of the culturally ‘brahmanising’
Mallas –, the local scholarly circles first turned to the Kātantra, most probably with
the contribution of newcomers from Mithilā. This in turn implies that in this re-
nowned citadel of brahmanical learning (and perhaps in other areas of North In-
dia222) the Kātantra system enjoyed a position of prestige and could count on influ-
ential followers. To what extent these differed from the Pāṇinīyas, and what the
factors and circumstances were that determined the affiliation to one or the other
system, we simply do not know, but it would be definitely worth investigating.
If we turn now to the Pāṇinian school, its true beginnings in the region appear
to go back to the late 15th century, at least one century later than Kātantra.223 This
impression is corroborated by the fact that virtually all the early copies of Pāṇinian
works are in Maithili script, and therefore they were probably imported to Nepal
from Mithilā, as if there had been a dearth of local copies. It is of course well known
that manuscripts in Maithili script were also produced by foreign scribes who had
settled in the Kathmandu Valley, but the geographical references found in the col-
ophons seem to be to Indian towns and villages, and none of them makes any men-
tion of a Nepalese king. However, from the late 15th century onward the data show
an increasing production of local copies of all the Pāṇinian works (with the remark-
able exception of the Vākyapadīya), including those of the so-called Na-
vyavyākaraṇa, the movement that effectively kicked off a revival of Pāṇinian gram-
mar across the subcontinent. At the same time, the substantial number of late
manuscripts of Kātantra works that were either copied locally or imported shows a
continued interest also in this system.
||
rulers, to those who love talking (?), those who are slothful, those who are engaged in trade,
farming, etc., and those who are busy with worldly affairs and the like’ (Dwivedi 1977, p. 3
prāstāvika; also quoted in Belvalkar 1976, 82, from which I take the reading vaṇik-
sasyādisaṃsakṭā; here Dwivedi read vaṇijas tṛṣṇādisaṃsaktā). For an overview of the state of the
art in Kātantra studies, see Shen forthcoming.
222 On the rise of Kātantra in Bengal in the 15th–16th centuries see Belvalkar (1976, 75).
223 With the usual caveat: if the picture we get from the manuscript collections is not distorted
by the fortuitous loss of all early Pāṇinian manuscripts.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 123
Interestingly, Ruegg (1996, 221) and Verhagen (2001, 207) point out that the in-
troduction of the Pāṇinian system into Tibet took place quite late in comparison to
Cāndra and Kātantra, namely in the 17th century, and suggest various possible ex-
planations, the main one, in Verhagen’s words, attributing ‘the impetus … to the
activities of a particular individual or a small group of associated individuals,
which could be one or more Indian master(s) proficient in a certain system who was
(or were) active in Tibet, or a Tibetan scholar-translator actively seeking tutelage in
a particular tradition’.224 In light of the data presented above it seems reasonable to
suggest that the historical events in Nepal – and their reflections on the local intel-
lectual community – may have played a significant role in the transmission of the
Sanskrit grammatical traditions to Tibet. It cannot be a coincidence that, broadly
speaking, the chronological sequence of this transmission appears to reflect the
state of the art in Nepal, with a delay of one or two centuries.
To conclude, it is tempting to relate the rise of both the Kātantra and the
Pāṇinian grammatical traditions as testified in the manuscripts to the dynastic
change that took place in the Kathmandu Valley in the second half of the 14th cen-
tury, with the rise to power of the Malla dynasty founded by Jayarajasthitimalla,
and the subsequent burgeoning of a more ‘mainstream’ Sanskritic culture that For-
migatti and Cuneo have aptly dubbed ‘the Malla Renaissance’ (see Formigatti
2016), in a context that saw the once dominant Cāndra tradition decline as a conse-
quence of the far-reaching changes Newar Buddhism, and Newar society at large,
underwent at the same time.
||
224 Gene Smith (1968, 6) suggests that one factor of the ‘revival of interest in Sanskrit’ in Tibet
in the 18th century ‘might have been the Newar artisan-merchant community resident in Tibet’,
with its century-long Sanskritic heritage. He also remarks that ‘when Si-tu and his contemporar-
ies went outside Tibet for studies, they almost invariably went to the Kathmandu Valley where
they found a considerable number of learned pandits’. This may already have been the case in
earlier centuries.
124 | Vincenzo Vergiani
Tab. 1: Cāndra manuscripts in Nepalese collections.
(CV = Cāndravyākaraṇa sūtrapāṭha; CVV = sūtrapāṭha with Vṛtti; Nep = Nepālākṣara; pl = palm leaf)
DATE SHELF TITLE SCRIPT MATERIAL
(in CE) MARK
990 NAK 5/732, NAK Sumatipañjikā Nep pl
5/734
before NAK 4/26, CV, CVV Transitional pl
1000 ? NAK 1/1692 Gupta
1085 NAK 4/311 CVV, Nep pl
Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā of
Ratnamati
1134 (kept in Tibet) CVV Nep pl
1155 NAK 3/379 CVV Nep pl
1194 Kaiser 9/27 Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā Nep pl
1199 Add.1657.2 Ratnamatipaddhati of Ānandadatta Nep pl
12th– NAK 5 /456 A, B, Kathmandu fragments of Nep pl
13th c. C, D, E Ratnamatipaddhati
12th c. Or.1278 Candrālaṃkāra of Sāriputta Bhaikṣukī pl
12th– NAK 1/1697 Sabdārthacintāvivṛti Nep pl
13th c.
12th– Add.1657.1 CV-Pañjikā Nep pl
13th c.
1225 NAK 5/729 CVV Nep pl
1243 Kaiser 17 CV-Pañjikā Nep pl
1257 NAK 1/1583 CV Nep pl
1259 (?) NAK 5/724 CV Nep pl
13th c. Or.714 Nibandha of Ratnadatta Nep pl
13th c. Add.1705 Ratnamatipaddhati Nep pl
13th– Add.2121 Dhātupārāyaṇa of Pūrṇacāndra Nep pl
14th c.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 125
DATE SHELF TITLE SCRIPT MATERIAL
(in CE) MARK
13th– Ratnamatipaddhati Nep pl
14th c.
1356 Asiatic Society CV Nep pl
Calcutta 3823
1369 NAK 5/410 Uṇādisūtravṛtti Nep pl
1397 (?) NAK 5/727 CVV Nep pl
14th– Cambridge UL Various CV and CVV Mss Nep pl
15th c.
1411 NAK 5/730 CV Nep pl
1412 Add.1691.4 CV Nep pl
1413 Kesar 582 Subantaratnākara of Subhūticandra Nep pl
1417 NAK 3/685 Ākhyātaratnakośa Nep pl
1420 Or.148 Subantaratnākara Nep pl
1420 NAK 3/361 Tiṅbheda Nep pl
1440 NAK 5/416 Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama of Nep pl
Subhūticandra
1441 NAK 5/731 CV + Uṇādisūtra Nep pl
1454 NAK 5/407 Prādivṛtti Nep pl
1654 NAK 5/6210 Upasargavṛtti Nep pl
126 | Vincenzo Vergiani
Tab. 2: Kātantra manuscripts in Nepalese collections
(K: Kātantra sūtrapāṭha; KV: sūtrapāṭha with Durgasiṃha’s Vṛtti; KVP: Trilocanadāsa’s Pañjikā; DN:
Devanāgarī; Nep: Nepālākṣara; pl = palm leaf)
DATE SHELF TITLE SCRIPT MATERIAL
(in CE) MARK
1286 NAK 3/397 KVP DN pl
1393 Kesar 14 Padarohaṇa of Nep pl
Utsavakīrti
1396 NAK 5/418 Syādyantakośa Nep pl
1411 NAK 5/417 K Nep pl
1416 NAK 1/1078 Dhātupāṭha Nep pl
1425 NAK 3/383 Paribhāṣāvṛtti of Durgasiṃha Nep pl
1447 NAK 9/589 KVP Nep pl
14th–15th c. ? Several Mss of K, KV, KVP, Nep, pl
Paribhāṣāvṛtti, etc. Maithili
1497 NAK 1/1406 K (?) DN paper
1480 or 1500 NAK 5/5496 Triliṅgaprakaraṇa DN (?) paper
(section of Syādyantakośa)
1500 Kesar 234 Syādyantakośasāra Nep (?) pl
1575–76 NAK 5/4274 KVP DN paper
1585 NAK 1/1528 K Nep paper
1587 NAK 1/1388 K (?) Nep paper
1635 Kesar 191 KV Nep paper
1682 not available Dhātuvṛtti-manoramā Nep paper
1692 NAK 1/1351 KV Nep paper
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 127
Tab. 3: Pāṇinian manuscripts in Nepalese collections
(DN: Devanāgarī; Nep: Nepālākṣara; pl = palm leaf)
DATE SHELF TITLE SCRIPT MATERIAL
(in CE) MARK
early 11th c. NAK 4/216 Kāśikāvṛtti Nep pl
1209 NAK 4/755 Sambandhasiddhi Nep pl
1478 NAK 1/464 Kāśikāvṛtti Maithili pl
1487 unknown Rūpāvatāra Maithili pl
1494 NAK 4/326 Aṣṭādhyāyī Maithili pl
1496 NAK 1/1537 Nyāsa Maithili pl
1496 NAK 1/468 Kāśikāvṛtti Maithili pl
after 15th c. Several Mss of Maithili, Nep, paper
Kāśikāvṛtti, Nyāsa, DN
Dhāṭupāṭha,
Rūpāvatāra,
Bhāṣāvṛtti,
Vārarucasaṃgraha,
etc.
1503 NAK 4/764 Rūpāvatāra Maithili pl
1567 NAK 4/257 Aṣṭādhyāyī Maithili pl
1577 NAK 5/5497 Rūpāvatāra Nep paper
1595 NAK 1/1114 Ṣaṭkārakabālabodhinī Maithili pl
1630 NAK 1/1490 Vārarucasaṃgraha Nep pl
1652 NAK 4/40 Siddhāntakaumudī Maithili pl
1660 NAK 1/468 Aṣṭādhyāyī Maithili pl
1672 NAK 1/309 Prakriyākaumudī Maithili paper
1672 NAK 5/3559 Prakriyākaumudī Maithili paper
1678 NAK 1/1076 Prakriyākaumudī Maithili pl
1678 NAK 1/313 Prakriyākaumudī Nep paper
1685 NAK 6/495 Vārarucasaṃgraha Nep paper
128 | Vincenzo Vergiani
DATE SHELF TITLE SCRIPT MATERIAL
(in CE) MARK
1763 NAK 4/151 Prayogamukha Nep paper
1790/1791 NAK 5/3832 Mahābhāṣya DN paper
References
Belvalkar, Shripad Krishna (1976), An account of the different existing systems of Sanskrit
grammar. (2nd ed., rev. ed.), Delhi: Bharatiya Vidya Prakashan.[First edition 1915]
Bendall, Cecil (1883), Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge. With introductory notices and illustrations of the palæography and chronol-
ogy of Nepal and Bengal, Cambridge: University Press.
Chatterji, Kshitish Chandra (1953), Cāndravyākaraṇa of Candragomin. Part 1 (Chapters 1–3);
Part 2 (Chapters 4–6), Poona: Deccan College.
Dash, Prafulla Chandra (1986). A Comparative Study of the Pāṇinian and Cāndra Systems of
Grammar (Kṛdanta portion). New Delhi: Ramanand Vidya Bhavan.
Deokar, Lata M. (2014), Subhūticandra’s Kavikāmadhenu on Amarakośa 1.1.1–1.4.8: Together
with Si tu Paṇ chen's Tibetan Translation, Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag.
Deokar, Mahesh A. (2008), Technical Terms and Techniques of the Pali and Sanskrit Grammars,
Varanasi: Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath.
Dimitrov, Dragomir (2010), The Bhaikṣukī manuscript of the Candrālaṃkāra: Study, script ta-
bles, and facsimile edition (Harvard Oriental Series 72), Cambridge, Mass.: Published by
The Harvard Oriental Series, The Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, Harvard Uni-
versity.
Dimitrov, Dragomir (2011), Śabdālaṃkaradoṣavibhāga. Die Unterscheidung der Lautfiguren
und der Fehler. Kritische Ausgabe des dritten Kapitels von Daṇḍins Poetik 'Kāvyadarśa'
und der tibetischen Übertragung 'Sñan ṅag me loṅ; samt dem Sanskrit-Kommentar des
Ratnaśrijñāna, dem tibetischen Kommentar des Dpaṅ Blo gros brtan pa und einer deut-
schen Übersetzung des Sanskrit-Grundtextes, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Dimitrov, Dragomir (2016), The Legacy of the Jewel Mind: On the Sanskrit, Pali, and Sinhalese
Works by Ratnamati: A Philological Chronicle (Phullalocanavaṃsa). Napoli: Series minor,
Università degli studi di Napoli L’Orientale.
Dwivedi, Jānakī Prasāda (ed.) (1997), Kātantravyākaraṇa of Ācārya Śarvavarmā with four com-
mentaries: Vṛtti and Ṭīkā by Śrī Durgasiṁha, Kātantravṛttipañjikā by Śrī Trilocanadāsa,
Kālāpacandra by Kavirāja Suṣeṇaśarmā, Samīkṣā by editor. Sarasvatībhavana-gran-
thamālā 135, Part 1. Varanasi: Sampurnanand Sanskrit University.
Einoo, Shingo (2005), ‘Ritual calendar. Change in the conceptions of time and space’, in
Journal Asiatique, 293.1: 99–124.
Formigatti, Camillo Alessio (2016), ‘Towards a Cultural History of Nepal, 14th–17th Century. A
Nepalese Renaissance?’, in Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 89: 51–66.
Gornall, Alastair (2013), Buddhism and Grammar: The Scholarly Cultivation of Pāli in Medieval
Laṅkā. Unpublished Ph.D Thesis, submitted to the University of Cambridge.
A Tentative History of the Sanskrit Grammatical Traditions in Nepal | 129
Hahn, Michael (1992), Haribhaṭṭa and Gopadatta. Two authors in the succession of Āryaśūra on
the rediscovery of parts of their Jātakamālās. (2nd ed., revised and enlarged, Studia philo-
logica Buddhica Occasional paper series, 1), Tokyo: International Institute for Buddhist
Studies.
Hahn, Oliver (2006), ‘The Ūṣmabheda of Maheśvara’, in Newsletter of the NGMCP, 2: 19-23.
Hahn, Oliver (2007), ‘The Ūṣmabheda of Maheśvara’, in Newsletter of the NGMCP, 3: 6-9.
Jaṭāśaṅkara, Śrīdhara (1997), Vasantarājaśākunam. Bhaṭṭa-Vasantarājaviracitaṃ Bhānu-
candragaṇiviracitayā ṭīkayā samalaṅkr̥ tam, Mumbai: Khemarāja Śrīkr̥ ṣṇadāsaśreṣṭhi.
Kane, Pandurang Vaman (19772nd), History of Dharmaśāstra, vol. 5, part II, Poona: Bhandarkar
Oriental Research Institute.
Kölver, Bernhard, and Hemrāj Śākya (1985), Documents from the Rudravarṇa-Mahāvihāra,
Pāṭan. 1, Sales and mortgages, Nepalica, 1. Sankt Augustin: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag.
Lalithambal, K.S. (1995), Dharmakīrti's Rūpāvatāra: A critical study, Bibliotheca Indo-Bud-
dhica, 153. Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications.
Liebich, Bruno (1902), Cāndra-Vyākaraṇa. Die Grammatik des Candragomin. Sūtra, Uṇādi,
Dhātupāṭha (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes. Band 11), Leipzig.
Malla, Kamal P. (2000), A Dictionary of Classical Newari. Compiled from Manuscript Sources.
[chief editor, K.P. Malla], Kathmandu: Nepal Bhasha Dictionary Committee.
Oberlies, Thomas (1989), Studie zum Cāndravyākaraṇa: Eine kritische Bearbeitung von Candra
IV.4.52-148 und V.2. (Alt- und neu-indische Studien 38), Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag Wiesba-
den.
Oberlies, Thomas (2012), ‘Cāndriana Inedita (Studien zum Cāndravyākaraṇa V)’, in François
Voegeli et al. (eds), Devadattīyam: Johannes Bronkhorst felicitation volume. Worlds of
south and inner Asia 5, Bern: Peter Lang.
Petech, Luciano (1984), Mediaeval History of Nepal (c. 750-1482). 2nd Edition (Serie orientale
Roma v. 54), Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.
Petrocchi, Alessandra (2016), ‘The Bhūtasaṃkhyā Notation: Numbers, Culture, and Language
in Sanskrit Mathematical Literatur’, in G. Thompson and Richard K. Payne (eds), On Mean-
ing and Mantras: Essays in Honor of Frits Staal, Berkeley: Institute of Buddhist Studies
and BDK America.
Pollock, Sheldon (2006), The Language of the Gods in the World of Men, Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Regmi, D.R. (1960), Ancient Nepal. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay.
Regmi, D.R. (1965), Medieval Nepal. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay.
Ruegg, D. Seyfort (1996), ‘Notes sur la transmission et la réception des traités de grammaire et
de lexicographie sanskrites dans les traditions indo-tibétaines’, in N. Balbir, G. Pinault
and J. Fezas (eds), Langue, style et structure dans le monde indien. Centenaire de Louis
Renou. Actes du Colloque international (Paris, 25–27 janvier 1996), Paris: H. Champion,
213–232.
Saini, R.S. (1999), Post-Pāṇinian Systems of Sanskrit Grammar, Delhi: Parimal Publications.
Sāṅkṛtyāyana, Rāhula (1935), ‘Sanskrit Palm-leaf Mss. in Tibet’, in Journal of the Bihar and
Orissa Research Society, 21, Part 1: 21–43.
Sāṅkṛtyāyana, Rāhula (1937), ‘Second Search of Sanskrit Palm-leaf Mss. in Tibet’, in Journal of
the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 23, Part 1: 1–57.
Śāstrī, Haraprasāda (1905), Report on the Search for Sanskrit Manuscripts (1901–1902 to 1905–
1906), Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal.
130 | Vincenzo Vergiani
Scharfe, Hartmut (1977), Grammatical Literature. History of Indian literature, vol. 5, Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
Shen, Yiming (forthcoming), ‘Fundamentals for the study of Kātantravyākaraṇa’. Nagoya Stud-
ies in Indian Culture and Buddhism: Sambhāṣā.
Slusser, Mary Shepherd (1982), Nepal Mandala. A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley. Vol.
1. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Smith, E. Gene (1968), in Lokesh Chandra (ed.), The autobiography and diaries of Si-tu paṇ-
chen, with a foreword by E. Gene Smith. Śata-piṭaka Series v. 77, New Delhi: International
Academy of Indian Culture.
Vergiani, Vincenzo (2011), ‘A Quotation from the Mahābhāṣyadīpikā of Bhartṛhari in the
Pratyāhāra Section of the Kāśikāvṛtti’, in P. Haag and V. Vergiani (eds), Studies in the
Kāśikāvṛtti. The Section on Pratyāhāras. Critical Edition, Translation and Other
Contributions, London: Anthem Press.
Verhagen, Pieter C. (1994), A History of Sanskrit Grammatical Literature in Tibet. Transmission
of the Canonical Literature. Volume One, Leiden: Brill.
Verhagen, Pieter C. (2001), A History of Sanskrit Grammatical Literature in Tibet. Assimilation
into Indigenous Scholarship. Volume Two, Leiden: Brill.
Zysk, Kenneth G. (2012), ‘The Use of Manuscript Catalogues as Sources of Regional Intellectual
History in India’s Early Modern Period’, in S. Rath (ed.), Aspects of Manuscript Culture in
South India, Leiden: Brill.
Dominic Goodall
What Information can be Gleaned from
Cambodian Inscriptions about Practices
Relating to the Transmission of Sanskrit
Literature?
Abstract: This is a short attempt to gather together such epigraphical clues as can
be found relating to writing for the purpose of the transmission of Sanskrit litera-
ture in the ancient Khmer-speaking world. What Sanskrit works were transmitted?
What were the writing materials used? Where were manuscripts kept? Portions of
both famous and little-known inscriptions have been adduced, involving fresh con-
sultation of estampages and, where possible, of the stones themselves. The first ev-
idence dates from around 600 CE, and snippets of relevant information may be
found scattered throughout the pre-Angkorian and Angkorian epigraphical record,
in other words up to the 13th century. Iconographic representations have also been
considered. Although no pre-modern manuscripts transmitting Sanskrit works are
known to have survived to the present day, it is no surprise to find that the manu-
script transmission of Sanskrit works was not only widespread, but was accorded
an attention in the surviving politico-religious documents of the Khmers that seems
not typical of other areas where the Sanskritic thought-world held sway. As the al-
most exclusive use of variants derived from Southern forms of Brāhmī script sug-
gests, poetic imagery that alludes to writing seems to confirm that the technology
was predominantly that of meridional India: letters were engraved into the surface
of palm-leaves.
1 Libraries and the copying of books
The existence of Sanskrit libraries in ancient Cambodia is attested to from an early
period: an inscription of c. 600 CE records that a certain brahmin benefactor, who
was connected by marriage to a kingly line, gave to the temple of a deity that he
had installed there ‘the entire [Mahā-]Bhārata, along with the Rāmāyaṇa and the
Purāṇa, and he instigated a daily, uninterrupted practice of their recitation’ (K. 359,
verse 4; for this reference-system, see the paragraph of explanation prefacing Re-
ferences). That these were physical books constituting a non-lending library is
clear from the damaged concluding verse of imprecation directed at anyone who
might damage the religious foundation. This inscription furnishes us with one of
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-005, © 2017 D. Goodall, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
132 | Dominic Goodall
the earliest epigraphical allusions to the creation of a brahminical library in the
Sanskritic world. Since it is short and presents a few difficulties of interpretation,
we shall begin this article by giving it in full.
The text, as read by Barth (1885:28–31), is given below, followed by a transla-
tion that differs from that of Barth on a few points and that is the fruit of discussion
between Gerdi Gerschheimer and myself.1
śrīvīravarmmaduhitā svasā śrībhavavarmmaṇaḥ
pativratā dharmmaratā dvitīyārundhatīva yā ||
hiraṇyavarmmajananīṃ yas tām patnīm upābahat
dvijendur ākṛtisvāmī sāmavedavidagraṇīḥ ||
śrīsomaśarmmārkayutaṃ sa śrītribhuvaneśvaram
atiṣṭhipan mahāpūjam atipuṣkaladakṣiṇaṃ ||
rāmāyanapurāṇābhyām aśeṣaṃ bhāratan dadat
akṛtānvaham acchedyāṃ sa ca tadvācanāsthitim
yāvat tribhuvaneśasya vibhūtir avatiṣṭhate
yo ya e […]
dharmmāṅśas tasya tasya syān mahāsukṛtakāriṇaḥ
[…]
itas tu harttā durbud(dh)ir yya ekam api pusta(kam)
[…]
There was a daughter of Vīravarman, sister of Bhavavarman, devoted to her husband, devoted
to duty, like a second Arundhatī, whom the moon among brahmins, Ākṛtisvāmin,2 foremost
among those knowing the Sāmaveda, married, the mother of Hiraṇyavarman.
||
1 A translation of mine of the first three verses has already appeared quoted by Bakker (2014,
142–143, n. 439), but without footnotes justifying the tricky points.
2 Barth (1885, 31) took ākṛtisvāmī to be an adjective (‘dont le seul aspect annonçait la noblesse’)
qualifying the husband, whose name he assumed to be Somaśarman. We shall come to Somaśar-
man below, but it is clear that ākṛtisvāmī does not naturally bear the sense that Barth gives it;
Majumdar, in fact, notes, when speaking about this term (1953, 19, n. 1), that ‘the reading is clear
but the sense is obscure’. This difficulty disappears if the expression is taken to be an anthropo-
nym, and it is abundantly clear from the numerous names ending in -svāmin that are attested in
pre-Angkorian inscriptions, as well as from many names of a comparable period that are known
to us from Indian sources, that Ākṛtisvāmin is likely to be the name of a brahmin. It may seem
abundantly clear that the individual in question was considered to be a brahmin, not simply
because he is qualified as dvijenduḥ (‘moon amongst the twice-born’) and married to a lady com-
pared to Arundhatī, the wife of the brahmin sage Vasiṣṭha, but also because of the rare and in-
triguing circumstance that he knew the Sāmaveda (sāmavedavidagraṇīḥ). Nonetheless, the point
needs to be spelled out fully since Vickery has called precisely this point into question, observing
(1998, 261) that ‘[t]here is in fact no mention of the quality of Brahman or Kshatriya in that inscrip-
tion, and we do not know that Indian caste names bore the same meanings, or that such caste dis-
tinctions were important’. Vickery tabulates the pre-Angkorian instances of names in -svāmin of
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 133
That [Ākṛtisvāmin] installed [here the liṅga called] Śrī-Tribhuvaneśvara,3 together with a
statue (arka) 4 of Śrī-Somaśarman,5 along with elaborate worship and extremely generous ben-
efactions.
||
which he was aware (1998, 201), unfortunately including also instances of governors of towns (-
purasvāmin) and theonyms, and he makes the interesting observation (1998, 200) that when in-
dividuals with names in -svāmin occurred in Khmer contexts, they bore the high-status title
mratāñ. We may add that one of the names that he cites, Dharmasvāmin (K. 725), occurs in a
Sanskrit text in which its bearer is explicitly described as a brāhmaṇa. To his list of such Pre-
Angkorian anthroponyms we may for the moment add Ākṛtisvāmin (following Barth, Vickery
had not realized this to be an anthroponym), Devasvāmin (mratāñ, K. 1214), Śikharasvāmin
(dvija, K. 1141), Kumārasvāmin (mratāñ, K. 1029). (A handful of others may be added once the
inscriptions in which they occur have been inventoried and published.)
3 As Éric Bourdonneau has pointed out to me in conversation, it is somewhat tendentious to
assume that this theonym is Śaiva and refers to a liṅga. Certainly, theonyms ending in -īśvara
typically are liṅga-names, but Tribhuvaneśvara is an exception: the only other pre-Angkorian
instance that we know, in T. 1214, seems to name a Viṣṇu, a point that has been discussed at
length by Griffiths (2005, 20–21, n. 34). Furthermore, all other pre-Angkorian theonyms in
Tribhuvana may all be Vaiṣṇava. Nonetheless, later instances of this theonym are, as the form
of the name leads one to expect, Śaiva (see Griffiths, ibidem), and the fact that this Tribhu-
vaneśvara is linked to what may have been a Pāśupata deity suggests to me that it is more likely
to be Śaiva than Vaiṣṇava. We cannot, however, exclude the possibility that Tribhuvaneśvara
might instead be a Viṣṇu here.
4 We are not aware of epigraphical attestations elsewhere of arka in the sense of ‘statue or wor-
ship’, but we may note that Kṣīrasvāmin in his commentary on the Amarakośa (3rd kāṇḍa,
nānārthavarga 4d: arkaḥ sphaṭikasūryayoḥ) observes (p. 189): arcyate ’rkaḥ, vṛkṣe ’pi, ‘the word
arka [is so formed because it means that which] is worshipped; [it is] also [used] in the sense of
a [particular kind of] tree’. We have therefore proposed understanding it to mean the same as
arcā, a statue that is worshipped. Barth (1885, 31) took it instead to refer to the Sun, which is of
course not impossible: Ākṛtisvāmin might have ‘installed Tribhuvaneśvara along with [statues
of] Somaśarman and the sun’.
5 Barth (1885, 31), as we have remarked in an earlier footnote, took Somaśarman to be the name
of the founder, and it is indeed attested as an anthroponym in an inscription of 930 śaka, namely
K. 989, where the man in question is a bhāgavata servant with the Khmer title chloñ; but, as we
have demonstrated above, the founder’s name here appears clearly to be Ākṛtisvāmin. Further-
more, we now know that Somaśarman may be used as the name of a Brahmin form taken by Śiva
in order to teach the Atimārga. Bakker (2014, 140–145) has set out clearly what little we know
about Somaśarman as the notional ‘fountainhead’ of Pāśupata teachings according to a small
handful of sources. As Bakker observes (2014, 142), ‘Statues of Somaśarman have not come to
light, or have not been recognized as such yet’. Nonetheless, this is not the only passage in which
one appears to be mentioned, for we find Somaśarman as the name for a deity in K. 1073 (of 847
śaka) and also in one other pre-Angkorian inscription, K. 54/55 (of 589 śaka). Once again, the
passage (stanzas V and VI in Cœdès’ edition) is not easy to interpret:
punas saṃskṛtya tenaiva śrī[madā]mrātakeśvare
yojitāśeṣavibhavaṃ śiva[li]ṅgadvayaṃ kṛta[m ||]
134 | Dominic Goodall
He gave the entire Mahābhārata, along with the Rāmāyaṇa and the Purāṇa,6 and he instigated
a daily, uninterrupted practice of their recitation.
For as long as the wealth of Tribhuvaneśvara remains, whoever […]
[…] just a part of the merit of such a person of great good deeds.
Whichever ill-thinking person should take even one book from here [will] […]
The blessing and the curse for future supporters and violators of the foundation can
no longer be reconstructed, so that we no longer know what punishment in which
hell or hells was threatened to impious miscreants; but what remains gives us
enough information to conclude that the gift of the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa
and the Purāṇa was a gift of physical books, presumably several manuscripts for
each of these lengthy works, since we know that the curse was to blight the exist-
ence of anybody who should steal so much as a single book.
The materials with which these manuscripts were produced is not alluded to
here, a point to which Barth draws attention (1885, 31–32, n. 2): ‘D’après la relation
chinoise, les Cambodgiens se servaient, pour écrire leurs livres, de peaux de daim
noircies. (Nouv. Mélanges asiatiques, I, p. 122) A présent, ils font usage des feuilles
d’un palmier qu’ils appellent treang.’ We shall return to this question below, after
pursuing the investigation of libraries in ancient Cambodia.
||
somaśarmmā jaṭāliṅgaṃ hariś caite tathā ˘ –
teṣāṃ tena ca dattaṃ yo devasvaṃ harttum iccha[ti ||]
Barth (1885, 58), who drily remarked ‘Comme il arrive parfois, la partie du texte restée intacte est
ici plus embarassante que celle qui est mutilée’, cautiously proposed ‘(Plus) un chignon où re-
pose la lune, un liṅga’ for the first quarter of the second of these verses. Cœdès (1951, 162, n. 2)
was able to improve upon this by recognizing that a jaṭāliṅga was very probably a sort of mukha-
liṅga upon which, instead of a face, we see the ‘silhouette d’une coiffure’. He then assumed that
Somaśarman was the name of a deceased Brahmin venerated in the liṅga: ‘Ceci admis, il n’y a
plus aucune difficulté à considérer Somaçarman comme un nom propre, celui d’un brāhmane
défunt, vénéré sous l’aspect d’un liṅga sur lequel il était représenté par son chignon (jaṭā)’. We
now propose a further tentative advance upon the two earlier interpretations by translating as
follows:
Having consecrated them again, the same man [scil. Vidyāvinaya] made two liṅgas of
Śiva, equipped with all the requisite wealth [for their worship], in [the temple of] the
venerable [Śiva called] Āmrātakeśvara; [he] also [put there] these: a [statue of]
Somaśarman, a jaṭāliṅga, a [statue of] Viṣṇu. Whoever should steal the divine property
given by this man to these [deities], […]
6 Such early allusions to the one Purāṇa are probably to an early Vāyupurāṇa: see Vielle 2005,
545, who explains that references to multiple Purāṇas begin to appear in works of the late 7th
century.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 135
The mention in stone inscriptions of instituting the practice of reciting or ex-
pounding learned works in temple-premises is of course not uncommon in the In-
dian epigraphical record. Among the very many examples that could be cited, an
endowment for the recitation of the Mahābhārata (Tamil: pāratam) in a maṇḍapa
of the Śaiva temple called the Vidyāvinītapallavaparameśvaragṛha is recorded in
lines 74–75 of the 7th-century Kuram Plates (Hultzsch 1890, 151 and 155), and, to cite
a later example, a mid-11th-century inscription from the Varadarāja-Perumāl temple
of Tirupuvaṉai (Pondicherry Inscriptions 102 in Vijayavenugopal 2006, 21f and 2010,
50) gives the details of endowments for the teachers and the students of numerous
disciplines (Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta) and Sanskrit works (including the epics, the
Manuśāstra and several Vedic texts), as well as for the reciters of Tamil devotional
literature (Tiruvāymoḻi).7
But Indian allusions to the copying of specific texts or to the maintenance of
manuscripts of them appear not only to be relatively rare, but also to date from
some centuries later than this and they tend not to mention specific texts or even
genres of texts. Thus of the half dozen such allusions mentioned by Chitra
Madhavan in her book on Sanskritic learning in Southern India, the earliest
(Madhavan 2013, 14) is a record from Gulbarga district dating from the 11th century
(1058) that mentions the employment of six librarians (sarasvatībhaṇḍāriga), but
most date from the 13th century or later (Madhavan 2013, 136, 138–139, 143–145),
including the most detailed case, a pair of inscriptions of the late-13th-century reign
of Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāṇḍya I (Madhavan 2013: 108 and 132–135) that describe
the activities of a library (sarasvatībhaṇḍāra) maintained in the Chidambaram tem-
ple. To these we may add hitherto unpublished inscriptional evidence of the 12th
and 13th centuries edited by Veluppiḷḷai that appears to speak of the restoration of
(manuscripts transmitting) Tamil devotional literature (tirumuṟaikaḷ) stored in a
part of Śaiva temples that is frequently called by the as yet unexplained name
tirukkaikkōṭṭi (Veluppillai 2013, 140–141 and 296ff).
Chitra Madhavan herself remarks on the paucity of such references (2013, 132),
commenting that ‘[r]eciting the Vedas by looking into books and writing the Vedic
texts have always been looked down upon in ancient times and therefore the Veda
pāṭhaśālās that imparted the knowledge of the Vedic text alone need not acquire or
organize a library’. She notes however (ibid.) that the inscriptional corpus mentions
pāṭhaśālas and ghaṭikās that taught also non-Vedic texts and that such establish-
ments might therefore have maintained libraries, but that there is curiously no
mention of these ‘at the important educational centres at Eṇṇāyiram, Tribhuvanai,
Tirumukkūḍal and the like’.
||
7 Further South Indian examples may be gleaned from Madhavan 2013.
136 | Dominic Goodall
In contrast, the rather smaller Cambodian corpus, of less than 1500 pre-Ang-
korian and Angkorian inscriptions in Sanskrit and Khmer, provides several allu-
sions to written transmission, and these allusions not only begin much earlier, but
they tend to be more specific about the texts copied. Thus, to the early 7th-century
allusion to manuscripts of the two epics and of the Purāṇa that we have examined
above, we may add a handful of others. One of the single richest sources for infor-
mation about Sanskritic learning in Cambodia is arguably the foundation inscrip-
tion of its most exquisite surviving Śaiva temple, Banteay Srei (Pandāy Srī), namely
K. 842 of 890 śaka. This beautifully engraved document explains at some length the
erudition of the founder, Yajñavarāha, the non-brahmin rājaguru who gave Śaiva
initiation to Jayavarman V (K. 842, verse XII).8 Such accounts, fascinating though
they are, are not the subject of this paper, although we shall have occasion to quote
something of Yajñavarāha’s remarks about his education below, but what we shall
examine briefly now is what is said about Yajñavarāha’s education of his own
younger brother Viṣṇukumāra. Here Yajñavarāha refers not merely to the disci-
plines that were taught, as one might expect from a conventional description of a
Sanskritic education, but also to the copying by Viṣṇukumāra of two particular
texts in manuscript.
K. 842/890 śaka (Pr. Pandāy Srī [=Banteay Srei], gopura IV est, face B)
XXVII.
(27) tasya yajñavarāhasya vidyānāṃ pāradṛśvanaḥ
khyāto viṣṇukumārākhyas sodaryyo yo jaghanyajaḥ ||
XXVIII.
(28) yasyāmṛtamayīṃ vidyājyotsnāṃ vaktrakumudvatī
||
8 Cœdès describes Yajñavarāha as a brahmin (IC I, p. 148), presumably because verse XIV of K.
842 tells us that his father was a brahmin called Dāmodara; but in two other textually related
inscriptions of Yajñavarāha, K. 619/620 and K. 662, he styles himself instead as a brahmakṣatra.
The first of these inscriptions shares its first 26 verses with K. 842, but the 27th (numbered X of
face B by Finot) reads:
(19) vrahmakṣatreṇa tenedaṃ vidyānāṃ pāradṛśvanā
(20) asmin yajñavarāheṇa sthāpitaṃ liṅgam aiśvaram
Finot (1928, 55) translates: ‘Ce brahmane-kṣatriya, nommé Yajñavarāha, qui avait vu l’autre rive
des sciences, édifia en ce [lieu] un liṅga d’Īçvara.’
Of K. 662, Cœdès (1929, 292) quotes only fragments from the first 7 stanzas in a footnote, but more
can be read with the help of K. 842 (which again contains identical passages), with the help of
K. 619/620, and from the group of estampages in the EFEO in Paris that are numbered n. 791.
Thus we may discover that its 30th stanza records the installation of a statue of Kātyāyinī and
that its 29th stanza may be plausibly reconstructed thus:
(21) vrahmakṣatre[ṇa tenedaṃ vidyānāṃ pāradṛśvanā]
(22) asmin ya(jña)[varāheṇa sthāpitaṃ liṅgam aiśvara]m
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 137
nirggatāṃ guruvaktrendoḥ pāyaṃ pāyam ajṛmbhata ||
Face B. XXIX.
(1) kṛtsnāni śavdavidyādiśāstrāṇi sakalāḥ kalāḥ
śaivañ ca gauravaṃ yogaṃ bhrātur jyeṣṭhād avāpa yaḥ ||
XXX.
(2) vidyāsantatyavicchittyai kṛtsnāṃ vṛttiñ ca kāśikām
pārameśvarapūrvvāñ ca yo likhac chivasaṃhitām //
Of this Yajñavarāha, who had seen the further shore of [the ocean of] knowledge, the younger
uterine brother was called Viṣṇukumāra. The water-lily of his mouth opened wide, drinking
in again and again the nectareous moonlight of knowledge that came forth from his guru’s
mouth. He received all the disciplines, beginning with that of grammar, from his elder brother,
[as well as] all the arts and the [forms of] yoga taught by Śiva, [and] by the guru [Patañjali].9
So that there should be no interruption in the transmission of knowledge, he wrote out the
whole Kāśikāvṛtti and the [text whose name is] Śivasaṃhitā preceded by [the qualification]
Pārameśvara-.
One of the two texts referred to here is of course probably the celebrated grammat-
ical commentary of Vāmana and Jayāditya known as the Kāśikā, and the other,
given the Śaiva context, seems likely to be one of the Mantramārga scriptures that
has Pārameśvara in its name, the most celebrated of which today is the Mataṅga-
pārameśvara-tantra. It is to that text that Bhattacharya (1961, 48, n. 3) assumes this
to be a reference. But given the absence of any qualifier other than Pārameśvara-,
it seems more likely to be the early Pārameśvaratantra that survives in a fragmen-
tary 9th-century manuscript in Cambridge (Add.1049) and that, from at least the 10th-
century in Kashmir, began to be known as the Pauṣkara[-Pārameśvara], no doubt
in order to distinguish it from other texts that purported to be recensions of the
Pārameśvara (see Fig.1).10
||
9 Cœdès interprets this to refer to just one form of yoga, which is both Śaiva and favoured by
Viṣṇukumāra’s brother: ‘le yoga çivaïte (qui était) celui de son guru’ (IC I, p. 154). This is indeed
a possible interpretation, but it makes the qualification gauravam seem redundant, since the
verse is in any case telling us about what he learned from his guru. If, however, gauravaṃ is
taken to mean ‘of the guru [Patañjali]’, then the verse is a testimony to the recognition that both
Śaiva and Pātañjala yoga could be studied side by side, a state of affairs that was recognised
early, for instance, in chapter 1 of the yogapāda of the Mataṅgapārameśvara, for which see the
recent study by Jean-Michel Creisméas, which includes an edition and translation of the whole
yogapāda of that work (2015).
10 See Goodall 1998, xli–xliv and Sanderson 2001, 5, n. 1.
138 | Dominic Goodall
Fig. 1: A leaf of the Pārameśvaratantra manuscript in Cambridge (Add.1049, fol. 5r), photo-
graphed by the University Library as part of the cataloguing project led by Vincenzo Vergiani
whose successful completion is celebrated by this volume. © Reproduced by kind permission
of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Besides the evidence of books that must have been kept in temple-libraries, it is
well known that the small buildings on either side of the (Eastern) approach to
many Cambodian temples are often referred to in secondary literature as ‘biblio-
thèques’. This uncertain identification was proposed before any inscriptional ev-
idence had been discovered (Lunet de Lajonquière 1902, xxx–xxxi), but now re-
poses also upon the combined evidence of two 10th-century Sanskrit epigraphs
recording the pious acts of a certain Hiraṇyaruci, namely K. 958 and K. 355. The
first of these, dated to 869 śaka (947 CE) and found, according to Cœdès, by Ber-
nard Philippe Groslier in 1959 in an incomplete tower at Pràsàt Kôk Čak, just off
the road between Phnom Penh and Siem Reap about 6 km from Siem Reap, rec-
ords several religious foundations in several towns, including a pustakāśrama, ‘a
resting place for books’ (Cœdès 1964 [IC VII], 141–147).
K. 958 (869 śaka) stanzas XVI–XVIII:
(31) hiraṇyarucinā tena pure rudramahā[laye]
(32) sthāpitaṃ vidhinā liṅgaṃ śrībhadreśvarasaṃjñakam /
(33) sa pinākipade śreṣṭhapure rudramahālaye
(34) rudrāśramatribhuvanasthāneśānapurādiṣu /
(35) liṅgāny arccāś śivādīnāṃ nyadhāl liṅgapurādiṣu
(36) śrāṇāśrayañ ca śraminām āśramaṃ pustakāśramam /
We may translate, following Cœdès (1964, 145), as follows:
This Hiraṇyaruci erected, following the [appropriate] rites, in Rudramahālaya a liṅga
named Śrī-Bhadreśvara. In Pinākipada, in Śreṣṭhapura, in Rudramahālaya, in Rudrāśrama,
Tribhuvanasthāna, Īśānapura and other towns, he set up liṅgas and cult-statues of Śiva and
other deities, a place [for distribution] of cooked food, an āśrama for [the repose of] the
weary and a library (pustakāśramam).
It is not clear from this passage whether Hiraṇyaruci installed only one library or
one in each or several of the towns listed.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 139
Fig. 2: View of the library (pustakāśrama) of Hiraṇyaruci at Phnoṃ Khna, taken on the occasion
of the visit of Dominique Soutif with a team from the Siem Reap Centre of the EFEO in February
2013. Photo: Julia Estève.
The second inscription, K. 355 (Cœdès 1911, 405–406), is the more significant one,
for it is inscribed on the badly damaged door-jamb of a building in the South East
of a Śaiva temple compound at Phnoṃ Khna and it identifies that particular
building upon which it is inscribed as a library. I am most grateful to Dominique
Soutif, Julia Estève and the epigraphic team of APSARA for visiting the site in
February 2013 and for sending me invaluable photographs of the building (see
Figs. 2 and 3), as well as of fresh estampages still pressed against the door-jamb
(see Figs. 4 and 5). These enabled us to confirm, unsurprisingly, that almost noth-
ing more can now be deciphered than was visible to Cœdès more than a century
ago.11
||
11 In several places, rather less can be deciphered, but there are just one or two places where
we can improve on Cœdès’ transcription. The first two visible akṣaras of the first line, namely
ścale, have oddly not been read by him and these allow us better to understand the first verse:
(1) * * * * * * * * ś cale jala ivāṅśumān
bhedābhedātmane tasmai parameśāya no na(2)[maḥ //]
[[Who is]] like the moon [reflected] in moving water— to that Supreme Lord, who is
[thus both] multiple and undivided, obeisance!
140 | Dominic Goodall
Fig. 3: View of the library (pustakāśrama) of Hiraṇyaruci at Phnoṃ Khna, taken on the occasion
of the visit of Dominique Soutif with a team from the Siem Reap Centre of the EFEO in February
2013. Photo: Julia Estève.
||
The moon divided when reflected upon ripples is an oft-repeated image for the paradoxical na-
ture of God found in such Śaiva works as the Parākhyatantra (1.42) and the Devyāmata (see
Ślączka 2016, 198, verse 86). In Cambodian sources, it is rather more common to find the moon
reflected on the surfaces of multiple bodies of water rather than on moving water: see, e.g., K.
225, stanza 1 (where we must understand naikanīra°, perhaps faintly confirmed by EFEO es-
tampage n. 321, in place of naikanira°, as printed in IC III, p. 67), and K. 570, stanza IX, where a
consultation of the stone today enables one to correct Finot’s metrically impossible reading
vikalpa[n n]o dād (which seems to be discernible in the EFEO estampage n. 421) to
vikalpa(bhe)dād. (A discussion of that interesting stanza would cause us to stray too far from our
topic here.)
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 141
Fig. 4: The epigraphic
team of APSARA taking an
estampage of K. 355, the
inscription of Hiraṇyaruci
on the doorjamb of the
entrance to the library at
Phnoṃ Khna in February
2013. Photo: Julia Estève.
Fig. 5: The estampage of K. 355
taken in February 2013 before
being removed from the stone.
Photo: Julia Estève.
142 | Dominic Goodall
XXII. hiraṇyarucinā te(20)[na] * * * * ~ – ~ –
* * * * * * jñ[e]na kṛto12yaṃ pustakāśramaḥ //
XXIII. adhyāpakādhyetṛhitaiḥ (21) * * * * ~ – ~ –
* * * * * * vānāṃ13 śāstrāṇāṃ śastabuddhinā //
That Hiraṇyaruci, of trained intellect (śastabuddhinā), who knew … (…jñena), created this
library (kṛto ’yaṃ pustakāśramaḥ) [[filled]] with [[books]] beneficial for teachers and stu-
dents [and] belonging to … disciplines (…vānāṃ śāstrāṇāṃ).
It is conceivable that, qualifying these ‘disciplines’, the text might once have had
the word śaivānāṃ in XXIIIc, since it is clear from stanzas XIII and XVI that
Hiraṇyaruci, like Yajñavarāha, laid claim to being a Śaiva preceptor of the Khmer
royal family. Stanza XIII can be partly repaired, with the help of stanza VII of K.
958,14 to read as follows:
* * * * * * * nottejayām āsa dhīnidhiḥ
yo dhaumya [i]va pāṇdūnāṃ raghūṇām iva vāruṇiḥ //
Who, a [veritable] treasury of intelligence, inflamed (uttejayām āsa) [[scil. the fiery energy of
those kings]], just as Dhaumya did for the Pāṇḍavas and Agastya for the Raghus.
Stanza XVI is not echoed in K. 958 and we can decipher no more in it than could
Cœdès, but we may attempt a partial translation, assuming that it refers to Speech
(Sarasvatī / Vāgīśvarī) residing in Hiraṇyaruci’s mouth, perhaps dancing upon his
tongue:
aṣṭaviṅśatidhā śaivī pañcadhādhyātmanai(15) ~ *
* * * * * * * * * * syakamale sthitā //
||
12 Cœdès prints jñana (?) kṛto in XXIIc, which would be unmetrical.
13 Cœdès prints [sar]vānāṃ in XXIIIc, which would be ungrammatical.
14 Stanza VII of K. 958 reads:
(13) teṣām uttejakas tejojvalanasyeśitā vidheḥ
(14) pāndūnāṃ iva yo dhomyo raghūṇām iva vāruṇiḥ /
Cœdès translates (IC VII, p. 144) as follows:
Maître de la règle, il attisait le feu de leur tejas, comme fit Dhaumya pour les Pāṇḍava,
et (Agastya) fils de Varuṇa pour les descendants de Raghu.
It seems not unlikely, however, that we are rather intended to take īśitāvidheḥ as a compound
referring punningly both to their consecration as kings and to their initiation as liberated souls,
causing them to realise their innate Śiva-nature:
Who was the one who inflamed the fire of their energy by bringing about their [innate]
Lord-ship (īśitāvidheḥ), …
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 143
Fig.6: Interior view of Hiraṇyaruci’s library at Phnoṃ Khna taken in February 2013, showing the
lozenge-shaped holes in the sides of the building. Photo: Julia Estève
[[In whose]] lotus-mouth ([ā]syakamale) Speech [[danced]], twenty-eight-fold in her Śaiva
form (śaivī); fivefold as [brahmanical] reflection about the self (?).15
Here Speech is presumably twenty-eight fold as the twenty-eight scriptures of the
Saiddhāntika canon.16
Returning for a moment to the seemingly windowless building that Hira-
ṇyaruci’s inscription labels as a library, it might appear that it was not intended
as a well-lit space for sitting down and poring over books, but rather as a place of
storage, for the small diamond-shaped holes in its sides (see Fig. 6) seem, at least
to a modern viewer used to the overcast skies of Northern Europe, to be designed
for ventilation rather than light. But Lunet de Lajonquière’s account of the fea-
tures typical of such library buildings across the Khmer world suggests that those
small openings were in fact intended for lighting the large vaulted spaces within,
||
15 If ādhyātma refers to a branch of learning that embodies Sarasvatī, it could refer to Upaniṣads
or, as in the Niśvāsamukhatattvasaṃhitā (4.42–69), to the philosophising of the Sāṅkhyas (see
Kafle 2015, 27 and 268ff). It is not clear to me why either of these should be described as fivefold.
16 For the names of these twenty-eight scriptures in various old Śaiva sources, see Appendix III
of Goodall 1998 (pp. 402ff).
144 | Dominic Goodall
and that they are, in other comparable buildings, replaced by windows screened
by balustrades (1902, xxx):
Ils ne renferment qu’une seule salle également rectangulaire, ouverte à l’O., c’est-à-dire
dans la direction du sanctuaire. Cette salle est souvent éclairée par des jours pratiqués dans
les grandes faces. Ces jours sont, ou bien de petites ouvertures en losange, ou bien des fenê-
tres larges mais peu hautes et garnies de balustres, toujours ménagés à une hauteur telle
qu’ils ne peuvent servir qu’à éclairer l’intérieur, sans permettre de regarder de l’extérieur à
l’intérieur ou réciproquement.17
So these may really have been intended as spaces for study, sufficiently lit, given
the strong sunshine of the region, by little more than slits in their sides. One other
misapprehension should perhaps be touched upon. It has been mentioned to me,
but I can unfortunately not remember by whom, that some comparable and sim-
ilarly positioned (opening to the West on either side of the Eastern approach to
the main sanctuary) buildings at other Khmer sites may bear signs of having had
fires lit in them, which might seem surprising if they were really places for the
storage and study of books. I do not know if this is true, but if any such buildings
did regularly have fires lit in them (the South-East being after all the direction of
Agni and the place of the kitchen in South Indian temples, such as in the great
temple at Tanjore), this does not necessarily preclude their having been used for
the storage of books, for hanging palm-leaf manuscripts above fireplaces, where
smoke and dry warmth would minimise the attacks of insects and fungus, was
evidently commonly practised in some parts of South India:18 manuscripts of
Tulu-speaking areas kept today in the French Institute of Pondicherry, for in-
stance, typically have blackened edges that appear to be the result of such stor-
age-practices, e.g. RE 43228 (see Fig. 7).
||
17 Translation: ‘These [buildings] enclose just one room, also rectangular, which opens to the
West, in other words towards the sanctuary. This room often receives light from windows made
in its long sides. These windows may either be small lozenge-shaped openings or windows that
are broad but not tall and decorated by balusters, always arranged at a height such that they can
only serve to give light to the interior, without allowing one to look from the inside to the outside,
or vice versa.”
18 P. Perumal’s thesis on manuscript conservation has information on this subject, including,
as far as I recall, images of metal frames conceived for hanging manuscripts over kitchen fires,
but I do not have access to this document. He mentions the practice in his blog of May 2013
(https://drperumal.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/preventive-consersvation-of-palm-leaf-manu-
scripts/), consulted on 25th October 2015.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 145
Fig.7: A palm-leaf manuscript in Tuḷu script, now in the collection of the Institut Français de
Pondichéry: RE 43228. The blackened edges of the leaves are consistent with its having been
kept above a fire. Photo: Dominic Goodall.
2 Inscriptional references to materials and
scripts
Particular attention being accorded to the preparation and preservation of man-
uscripts, rather than simply to the texts that they transmit, as is common in the
Indian subcontinent, is further attested to by inscriptions of the preceding and
succeeding centuries. Of particular note are the late-9th-century inscriptions of
King Yaśovarman. Among the numerous ashrams founded by this king, those in
Angkor include in their inscription-charters (verse 87 of K. 701 and K. 279) the
provision that students should be furnished with blank palm-leaves (riktapattra),
ink (maṣī) and mṛtsnā (Cœdès 1932, 92 and 103), and the stipulation (verse 98)
that each ashram should employ two scribes (lekhakau), two librarians
(pustakarakṣiṇau, ‘book-protectors’) and six preparers of leaves (pattrakārakāḥ)
146 | Dominic Goodall
(Cœdès 1932, 92 and 104).19 We shall return below to the question of why mṛtsnā,
which Bergaigne (1893, 430) and, following him, Cœdès (1932, 103) both take to
be chalk (‘craie’), should be supplied to students.
This same Yaśovarman may well have been personally interested in ques-
tions of transmission, for it is he who attempted, it seems, to bring about a change
in official script in his kingdom. Alongside the alphabet regularly used in his day
for both Sanskrit and Khmer that had gradually evolved from the script often
dubbed ‘Pallava Grantha’ (although actually used across much of South East
Asia, along the Eastern littoral of the Indian sub-continent and across a large
swathe of the southern end of the Indian peninsula), Yaśovarman championed a
new script of Northern type, related to the group of styles usually referred to as
Siddhamātṛkā, and it seems that he intended it to become a sort of national
script.20
K. 290, stance CIX.
ambuje[ndrapratāpena ka]mvujendrena nirmmitam
amvujākṣe[ṇa tenedaṃ] kamvujākṣaram ākh[y]ayā //
This lotus-eyed king of the Kambujas, who had the fiery energy of [the sun, who is] the lord
of lotusses, created this [script], by name Kamvujākṣara.
Moreover, as Estève and Soutif remark in their discussion (2011, 341–342) of this
attempt at an official change of script — an attempt which appears not to have
outlasted this king’s reign —, Yaśovarman vaunted himself, in the inscriptions he
commissioned, not only for his śāstric learning, but also for his prowess in
scripts.
K. 323 (śaka 811), verse 51 describing the king Yaśovarman
yas sarvvaśāstraśastreṣu śilpabhāṣālipiṣv api
nṛttagītādivijñāneṣv ādikartteva paṇditaḥ
||
19 For some of the latest discoveries and reflections relating to Yaśovarman’s extraordinary
campaign of āśrama-building, see Estève and Soutif 2011. The description of further archeologi-
cal discoveries is to be expected in the doctoral thesis of Socheat Chea, ‘Saugatāśrama’, un
āśrama bouddhique à Angkor (Ong Mong), to be defended at the university of Paris IV. For a dis-
cussion of the possibility that pattrakāra might refer not to those who prepare palm-leaves for
writing but instead to those who use leaves to prepare dishes for eating from, see Chhom 2016,
85–100.
20 For a discussion of this official script-change, see Estève and Soutif 2011, 341–342.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 147
Who was, like the primordial creator, skilled in all disciplines of learning and in weaponry,
in arts, languages and scripts too, [and] in such branches of knowledge as dancing and
singing.
This emphasis on the written word again would, it seems to me, be surprising in
the Indian subcontinent, where knowledge of numerous scripts seems often not
to be especially prized today, and where I am not aware of having noticed such
knowledge adverted to in royal lapidary proclamations.21 Nor is it the only such
passage in the Cambodian epigraphical record: returning to the foundation in-
scription of the temple now called Banteay Srei, K. 842, we find that a similar
claim is made for Yajñavarāha in stanza XXI:
(21) ākhyāyikākṛtir abhūt svadeśe yadupakramam
nānābhāṣālipijñaś ca prayoktā nāṭakasya yaḥ ||
In Cœdès’ translation, this is rendered thus:
Dans son pays, il provoqua la rédaction de petits récits, lui qui connaissait diverses langues
et écritures et composait des pièces de théâtre.
But it is possible that we should rather understand as follows:
Inspired by whom, the composition of an ākhyāyikā22 was produced in his native place;
who, knowledgeable about various languages and scripts, acted in dramas.
||
21 A counter example brought to my attention by Melinda Fodor: a very much later boast in
quite a different context may be found in verse 5 of the prologue to the Ānandasundarī, a Prakrit
play about the 17th-century warrior-king Sivaji, which describes its author in these terms:
īso jassa khu puvvao uṇa mahādevvo pidā ajjuā
kāsī jassa a suṃdarī piaamā sāaṃbharī a ssasā
sattaṭṭhottilivippahū guṇakhaṇī coṃḍājibālājiṇo
potto bāvisahāaṇo caürahī jo savvabhāsākaī
The chāyā of Bhaṭṭanātha reads:
īśo yasya khalu pūrvajaḥ punar mahādevaḥ pitā, ambā
kāśī yasya ca sundarī priyatamā śākambharī ca svasā|
saptāṣṭoktilipiprabhur guṇakhaniś cauṇḍājibālājeḥ
pautro dvāviṃśatihāyanaś caturadhīr yaḥ sarvabhāṣākaviḥ
We may translate :
Whose elder brother, as is well known, is Īśa, whose father is Mahādeva, whose mo-
ther is Kāśī, whose beloved is Sundarī, whose sister is Śākambharī, master of seven or
eight languages and scripts, a mine of virtues, grandson of Cauṇḍājibālāji, twenty-two
years of age, clever-minded, a poet in every language.
22 How exactly an ākhyāyikā is to be defined is something about which there has been disagree-
ment from the time of Bhāmaha and Daṇḍin, and the only ancient surviving work agreed to be
148 | Dominic Goodall
3 Post-10th-century evidence
Moving forward in time to the 11th century, we find another donation of a physical
book, this time not identified, to a religious foundation by a certain Śivavindu,
whose grandfather received from Sūryavarman I the hereditary priesthood of a
Kapāleśa temple (K. 278, stanza 23):
śāstrasandarśśanābhyāsād vyatārid23 rāmaṇīyakam
pustakaṃ yo vimānārthaṃ śrībhadreśālayeśvare //
Barth translates (1885, 116):
Appliqué à faire connaître les saints livres, il fit hommage à l’Īçvara du sanctuaire de
Bhadreça d’un splendide volume au contenu vénéré.
Given the presence of the word abhyāsa here, it seems conceivable that the verse
is intended to mean that Śivavindu himself copied a book (or books, if we assume
a generic singular) before donating it, for we might interpret as follows:
Motivated [by a desire both] to cause [others] to see the śāstras/scriptures and to practise
them [himself], he gave a beautiful book [that he had copied] to the Lord of the Bhadreśa
temple, for [keeping in] the vimāna.
Finally, the 12th-century biographical poem of K. 364 from Ban That (Finot 1912),
about a certain Subhadra who took the Śaiva initiation name Mūrddhaśiva, fur-
nishes further evidence of the emphasis in Cambodia on the physical book rather
than the discarnate text, for here too we find a reference to a library.
[...]Last face of K. 364 (continuous numeration of the stanzas is impossible because of dam-
age):
niśśeṣaśāstrair likhitais sanāthā[n] (54) = - ~ - - ~ ~ - ~ - ān |
sa pustakān adhyayanācchidārthaṃ tatrāśrame nekavidhān acaiṣīt ||
Dans cet āçrama, pour que l’étude y fût poursuivie sans interruption, il réunit un grand
nombre de manuscrits traitant de toutes les sciences... (Finot 1912, 28).
||
an ākhyāyikā is the Harṣacarita; what is clear is that it should be either an autobiographical San-
skrit prose poem or one based on facts that were directly experienced by the author (see De 1924,
in particular p. 517).
23 We must of course understand vyatārīd; Barth notes (1885, 107, n. 18) that ‘L’i bref est ici
parfaitement net’.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 149
Furthermore, the same inscription offers us a fine four-verse vignette of the edi-
fying spectacle of a scholarly debate in which the judges have their books laid
out in front of them for reference.
XVIII.
(35) dīkṣāvidhau sati na kevalam eva somam
āmantrito sakṛd apāyayad ānṛśaṃsāt
(36) yo nyāyasāṃkhyakaṇabhuṅmataśabdaśāstra-
bhāṣyārthasomam api sūrijanān pipāsūn (corr.; pipāsūr Finot)
When he accomplished a dīkṣā [for performing a Vedic sacrifice], he caused, when invited
to do so, thirsty learned folk to drink repeatedly (asakṛt), not only Soma-juice, but also, out
of kindness, the juice that was the expounded meaning24 of the disciplines of Nyāya,
Sāṅkhya, Vaiśeṣika and grammar.
XIX.
(37) vidyāpavarggavihitāpacitiprabandhe
yasyāśrame ’navaratāhutidhūmagandhe
(38) durggāgameṣu matibhedakṛtārthanītyā
vidyārthināṃ vivadatāṃ dhvanir utsasarppa
Above his āśrama, in which there was a constant stream of [donative] acts of honour per-
formed [by graduating students] at the moment of concluding their studies, which was fra-
grant with the smoke of an uninterrupted sequence of sacrifices, there rose [constantly] the
sound of students debating over difficult [passages of] transmitted texts (durgāgameṣu) in
a fashion that was successful in accordance with the various schools (matibheda-
kṛtārthanītyā).25
XX.
(39) athādhvare śrījayavarmmadevas
satkartukāmo guṇinān nikāyam
(40) guṇānurodhena parīkṣaṇāya
niśśeṣaśāstrārthavido nyayuṅkta
Now Śrī-Jayavarmadeva, desirous of honouring an assembly of persons of merit, appointed
scholars of all the śāstras to examine, in accordance with his good qualities, [Mūrdhaśiva].26
||
24 Instead of taking °bhāṣyārtha° in this way, one could understand °bhāṣya° to refer to the
Mahābhāṣya, as Finot has done (1912, 25).
25 This expression seems not straightforward to me and I am not certain of having interpreted it
correctly. Finot (1912, 26) translates: ‘discutant sur les textes difficiles avec la dextérité de contro-
versistes éprouvés’.
26 I have assumed that it was Mūrdhaśiva/Subhadra whom the king wanted to have examined for
the amusement and edification of persons of merit, but Finot’s translation (1912, 26) suggests a
150 | Dominic Goodall
XXI.
(41) teṣāṃ purassthāpitapustakānāṃ (corr.; puras sthāpita° Finot)
saṃpraṣṭum udyuktavatān nikāmam
(42) ciccheda pakṣaṃ mativajrapātād
yaḥ parvvatānām iva vajrapāṇiḥ
With the thunderbolt of his understanding, he slashed their arguments (pakṣam) as they
began eagerly to interrogate him, with their books placed in front of them, just as Indra
[slashed] the wings (pakṣam) of the mountains.
4 Materials
Before bringing to a close this small collection of allusions to manuscripts and textual
transmission in ancient Cambodia, we should return for a moment to consider the ques-
tion of materials that were used. We saw above that the earliest reference to books tells
us nothing about the materials of the books in which texts were written and that Barth,
citing a Chinese source, mentioned blackened deerskin leather. We have no basis for
excluding altogether the possibility that leather was used for text-transmission, but it
would be culturally surprising; given the Southern script-type adopted in Khmer-speak-
ing territory, we might reasonably expect other aspects of the writing-culture to be
shared. Moreover, such later indications of materials as can be found invariably point
to the use of palm leaf. These indications include textual references, such as those in
the 9th-century āśrama-inscriptions of Yaśovarman that we have alluded to above, and
sculptural representations of books: for an example in which the book seems clearly to
be a regular bundle of palm-leaves tied together, see Fig. 8.27
Sculptures can of course be deceptive, as many South Indian examples demon-
strate, since the convention there seems typically to represent palm-leaf books as be-
ing so implausibly floppy that they hang down from the sides of the holder’s
hand (see Fig. 9). In other words, one might even ask oneself whether these ‘palm
||
slightly different scenario: ‘Un jour, dans un sacrifice, le roi Jayavarman, voulant honorer une réu-
nion d’hommes de mérite, chargea des connaisseurs en toutes sciences de les examiners selon leur
mérite.’
27 As Brice Vincent has kindly pointed out to me, one of the nearly 2000 celestial ladies carved in
bas-relief at Angkor Vat is described by Goloubew (1930, 8) as holding such a palm-leaf bundle:
‘Elle tient, entre le pouce et l’index de la main droite un livre en feuilles de latanier sur lesquelles
sont gravés des caractères.’ But to me examining the images in question (Planches 223 and 224), it
is not clear whether the sculptor has tried to represent a tablet or a book of palm-leaves or some
other inscribed object.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 151
Fig.8: Statue of Avalokiteśvara of the 11th or 12th century kept in the National Museum in Bangkok.
In his upper hands he holds a rosary and a conch; in his lower hands he holds what looks like a
custard apple, but is presumably a lotus-bud, and a palm-leaf book. The statue is on display with
no indication of provenance beyond that it is an instance of ‘Khmer Art’. Photos: Dominic Goodall.
leaves’ could not after all have been straps of leather! Furthermore, such evidence does
not show us whether the surface of the leaves was written upon with ink and using a
nib, as in Nepal and Northern India and some parts of the Indonesian archipelago (see
Gunawan 2015), or whether the surface was incised with a stylus and then inked, as in
the South of India and along the Eastern littoral. But here too it seems reasonable to
assume that the Southern technology of incision was followed from early on, not only
because it is that tradition that was employed in Cambodia for writing on palm leaves
until recent times, but also because Khmer script derived from ‘Southern Brāhmī’ and
in the various pre-modern stages of its evolution seems never to display the thick and
thin strokes that are typically associated with a nib rather than with a stylus. (The ac-
quisition of thicks and thins in printed modern Khmer is parallelled in the printed forms
of the South Indian scripts used for Tamil, Kannaḍa and Telugu, which all also lacked
thicks and thins in their pre-modern manuscript forms.) Even the samples of ‘Northern’
Kamvujākṣara from the reign of Yaśovarman do not seem to display such thicks and
thins (see Fig. 10). By way of contrast, well engraved inscriptions from regions in which
writing on palm leaves does not involve incision do typically have broader and thinner
strokes and often thickened serifs (see Fig. 11), with these features often forming part of
the identity of the letters that have them.
152 | Dominic Goodall
Fig. 9: Dakṣiṇāmūrti, holding a book in his lower left hand, on the South side of the circa 9th-cen-
tury Aṭṭahāseśvara temple in Tiruttaṇi. Photo: Dominic Goodall. Were the leaves really this floppy?
Is this not actually a representation of the kind of palm-leaf manuscript we see today? Or is the
apparent floppiness an artistic convention for conveying the flexibility of palm-leaves?
Fig. 10: Detail of an estampage of one of Yaśodharavarman’s 9th-century āśrama-inscriptions
in ‘Kamvujākṣara’: EFEO estampage No. n. 352-C of K. 279. Note that there are no thicks and
thins and that rather than serifs the letters have the sorts of small volutes that are typical of
scripts associated with incision in palm- leaves.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 153
Fig. 11: Detail of a finely engraved Nepalese inscription that displays the serifs and the thick
and thin strokes typically associated with writing on the surface of a document using a nibbed
instrument. Note, for instance, the bha in the first line (which begins [oṃ] svasti kailāsakūṭa-
bhavanād): its serifs are an integral part of the letter; without them, we might not recognise it.
Photo: Dominic Goodall. The inscription is that published as No. XLI by Gnoli (1956, 56 and
Plate XLII).
I have just asserted that the 9th-century āśrama-charter inscriptions of Yaśovar-
man provide evidence of the use of palm-leaves, but it should be noted that this
is not how the passage was interpreted when it was first printed. Here is the half-
line in question as it occurs in K. 279:
LXXXVII ab.
(11) riktapattraṃ maṣīṃ mṛtsnāṃ dadyād adhyetṛsādhave
154 | Dominic Goodall
Bergaigne (1893, 430–431), translating a version of this in which the second pāda
instead reads adhyetṛṣu diśed api, interprets as follows:
Des feuillets vides, du noir animal, de la craie, seront fournis aux étudiants.
And he adds a note (1893, 430, n. 8) that begins: ‘Du noir animal pour noircir les
feuillets, de la craie pour y écrire.’ He then proceeds to refer back to the footnote
of Auguste Barthe (1885, 31, n. 5) mentioned above that records that an ancient
Chinese account refers to the use by the Khmers of blackened deerskin. This sug-
gests that Bergaigne imagined that the āśrama-charter inscriptions referred to
blank ‘leaves’ of deerskin that were blackened and written upon with chalk.
Coèdès (1908, 222 and 1932, 103) follows Bergaigne’s translations of all three
items with no further comment.28 Now that we have more context than Bergaigne
in the 1890s, the notion that ‘blank leaves’ referred to pieces of deerskin and that
the maṣī was used for blackening the whole surface of those pieces of parchment
seems rather less probable than that the ‘leaves’ were simply palm leaves and
that the maṣī was a blackening agent for rubbing into incised letters. Further-
more, apart from the semantic stretching that would be required to allow ‘leaf’
(pattra) at this early date to mean parchment, there would also be the oddity that
the charters would charge the students with blackening sheets of parchment even
though the same charters inform us, as we have seen above, that a staff of six was
to be engaged in preparing the ‘leaves’ (ṣaṭ pattrakārakāḥ). Assuming then that
the leaves are after all unblackened palm-leaves, this leaves the question of the
identity and purpose of mṛtsnā, which typically appears to mean ‘clay’, but for
which Monier-Williams, although he does not mention chalk, also records the
sense ‘aluminous slate’.
Until now, it seems to me, the scholarly literature has not focussed on this
difficulty and has therefore not yet drawn into the discussion of this passage an-
other verse, one from a royal panegyric engraved just 70 years later, that also re-
fers to mṛtsnā and writing together. The verse in question is 134 on the huge 298-
verse stela-inscription commemorating the foundation of the Śaiva temple
known today as Pre Rup in 883 śaka. It is, of course, part of a description of a
king, this time the tenth-century Khmer king Rājendravarman:
yadīyaṃ śaramṛtsnābhir yyaśaḥ kāmena kāntijam
||
28 Cœdès attempts, however, to respect number and syntax more literally, rendering the same
reading from another charter inscription thus (1908, 222): ‘Qu’on fournisse aux étudiants un
feuillet vide, du noir animal et de la craie’. His three other translations (1932, 103) similarly at-
tempt to reflect closely the small differences in formulation in other charters.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 155
hṛdyaṃ hṛdi varastrīṇāṃ lagnaṃ likhitam akṣaram
Following Cœdès interpretation (1937 [IC I], 124) we would understand: 29
The glory that was born of his beauty, and that was pleasing to the heart, was a written
character (akṣaram) that Kama had engraved indelibly (akṣaram) in the hearts of noble
women with the powder of his arrows (śara-mṛtsnābhiḥ).
This is fine as far as it goes. The verse calls to mind several poetic ideas, such as
the convention of heroes marking their arrows with names (usually their own)
before shooting them, and the smearing of arrows with poisons,30 and there is an
elegant play on the word akṣara (letter/indelible). But there are two basic diffi-
culties with this interpretation for me. What can the ‘powder of his arrows’ be ?
And how would the powder be involved in the writing process ?
In Kāma’s case, this powder might be the pollen of the flowers that are his
arrows. Sarva Daman Singh (1965, 172) recounts this anecdote about an extraor-
dinary South Indian archer in modern times who was nicknamed Kaliyugī Ar-
juna:
He smeared exceedingly sharp arrow-tips with chalk dust and shot them at the bare backs
of students with a perfect delicacy of control, so that they left only chalk marks on their
tender targets without even grazing them.
Now this is not about ancient times, but if the trick was practised recently, then
it might have been thought up long ago. So perhaps the pollen of Kāma’s flower-
arrows is fancied to be similarly used here. Or perhaps Kāma is after all imagined
simply to have dusted his arrows with chalk ?
As for the use of powder in the writing process, one can imagine it being
rubbed onto leaves to cure them or render them supple, or light-coloured powder
being rubbed over certain letters to highlight them, or perhaps even being rubbed
into the incisions forming certain letters instead of the soot or blackening agent
and thus achieving a sort of ‘rubrication’. But none of these actions seems a natural
parallel to powder from Kāma’s arrows producing written letters upon ladies’
hearts.
||
29 ‘La gloire née de sa beauté, et plaisante au cœur, était un caractère d’écriture que l’Amour avait
gravé d’une façon indélébile dans le cœur des nobles femmes avec la poudre de ses flèches.’
30 Cf., e.g., Mālavikāgnimitra 2.13: avyājasundarīṃ tāṃ vijñānena lalitena yojayitā / upakalpito
vidhātrā bāṇaḥ kāmasya viṣadigdhaḥ, which Balogh and Somogyi translate (2009, 67): ‘When he
imbued this innocent beauty with the discipline of coquetry, the creator crafted a poison-
smeared arrow for the god of love.’
156 | Dominic Goodall
So perhaps another way of analysing this compound is worth exploring. Would
not the compound śaramṛtsnābhiḥ fit rather better here if it were a mukhacandra-
type comparison-compound? In that case mṛtsnā could designate a writing instru-
ment such as a stick of chalk or of ‘alluminous slate’ or a sort of crayon of the kind
that Aditia Gunawan supposes might be referred to with the expression tanah in
Old Javanese (2015, 263–264). In that case we might instead understand:
Kāma fixed as indelible (the letter that was) the heart-enflaming fame of his beauty [by ren-
dering it] engraved in the hearts of lovely women by means of the crayons that were his arrows
(śaramṛtsnābhiḥ).
One might even go a step beyond this and assume that an expression whose pri-
mary meaning was ‘crayon’ (of slate, clay, steatite, tailor’s chalk or whatever) came
to be generalised to refer to any writing instrument, a bit like the word ‘pen’, which
no longer suggests the notion of ‘feathers’ to most people who use it, or the word
‘pencil’, which no longer calls to mind a brush. In other words, one might even haz-
ard the guess that mṛtsnā might have come to mean ‘stylus’ in the Sanskrit of the
Khmers in this period. In that case, we would have the leaves (riktapattrāṇī), the
blackening agent (maṣī) and the writing stylus (mṛtsnā) all referred to together in
the sentence of the āśrama-charters. But this, as Andrew Ollett has pointed out to
me (email of 25.xi.2015) would probably be a step too far, …‘since it would have
been impossible for the king's glory (and therefore also the letter drawn by Kāma's
arrows) to have been anything other than white’.31
I therefore propose that mṛtsnā may refer to a crayon of something like tailor’s
chalk that was used for tracing preliminary non-permanent marks upon palm-
leaves before beginning to incise them.32 Such non-permanent pale crayon marks
paradoxically become indelible when traced by Kāmadeva’s arrows, in such a way
that they mark the yaśaḥ of Rājendravarman, on the hearts of gorgeous ladies.
||
31 Andrew Ollett’s email was a reaction to an exchange of messages on the subject of mṛtsnā in
these two passages that took place in November 2015 within a thread about ‘rubrication’ on the
Indology Bulletin Board. I am grateful also to other participants in the discussion for their re-
marks.
32 One further possibility should be recorded, and that is that chalk was supplied in fact for
writing on a sort of blackboard (phalaka), which is then curiously not mentioned among the
supplies to be given to students, just as the writing-implement for writing on the palm-leaves is
also curiously not mentioned. For attestations to the use of chalk (khaṭikā) and such boards in a
wide range of Indian sources, see S.R. Sarma’s short but richly informative monograph on Writ-
ing Material in Ancient India (1985).
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 157
5 In lieu of a conclusion
Such a collection of gleanings perhaps does not require a conclusion, but if one
is to be drawn, perhaps we may conclude from the above pages that there seems
to be a greater attention paid to writing and the written word in the Khmer world
than is typical in the Indian sub-continent, where books and learning are cer-
tainly revered, but the physical aspects of books often pass unmentioned and
might even be said to be sometimes rather neglected.33 We can produce no statis-
tics for comparison and we are aware that there may be thousands of pre-modern
inscriptions (among other relevant documents) from the Indian subcontinent
that we have not examined, but it seems from what we have seen that the rela-
tively small corpus of Cambodian inscriptions contains relatively frequent allu-
sions to matters that seem to reflect this heightened attention: allusions to
knowledge of scripts, for instance (rather than just to knowledge of languages
and of genres of literature), as well as mentions of physical books, mentions of
their being copied, and mentions of their storage in libraries. These inscriptions
inform us principally about Cambodian court circles and so they suggest the pres-
tige of writing in the ancient Khmer world. There is of course another minor con-
sideration, too obvious and well-known to require treating at any length, that fur-
ther suggests this. The care lavished upon writing stands out also in the superb
execution of the inscriptions themselves, where we typically encounter fine cal-
ligraphy and a balanced layout that reveals at once the metrical structure of what
is engraved; remarkable calligraphy may be found in the epigraphical traditions
of the Indian subcontinent too, but such aesthetically pleasing features seem very
much the exception rather than the rule.
||
33 Of course this is not to say that care was never accorded to the details of written transmission
in the Indian subcontinent or that it was never discussed. For an old account of book-production
(and book-worship), see that of the Śivadharmottara, whose second chapter, devoted to the
theme of vidyādāna, has recently been edited by Florinda De Simini 2016.
158 | Dominic Goodall
References
Numbers, prefaced by ‘K.’ (for ‘Khmer’), are inventory numbers for Cambodian inscriptions. The
inventory, as far as it had reached in 1966, was published by Cœdès in volume 8 of his Inscrip-
tions du Cambodge (IC), and from this it can be determined where the various inscriptions pub-
lished before then had appeared. An online version, prepared by Dominique Soutif as part of
the CIK project (‘Corpus des inscriptions khmères’) and periodically corrected is now available
here: epigraphia.efeo.fr/CIK.
Amarakośa with Kṣīrasvāmin’s commentary. The Nâmalingânuśâsana (Amarakosha) of Amara-
simha With the Commentary (Amarakoshodghâtana) of Kshîrasvâmin, ed. Krishnaji Go-
vind Oka. Poona Oriental Series 43. Poona 1913.
Mālavikāgnimitra of Kālidāsa. Málavika and Agni•mitra by Kali•dasa. Translated by Dániel
Balogh & Ester Somogyi. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York University Press and JJC Founda-
tion, 2009.
Parākhyatantra. See Goodall 2004.
Bakker, Hans T. (2014), The World of the Skandapurāṇa. Northern India in the Sixth and Sev-
enth Centuries. Leiden–Boston: Brill (Supplement to Groningen Oriental Studies).
Barth, Auguste (1885), Inscriptions sanscrites du Cambodge. Académie des Inscriptions et
Belles-Lettres, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et autres
bibliothèques, vol. 27, n° 1: p. 1–181, Paris.
Bergaigne, Abel (1893), Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque nationale et au-
tres bibliothèques publiés par l’Institut national de France. Faisant suite aux notices et ex-
traits lus au comité établi dans l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. Tome vingt-
septième (1re partie). 2e fascicule, Paris: Imprimerie nationale.
Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1961), Les religions brahmaniques dans l’ancien Cambodge,
d’après l’épigraphie et l’iconographie, Paris: EFEO (PEFEO 49).
Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar (1991), Recherches sur le vocabulaire des inscriptions sanskrites du
Cambodge, Paris: EFEO (PEFEO 167).
Chhom, Kunthea (2016), Le rôle du sanskrit dans le développement de la langue khmère : une
étude épigraphique du VIe au XIVe siècle. Doctoral thesis defended at the École pratique
des hautes études, Paris, in 2016.
Cœdès, George (1908), ‘La stèle de Tép Praṇaṃ (Cambodge)’, in Journal Asiatique XI [dixième
série, tome XI] (1908): 203–225.
Cœdès, George (1911), ‘Études cambodgiennes. VI. Des édicules appelés « bibliothèques », in
Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 11 (1911): 405–406.
Cœdès, George (1929), ‘Études cambodgiennes. XIII. La date du temple de Bantāy Srĕi’, in Bul-
letin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 29 (1929): 289–296.
Cœdès, George (1932), ‘Études cambodgiennes. XXX. À la recherche du Yaçodharāçrama’, in
Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient, 32 (1932): 84–112.
Cœdès, George (1937–66), See IC below.
Creisméas, Jean-Michel (2015), Le yoga du Mataṅgapārameśvaratantra à la lumière du com-
mentaire de Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha. Doctoral thesis defended at the Université Sorbonne
Nouvelle — Paris 3 in October 2015.
Cambodian Transmission of Sanskrit Literature | 159
De, Sushil Kumar (1924), ‘The Akhyayika and the Katha in Classical Sanskrit’, in Bulletin of the
School of Oriental Studies, 3 (1924): 507–517.
De Simini, Florinda (2016), Of Gods and Books. Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the Man-
uscript Cultures of Premodern India (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 8), Boston/Berlin: De
Gruyter.
Estève, Julia, and Dominique Soutif (2011), ‘Les Yaśodharāśrama, marqueurs d’empire et
bornes sacrées. Conformité et spécificité des stèles digraphiques khmères de la région de
Vat Phu’, in Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 97–98 (2010–2011): 331–355.
Finot, Louis (1912), ‘Notes d’épigraphie. XIII. L’inscription de Ban That’, in Bulletin de l’École
française d’Extrême-Orient 12.2 (1912): 1–28.
Finot, Louis (1928), ‘Nouvelles inscriptions du Cambodge. II. Les inscriptions de Sek Ta Tuy’, in
Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient 28 (1929): 46–57.
Finot, Louis, Henri Parmentier and Victor Goloubew (1928), Le temple d'Içvarapura (Bantāy
Srěi, Cambodge). Mémoires archéologiques I, Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient.
Gnoli, Raniero (1956), Nepalese Inscriptions in Gupta Characters (Serie Orientale Roma X. Ma-
terials for the Study of Nepalese History and Culture 2), Rome: Is.M.E.O.
Goloubew, Victor (1930), Le temple d’Angkor Vat. Deuxième partie [:] la sculpture ornementale
du temple (Mémoires Archéologiques publiés par l’École Française d’Extrême-Orient 2),
Paris: Éditions G. van Oest.
Goodall, Dominic, ed. and trans. (1998), Bhaṭṭa Rāmakaṇṭha’s Commentary on the Kiraṇatan-
tra. Volume I: chapters 1–6. Critical Edition and Annotated Translation (Publications du
département d’indologie 86.1), Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry / École fran-
çaise d’Extrême-Orient.
Goodall, Dominic (2004), The Parākhyatantra, a Scripture of the Śaiva Siddhānta. A Critical Edi-
tion and Annotated Translation (Collection Indologie 98), Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO.
Griffiths, Arlo (2005), ‘La stèle d’installation de Śrī Tribhuvaneśvara: une nouvelle inscription
préangkorienne du Musée National de Phnom Penh (K. 1214)’, in Journal Asiatique, 293.1:
11–43.
Gunawan, Aditia (2015), ‘Nipah or Gebang? A Philological and Codicological Study Based on
Sources from West Java’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde / Journal of the
Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 171 (2–3): 249–80.
doi:10.1163/22134379-17101004.
Hultzsch, Eugen (1890), South Indian Inscriptions Volume I. Tamil and Sanskrit, from Stone and
Copper-plate Edicts at Mamallapuram, Kanchipuram, in the North Arcot District, and Other
Parts of the Madras Presidency, Chiefly Collected in 1886–87, Madras: Archæological Sur-
vey of India. [Mysore reprint of 2001.]
IC Cœdès, George (1937-66), Inscriptions du Cambodge, éditées et traduites. 8 vol. Ha-
noi / Paris : Imprimerie d’Extrême-Orient / EFEO. (Collection de textes et documents sur
l’Indochine 3).
Kafle, Nirajan (2015), The Niśvāsamukha, the Introductory Book of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā.
Critical Edition, with an Introduction and Annotated Translation Appended by Śivadhar-
masaṅgraha 5–9. Doctoral thesis defended at the University of Leiden in October 2015.
Lunet de Lajonquière, E. (1902), Inventaire descriptif des monuments du Cambodge (Publica-
tions de l’École française d’Extrême-Orient Volume IV), Paris: Ernest Leroux.
Madhavan, Chithra (2013), Sanskrit Education and Literature in Ancient and Medieval Tamil
Nadu. An Epigraphical Study (Reconstructing Indian History & Culture 36), New Delhi: D.K.
Printworld.
160 | Dominic Goodall
Monier-Williams, Monier (1899), Sanskṛit-English Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pou, Saveros (1989, 2001), Nouvelles inscriptions du Cambodge I, II–III (Collection de textes et
documents sur l’Indochine XVII, XXII, XXIII), Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient.
Sanderson, Alexis (2001), ‘History through Textual Criticism in the Study of Śaivism, the
Pāñcarātra and the Buddhist Yoginītantras’, in François Grimal (ed.), Les sources et le
temps/ Sources and Time. A colloquium Pondicherry 11–13 January 1997, 1–47 (Publica-
tions du département d’indologie No. 91), Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO.
Sarma, S.R. (1985), Writing Material in Ancient India (Aligarh Oriental Series 5), Aligarh: Vivek
Publications.
Singh, Sarva Daman (1965), Ancient Indian Warfare. With Special Reference to the Vedic Period,
Leiden [reprint of Motilal Banarsidas, Delhi, 1997].
Ślączka, Anna (2016), ‘Two Iconographic Chapters from the Devyāmata and the Art of Bengal’,
in Dominic Goodall and Harunaga Isaacson (eds), Tantric Studies. Fruits of a Franco-Ger-
man Collaboration on Early Tantra (Early Tantra Series 4 / Collection Indologie 131), Pondi-
cherry: IFP/EFEO.
Veluppillai, Uthaya (2013), Cīkāḻi : hymnes, héros, histoire. Rayonnement d’un lieu saint
shivaïte au Pays Tamoul. Doctoral thesis defended at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle —
Paris 3 in 2013.
Vickery, Michael (1998), Society, Politics and Economics in Pre-Angkor Cambodia. The 7th-8th
Centuries, Tokyo: The Centre for East Asian Cultural Studies for Unesco / Toyo Bunko.
Vielle, Christophe (2005), ‘From the Vāyuprokta to the Vāyu and Brahmāṇḍa Purāṇas: Prelimi-
nary Remarks Towards a Critical Edition of the Vāyuprokta Brahmāṇḍapurāṇa’, in Petteri
Koskikallio (ed.), Epics, Khilas, and Purāṇas: Continuities and Ruptures. Proceedings of
the Third Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Purāṇas, Septem-
ber 2002, Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 535–560.
Vijayavenugopal, G. (2006), Putuccēri mānilak kalvēṭṭukkaḷ. Pondicherry Inscriptions. Part I In-
troduction and Texts with Notes (Collection Indologie 83.1), Pondicherry: IFP/EFEO.
Vijayavenugopal, G. (2010), Putuccēri mānilak kalvēṭṭukkaḷ. Pondicherry Inscriptions. Part II.
Translation, appendices, glossary and phrases (Collection Indologie 83.1), Pondicherry:
IFP/EFEO.
|
Codicology (from Orality to Print)
Eva Wilden
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and
Distribution
Abstract: In the Tamil and also the wider Indian tradition we find, among the multi-
farious types of paratexts that accompany and envelop a text in a manuscript, little
(and sometimes not so little) stanzas that in one way or another have a bearing on
the text and its transmission. Little work has been done so far in order to understand
their function(s), and many of them do not even make it into the printed editions.
However, the fact that they have verse form shows two things, namely on the one
hand that some thought and effort has been put into their production, and on the
other hand that it was deemed important that they should be easy to memorise, in
other words, they stand on the threshold between an oral and a written tradition.
This article, the third in a series, will try to map the positions such stanzas take up,
to distinguish their genres and finally to understand how editors dealt with them
when developing the standard layout of a Tamil literary edition. In order to demon-
strate how widespread the phenomenon was, examples are taken firstly from one
well-defined sub-group of classical Tamil manuscripts and secondly from the
smaller Tamil manuscript collection in the Cambridge University Library.
1 Introduction
In recent years there has been some debate in order to adapt the conception of
paratexts as developed by Genette with respect to the print presentation of early
European books to the description of manuscripts.1 From a manuscript perspec-
tive, the term paratext is first of all intended as a phenomenological reference to
||
This article, produced within the intellectual framework of the ERC-funded project NETamil, is the
third in a series of so far three dealing with the Tamil satellite stanzas (cf. Wilden 2017a). It is
based on a presentation in ‘The South Asian Manuscript Book: Material, Textual and Historical
Investigations’, Cambridge, 26 September 2014, enhanced by a number of discussions within the
Paratext group and the Terminology group of the Hamburg Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cul-
tures (Sonderforschungsbereich 950, funded by the DFG), and a presentation at the workshop
‘Distinguishing Paratexts from Texts. Orality. Commentaries. Genres’, Hamburg, 15 May 2015. My
thanks go to all the participants who contributed to the discussion. Special thanks go to Jean-Luc
Chevillard and Giovanni Ciotti for reading preliminary versions.
1 For some recent case studies centred on such a notion, see Ciotti/Lin 2016.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-006, © 2017 E. Wilden, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
164 | Eva Wilden
all the little texts that surround a text in a manuscript, or rather that embed a text
in a manuscript and in its Lebenswelt, i.e., the whole is an interwoven texture that
links a piece of human knowledge deemed worthy of further transmission with
those who produced, transmitted and used it. Genette’s famous metaphor is that
of the threshold (‘seuil’): paratexts would be the way that leads into a text.
We may think of different elaborations of that metaphor for the different types
of paratexts. For the documenting type such as colophons, the threshold of a mere
house may be too simple a model, but we may visualise an Indian temple town
where one or several central shrines as the text(s) are surrounded by concentric
walls which each have their separate gate. For the commenting type, i.e. glosses
and commentaries we might rather choose a tree as a model, that is, the concentric
year rings of growth that can be counted in an old tree (once it has been felled, to
be sure) where the inner part becomes solid while on the outside there is green
growth, adding a new layer every year as long as the transmission is alive. The hard
inner core can even rot away, like a root text overtly still explained by a commen-
tary, which in fact has long since taken over the function of the main text, as is the
case in most Indian theoretical domains. Another aspect of the threshold is that
usually it is not only one-way, but two-way. It is a means of going in, namely into
the text, but also of going out into the community and culture that produced the
manuscript. This may be more of a self-evident point for Genette, thinking about
European book culture where the outside (mostly) is prettily mapped and well doc-
umented, but in many less well-known traditions the paratexts are our only way
back into that world.
A basic definition of the term ‘paratext’ could be the following: a paratext is a
textual element that mediates and mirrors the relationship between a textual arte-
fact in a manuscript and its environment, that is, the people who conceived, pro-
duced and used it. Paratexts capture the threefold tie a manuscript has with time,
namely, firstly, with the time prior to its production, when the text it carries was
composed, secondly, the period when the individual manuscript was copied, and,
thirdly, its more or less long history of storage and use. The word can be used as a
cover term for a huge number of subcategories that partly overlap with literary sub-
genres, which can be arranged by function (A) and by position within the layout of
a manuscript (B). It does not make sense to divorce literary studies and manuscript
studies with respect to paratexts. We have to understand how, why and when par-
atextual sub-genres developed in the respective literary traditions in order to make
sense of the data encountered in the individual manuscripts, and in turn manu-
script evidence can help us to reconstruct the processes of their evolution.
How would we want to describe the basic configuration of that world around
a manuscript? On the one hand there are various agencies involved in conception,
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 165
production and storage, and use. On the other hand there is the individual physical
incarnation of one text in a particular manuscript. The relationship between them
is mirrored and often overtly negotiated in the paratexts that surround the text as
it is copied. With yet another metaphor paratexts might be characterised as a dou-
bly permeable membrane from environment to manuscript and manuscript to text.
The whole fabric of text, paratext and manuscript can be depicted in the following
diagram:
interest
financial + moral support use
manuscript
COMMUNITY
title notes
invocation
blessings preface
SCHOLAR
subheading TEXT illustration
author
TRADITION commentary commenta-
form
gloss TEXT gloss tor
discipline
commentary translator
genre
gloss TEXT gloss reader
convention
[editor]
commentary
pagination colophon notes
notes
INSTITUTION
copyist, corrector, librarian,
proprietor
166 | Eva Wilden
A manuscript as a physical object is the outcome of a complex process of produc-
tion and transmission. It presupposes a community that lends financial and moral
support to the fabrication and is interested in making use of the outcome, be it by
mere storing, by reading in a wider sense or by specialised usages, for example in
ritual. Usually the task of producing manuscripts is entrusted to an institution that
procures writing support (palm leaf, etc.) and employs artisans such as scribes and
correctors, and at the same time functions as a repository where the stock is col-
lected, stored and safeguarded and, if necessity arises, recopied. This function of a
librarian can be taken over, on a smaller scale, by individual proprietors. Form and
content of a manuscript and/or a manuscript collection are predetermined by tradi-
tion. Tradition is made up by an implicit substratum of conventions about layout and
genre on which can be superposed explicit schools of theoretical thinking about text
and text forms. Its historical dimension is the mapping out of the intellectual uni-
verse into domains or disciplines. The intellectual work of either conceiving and
composing new texts, or of explaining and transmitting older textual material is in
the hand of scholars (teachers, priests, poets, specialists in a particular domain).
They function as authors, commentators or even translators and they form the kernel
of a readership viewed with benevolence or even actively supported by the wider
community.
The manuscript is anchored in time in a triple way. As a copy, it is meant to rec-
ord the state of a text prior to the copy’s own period. As a physical object, it bears the
testimony of its own production. As a historical artefact, it bears the traces of its
transmission and reception, not to mention the visible signs of its more or less ad-
vanced physical deterioration. Questions of layout can be practically discounted in
any South-Indian tradition. In this respect the real manuscript does not resemble the
diagram above. The text lies in a massive block on the narrow palm-leaf; at first
glance there is nothing much to be seen but a high-density data storage device. The
scriptio continua does not encourage the differentiation of layers, and except for mar-
ginal titles, possibly inter-titles, and folio numbers, we find little mark-up. Marginal
blessings can be seen in the beginning and at the end, and possibly a pratīka index
with verse- or sūtra beginnings. Corrections and additions of phrases omitted on the
page are rare. The intricate web of the actual text, its representation and its elucida-
tion has to be discerned by the educated and attentive reader who ideally is already
familiar with its wording.
The copy aims at preserving the text as it is at a given point in time but it is fairly
free as to its embedding. Title and author are usually mentioned, if not in the margin
then in a stanza composed for the purpose and transmitted in the wake of the text or
in a colophon that belongs to the text and is recopied with it. If there is a commentary
it means that the copy already incorporates a minimum of two distinct stages in the
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 167
life of the text, for few texts were composed along with a commentary. The need was
felt after a certain time had passed. Comments range from simple glosses of difficult
or rare words to elaborate paraphrases. They can be accompanied by more or less
extensive discussions, and there is a point where one may ask whether what is
framed like a paratext is not the actual text after all. Such is typically the case in many
theoretical domains.
The physical object is shaped, within the limitations set by the material, accord-
ing to the conventions of the genre, time, and place. The copyist may add explicit
information to that extent, for example by writing a colophon. More often he does
not. However, he leaves his mark on the text he copies, depending on his own degree
of education and involvement. He may leave blanks in a text where he could no
longer decipher the model he perused. He may simply close the gaps and thus pro-
duce at best a metrically faulty passage. Or at worst the passage in question is no
longer comprehensible. He also leaves traces of his local or idiosyncratic spelling. He
may alter the commentary, abridging or expanding it as he sees fit. He may bring in
additional material. He may make partial copies, combining texts that traditionally
do not belong together, in accordance with his own needs or preferences.
The historical artefact may appear more convoluted, for example by folios added
at the beginning and/or the end, typically bringing in further glosses, tables of con-
tent, glossaries or additional verse material. Remarks and notes may appear, often
not inked and thus hard to decipher. Readers may try to correct the text and even fill
in blank space left by the original scribe in places where his source already was de-
fective. Today’s surviving palm-leaf manuscripts often contain pencil marks and sec-
ondary pagination applied by earlier editors of the text. The strings that bind the
bundle probably had to be replaced several times. Libraries add their seals to the
leaves and labels to the wooden covers. They also put successive shelf marks and
inventory numbers.
One pervasive motif in all the three temporal strands that run together in this
one object is the anxiety for its safety and continued transmission. Margins are left
free, especially the right one where the leaf is turned, and spaces are left around the
vulnerable holes. Invocation and colophon bracket the beginning and end of the
text, blank folios precede and follow, because it is there that calamity, for example
in the form of insects, strikes first. Mnemonic stanzas safeguard the structure of the
text, its position within a corpus, its authorship and provenance. Commentaries try
to ensure the continued comprehensibility of what may have been composed in a
distant past. They are changing over time because the language of the copyists is
changing, along with their degree of education and motivation. Colophon verses re-
mind scribes as well as readers of their duty to preserve intact what has been trans-
mitted. The first and most important lesson we can learn from the generations of
168 | Eva Wilden
scribes we are looking back on is one of humility. We are not the end-point in a long
process but we are just one link in the ongoing chain of transmitters.
The purpose of the present paper is to map out one significant element among
the paratexts occupying this Tamil manuscript world, one ubiquitous not only in the
South-Indian traditions but in the pan-Indian ones and beyond. The simplest desig-
nation for this element is the satellite stanza, consisting in a variety of little (and
sometimes not so little) verses that surround a text as it is copied. We can basically
distinguish three types, namely the anonymous one, that with a known author, and
that which can be identified as a quotation from elsewhere. Their number, distribu-
tion and wording are variable from manuscript to manuscript, and often several va-
rieties are found. The currently known text with the highest density may be the Tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai: already Cāminātaiyar’s standard edition comes with twelve
additional verses, and some thirty-six have by now been collected by Emmanuel
Francis for his critical edition.2 The relation in which such a stanza stands to the man-
uscript and/or the text it is transmitted with has to be established in each particular
case, although of course there are conventions.
2 Distribution and genres
After first stumbling across these stanzas when working on the manuscript transmis-
sion of the Caṅkam corpus3 I believed that they were a peculiarity of those very ‘clas-
sical’ texts, but since then the occupation with other groups of manuscripts brought
home to me the fact that, firstly, they are ubiquitous, and, secondly, they have reper-
cussions with several literary genres: they are threshold texts in yet another sense,
in that they influenced the development of pre-modern notions on literary genres
and the elements they are made of.4 In other words, we find ourselves in the slightly
paradoxical situation of seeing some paratexts defined as subgenres of the texts they
are supposed to mediate – some, but by no means all of them. This point is important
since what I intend to show here is that in cases where a sub-genre came into being
– a process linked to the creation of a Tamil term to denote the type in question – the
||
2 Cf. Francis forthcoming.
3 For a collection, collation and translation of the verses connected with the Caṅkam corpus, see
Wilden 2014, 177–215.
4 This point ought to be examined in greater detail at some point, but here suffice it to say that
some types of stanzas, such as the kāppu, find their place, if not a straightforward one, in the
enumerations of pirapantam-s (< Skt. prabandha-, ‘composition’), the current Tamil word that
comes closest to a European notion of literary genre; cf. n. 9.
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 169
transmission is more stable and often led to the inclusion of the verse into the edition
of the respective text. Where that was not the case, and this is true especially of one
important type I am inclined to call colophon stanza, transmission tends to be more
variable and the way such stanzas cross over to the print age is less predictable.
At this point the question arises how and why did they survive at all? The answer
to this is best illustrated with one further, more general question: How to preserve
knowledge on a precarious material basis? How is it possible to ensure a continuous
transmission when palm leaf is fragile and times are dangerous, the political situa-
tion, hence the economy and the livelihood of scholars, and even religious institu-
tions, unstable, as they were so often during the long course of Indian history? The
standard answer here points to the parallel existence of an oral tradition. Yes, this
certainly is one aspect. Texts were recited and, of course, they were taught. But it is
not enough to know a text, or even many texts by heart. A scholar also has to mem-
orise the domains and their interrelations, the composition and layout of text cor-
pora, the names and credentials of poets and theoreticians – in other words, he has
to know the precise position of everything and everybody in the dense network of
intertextual relations that constitutes a major literary tradition. A significant role in
transporting through time the vital pieces of meta-information on what was to be
transmitted was played by mnemonic stanzas, put in verse so as to be easy to mem-
orise.
oral tradition
Memorising
mnemonic
+
stanzas
Recitation
manuscripts
170 | Eva Wilden
Manuscripts were copied and collected, in monastery and palace libraries as well
as by scholars. At the same time the teaching tradition ensured that students had
the capacity to memorise and recite large chunks of text.5 The links between the
two kinds of activity were the mnemonic stanzas, many of which survive in the
margins of the manuscript transmission. They appear in a variety of metres, genres
and positions.
The minimal coherence of the codicological unit of South-Indian palm-leaf
manuscripts dictates the possible places for additional material. Thinking of a
manuscript from one of the early classical corpora (Caṅkam and Kīḻkkaṇakku), we
usually have manuscripts that contain more than one text and as a group make up
the corpus or, more likely, a considerable portion of it. The folios are numbered,
but often the manuscript contains one or more unnumbered extra folios, both at
the beginning and at the end. Often such extra folios will contain stray stanzas,
while almost always the folio 1a begins with an invocation stanza, the kaṭavuḷ
vāḻttu (‘praise of god’), named as such in the manuscript itself. This is the most
straightforward type of stanza in that it has come to be regarded as part of the text
itself – in many cases, such as the Kalittokai, the Pattuppāṭṭu and the Tirukkuṟaḷ, it
is even included in the numbering of verses in the text, as poem number 1.6 This is
directly followed by the text itself. The next possible place for insertions is the end
of a section where we usually find a short intermediate colophon. It rarely goes
beyond the final title, but occasionally further information interspersed with verse
material is inserted here. The natural position, however, is at the end of the text,
where we get the final title and the traditional colophon for text and/or commen-
tary. This colophon is the preferred position for further stray stanzas, hence colo-
phon stanzas. Here at least four types can be distinguished, namely poetological
stanza, caveat, author stanza and patron stanza. Significantly, none of them seems
to have acquired a Tamil designation. This, then, may or may not be followed by a
scribal colophon, again possibly enhanced by further verses.
This first, unsystematic state of affairs seems to have influenced the shape of
texts within the next set of classical collections, the bhakti anthologies. A large
majority of bhakti texts is composed in decades that each end with a stanza which
is at the same time a signature verse and a phalaśruti (an enumeration of the ben-
efits to be derived from knowing and reciting the decade). The term developed to
denote them is, in the Śaiva tradition, tirukkaṭaikkāppu, ‘sacred end protection’. In
||
5 For a description of how written and oral education were carried out side by side in the training
of a 19th-century poet-scholar (pulavar) see Ebeling 2010, 37ff.
6 For a detailed discussion of the invocation stanzas connected with the classical corpus, see
Wilden 2017b (in print).
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 171
phraseology and spirit they seem related to the author stanzas found in the colo-
phons of the earlier anthologies mentioned above. Although partly disputed as
later additions, in general they are viewed as part of the textual transmission, not
as paratexts. Moreover, in the Vaiṣṇava Tivyappirapantam we find a minimum of
one author stanza per text, again modelled on one type of the earlier colophon
stanzas. An important difference is, however, that now the authors of the stanzas,
too, are known by name, which incidentally gives us a clue as to their age, since
these authors are usually Ācāryas of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community – the sect that
transmitted the Tamil bhakti corpus and linked it with the theology of Rāmānuja.
This shows that an expectation has been raised and that a new type of subgenre
has been created, although here the designation is still simply taṉiyaṉ, ‘solitary
verse’.7 These seem to be the first instances where the author of a text is named and
lauded in the beginning, not at the end.
The end point of this development can be seen in the early prints of the 19th
century. The system found in place there can be shown to be based on a reorgani-
sation of the additional material as it was found on the leaves of a manuscript. Its
basic principle might be explained as a restructuring of the beginning and an un-
burdening of the end: in brief, the colophon is ejected and replaced by an elaborate
pattern of prefatory materials. How this evolution actually took place and how long
it took is difficult to say since Tamil manuscripts, with at best some 300 years of
age, are just not old enough. Accordingly, the evidence presented in the practical
part of this paper is based on a mixed argument: it seems that the patterns in place
for the older texts do no longer work for the younger texts, so that in spite of the
fact that material evidence roughly belongs to the same period certain tendencies
can be observed. Moreover, what is badly needed, here as elsewhere, is manuscript
statistics: while I can say that I have a fair idea of what remains of the manuscript
transmission for texts from the first millennium, my knowledge for those of the
medieval and early modern periods is restricted to snapshots such as the ones I
give later from the Tamil manuscripts of the Cambridge collection. As far as early
printed literature is concerned, the following six are sub-genres of verses prefixed
to a text, although hardly a case could be found where all six would be present for
a single text:
||
7 A preliminary count of taṉiyaṉs related to the Tivyappirapantam on the part of Suganya Anan-
dakichenin (EFEO Pondy) comes up to 54, 13 in Sanskrit and 41 in Tamil.
172 | Eva Wilden
1. kāppu (‘protection’)
2. ciṟappuppāyiram (‘laudatory preface’)
3. varalāṟu (‘line of transmission’)
4. pāyiram (‘preface’ of a treatise)
5. patikam (‘preface’ of a poetic text?)
6. avaiyaṭakkam (‘submission to the assembly’)
Part of the genesis can be explained with some confidence. The invocation stanza,
named kaṭavuḷ vāḻttu in the early classical tradition, also referred to as kaṭavuḷ
vaṇakkam in the medieval tradition, seems to make way for the kāppu. The early
invocation never explicitly referred to the text it was added to, although there was
an indirect relationship in that the metrical form of the kaṭavuḷ vāḻttu mirrored the
form of the poetic text it belonged to, and was dedicated to the chosen deity of the
poet or compiler. The kāppus did not follow the metrical imitation principle any-
more, but often had the form of a four-line Veṇpā – the most simple and predomi-
nant form of a mnemonic verse – and they had a tendency not only to refer to a
deity (frequently Gaṇeśa), but also to allude to the title of the text and/or its author,
in other words, many of them look like portmanteau stanzas for the earlier invoca-
tion combined with a colophon stanza. They may even contain phalaśruti phrases
as were found in the signature verses of the bhakti corpus. The problem here is that
it is not always easy to identify a kāppu. Ideally there is one verse that is put at the
beginning of the first folio, along with the designation kāppu. But in many cases
there are several verses prefixed, part of them on unnumbered folios, and a desig-
nation is not necessarily given. Many texts end up printed with several kāppus, and
a detailed investigation into their respective manuscript traditions would be nec-
essary. It is quite obvious that not all these verses appear in all the manuscripts. It
looks probable that in subsequent copies there is a gradual process of integrating
scribal and authorial invocation verses.8
||
8 This development seems to be reflected even in some recesses of theoretical literature in that
some medieval works on genre, of the Pāṭṭiyal type, contain spurious verses on a pirapantam genre
called Kāppumālai, ‘garland of protection [verses]’, made up of three, five or seven stanzas (cf.
Navanītap Pāṭṭiyal, 14th c., comm. on s. 31: kāppu mūṉṟ’ aint’ ēḻ kāppumālai ām; the editor Vaiyāpu-
rip Piḷḷai gives an appendix with a concordance of pirapantam definitions where there are further
references).
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 173
Talking about the series of further prefatory sub-genres loosely connected by
the heading of ‘preface’ (pāyiram), then, means opening Pandora’s box.9 We have
to distinguish three layers, namely centuries of theoretical discussion and defini-
tion,10 usage in the manuscript tradition (with differences between marginal and
final titles, but also simply between local traditions and/or scribes), and finally the
early prints. For our present purposes it is sufficient, however, to understand the
rationale underlying the categories and conventions followed by early editors.
First of all there is a dividing line between items 2 plus 3 and 4, 5, 6 in the above
list. The laudatory preface (ciṟappuppāyiram) and the line of transmission
(varalāṟu) are supposed to have been written by somebody who is not the author
of the actual text. The former has been described as a key element in the ‘economy
of praise’ among the pulavar (‘poet-scholars’ of the 19th century where it was of
supreme importance for the promotion of a new literary work to secure such a pref-
ace from a poet already well established [Ebeling 2010, 73–84]). Here the emphasis
lies on laudatory, and that might be one reason why the ciṟappuppāyiram has be-
come the main slot for the relocation of colophon material to the beginning of a
book. Where the name of a work or an author is mentioned in verse, there one finds
at least a couple of ornamental attributes in order to fill the metre, and often more
elaborate praise. Be that as it may, in any case, while there is not much evidence
for laudatory prefaces in the preprint tradition except of the type described by
Ebeling, the category is almost invariably present in any printed book.
The three categories that remain, pāyiram (‘preface’), patikam (‘introduction’)
and avaiyaṭakkam (‘submission to the assembly’) are supposed to be composed by
the author of a work. There is some evidence to suggest that pāyiram was the word
for prefaces used with theoretical texts while patikam comes with poetic works
such as the Cilappatikāram, but that ought to be further investigated. Interesting
||
9 To give just one example, the famous verse starting with vaṭavēṅkaṭam teṉkumari that custom-
arily precedes the Toḷkāppiyam Eḻuttatikāram is identified as a pāyiram composed by
Paṉampāraṉār in the commentary of Pērāciriyar on TPp 649, that is, in about the 12th century. In
the palm-leaf transmission it is called a pāyiram, without the name of the author, or the uraiyāciri-
yar pāyiram, that is, the ‘preface by the commentary teacher’, i.e. by Iḷampūraṇar who is the oldest
commentator of the Tolkāppiyam tradition. In some late paper manuscripts we find the first des-
ignation as ciṟappuppāyiram, as becomes the print standard, and in T.V. Gopal Iyer’s edition of
2003, then, the identical verse is headed as ciṟappuppāyiram as it precedes Iḷampūraṇar’s com-
mentary and as potuppāyiram (‘general preface’) as it precedes Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s commentary.
10 The two earliest discussions are found in Nakkīraṉ’s commentary on the Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ,
in the beginning of the elaborate discourse after the first sūtra that functions as preamble to the
commentary, in the prefatory material to the Naṉṉūl, and then again in that treatise itself. Their
distinction between a ‘general preface’ (potuppāyiram) and a ‘specific preface’ (ciṟappuppāyiram)
does not seem to have much reflection in the manuscript tradition.
174 | Eva Wilden
here is the last one, the avaiyaṭakkam, because here again we see a slot for reloca-
tion. While manuscripts often integrate caveat verses into their colophons, excus-
ing the quality of the copy with the insufficient education of their scribes and ask-
ing the audience to keep the transmission up, now the same sentiment and often
similar phrases are transferred to the poet who has to excuse himself in front of the
assembly, the traditional venue to present new compositions, for any flaws that
may remain in his work.
In order to substantiate the preceding rather theoretical exposition I will now
present two sets of examples: one is a particularly instructive special case that still
has to be termed ‘literary’, because only a very small part of the manuscript evi-
dence has been inspected so far, the other is based on manuscripts I recently hap-
pened to look at with a view to cataloguing them, most of them from the collection
of the Cambridge University Library.
2.1 Literary examples
Author stanzas are one of the two primary sources of information about a poet,
theoretician or commentator. Often the stanza does no more than establish a link
between a text and a name, but there are also cases where the place of birth or
residence, the family, the caste and/or further works are mentioned. The only other
source of direct information are the prose part of the colophon and marginal inter-
titles and final titles, usually quite terse and often in a rather loose correspondence
to the stanzas. The stanzas connected with Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar, the celebrated com-
mentator of the 14th century, constitute one extreme case since there are no less
than six of them, five free-floating and one with an identifiable source. They are
also instructive in their partial agreement and partial disagreement and in their
metrical variety, which allows some educated guesses as to their respective ages.
In the introduction to his edition of the Pattuppāṭṭu, U.V. Cāminātaiyar has
brought them together under the heading ‘history of Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’ (nacciṉārk-
kiṉiyar varalāṟu), identifying the verses as ‘verses of laudatory preface to the com-
mentary’ (uraicciṟappupāyirac ceyyuṭkaḷ). He then simply heads five of them by the
metre, as is also often done in manuscripts, namely two Veṇpā, one Āciriyappā
and two Āciriya viruttam, while for one he mentions the source instead, namely
the Pāṇṭi Maṇṭala Catakam.
Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar is an outstanding figure among the great medieval commen-
tators in that he constitutes a link between no less than three great literary tradi-
tions, the poetic, the grammatical and the epic. His commentaries survive for two
of the Caṅkam anthologies, the Kalittokai and the Pattuppāṭṭu (hence the inclusion
of verses for him in Cāminātaiyar’s preface to the latter), for the foundational text
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 175
of ilakkaṇam, the Tolkāppiyam (Eḻuttu, Col and six chapters of Poruḷ), and last but
not least for one of the ‘Five Big Poetic Compositions’ (aimperuṅkāppiyam, Skt.
mahākāvya) the celebrated Cīvakacintāmaṇi. All of this would comprise an enor-
mous body of manuscripts to be checked, and since the transmission for both the
grammar and the epic is more substantial that for the Caṅkam corpus, the foray
into the jungle made by the Caṅkam project probably just reveals the tip of the ice-
berg.11 Notable is, first of all, that not a single verse on the commentator has come
down to us with any of the still extant Pattuppāṭṭu manuscripts. One likely expla-
nation for this is the fact that few among them still have a beginning or an end:
only one manuscript (UVSL 1074) still begins with the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai and
that starts directly on the first line of the poem (ulakam uvappa...). Of the two re-
maining manuscripts that cover the end of the last song, the Malaipaṭukaṭām, one
(UVSL 279, palm-leaf) simply end with the Veṇpā that usually accompanies the
poem, and the other, one of the emergency paper copies of disintegrating palm-
leaves made in the GOML (D-269), ends with a special verse on the songs contained
in the anthology that seems to mention the scribe and the patron for the manu-
script (not the text).12 Different is the situation with the Kalittokai. Three of the
verses collected by Cāminātaiyar, among them the one in Āciriyappā – highly un-
usual in that it does not content itself with the customary four lines, but runs up to
a proud 57 lines – are found in one old palm-leaf manuscript (GOML D-210) and in
a paper manuscript (GOML R-5754) that is probably its copy, since the stanza text
and their sequence are in close agreement. They appear as integrated into the col-
ophon, together with a caveat verse, at the end of the Kali text and its commentary.
There is no means of ascertaining whether this row was firmly established in the
Kali transmission since these two manuscripts are the only surviving ones that
cover the end of the text.
Before looking into the verses themselves it might be useful to add a few ob-
servations on metre as an indication of age. Of course it is impossible to date an
anonymous verse with any degree of certainty, but at least it is permissible, and
perhaps useful, to weigh the probabilities. The four-line Veṇpā has to be regarded
as the standard format for mnemonic stanzas. The metre developed in the 5th–6th
century, and some stanzas might well go back at least to the late centuries of the
first millennium; one of the verses accompanying the Pattuppāṭṭu, the one for the
Malaipaṭukaṭām, for instance, is quoted in the Yāpparuṅkala Virutti (10th c.). This
||
11 Note, however, that in the chapter on Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar contained in Cāminātaiyar’s earlier
edition of the Cintāmaṇi two of the six stanzas are still missing, one Veṇpā and the Āciriyappā.
This suggests that neither of them was found in any manuscript of the Cintāmaṇi at his disposal.
12 This poem is quoted and translated in Wilden 2014, 200.
176 | Eva Wilden
means that probably the oldest surviving stanzas were composed in Veṇpā, and
since Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar belongs to perhaps the 14th c., any verse dedicated to him
might be seen as the continuation of a tradition. One should add, perhaps, that
also attempts to rewrite (or re-substantiate) history more likely than not made use
of this format.13 Their layout is terse, easy to memorise and where necessary sup-
plemented by ornamental adjectives as metre fillers. Āciriyappā is of course the
metre of the oldest heritage. To have it composed in the second millennium almost
certainly implies a political statement. In 14th or 15th centuries, the final period of
glory for Maturai and classical learning under Pāṇṭiya aegis, it might be meant pre-
cisely to forge a link between Nacciṉārkkiṉar, the Caṅkam corpus and the second
Pāṇṭiya dynasty. As for Āciriya viruttam, it is one of the complicated later metres
en vogue when after the fall of Vijayanagara and the independence of the Nayaks
there was a resurrection of traditional Tamil culture, and thus was perhaps em-
ployed in the 17th or 18th centuries. It also comprises four lines, but far longer ones,
which means the amount of information is not at all greater than in a Veṇpā but
there is far more space for ornamentation and mere laudatory phrases, or, worded
differently, that there is ample space to display poetic skills.
The first verse to be quoted14 is the memorable and informative standard
Veṇpā, so far not found in any manuscript (that is, neither with the Pattuppāṭṭu
nor with the Kalittokai). It was found, according to Cāminātaiyar, in a manuscript
of the Tirukkuṟaḷ with Parimēlaḻakar’s commentary from Tiruvāvaṭutuṟai Mutt in a
series of further mnemonic stanzas, i.e., the ones enumerating the texts assembled
in the Eṭṭuttokai, the Pattuppāṭṭu and the Kīḻkkaṇakku.15
pāra+ tolkāppiyamum pattupāṭṭum kaliyum
āra+ kuṟuntokaiyuḷ aiññāṉkum – cāra+
tiru+ taku mā muṉi cey cintāmaṇiyum
virutti nacciṉārkkiṉiyamē.
||
13 A case in point is the author stanza of the Kalittokai, discussed in Wilden 2017a; see also the
introduction to the new critical Kali edition by T. Rajesvari (p. li–lii).
14 In all transcriptions from Tamil that follow the plus sign (+) is used to indicate geminated con-
sonants and a tilde (~) stands for the gliding consonants y and v.
15 This shows us, incidentally, that at least smaller collections of stanzas existed. An extant case
in point is one of the Kiḻkkaṇakku mss. of the UVSL (885, fol. 1a) where on a prefixed folio we find
the three standard Veṇpās connected with the three classical anthologies. In fact the back of this
folio is blank and the next page again begins counting from 1. This means that either the folio has
come from elsewhere or, perhaps more likely, that it was added as an afterthought and could be
formally integrated only by being redundant on numbering.
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 177
On the weighty Tolkāppiyam and the Pattuppāṭṭu and Kali
and on five [times] four in the ornamental Kuṟuntokai and on the
essential Cintāmaṇi made by the brilliant great sage (Tirutakkatēvar)
[are] the elaborate commentaries [attributed] to Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar.
So here the stanza gives just the name of the commentator and the commentaries
made by him, including one on 20 verses of the Kuṟuntokai. This latter one has
never been seen in living memory, but its existence has always been taken for
granted by the tradition, precisely on the strength of the Veṇpā. I have even heard,
from my late and lamented teacher T.V. Gopal Iyer, that ‘some say’ once there was
a commentary by Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s predecessor Pērāciriyar on almost the whole
of the Kuṟuntokai, except for the last 20 stanzas, which is why Nacciṉārkkiyar had
to take them up. This sounds like a trope imitating the story of the Tolkāppiyam,
where Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s commentary on the Poruḷ section just covers the chap-
ters that had been left off by Pērāciriyar (with the famous exception of the
Ceyyuḷiyal for which we have commentaries by both). However, what comes closest
to a written source for this story is another verse, the 57-line Āciriyappā.
The stanzas quoted in what follows are given as far as possible in the wording
found in the Kali manuscripts; for a critical apparatus collating also the versions
from Cāminātaiyar’s Pattuppāṭṭu edition and that from the early Kali editions, see
Wilden 2014, 187ff. Since the full text and translation for the 57-line Āciriyappā are
also found there, suffice it here to quote the lines of interest to the current argu-
ment.16 In GOML D-210, fol. 332a, line 9, the Āciriyappā just follows the final title of
Mullai plus Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s commentary, i.e., the end of the text. Distributed
over the first 40 lines we find praise for the known commentaries on Tolkāppiyam,
Pattuppāṭṭu, Kalittokai and Cintāmaṇi. Lines 41–45, then, continue with the story
about the Kuṟuntokai commentary.
nal +aṟiv’-uṭaiya tol pēr ācāṉ
kalviyum kāṭciyum kāciṉi ~aṟiya+
poruḷ teri kuṟuntokai ~irupatu pāṭṭiṟk’
itu poruḷ eṉṟavaṉ eḻutāt’ oḻiya
~itu poruḷ eṉṟataṟk’ ēṟpa ~uraittum 45
||
16 The amount of variation between the two Kali manuscripts and Tāmōtarampiḷḷai’s editio prin-
ceps show clearly that he must have had another source, i.e. Kali manuscripts lost or incomplete
today. Cāminātaiyar’s version in the Pattuppāṭṭu edition, however, follows Tāmōtarampiḷḷai so
closely that either he perused the same source(s) or copied from the former’s Kali edition (as was
done by all the later Kali editors).
178 | Eva Wilden
when scholarship and insight
of the old great teacher possessing good knowledge
was left unwritten, He, thinking this to be the meaning of the twice ten songs
in the Kuṟuntokai where meaning [yet] has to be understood, for the world to know,
made a commentary in order to take charge of expressing this meaning,
So here we see an allusion to at least some of the elements reported by T.V. Gopal
Iyer. The pēr ācaṉ of the stanza evidently has been taken to refer to Pērāciriyar, the
commentator, interpreting ācāṉ as a non-honorific and more contracted form of
the same Sanskrit loan word ācārya. That part of that scholar’s knowledge on the
Kuṟuntokai was left unwritten might imply that the rest had been written down (but
is now lost, which is of course perfectly possible). Finally, for the twice ten stanzas
in the Kuṟuntokai that were left off Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar wrote the commentary (now
also lost).
The rest of the Āciriyappā fleshes out the information on the person of
Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar:
taṇ tamiḻ terinta vaṇ pukaḻ maṟaiyōṉ
vaṇṭ’ imir cōlai maturā puri taṉil
eṇ ticai viḷaṅka vanta vācāṉ
payiṉṟa kēḷvi pārattuvācaṉ
nāṉ maṟai tuṇinta nāṟporuḷ ākiya 50
tūya ñāṉam iṟanta civa+ cuṭar
tāṉē ~ākiya taṉmai ~āḷaṉ
naviṉṟa vāymai nacciṉāṟkiṉiyāṉ
...
vāḻi vāḻi ~im maṇ-micai yāṉē.
the liberally praised brahmin to whom cool Tamil was clear,
inhabitant who came, for the eight directions to shine,
from Maturai city with groves where bees hum,
Bhāradvāja of practiced transmission,
who is the four meanings resolved in the four Vedas,
the man of a nature that is Śiva’s glow
itself, who traversed pure knowledge,
Nacciṉāṟkiṉiyāṉ, of practiced truthfulness,
...
may he live, may he live on this earth.
Where the Veṇpā gave the mere name, here we find a variation of the name, non-
honorific and with a long vowel in the last syllable, Nacciṉārkkiṉiyāṉ – further
variations are found in other verses and in the colophons – and he is identified as
a Brahmin of Bhāradvāja gotra hailing from Maturai. What follows in the Kali man-
uscripts is one further Veṇpā:
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 179
tolkāppiyattiṉ tokutta poruḷ aṉaittum
ellārkkum oppa iṉit’ uraittāṉ – col +ār
maturai nacciṉārkkiṉiyaṉ mā maṟaiyōṉ kalvi
katiriṉ cuṭar eṟippa kaṇṭu.
He who pleasingly commented, agreeable to all,
on the whole of the accumulated meaning/matter of the Tolkāppiyam
[is] Nacciṉārkkiṉiyaṉ from Maturai filled with words, a great Brahmin,
having seen [it], for the lustre of the beams of [his] erudition to shine.
Here there is confirmation of the fact that Nacciṉarkkiṉiyaṉ (here with short a)
would have been a Brahmin from Maturai. What is interesting is that the verse does
not mention the commentary on the Kalittokai, as one would expect in a Kali man-
uscript, but only the one on the Tolkāppiyam, and that, too, in slightly surprising
terms, since we know well that it is not complete. To give the author the benefit of
the doubt, however, we may assume that the ‘whole’ here refers to the fact that the
commentary covers all three sections, Eḻuttu, Col and Poruḷ, even if the latter is in-
complete.
One more stanza is added by the manuscript, this one in Āciriyaviruttam:
paccai māl aṉaiya mēkam pauvam nīr paruki+ kāṉṟa
~ecciṉāl ticaiyum uṇṇum amirteṉa ~eḻu-nā vecciṉ
miccil nāḷ-nāḷum viṇṇōr nukarkuvar vēta pōtaṉ
nacciṉāṟkiṉiyāṉ nāvil nal +urai navilavar nallōr.
Good people study the good commentary from the tongue of Nacciṉāṟkiṉiyāṉ,
knowledgeable in the Vedas of the celestials, who daily enjoy the remainder
from the heat of the one with seven tongues (Agni), like ambrosia, absorbed by all the direc-
tions from the excess that drips after the green, Māl-like clouds have drunk from the ocean.
No further information can be gleaned from this, just an elaborate praise of the
commentator, alluding to his Brahmin origin by emphasising his knowledge of the
Veda, and to Vedic sacrifice that is drunk by the gods. As mentioned above, the
four lines in this metre are far longer and leave ample space for poetic embellish-
ment. In the Kali palm-leaf manuscript, this is followed by a brief final colophon
clause stating that the commentary to the Kali made by Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar ended
there. Afterwards we get a fourth verse, a caveat in the form of a Veṇpā and then a
final blessing. The paper copy follows suit, except that the caveat Veṇpā is trun-
cated and followed by another blessing.
180 | Eva Wilden
Fig. 1: GOML D-210, fol. 233b: end of the Āciriyappā in line 2, Veṇpā up to line 3, Āciriyaviruttam
up to middle of line 4, colophon clause, caveat beginning line 5, blessing line 6. © Government
Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai, India.
To sum up the situation, manuscript evidence for the verses connected with the
name of Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar has been surveyed from the Pattuppāṭṭu, where none of
the extant manuscripts contains any verse on the commentator, and from the Kalit-
tokai, where two manuscripts do. One palm leaf (GOML D-210, fol. 233a+b, see Fig. 1)
is closely followed by one paper copy from the same library (GOML R-5754, image
250f.). Of the six stanzas collected by Cāminātaiyar in his Pattuppāṭṭu edition, three
have been quoted there in the colophon, namely the long Āciriyappā, one Veṇpā
and one Āciriyaviruttam. If we now look at Tāmōtaram piḷḷai’s editio princeps of
the Kalittokai, printed in 1887, we find all three of them included at the beginning.
The Āciriyaviruttam has become ‘praise of the commentary scholar’ (uraiyāciriyar
ciṟappu). The Āciriyappā has become the laudatory preface (ciṟappuppāyiram).
The Veṇpā has been relegated to the editor’s preface. The caveat has not been in-
cluded at all.
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 181
Fig. 2: Kalittokai edition, Tāmōtarampiḷḷai 1887: the Āciriyaviruttam as uraiyāciriyar ciṟappu.
Fig. 3: Kalittokai edition, Tāmōtarampiḷḷai 1887: the Āciriyappā (beginning) as ciṟappupāyiram.
182 | Eva Wilden
2.2 Manuscript examples
In order to illustrate the variety of genres that are endowed with stanzas the third
part of this paper will deal with examples from random manuscripts I chanced to
come across in recent years, one from the Royal Library of Copenhagen and five
from the Tamil manuscripts of the Cambridge collections (which are not very nu-
merous – less than 50 items).
The first verse appears on an unnumbered folio prefixed to the Copenhagen
manuscript of the earliest in a long line of poetic Thesauri from the Tamil literary
tradition, the Tivākaram, of perhaps the 9th century, Royal Library Copenhagen
Cod. Tam. 45 (Fig. 4):17
Fig. 4: Copenhagen Tam. 45, unnumbered head folio: Veṇpā. © Royal Danish Library, Copenha-
gen: Cod. Tamil. 45.
tantimukatt’ entai cataṅkai+ patam pōṟṟi+
cintai viḷakk’ ām tivākarattil [l. 1] [vanta]
tokuti ~oru pa[ṉ]ṉireṇṭum cōrāmal nērē
pakuti ~uṟavar maṉamē paṟṟu.[l. 2]
Praising the bell-stringed feet of the elephant-faced one’s father,
straight, without relinquishing the unique twelve sections
that come in the Tivākaram that is a lamp to the mind,
grasp [it] o minds of those who will partake.
Here we are back again to the standard Veṇpā format. No author is mentioned, but
the title is named along with the number of chapters, i.e. twelve. Moreover, there is
||
17 On the function and the history of such poet’s dictionaries, see Chevillard 2010.
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 183
reference to a deity, in other words, we see here what I above termed a portmanteau
verse fulfilling at the same time the functions of an invocation and of a colophon
stanza. The god to be praised by the reader (addressed as maṉamē, ‘o mind’) is Śiva,
described as the father of Gaṇeśa. The elephant god becomes a very popular addressee
for kāppu verses, for the first time perhaps seen in the first kaṭavuḷ vaṇakkam of the
roughly contemporaneous Pārataveṇpā.18 Although at least the manuscript referred to
does not say so – to be sure, one would have to check many more manuscripts of this
popular text – the verse is printed as a kāppu in the editio princeps of 1840.
A similar verse is found in the first numbered folio of Cambridge Add.2573 (Fig. 5),
a multiple-text manuscript that begins with a Paḻamoḻi Viḷakkam, alias Taṇṭalaiyār
Catakam, an 18th-century poem by Cāntaliṅkak Kavirāyar, this one not in Veṇpā, but
something that might be Āciriyaviruttam.
Fig. 5: Cambridge Add.2573 fol. 1 a: Āciriyaviruttam. © Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
cīr koṇṭa kaṟpakattai vātāvi ṉāyakaṉai+ tillai[l. 1] vā[ḻ]um
kār koṇṭa karimukaṉai vikaṭa cakkura+[l. 2] kaṇapatiyai+ karuttuḷ vaittu[m]
pēr koṇṭa ñā[l. 3]ṉam nāyaki pāka[ṉ] nīḷ neṟi ~[em]+ perumāṉ mītu[l. 4]
ēr koṇṭa nava-kaṇṭam icai-tanta pa[ḻ]amo[ḻ]i viḷa[l. 5]kkam ēṟṟa+ tāṉē.19
||
18 Incidentally, the Pārataveṇpā is printed with three verses of kaṭavuḷ vaṇakkam, thus perhaps provid-
ing the first instance of what the theoreticians named a Kāppumālai (cf. n. 9). The first Veṇpā runs thus:
ōta viṉai akalum ōṅku pukaḻ perukum
kātal poruḷ aṉaittum kaikkūṭum cītap
paṉi kōṭṭu māl varai-mēl pāratap pōr tīṭṭum
taṉi kōṭṭu vāraṇattiṉ tāḷ.
‘Bad karma departs, high fame increases,
love [and] wealth all succeed –
at the feet of the elephant with the single tusk
who writes about the Bhārata war on the vast mountain with cool dewy peaks.’
19 Here in the text a number of corrections are necessary, most of them obvious, with the excep-
tion of the third line where the manuscript reads neṟiyai perumāṉ, emended with the help of the
printed text into neṟi eṉperumāṉ.
184 | Eva Wilden
In our mind let us place the excellent wish-fulfilling tree, the lord of Vātāvi,
the cloud[-coloured] elephant-faced one who lives in Tillai, Kaṇapati with the mischievous
discus,
so that the Paḻamoḻi Viḷakkam – sung on the nine beautiful continents, on our great lord
of the long path who has as a part the famous lady of knowledge – may sound in praise.
Here the element of reception is missing. Gaṇeśa is indirectly implored to help the
poet (speaking of himself in the 1st person plural) accomplish the poem to the hon-
our of Śiva. This poem and the two following ones are printed as kāppu, again pre-
sumably constituting a minimal Kāppumālai. There is a śleṣa in the first line,
namely either vātāvi nāyakaṉ, as read by the edition, or vātā viṉāyakaṉ, ‘the un-
torn Viṉāyaka’, as is suggested by the alveolar ṉ in the manuscript version.
The next verse is prefixed on an extra folio to a so far unidentified version of
the Pāratam, a Mahābhārata in Tamil, Cambridge Add.299, again a simple four-
liner, but in a longer metre (Fig. 6).
Fig. 6: Cambridge Add.299, unnumbered head folio; no soot left in the Āciriyaviruttam. © Repro-
duced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
muṉṉa mā tavarkaḷ coṉṉa muḷḷa mā muṭaiyāṉ
taṉṉai teḷḷiya tami[l. 1]ḻiṉālē cīrpeṟa+ cepputaṟku
poṉmalai taṉilē pāratattaiyē ma[l. 2]ruppiṉālē
miṉṉavē ~eḻutukiṉṟa viṉāyakaṉ kāppu+ tāṉē.
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 185
Protection itself [is] Viṉāyakaṉ who writes flashingly
with [his] tusk the Pāratam on the golden mountain itself,
in order to speak excellently in Tamil to make it clear to the one
with a thorny big palm-leaf umbrella, spoken about by the great ascetics of old.
Here we have yet another verse dedicated to Gaṇeśa, clearly mirroring the one from
the Pārataveṇpā cited in note 18. The person for whose benefit the elephant god
writes is presumably the legendary author of the Sanskrit epic, Vyāsa, but it is not
clear why he would be described as the one with the palm-leaf umbrella.
The same topos of the god writing with his tusk as a stylus is found yet again
with the most famous Tamil version of the Mahābhārata, the Villipāratam, com-
posed in the 15th century by Villiputtūrāḻvār. This popular text (or rather part of it)
is preserved in two manuscript copies in the Cambridge collections. Both are
quoted here to show the deviations between the two versions, the first from an un-
numbered prefixed folio in Cambridge Add.1572 (Fig. 7), the other on the title folio
itself of Cambridge Corpus Christi, Oriental Box 38, item 1 (Fig. 8).
Fig. 7: Cambridge Add.1572, head folio. © Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cam-
bridge University Library.
nīṭ' āḻi ~ulakattu maṟai ṉāloṭ’ ēnt’ eṉṟu - nilam nirkkavē
vāṭāta tavar vāḻmai [l. 1] miku vēta muṉiṟācaṉ makāpāṟatam coṉṉa ṉāḷ
ēṭ' āka vaṭamēru verpp’ āka vem [l. 2] kūr eḻuttāṇi taṉ -
kkōṭ’ āka ~eḻutum piṟaṉai+ paṇint’ ampu kūr[l. 3]vām arē.
Fig. 8: Cambridge Corpus Christi, Box 38, item 1, title folio. © Cambridge Corpus Christi College.
nīṭ’ āḻi ~ulakattu maṟai nāloṭ’ aint’ eṉṟu nilai niṟkavē
vāṭāta tava vāymai miku vēta muṉirācaṉ māpāratam coṉṉa nāḷ
ēṭ‘ āka vaṭamēru veṟp’ āka[l. 1] vem kūr eḻuttāṇi taṉ
kōṭ’ āka ~eḻutum pirāṉai+ paṇint’ aṉpu kūrvām arō.
186 | Eva Wilden
Ah, we are full of love, humbling ourselves before the lord who writes with his tusk
as a cruel sharp stylus, while there is the Northern Mēru mountain as a palm-leaf,
on the day the Māpāratam is told by the king of Veda sages ample in truthfulness, of unfading
penance,
so that it may stand fast as fifth with the four Vedas in the world [fenced] by the vast ocean.
Here it is obvious that the first version is full of copying mistakes and moreover
betrays an oral substratum where the distinction between the two type of r conso-
nant, periya and ciṉṉa ra (= ṟ or r) is blurred. The only interesting deviation con-
cerns the title of the text, the first a direct transposition of the Sanskrit word
mahābhārata- into Tamil, the other a translation of the adjective Sanskrit mahā
into Tamil mā. The tone is far more devotional and might be connected with an
agenda, since it tries to establish the Pāratam as the fifth Veda. Its position in the
transmission of the text, however, will need further study. It has been printed as
the first of two kāppu in the Villipāratam.
The second of the two copies, the one from Corpus Christi with the verse on the
title page, is prefixed with yet another stanza on an unnumbered folio:
Fig. 9: Cambridge Corpus Christi, Box 38, item 1, head folio. © Cambridge Corpus Christi College.
tikaḻ taca+ karam cem mukam aint’ uḷāṉ
cakaṭa cakkara+ tāmarai nāyaka[l. 1]ṉ
akaṭa cakkara ~iṉ maṇiyat’ ā ~uṟai
vikaṭa cakkaram mey+ patam pōṟṟal ām.
He who is with five red faces [and] ten shining hands
the lord with a chariot wheel in [his] lotus [hand],
let us praise the bodily/true feet of [him with] the mischievous discus
who dwells with the cow of sweet bells, with a belly wheel.
Here the meaning of the third line (the fourth in the translation) is not clear. If there
is a link between the two verses, it does not seem to be the Mahābhārata anymore
but just the praise of Gaṇeśa. However, this stanza does not originally belong to
the transmission of the Villipāratam, but it is otherwise attested as the kāppu of the
Kantapurāṇam.
To conclude with a completely different genre, the Pañcapakṣicāstiram is a
treatise on bird omens. The Cambridge copy Add.3438 (Fig. 10), starts folio 1 with
two prefixed Veṇpās, the first of them qualified as a kāppu:
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 187
Fig. 10: Cambridge Add.3438, fol. 1a, l. 1–4: Veṇpā. © Reproduced by kind permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
uṉṉi ~oruvaṉ uraitta mutal eḻuttai [col. 3, l. 1]
paṉṉi+ paṟavai ~āy+ pāvittu – vaṉṉi [l. 2]
~utaiya ticai+ pakṣi ~uṇmai ~uraikka+ [l. 3]
katai kāviya+ poruḷē. [l. 4]
Uttering the first syllable spoken by the one to be meditated upon,
contemplating it as birds, let the birds
in the fiery(?) eastern direction tell the truth,
so that the message carries meaning.
Here the reference to a deity is rather veiled; presumably the ‘one to be meditated upon’,
who uttered the first syllable, is Śiva. The birds from the title are mentioned, and the func-
tion of the treatise is alluded to when those birds are exhorted to tell the truth. The library
of the French Institute in Pondicherry holds two texts with the title Pañcapakṣicāstiram
(with the shelf marks TA SC-MATH 0010 and 0047), old cheap brochure prints without
title pages, one of which seems to correspond to the text of the manuscript.
The second stanza, which is not termed a kāppu, brings in an open reverence to
Lakṣmī. Here there also is an allusion to the actual text, with the birds of five kinds:
Fig. 11: Cambridge Add.3438, fol. 1a, l. 5–1b, l. 1: Veṇpā 1. © Reproduced by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
tuyya malar uṟaiyum tōkaiyu[m] tam poṉ [l. 5]
ceyya malar+ pātam cēvitteṉ – vaiyatt’ [l. 6]
aintu vakaip pakṣi ~amaiyum kuṇam [l. 7; f. 1b]eṉ taṉ
cintai taṉi niṟkavē.
188 | Eva Wilden
I have served the gold-red feet of the peacock [lady]
who dwells in the pure [lotus] blossom, so that my mind
may stand in solitude [directed] to the characteristics that are fit
for the birds of five kinds in the world.
When read together these two verses seem to suggest a double invocation by the
author of the treatise, one to the birds whose voice is vital to his trade, the other to
the goddess of wealth and luck. However, the Pañcapakṣicāstiram is the only text
taken up here that does not come from one of the literary traditions, but from a
practical domain. As such it may follow another set of conventions that have not
been established yet.
3 Preliminary conclusions
The two practical parts of the present article discussed one genre of paratext to be
found in manuscripts, i.e., of additional stanzaic material, from two different per-
spectives. The first proceeded from a collection of additional stanzas made by an
earlier scholar (U.V. Cāminātaiyar in his edition of the Pattupāṭṭu) and the manu-
script evidence that can be found for them. The second proceeded from the stray
verses present in a series of manuscripts arbitrarily chosen from different literary
domains (for the most part brought together by chance in one library in Cam-
bridge). The foremost conclusion is that in order to fully judge and understand the
development that led from a fairly simple arrangement with an invocation in the
beginning and one or several colophon stanzas at the end of a text in a manuscript,
via the creation of various layers by adding folios at the beginning and at the end,
to an elaborate system of prefatory materials in the early Tamil prints, it would be
necessary to survey far more extant manuscript material in all its peculiarities.
However, a few preliminary conclusions can be drawn with respect to the con-
struction of Tamil literary history on the strength of the material shown on one of
the greatest medieval Tamil scholars, the commentator Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar.
– Most of the information available on the commentator Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar di-
rectly or indirectly comes from the stanzas, beginning with his name, to be
found in about five different spellings, if one includes marginal, inter- and end
titles.
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 189
– A sideline to be followed up in future research is smaller regional texts such as
the Pāṇṭi Nāṭu Catakam, which digest such information and presumably inte-
grate them into their praise of the glories of the particular region.20
– In print the verses are displaced and taken out of their original context, from
the colophon to the beginning of the text. Some are delegated into the editor’s
prefaces (and some vanish altogether). At the same time literary history is writ-
ten which retains and freely interprets the information but discards the
sources.
Now, why would it matter whether a stanza found on the vestiges of a manuscript
tradition was printed at the beginning or at the end? Because it changes our ap-
proach towards its interpretation. When a colophon stanza is relocated from the
end of a manuscript to the beginning of a printed book as a laudatory preface
(ciṟappuppāyiram), its function is re-defined. Genette might say it is transferred
from a metatext into a peritext. The main function of a colophon stanza was to be
a mnemonic verse, a poem composed in order to ensure the transmission of vital
information in a semi-oral environment. It certainly included ornamental ele-
ments, on the one hand as metrical fillers, on the other hand as a means of paying
proper respect to the text and its author. The main function of a ciṟappuppāyiram,
however, was, as the name says, laudatory, at least in the 18th and 19th centuries,
the period of the last pulavar productions, but also of the vast majority of manu-
scripts that remain – to establish and maintain a place of recognition for the author
of a poetic work within a community of connoisseurs. The former was an anony-
mous stanza, the latter was a verse replete with the personality of its author.21
||
20 This verse does not add anything new, but on the contrary leaves off the commentary on the Kali
and does not mention the Kuṟuntokai. Quoted from Cāminātaiyar’s Pattuppāṭṭu edition it reads:
karai peṟṟat’ ōr pañcalaṭcaṇamāṉa tolkāppiyamum
tarai muṟṟum pōṟṟiya cintāmaṇiyun tamiḻ caṅkattiṉ
nirai peṟṟ’ uyar pattuppāṭṭum viḷaṅka nica uraiyai
varai nacciṉārkkiṉiyaṉ aiyaṉ pāṇṭiya maṇṭalamē.
‘The lord of the Pāṇṭiya land [is] Nacciṉārkkiṉiyaṉ who wrote
eternal commentaries on high Pattuppāṭṭu, getting a firm position(?)
in the Tamil academy, on the Cintāmaṇi, lauded by the whole earth,
and on the Tolkāppiyam, a [treatise on the] five categories of grammar that has seen the [other]
shore (of the ocean of knowledge).’
21 In this respect the taṉiyaṉ-s of the Śrīvaiṣṇava Tivyappirapantam transmission might be seen
as its predecessor. Although demonstrably continuing the form of the author stanza, they are al-
ready employed in a different manner in that they constitute the personal praise of an Āḻvār and
his/her work uttered by persons important to the community.
190 | Eva Wilden
Admittedly in practice such a distinction was not always easy and straightfor-
ward, as is demonstrated by the material in the third part. One factor is that we
often find portmanteau stanzas at the beginning of a manuscript, often on folios
outside the regular pagination, verses that integrate elements of the earlier colo-
phon stanzas with information on the author and the text, with elements of invo-
cation verses that address a deity. These in turn seem to trigger the addition of yet
other verses of purely devotional content, often quoted from elsewhere. Another
factor is the length of a transmission period, measured on the one hand by the cen-
turies a text remains alive and important enough to copy to some people, on the
other hand by the number of physical acts of recopying. If a verse on a text or
scholar has already become part of the transmission, further readers/users/copy-
ists of the text may want to add their own to what is already there, perhaps slightly
altering the informative content according to the views of their own community,
employing the metres in vogue at their own time or simply producing poetic vari-
ation. Thus stanzas accumulate.
A clearer picture might be gained from collecting and collating as great as pos-
sible a number of stanzas from a variety of domains.
References
Manuscripts
Kalittokai GOML D-210, Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai, India
GOML R-5754, Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai, India.
Pattuppāṭṭu UVSL 1074, U. V. Swaminatha Iyer Library, Chennai, India.
UVSL 579-G, U. V. Swaminatha Iyer Library, Chennai, India.
GOML D-269, Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai, India.
Tivākaram Cod. Tam. 45, Royal Library Copenhagen.
Paḻamoḻiviḷakkam alias
Taṇṭalaiyār Catakam Cambridge UL Add.2573
Pāratam Cambridge UL Add.299
Villipāratam Cambridge UL Add.1572
Cambridge Corpus Christi, Oriental Box 38, item 1
Pañcapakṣicāsttiram Cambridge UL Add.3438
Tamil Satellite Stanzas: Genres and Distribution | 191
Primary sources
Caṅkayilakkiyam Eṭṭuttokaiyum Pattuppāṭṭum. Ed. by C. Vaiyāpurip Piḷḷai, 2. vols, Cātu Accuk-
kūṭam, Ceṉṉai 1940.
Cāntaliṅkak Kavirāyarāl pāṭiyatu Taṇṭalaiyār Catakam eṉkiṟa Paḻamoḻi Viḷakkam.
Karuṇāṉantacuvāmikaḷ avarkaḷāṟ pārvaiyiṭappaṭṭu. Ed. by Kēcavamutaliyār, Pirapākara Ac-
cukkūṭṭam, Cintātirippēṭṭai 1871.
Cēntaṉ Tivākaram. Ed. by Tāṇṭavarāyamutaliyār, American Mission Press 1840.
Cilappatikāram mūlamum arumpatavuraiyum Aṭiyārkkunallaruraiyum. Ed. by U.Vē. Cāminātai-
yar, Ve.Nā. Jubili Accukkūṭam, Ceṉṉai 1892 (rep. of the 5th edition: 1955).
Cīvakacintāmaṇi mūlamum Nacciṉārkkiṉiyaruraiyuṭaṉ. Ed. by U.V. Cāminātaiyar, Kapīr Accuk-
kūṭam, Ceṉṉai, 1907 (rep. 1942).
Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ + Nakkīraṉ’s urai. No editor, Caivacittānta Nūṟpatippuk Kaḻakam, Tirunelvēli
1953 (rep. 1964).
Kalittokai nacciṉārkkiṉiyār uraiyuṭaṉ. Ed. by Ci.Vai Tāmōtaram piḷḷai, Scottish Press, Madras
1887.
Kalittokai mūlamum nacciṉārkkiṉiyār uraiyōṭum. Ed. by I.Vai. Aṉantarāmaiyar, 2. vols, Tamiḻp
Palkalaik Kaḻakam 1925+1931 (rep. Tañcāvūr 1984).
Kalittokai Nacciṉārkkiṉiyaruraiyuṭaṉ. Ed. by Kācivicuvanātan Ceṭṭiyār, Caivacittānta Nūṟpatippuk
Kaḻakam, Tirunelvēli/Madras 1938.
Kalittokai mūlamum nacciṉārkkiṉiyār uraiyum. Critical Texts of Caṅkam Literature 3.1+2, ed. by T.
Rajesvari, Tamilmann Patippakam/EFEO, Ceṉṉai 2015.
Kantapurāṇam. Ed. in 3 vol. by Va.Cu. Ceṅkalvarāya Piḷḷai, Śrīkāci Maṭam, Tirupaṉantāl 1952–53.
Kuṟuntokai, Critical Edition and Annotated Translation + Glossary and Statistics. Ed. by E.
Wilden, 3 vols, EFEO/Tamilmann Patippakam, Critical Texts of Caṅkam Literature 2.1–2.3,
Ceṉṉai 2010.
Makāpāratam Villipputtūr Āḻvār aruḷiceyttu. Ed. by Ma. Tiruvēṅkaṭa Mutaliyār, Vāṇi Vilāca Accuk-
kūṭam, Ceṉṉai 1914.
Naṉṉūl mūlamum mayilainātar uraiyum. Ed. by U.Vē. Cāminātaiyar, published by S. Kaliyāṉa
Cuntaraiyar, Kapīr Accukkūṭam, Ceṉṉai 1946.
Navanītap Pāṭṭiyal uraiyuṭaṉ. Ed. by Es. Vaiyāpurip Piḷḷai, Mayilait Tamiḻ Caṅkam, Ceṉṉai 1943.
Patiṉeṇkīḻkkaṇakku. Es. Rājam, Ceṉṉai 1959.
Pattuppāṭṭu mūlamum Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar uraiyum. Ed. by U.V. Cāminātaiyar, 6th ed. Kapīr Accuk-
kūṭam, Ceṉṉai 1961.
Peruntēvaṉār Pāratam eṉṉum Pārata Veṇpā. Ed. by A. Kōpālaiyaṉ, "Centamiḻ Mantiram" put-
takacālai, Mayilāppur Irakṭākṣi v° ~ 1924/25.
Taṇṭalaiyār Catakam eṉkiṟa Paḻamoḻi Viḷakkam. Taṇṭalaiccēri Cāntaliṅkak Kavirāyar avarkaḷ
iyaṟṟiyatu, Tiruveṇkāṭu Āṟumukacuvāmikaḷ pārvaiyiṭappaṭṭu. Ed. by Irucappamutaliyār
Kumārār Paracurāmamutaliyār, Parappiramamuttirākṣacālai, Tiruvoṟṟiyūr Īsvara v° (~
1877/78 or 1937/38).
Tirukkuṟaḷ mūlamum Parimēlaḻakar uraiyum. Ed. by Vaṭivēlu Ceṭṭiyār, 3 vols, Maturaip Palkalaik-
kaḻakam [1904], 1972–76.
Tolkāppiyam, Eḻuttatikāram, Collatikāram, Poruḷatikāram with all the commentaries. Ed. by T.V.
Gopal Iyer, 14 vols, Tamiḻmaṇ Patippakam, Ceṉṉai 2003.
Yāpparuṅkalam Paḻaiya Viruttiyuṭaṉ. Ed. by Mē.Vī. Vēṇukōpālap Piḷḷai, Ulakattamiḻārāycci
Niṟuvaṉam (IITS), Ceṉṉai 1998 (rep. of 1960).
192 | Eva Wilden
Secondary sources
Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2010), ‘“Rare words” in classical Tamil literature: from the Uriyiyal to the
Tivākaram’, in Acta Orientalia, Volume 63.3: 301–317.
Ciotti, Giovanni, and Hang Lin (eds) (2016), Tracing Manuscripts in Time and Space through Para-
texts (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 7), Berlin: De Gruyter.
Ebeling, Sascha (2010), Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature in
Nineteenth-Century South India, Albany: State University of New York Press.
Francis, Emmanuel (forthcoming), ‘Supplementing Poetry and Devotion: The Additional Stanzas
to the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai’.
Genette, Gérard (2002), Seuils. Points, Paris (1re édition: Éditions du Seuil, Paris 1987).
Wilden, Eva (2014), Manuscript, Print and Memory: Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu (Studies in
Manuscript Cultures 3), Berlin: De Gruyter.
Wilden, Eva (2017a), ‘Making Order in the Vaults of Memory: Tamil Satellite Stanzas on the
Transmission of Texts’, in Daniele Cuneo, Elisa Freschi, Camillo A. Formigatti (eds). Not Far
Afield: Asian Perspectives on Sexuality, Testimony and Print Culture. A Coffee Break Project,
KERVAN - International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies, vol. 21, Turin 2017, 317–337 (retriev-
able at http://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/kervan/article/view/2265).
Wilden, Eva (2017b) (in print), ‘The Plurality of God(s) as a Poetic Concept in the Early Tamil Invo-
cation Stanzas’, in Marcus Schmücker (ed.), Changing Forms and the Becoming of a Deity in
Indian Religious Traditions: The God Viṣṇu-Nārāyaṇa. Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna
2014, 83–112.
Giovanni Ciotti
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through
Tamil
Evidence from Manuscripts of the Amarakośa with Tamil
Annotations (Studies in Late Manipravalam Literature 2)
Abstract: This paper investigates a specific aspect of Sanskrit education in 19th-
century Tamil Nadu. In particular, it makes use of manuscripts containing copies
of the Sanskrit thesaurus entitled Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana (also known as Amara-
kośa) that are accompanied by intralinear annotations composed in a particular
register of highly Sanskritised Tamil, which for convenience’s sake can be called
Manipravalam. The fact that these manuscripts were used as educational tools by
intermediate students of Sanskrit does not only emerge from the content of the
work they contain, but also from the analysis of their paratexts. This study aims
at reconsidering some of the common assumptions about the traditional Indic
educational setting, which is often and most probably unfairly described as rely-
ing mostly upon memory to the detriment of the written medium.
1 Introduction
In this paper I attempt to study manuscripts as sources of information for recon-
structing practices of teaching and learning. In particular, I concentrate on San-
skrit education in 19th century Tamil Nadu, focusing on the contexts in which a
highly Sanskritised register of Tamil, which for convenience’s sake can be called
||
Quite a number of people helped me to improve this article significantly. First and foremost, I
would like to thank R. Sathyanarayanan. My thanks also go to Suganya Anandakichenin, Bidur
Bhattarai, Jonas Buchholz, Jean-Luc Chevillard, Daniele Cuneo, Dominic Goodall, Marcus
Schmücker, and Eva Wilden. Of course, all shortcomings are my own. I would also like to thank
N. ‘Babu’ Ramaswamy and the late G. Ravindran for their kind assistance in photographing part
of the manuscripts.
The research for the present work was carried out within the scope of (1) the SFB 950 ‘Manu-
skriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika und Europa’ / Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC),
Hamburg, funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft,
DFG) and (2) NETamil ‘Going From Hand to Hand: Networks of Intellectual Exchange in the Tamil
Learned Traditions’, Hamburg / Pondicherry, funded by the European Research Council (ERC).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-007, © 2017 G. Ciotti, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
194 | Giovanni Ciotti
Manipravalam, was used for scholarly communication.1 The manuscripts I have
selected for carrying out this inquiry are copies of the Sanskrit thesaurus entitled
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana (also known as Amarakośa) that contain intralinear annota-
tions composed in Tamil.2
2 Learning Sanskrit in 19th century Tamil Nadu
At the beginning of the 19th century Sanskrit was considered a particularly useful
language to be acquainted with for the young British civil servants appointed to
the Madras Presidency.3 Since many words of Sanskritic origin can be found in
the languages of South India, the study of Hindi, Bengali, or Persian was consid-
ered to be of very limited use for learning Tamil, Telugu, etc. Thus, many serv-
ants-to-be were taught Sanskrit already at the East India College (Hertford, UK),
before venturing into the study of the languages of the Presidency taught at the
Fort of St. George (Madras), especially after the foundation of its College in 1812
under the impulse of Francis Whyte Ellis. In order to familiarise themselves with
Sanskrit, students would have had at their disposal not only grammars, but also
the most famous Sanskrit thesaurus, namely the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana (‘Teaching
on Nouns and [their] Genders’) of Amarasiṃha (Trautmann 2006, 116–135). A
then new edition and partial translation in English of this work had in fact been
published in 1808 by Henry Thomas Colebrooke.
At the same time, the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana kept playing what was its tradi-
tional role in those elite scholarly environments of Tamil Nadu, and of South Asia
||
1 This article is the outcome of an ongoing research on ‘Late Manipravalam’ and its literature,
in particular as they emerge from the study of manuscripts produced in 18th–19th-century Tamil
Nadu. The scope of this research is defined in Ciotti and Sathyanarayanan forthcoming (Studies
in Late Manipravalam Literature 1), Preamble.
2 I use the term intralinear to specify that the annotations found in the manuscripts studied in
this article are interspersed within the same lines where the annotated text is written. In other
words, annotations are neither found on the margins of the folia, nor in between the lines of the
Amarakośa, i.e. interlinearly. Furthermore, for the time being, I use the term ‘annotation’ to in-
dicate a wide range of remarks, including glosses (de facto synonyms), succinct grammatical
remarks, but also full-fledged commentaries. In §§ 6.4 and 6.5, I will more carefully distinguish
among these categories.
3 At that time, the territory of the Madras Presidency corresponded to most of South India with
a few exceptions constituted by some semi-independent native kingdoms (e.g. the kingdom of
Tiruvitāṃkūr/Travancore), which were however subject to a strong British influence. The head-
quarters of the Presidency was in Madras, today Ceṉṉai/Chennai (Tamil Nadu).
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 195
in general, where Sanskrit was one of the main target languages. Since the time
of its composition (or redaction) possibly around the 7th century CE, the
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana, also known as Amarakośa (‘Amara[siṃha]’s Thesaurus’),
had in fact been a fundamental tool for teaching Sanskrit to young students, and
a constant reference work for trained scholars.4 Owing to its importance in the
traditional lore, it comes as no surprise that this work has been at the centre of a
fervid commentarial activity with textual outputs both in Sanskrit (Vogel 2015,
24–34) and several of the local literary languages of the subcontinent. South In-
dian languages are certainly no exception: from the library catalogues we know
of versions of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana accompanied by annotations – rather than
full-fledged commentaries – in Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam, and Tamil. Hereaf-
ter, I will focus on the latter category, i.e. Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanas annotated in
Tamil.5
||
4 In his three reports dated 1835, 1836 and 1838 on the state of the ‘native’ education in Bengal
and Bihar, William Adam described the use of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana for the instruction in San-
skrit of students who were native speaker of Bengali or Hindi (see Long’s 1868 reprint). In the
majority of cases, students would first study grammar, and would then move to ‘lexicology’ as
well as other more demanding subjects, such as law, logic, etc. The average age at which stu-
dents would study ‘lexicology’ ranges from 15 to 23 (Long 1868, 190, 193, 195, passim). Since these
reports are, to the best of my knowledge, the most detailed accounts of the curricula in Sanskrit
studies that were offered in 19th century India (or, at least, in its first half), I will at times rely on
them for drawing patterns representing educational practices that mutatis mutandi could have
been at work in 19th century Tamil Nadu, too.
5 Vogel’s otherwise detailed 1979 study on Sanskrit lexicography—as well as the 2015 revised edi-
tion—does not account at all for Tamil commentaries and annotations to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana.
This is easily explained by the fact that so far there have been no studies on this topic. For this
article, I had the opportunity to study the following manuscripts: RE22704, RE34008, RE37121,
RE43496, RE45807, and RE50420 of the Institut Français de Pondichéry; EO0044 and EO1272 of
the École française d’Extrême-Orient (Pondicherry); ORI3117 and ORI3118 of the Oriental Re-
search Institute of the Sri Venkateswara University (Tirupati); and AL69312, AL70200, AL70820,
AL71010, and AL72614 of the Adyar Library (Chennai). The Adyar Library contains more copies I
did not have the opportunity to check (see Krishnamacharya 1947). I also had access to some
relevant manuscripts held at the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library of Chennai, but I
could not include any of them in this study since their conservation state does not allow to work
on them (see Kuppuswami Sastri and Subrahmanya Sastri 1938). Similarly, I could only have a
glance at the last folio (containing the colophon) of UVSL 1365 of the U.V. Swaminatha Iyer Li-
brary (Chennai), since this is also in a very critical state of conservation (see Anonymous 1977,
37–38). Other copies I could not assess are found at the Saraswathi Mahal Library of Tanjore (see
Sastri 1930) and the University Manuscript Library of Trivandrum (see Raghavan Pillai 1965). As
for the manuscripts belonging to the EFEO and the IFP, I refer to unnumbered pages according
to the image number they correspond to in the .pdf or .jpg files that were produced by the two
institutions.
196 | Giovanni Ciotti
3 Linguistic landscape and linguistic education
Language teaching in 19th-century Tamil Nadu mostly consisted in the training of
native speakers of Tamil into the literary and scholarly registers of their language,
as well as a number of second languages (L2), namely Sanskrit and, possibly, Tel-
ugu.6 In the context of this article, it is the curriculum combining Tamil and San-
skrit that matters.
As a general remark, before venturing any further, one should be aware that
the number of (almost exclusively male) individuals who had access to even the
lowest level of formal education was rather limited. Furthermore, the number of
students who accessed higher forms of scholarly education, and in particular
those who received instruction in Sanskrit, should be estimated in the order of a
few hundreds in each generation.7
We do not know much about formal education in Tamil language in the pe-
riod here taken into consideration. Sascha Ebeling (2010, 37–55) has produced a
detailed account of the few direct and indirect sources that are presently at our
disposal, in particular in the case of the education of Tamil pulavars, i.e. Tamil
traditional scholars. Bhavani Raman (2012, 106–134) touches in part upon the
same material, while also taking into consideration the reports on the state of
education in the Madras Presidency that were produced under the aegis of the
British colonial enterprise. In particular, Raman does not focus on those pupils
who become pulavars, surely a minority, but on those who went into accounting,
and for whom the ability of keeping records and making calculations were the
required skills to master. What emerges from the pages of Ebeling and Raman is
that we know relatively well how young students started their scholastic carrier,
being initiated to the letters of Tamil script before or right after entering school;
that we have a few witnesses listing the texts studied by intermediate students;8
and, finally, that we know very little of what was studied by advanced students,
||
6 One can imagine a similar situation for Telugu native speakers living in the area of Tamil
Nadu, who were instructed in formal Telugu, and also in Sanskrit and Tamil (Narayana Rao
2004, 148–149, passim).
7 In particular his third report dated 1838, Adam offers some interesting figures concerning the
number of Sanskrit students in Bengal and Bihar (Long 1868, 143ff.).
8 Works that were widely studied are the Āticcūṭi and the Tirukkuṟaḷ (both containing moral
teachings), the Kampa Irāmāyaṇam (epic), the Naṉṉul (grammar), and some unspecified Ni-
kaṇṭus (lexicography) (see Gover 1874, 54 and Raman 2012, 115).
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 197
U.V. Cāminātaiyar’s autobiography being virtually the only source at our dis-
posal.9
Much less we know about how Sanskrit was taught. Surely, a number of as-
piring paṇḍitas (‘scholars’) populated the pāṭhaśālās (‘schools’) of Tamil Nadu:
men of religion (e.g. Vedic reciters and temple priests), men of knowledge (e.g.
court poets), and men of law (see Michaels 2001 and Davis 2009).10 In most cases,
these categories were partly overlapping. As Sharfe (2002, 311) writes:
[…] the native Tamil speaker, if he happened to be a brahmin, would have learned Sanskrit
in his early school years, probably by the direct method, i.e., by listening and imitating. […]
We found a similar approach to teaching in the acquisition of artistic and technical skills of
musicians, warriors, etc.: the textbook may be in the hands of the teacher, but the student
is introduced to it, if at all, only after he has mastered the practice.11
We will return to the ‘textbook’ in the next subsection, but for now, I would briefly
like to touch upon the linguistic background of the “brahmin”. For certain Tamil
native speakers, in fact, elements of the Sanskrit lexicon were not alien to their
mother tongue. There are in fact certain registers of Tamil that are characterised
by the presence of a remarkable number of words borrowed from Sanskrit. More
||
9 Cāminātaiyar’s autobiography is certainly exemplifying, but cannot be taken as the epitome
of every possible curriculum that advanced students of Tamil had to undertake. In this respect,
for instance, one can notice that Cāminātaiyar himself was not familiar with the fact that the
Cīvakacintāmaṇi (Jain epic) was at his time still studied within the Jain community of Tamil Nadu
(see Zvelebil 1994, 372–5).
10 Contrary to Adam’s reports (Long 1868), A.D. Campbell’s report on the Beḷḷari/Bellary district
(in the eastern part of nowadays Karnataka), which to the best of my knowledge is supposed to
be the most detailed account of early 18th-century education in the Madras Presidency, does not
take into account Sanskrit schools. As its author writes: ‘[…] there are 23 places of instruction
attended by Brahmins exclusively, in which some of the Hindoo sciences, such as theology, as-
tronomy, logic and law are still imperfectly taught in the Sanscrit language. In these places of
Sanscrit instruction in the Hindoo sciences, attended by youths, and often by persons far ad-
vanced in life, education is conducted on a plan entirely different from that pursued in the
schools, in which children are taught reading, writing and arithmetic only, in the several ver-
nacular dialects of the country. I shall endeavour to give a brief outline of the latter, as to them
the general population of the country is confined […]’ (Campbell 1823, see extract 1834, 350). For
a study of epigraphic records about Sanskrit education in the area of Tamil Nadu during the ‘an-
cient and medieval’ period, see Madhavan 2013.
11 Note that Adam remarks that students of Sanskrit schools were instructed at home (Long
1868, 196), and that those who went to elementary schools, where writing and calculus were
taught through Bengali and Hindi, mostly pursued carriers as accountants. However, Adam also
reports a few elementary schools, where elements of Sanskrit grammar and lexicography were
taught to pupils (Long 1868, 167).
198 | Giovanni Ciotti
specifically, these registers see the combination of Sanskrit nominal and verbal
stems with Tamil morphology (case and verbal endings). This is the case for the
so-called Brahmin Tamil, a not so well-studied variety of Tamil spoken by com-
munities of brahmins.12
Besides Tamil brahmins, among those who happen to be particularly familiar
with Sanskrit are the learned scholars belonging to the Śrīvaiṣṇava branches of
Tamil Nadu (and Karnataka). Śrīvaiṣṇavism is a multifaceted and widespread re-
ligious tradition that is embraced by both brahmins and non-brahmins. It also
includes a community of scholars devoted to the study of ubhayavedānta, i.e. a
specific corpus of texts composed both in Sanskrit and Tamil (see Venkatachari
1978). A great deal of Śrīvaiṣṇava literature is composed in Manipravalam (‘gem
and coral’, spelled maṇipravāḷam in Sanskrit and maṇippiravāḷam in Tamil). This
could be variously defined as a highly Sanskritised register of Tamil (as in the
case of the abovementioned Brahmin Tamil), or as mixed language (see Mccann
2016).13
No matter which label we decide to attribute to it, the register of Tamil annota-
tion found in certain copies of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanas is a highly Sanskritised one
(see below §§ 5.4–5). It seems safe to assume that Tamil Brahmins and scholars be-
longing to the Śrīvaiṣṇava communities were the most probable audience for these
annotations. However, one should not think of the latter as the only target for these
works. Below in § 5.1, we will see that although a conspicuous number of paratexts,
in particular of invocations, is in honour of Viṣṇu, other manuscripts pay homage
to Śiva, and certain sets of annotations to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana are meant to be
for the benefit of students of any confession.
||
12 A number of short descriptions of Brahmin Tamil and various references to its features can
be found in, for instance, Burnell 1877; Bloch 1910; Bright 1960a, b; and Zvelebil 1959, 1960, and
1963. However, to the best of my knowledge, a comprehensive investigation of this register of
Tamil remains a desideratum.
13 The ratio between Sanskrit and Tamil stems in Manipravalam is a prerogative of the stylistic
inclination of each individual author. Indigenous definitions of Manipravalam can be found, but
they can hardly be used to label Śrīvaiṣṇava literature. Two grammars, the Līlātilakam (see Go-
pala Pillai 1985, 95–109) and the Vīracōḻiyam (see Gopal Iyer 2005, 711), envisage a belletrist do-
main for the use of Manipravalam as it is said, respectively, to require either the presence of rasa
(‘aesthetic experience’) or of some particular stylistic features, on top of a specific set of linguistic
– mostly morphological – features. Thus, both works do not seem to include commentarial liter-
ature, such as that of the Śrīvaiṣṇavas, in their definitions. However, Vīracōḻiyam 182 also seems
to suggest the existence of another possible phonological/graphic mix of the two languages
called virav’ iyal (‘mixed nature’). The Vīracōḻiyam leads us to a further dimension of multilin-
gualism, i.e. its graphic representation. In fact, it is quite common to find a mixture of Tamil
script and Tamilian Grantha script both in manuscripts and inscriptions.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 199
4 Retrieving information from manuscripts
In 2002 Hartmut Scharfe published the most up-to-date overview of the educa-
tional system in pre-modern India based on (mostly Sanskrit and, to a more lim-
ited extent, Tamil) textual sources. In this article I would like to stress the im-
portance of another precious source of data that can be used to reconstruct the
educational practices of India: manuscripts.
Virtually every complete manuscript contains textual elements that can be
collectively called paratexts. These can accompany the main text of the manu-
script by means of fixing the temporal and spatial coordinates of its reproduction
(e.g. a colophon reporting date and place of production), or by recording the state
of its reception and interpretation (e.g. a set of annotations commenting upon its
content according to a specific school of thought). In a way, paratexts can be seen
as the interfaces between texts and their material instantiations.14
One should notice that paratexts are usually not reported in printed editions.
In this way, a number of precious indications about the history of texts in their
actual contexts is overlooked.15 As a consequence, the intention underlying the
production of a new copy of a text, i.e. a new manuscript, can be lost. In subsec-
tion 6, we will see how it is possible to argue that manuscripts of the Nāmaliṅgā-
nuśāsana with Tamil annotations were used as educational tools on the basis of
their paratexts. This will also enable us to reconsider some of the general assump-
tions concerning the role played by manuscripts in teaching and learning.
In fact, what emerges from the modern or even contemporary literature on
the topic of education in South Asia (in particular, education in Sanskrit and
Tamil) is that students were generally discouraged, if not prohibited, to use man-
uscripts. This view can be found in ethnographic accounts as well as in colonial
||
14 The concept of paratext was first introduced by Genette 1987, whose focus was on modern
Western printed books. For various examples of studies of paratexts in manuscripts, see Ciotti
and Lin 2016. For an introduction to the study of manuscript as material objects, see Quenzer
2014.
15 This is not only the case for marginal invocations, but also for more conspicuous types of par-
atexts, such as such as intralinear annotations (see n. 2). A blatant case is that of commentaries
(here also subsumed under the category of paratexts) of Sanskrit kāvyas, which contrary to the
commentaries of, for instance, grammatical or philosophical works, have been object of a limited
scholarly interest, at least until recently. A call for more attention to this kind of commentarial
literature, which has in the case of certain works a prominent didactic function, is represented
by Isaacson and Goodall’s (2003–) ongoing edition of Vallabhadeva’s Raghupañcikā. For the re-
lationship between various commentaries of kāvyas and how these are textualised in manu-
scripts, see Klebanov 2017, which also includes a survey of the secondary literature on the topic.
200 | Giovanni Ciotti
administrative reports. Even more strongly such a view is enhanced in the litera-
ture that regards Vedic education as representative of education in South Asia in
general, thus putting an overemphasis on orality over writing (see references in
Fuller 2001). The quotation from Scharfe in the previous subsection epitomises
such a view: ‘the textbook [i.e. the manuscript] may be in the hands of the
teacher, but the student is introduced to it, if at all, only after he has mastered the
practice’.
However, from the same literature it is possible to gather data outlining a
more lively connection between students and manuscripts. I refer here in partic-
ular to intermediate students, who would have reached enough intellectual ma-
turity to be able to engage individually with texts, whether new ones, or those
explained in class by the teacher.16 Furthermore, even in the case of Vedic educa-
tion, the number and character of prohibitions against the use of manuscripts
(see, for instance, Kane 1941, 347–349) can be easily understood as evidence of
the fact that manuscripts were actually used.
As for gurus (‘teachers’), it is usually said that they would employ manu-
scripts as mnemonic aids only, recurring to them for refreshing their memories
about texts they had previously familiarised with, or even fully learnt by heart
(see, for instance, Gover 1874; Galewicz 2011, 141). However, high-profile teachers
were also scholars who would have continued engaging with new texts, therefore
acquiring new manuscripts on which to study (a practice that in this context also
means exercising one’s own memory).17
These assumptions are however based on scarce evidence. One can more
soundly argue that manuscripts, in particular those containing texts well-known
for being part of the standard curriculum such as the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana, were
not so far removed from the educational praxis of students and teachers by as-
sessing their paratextual materials.18
||
16 For instance, while talking about students of Sanskrit in the Rajshahi district of Bengal,
Adam (see Long 1868, 123) remarks that: ‘[h]is books he either inherits from some aged relative
or at his own expense and with his own hands he copies those works that are used in the college
as text-books. […] most of the labor of copying is performed by night after the studies of the day
have been brought to a close.’
17 A renowned example is that of U.V. Cāminātaiyar, who extensively toured Tamil Nadu be-
tween the late 19th and early 20th century searching for Tamil manuscripts (see Zvelebil 1994).
18 Galewicz 2011 employed a similar approach for studying manuscripts containing Vedic texts.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 201
5 Multilingual manuscripts
Before moving to the analysis of the paratexts, it may be helpful to focus shortly
on the nature of multilingual manuscripts, which are especially relevant for at-
tempting a reconstruction of the educational practice of 19th-century Tamil Nadu.
In this context, by the expression ‘multilingual manuscripts’ I refer to manu-
scripts containing Sanskrit texts accompanied by Tamil annotations. All to-
gether, they constitute a small group of manuscripts if compared to the oceanic
amount of bundles containing just monolingual texts. However, their didactic
scope seems to be clear: these are Sanskrit texts presented through vernacular
lenses, i.e. in the language spoken by the students.19
Manuscript catalogues generally report whether a manuscript contains more
than one script. Therefore, as Tamil language is written almost exclusively in
Tamil script, when the latter is mentioned next to the indication ‘Grantha script’,
we automatically know that that manuscript must contain texts in both Sanskrit
and Tamil. As for which Sanskrit texts are more frequently accompanied by Tamil
annotations, from a cursory view through some catalogues (Narahari 1951, Kup-
puswami Sastri and Subrahmanya Sastri 1938, Parameshwara Aithal 1968, and
Sastri 1933) it emerges that manuscripts containing lexicographical works (virtu-
ally almost exclusively copies of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana) are by far the most
common.20 These are followed by manuscripts with works on nīti (in particular
the collection of subhāṣitas called Nītisāra), medicine (in particular the Nānāvi-
dhavaidya), and astronomy/astrology.21 Anyway, this list serves only the purpose
to offer an impressionistic view: a study – even a mere statistical evaluation – of
the kinds of Sanskrit texts that can be found together with Tamil annotations is
yet to be written. It seems evident that basic didactic purposes were the main con-
cerns of the authors of these Tamil annotations: on the one hand, as already said,
lexicography, but also easy-to-digest moral teachings (nīti), were at the founda-
||
19 A more frequent case of multilingualism is that of a manuscript containing a Sanskrit text
and a colophon written in Tamil, or in a hybrid of the two languages (see Ciotti and Franceschini
2016).
20 It should be said though that the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana is overall one of the most copied texts
in all of South Asia.
21 Also, one find sporadic occurrences of manuscripts with Tamil annotations to ritual texts (for
which see in particular the catalogues of the manuscript collections of the Institut Français de
Pondichéry – Varadachari 1986, 1987, and 1990; Grimal and Ganesan 2002), kāvyas, Jain works,
stotras and a few other Sanskrit texts.
202 | Giovanni Ciotti
tions of any curriculum in Sanskrit studies, whereas medicine and astronomy/as-
trology were disciplines in which a superficial grasp of Sanskrit would have suf-
ficed to most practitioners for their everyday activity.
What remains difficult to evaluate from the catalogues is what kind of Tamil
register hides behind the indication ‘Tamil script’. Whether it is the highly San-
skritised register that is commonly used to comment on the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana
or any other cannot be assessed. Furthermore, as a rule of thumb, one can get an
idea of the nature of such annotations on the basis of the terms used in the title
description found in the catalogues. For instance, if the annotations are just
glosses to single words the term nighaṇṭu is sometimes inserted, whereas for more
elaborated forms of vernacular commentaries other terms can be used, such as
ṭīkā, vyākhyā, and pañcikā. In the latter case, the identification of a manuscript
containing a Sanskrit text annotated in Tamil is made easier, as an entry would
be given as Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanam Drāviḍaṭīkāsahitam (see e.g. AL72614).
In this brief excursus I have not touched upon the vast corpus of the
Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial literature, of which a good deal is written in the above-
mentioned highly Sanskritised register of Tamil called Manipravalam (see § 2 and
Venkatachari 1978). The entries of these works are not only found in Sanskrit
manuscript catalogues, but also in some Tamil catalogues (see, for instance,
Olaganatha Pillay 1964).
Multilingualism seems to be the feature characterising manuscripts with a
well-defined intended audience, namely teacher and students. Surely, this kind
of manuscript exemplifies how texts were widely manipulated by interspersing
the mūla texts with glosses and annotations, possibly in order to make them use-
ful for students. In terms of a purely speculative exercise, one could even argue
that Tamil annotations were in competition with annotations composed in San-
skrit, which are in any case those found in the large majority of annotated man-
uscripts. One could speculate about pockets of Sanskrit education in which the
vernacular medium was privileged, and possibly only advanced students were
invited to engage with more complex commentaries composed in Sanskrit.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 203
6 Engaging with paratexts
6.1 Religious affiliation
The close association between the copies of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanas with Tamil
annotations – at least those I have been able to assess – and a Vaiṣṇava religious
context can be convincingly argued on the basis of several paratexts. For instance,
in the colophon of AL69312 [1r1–2] the name of the father of a borrower of the man-
uscript is given as Śrīṉivācayyaṅkār from Pāṟācūr (= Pārācūr, Tiruvaṇṇāmalai dis-
trict): Ayyaṅkār is a typical Śrīvaiṣṇava brahmanical name. Similarly, ORI3318 has
an ownership tag attached to the verso side of its guard leaf reporting that this is
the 9th in a series of manuscripts that belonged to a certain S. Kiruṣṇa Ayyaṅkār.
Particularly informative in terms of religious affiliation are the invocations
found throughout the manuscripts. For instance, AL70820 [1r1] opens with a well-
known verse addressed to Viṣṇu:
śuklāmbaradharaṃ viṣṇuṃ śaśivarṇaṃ caturbhujam |
prasannavadanaṃ dhyāyet sarvavighnopaśāntaye ||
One should meditate on the wearer of the white garment Viṣṇu, of moon-like complexion,
four-armed, with a kind face, for the removal of every obstacle.
Furthermore, AL71010 [1r1] opens with the so-called hayagrīva-stotra (note that
Hayagrīva is a manifestation of Viṣṇu):
jñānānandamayaṃ devaṃ nirmalasphaṭikākṛtim |
ādhāraṃ sarvavidyānāṃ hayagrīvam upāsmahe ||
We honour Hayagrīva, the god abounding in knowledge and bliss, with a spotless moonstone-
like [bluish] complexion, the foundation of all sciences.
Praises for Viṣṇu are also found in marginal invocations, in particular in the rather
common formula hariḥ oṃ | śubham astu (‘Hari (= Viṣṇu) oṃ, may there be pros-
perity’). Examples are found in RE37121 [2r], EO1272 [GL1r] and ORI3317 [GLr]. On
the margin of AL70820 [1r] one reads śrīrāma jeyam (‘O śrī Rāma, victory!’). A mar-
ginal invocation to Hayagrīva together with Rāmānuja – the founding figure of
Śrīvaiṣṇavism – is a few times repeated on the guard leaf of ORI3318; e.g. on its
verso side it reads: śrimate – rāmānujāya namaḥ [?] hayagrīvāya namaḥ | (‘Honour
to śrimat Rāmānuja, honour to Hayagrīva’).
204 | Giovanni Ciotti
However, it is indeed also possible to come across copies of the Nāmaliṅgā-
nuśāsana with Tamil annotations containing paratextual elements of a Śaiva char-
acter. In this respect, it may be interesting to compare two particular manuscripts,
namely RE37121 and RE45807. Both offer glosses to the various words of the first
verse of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana:
yasya jñānadayāsindhor agādhasyānaghā guṇāḥ |
sevyatām akṣayo dhīrāḥ sa śriyai cāmṛtāya ca ||
O sages! The imperishable one, the unfathomable ocean of knowledge and compassion,
whose qualities are spotless, he should be worshipped for śrī and immortality.
We will come back in more detail on the interpretation of this verse (§ 5.5). For the
time being, it is relevant to note the interpretation of the word śriyai (‘for śrī’). On
the one hand, RE37121 [2r1] glosses it as lakṣmīyiṉ aṭi poruṭṭum (‘for the sake of [wor-
shipping] Lakṣmī’s foot’), Lakṣmī being Viṣṇu’s spouse. On the other hand,
RE45807 [3r6] glosses śriyai ca as aiśvaryyattum poruṭṭum (‘for the sake of [obtain-
ing] divine power’), where aiśvaryyam (‘sovereignty’) is a way to refer to Śiva’s
power. The Śaiva affiliation of RE45807 is further corroborated by the marginal in-
vocation on the recto side of its second guard leaf, which reads civamayam (‘Śiva in
essence’, ‘all glory to Śiva’).
6.2 Additional verses on the target of the Tamil annotations
That Tamil annotations to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana were meant for the benefit of
young students is not only clear from secondary sources stating the importance of
this mūla text for learning Sanskrit, but also from evidence found in manuscripts. In
particular, manuscripts containing two particular sets of such annotations, i.e. those
authored by Vaidyanātha Yajvan and Veṅkateśvara, present some extra verses men-
tioning bālas (lit. ‘boys’, thus ‘young students’) as the intended audience.
Manuscripts AL72614 and RE50420 are two copies of Vaidyanātha Yajvan’s an-
notations. They both contain, the former at its beginning [1r1–2] and the latter at its
end [unnumbered folio r2–4] (corresponding to image 109 in the IFP file), the follow-
ing couple of stanzas:
bālavyutpādanārthāya vaidyanāthena yajvanā |
kriyate ʹmarakośasya vyākhyā draviḍabhāṣayā |
padavākyapramāṇānāṃ pāragaiḥ pūrvasūribhiḥ |
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 205
nirṇīya likhyate yo ʹrthaḥ sa evātra vilikhyate ||22
The commentary (vyākhyā) of the Amarakośa is composed by Vaidyanātha Yajvan in Tamil
language for the instruction of young students. The meaning of the means of knowledge of
words and sentences, which is written by previous accomplished (pāragaiḥ) scholars after
having ascertained it, is here exactly copied (?).
Similarly, EO0044 [unnumbered r1] (corresponding to image 30 in the EFEO file)
contains a small fragment of Veṅkateśvara’s Amarapañcikā (the title is partly read-
able on the left margin of the damaged folio). Here I report the verse found just at
the beginning of the text:
śrīśailaveṃkaṭeśānāv ānamya śivakeśavau |
bālakānandajananīṃ karomy amarapañcikām ||
Having bowed to the lords (°iśāna) of the holy [abodes of] Śaila and Veṃkaṭa, [namely] Śiva
and Keśava (= Viṣṇu), I compose the Amarapañcikā, bestower of happiness for young stu-
dents.23
Interestingly, Veṅkateśvara’s Amarapañcikā also represents an example of a set of
annotations that is meant for the benefit of both Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva students.24
||
22 RE50420 presents a slightly unmetrical reading of the beginning of the first verse as it reads
bālānāṃ vyutpādanārthāya.
23 EO1272 contains a copy of the same set of Tamil annotations (with some variants) and mentions
several times Veṅkaṭeśvara as their author; e.g. [7r1] śrīmad ātreyaveṃkaṭeśvaravi\ra/citāyāṃ [7r2]
amarapañcikāyāṃ svargavivaraṇaṃ (‘[This is] the explanation [on the names] of heaven in the Am-
arapañcikā composed by śrīmad Ātreya Veṃkaṭeśvara’). The last folio of UVSL 1365 (possibly 262r)
– the only folio of the manuscript I could check – concludes what is probably a further copy of
Veṅkaṭeśvara’s annotations. It reads iti śrīliṃgappasūritanujaśrīveṃkaṭeśvarabhaṭṭārakaka-
vikaviracitāyām ama[rapañci]kā samāptāḥ | (Anonymous 1977, 38 emends and reads iti śrīliṅgap-
pasūritanujaśrīveṃkaṭeśvarabhaṭṭārakakaviviraviracitām [sic!] - amarapañcikā samāptā ‘The Ama-
rapañcikā composed (emend °viracitām into viracitā - GC) by Śrīveṃkaṭeśvarabhaṭṭāraka, excellent
poet son of Śrīliṅgappasūri, is completed’). Furthermore, the GOML catalogue lists three other man-
uscripts which are given the title of Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanavyākhyā Amarapañjikā by Veṅkateśvara,
but I could not inspect them. The catalogue of the Adyar Library lists nine works with the same title,
among which I have inspected AL69312 and AL70200 (both with some variants). It is probable that
the work of Veṅkateśvara enjoyed a certain degree of popularity.
24 Another manuscript containing the name of the author of its Tamil annotations is n° 4971 of
the Saraswathi Mahal Library in Tañjāvūr/Thanjavur. I have not been able to check this manuscript
personally, but the second verse at its beginning is given in the catalogue (Sastri 1930, 3837) as:
kriyate śrinivāsena yajvanā bālabodhinī | ṭīkā hy amarakośasya samyag āgastyabhāṣayā || (‘The
Bālabodhinī [Instruction for young students], a commentary (ṭīkā) of the Amarakośa, is thoroughly
206 | Giovanni Ciotti
6.3 A compendium of nominal declensions
RE45807, which contains a copy of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana with Tamil annotations
entitled Amarapañcikai (different from the Amarapañcikā mentioned above), also
presents a kind of paratext that is unique among the manuscripts that I have been
able to scrutinise. One could label such a paratext ‘appendix’. In fact, as the Ama-
rapañcikai ends on folio 205, one then encounters two additional texts.
First, on an unnumbered folio (corresponding to image 212 in the IFP file) there
is a list of Tamil case endings presented in a single column (see Fig. 1):
avaṉ - yivaṉ - avaḷ - yivaḷ - atu yitu ā pra
avaṉai yivaṉai avaḷai yivaḷai atai yitai ā dvi
āle yoṭe tri
koḷ poruṭṭu ca
niṉṉuṅ kāṭṭilum nimittam āleyu[m]25 pa
ikum26 uṭaiya ṣa
illum ile sa
Here the case endings are presented according to the traditional progressive order
from the pra[thamā vibhakti] (‘first case’) to the sa[ptamī vibhakti] (‘seventh case’),
excluding the vocative case. Note that the first and second case, i.e. nominative and
accusative respectively, are exemplified by third person singular pronouns (mascu-
line, feminine, and neuter), which are also given according to the two deixes (e.g. atu
‘that’ and (y)itu ‘this’).27
Thereafter, seven folios (corresponding to images 213–219 in the IFP file; with a
double page number 5!) contain a rūpāvalī (‘list of declensions’) arranged in columns.28
For instance, the declension of akārāntaḥ pulliṃgo rāmaśabdaḥ (‘the word Rāma, end-
ing in -a, masculine’), i.e. of the masculine nominal stem in short -a, is provided as fol-
lows on [unnumbered folio 1r, column 1] (corresponding to image 213 in the IFP file):
||
composed by Śrinivāsa Yajvan in the language of Agastya’). Note that Agastya is traditionally con-
sidered the founding figure of the Tamil grammatical tradition (see e.g. Chevillard 2009).
25 Most probably, this section should be understood as ‘[The endings] -niṉ and -kāṭṭil [indicating]
cause, and -āle.’
26 Most probably, ikum (read iku-um) is a way to represent the ending of the Tamil fourth case,
which would be usually indicated as -(k)ku. This ending is normally used to render the Sanskrit
sixth case in Manipravalam.
27 Both lists of pronouns are followed by the syllable ā. In Tamil this syllable is also a word mean-
ing ‘cow’. My tentative guess is that the two ās are examples of the nominative and accusative cases
of an inanimate noun, which can be left morphologically unmarked.
28 In particular, these folios contain declensions of nominal and pronominal stems, exceptions
such as the noun sakhi (‘friend’), and the number dvi (‘two’).
Fig. 1: List of Tamil case endings presented in a single column (RE45807-212.jpg).
Fig.2: RE45807 [3r] (RE45807-007.jpg).
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 207
208 | Giovanni Ciotti
akārāntaḥ pulliṃgo rāmaśabdaḥ
rāmaḥ rāmau rāmāḥ prathamai
he rāma he rāmau he rāmāḥ saṃbuddhi
rāmaṃ rāmau rāmān dvitīyyai
rāmeṇa rāmābhyāṃ rāmaiḥ tritī
rāmāya rāmābhyāṃ rāmebhyaḥ caturthī
rāmāt rāmābhyāṃ rāmebhyaḥ [pañca]mi
rāmasya rāmayoḥ rāmāṇāṃ ṣaṣṭhi
rāme rāmayoḥ rāmeṣu saptami
Together with its appendixes, RE45807 constitutes what seems to be a reference
work for the formation of nouns in both Manipravalam and Sanskrit. Manipravalam
nouns can be formed by adding the required Tamil endings, which are listed in the
first appendix, to Sanskrit nominal stems listed in the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana. On the
other hand, the same Sanskrit nominal stems can be declined according to the ex-
amples provided in the second appendix.
6.4 Glosses and annotations to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana
Full-fledged Sanskrit commentaries to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana were most probably
the object of interest of advanced students and scholars. If we consider those com-
mentaries with a clear Southern Indian provenance, for instance, we can see that
Liṅgayasūrin’s Amarapadavivṛti focuses mostly on etymological explanations of
single lexemes, whereas Mallinātha Sūri’s Amarapadapārijāta offers etymological
remarks and a number of quotations from other relevant texts, such as Pāṇini’s
Aṣṭādhyāyī (Ramanathan 1971). On the other hand, Tamil annotations to the
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana are rather simple. In most cases, we find one Tamil gloss for
each lexical sub-group. An example of the latter case is found in RE45807 [3v7–8],
where the list of names of asuras (‘anti-gods’) is presented as follows:
asurāḥ | daityāḥ | daiteyāḥ | danujāḥ | indrārayaḥ | dānavāḥ | śukraśiṣyāḥ | ditisutāḥ | pūr-
vadevāḥ | suradviṣaḥ | yinta - 10 - asurāḷ per |
Here the verse about the names for anti-gods is not reported, instead its word by
word division is given, followed by the simple gloss yinta 10 asurāḷ per (‘these ten
are the names of the anti-gods’).29
||
29 Note that the plural ending -āḷ in asurāḷ is a typical feature of Brahmin Tamil.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 209
However, at times ampler annotation is provided for some lexical sub-groups.
One more example from RE45807 [3r4–6] will clarify this point (see Fig. 2):
svaḥ | avyayaṃ | svargaḥ | nākaḥ | tridivaḥ | tridaśālayaḥ | suralokaḥ | dyoḥ30 | dyodivau
| divat | dve | striyāḥ | dyo | śabdaṃ | okārāntaṃ | divach śabdaṃ | vakārāntaṃ | yinta - 2 -
striliṃgaṃ | triviṣṭapaṃ | klībe | napuṃsakaliṃgattile varttikkim31 - yinta 9m - svargattukkup
per -
I have marked in bold the words singled out from the mūla verse. I have left un-
marked the two words composing dyodivau, which is split as dyoḥ and divat,32
preceding and following the compound, respectively. I have marked the Tamil an-
notations in italics. Apart from the final remark for the whole subsection, i.e. yinta
9m svargattukkup per (‘these nine are the names of heaven’), one also finds some
further annotations, contrary to the subsection seen before. On the one hand, we
are here offered remarks about the stems of the words dyo and div, which are clas-
sified as ending in -o (okārāntaṃ) and -v (vakārāntaṃ), respectively. On the other
hand, we find annotations to the Sanskrit terms used to indicate the feminine and
neuter gender of certain words (as it normally happens in the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana):
striyāḥ as striliṃgaṃ, and klībe as napuṃsakaliṃgattile.
In some manuscripts, one finds versions of these extended annotations char-
acterised by a large use of abbreviations. An example is found in ORI3317 [3v1–2]:
svaḥ | a | svargaḥ | nākaḥ | tridivaḥ - tridaśālayaḥ - suralokaḥ | pu | dyauḥ - o - dyauḥ | va
- strī | triviṣṭapaṃ | na | inta | 9m - svargattukkup peyar |
Here, a stands for avyaya (‘indeclinable’), pu for puṃliṅga (‘masculine’), na for na-
puṃsakaliṅga (‘neuter’), strī for strīliṅga (‘feminine’), o for okārānta (‘[nominal
stem] ending in -o’), and va for vakārānta (‘[nominal stem] ending in -v’).
After analysing this as well as other similar passages, it seems to me that even
in case two manuscripts share the same set of annotations, the amount of variant
readings is remarkable. Changes in the order of words, omissions and synonyms
are evidence of a rather fluid transmission (see example in Appendix 1). Such fluid-
ity could suggest that these manuscripts were not intended to transmit a fixed text,
but contained notes for teaching and learning the root-text (mūla). In other words,
||
30 RE45807 originally reads dvyoḥ.
31 The word varttikkim appears several times in similar positions in this manuscript. However,
its precise meaning and etymology (cf. Skr. vārttika ‘explanatory annotation’?) escapes me.
32 Since the second nominal root should be div-, I am inclined to understand -at as a metalin-
guistic grammatical marker. However, I cannot trace such affix in the literature.
210 | Giovanni Ciotti
these manuscripts may have been an aide-mémoire for the mūla, but not for the an-
notations, which vary from copy to copy. Therefore, I would argue that, contrary to
the mūla text, Tamil annotations, together with their educational bearing, were
bound to the manuscript and not to memory, and that therefore manuscripts should
have been actively used as educational tools, possibly by both teachers and learners.
Further philological features can also be considered in order to account for the possi-
bility that students were in fact active users of at least some of the manuscripts here
under investigation. In particular, a number of scribal mistakes can be explained if
one assumes that the scribes were still inexperienced Sanskritists. For instance, aspi-
rated consonants are not rarely written down as unaspirated ones, a fact which could
also hint to a Tamil speaking scribe; and colophons, when composed in Sanskrit, can
present a rather broken variety of the language (see n. 21 and 22).
6.5 A commentarial leap
In most manuscripts, the annotations to the first five verses of the
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana, i.e. the invocation (verse 1) and the instructions on how to
use the thesaurus (verses 2–4), are notably different from those to the other verses
of the mūla text. There, we do not just find simple glosses, but we are presented
with more or less lengthy commentaries. These are usually annotated according
to a specific system known as pañcalakṣaṇa (‘five explanations’).
Given a verse, this pattern runs as follows: 1. the words of the verse are di-
vided and the sandhi dissolved (padaccheda), 2. words are rearranged according
to a syntax free of metrical constraints (anvayokti), 3. grammatical complexes
such as compounds are analysed (vigraha), 4. the meaning of individual words is
explained, i.e. glossed (padārthabodha), 5. and the gist of the verse is provided
(tātparya).33 The pañcalakṣaṇa system has a clear didactic nature (see also
Goodall and Isaacson 2003, l–li for the case of commentaries on kāvyas). Stu-
dents are taken step by step through the components of each verse. It is possible
to assume that this system also corresponds to the way in which teachers orally
instructed their pupils.
Not all the stages of the pañcalakṣaṇa are always present in the manuscripts
I have investigated (often the tātparya is skipped). An example that presents four
out of five of these stages is RE45807 [1r1–6]:
||
33 For a short but informative report about pañcalakṣaṇa and the stanzas in which the five ele-
ments are listed together, see Formigatti (2015, 66–67). For more detailed information on the
pañcalakṣaṇa, see Tubb and Boose 2007.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 211
[mūla]
yasya jñānadayāsindhor agādhasyānaghā guṇāḥ | sevyatām akṣayo dhīrās sa śriyai
cāmṛtāya ca |
[padaccheda]
yasya [|] jñānadayāsindhoḥ | agādhasya | anaghāḥ | guṇāḥ | sevyatāṃ | akṣayaḥ | dhīrāḥ |
saḥ | śriyai | ca | amṛtāya |
[anvayokti]
he dhīrāḥ | jñānadayāsindhoḥ | agādhasya | yasya guṇāḥ | anaghāḥ | akṣayaḥ | saḥ | śriyai |
amṛtāya ca | ca | sevyatāṃ |
[padārthabodha, including the vigraha of the compound jñānadayāsindhoḥ]
he dhīrāḥ | (a)hoy vidvāṃsāḷe | jñānadayāsindhoḥ | jñānā - jñānattukkum | dayā |
dayaikkum | sindhoḥ | samudrarājaṉaip poleyu[m] - agādhasya | agādhahṛdayam
āyum - yasya - yāt[’] oru tevataiyaṉuṭaiya (guṇā)ḥ | guṇaṅkaḷukkum | anaghāḥ |
doṣarahitam ākavum - akṣayaḥ | nāśarahitar āy iruppār āy | saḥ | anta devataikaḷai |
śriyai ca | aiśvaryyattum poruṭṭum | amṛtāya ca | moṭcattum poruṭṭum | sevyatām |
sevikkireṉ -
Often, padaccheda, anvayokti, vigraha, and padārthabodha are merged together.
For instance, in AL70820 [1r1–2] one just reads what corresponds to the
padārthabodha section of RE45807 just mentioned above:
he dhīrāḥ | vāruṅkoḷ34 vidvāṃsarkaḷe | jñānadayāsindhoḥ | jñāna | jñānattukkum | dayā [|]
dayaikkum | etc.
In certain manuscripts the commentary to verse 1 is remarkably more complex
than the commentaries to verses 2 to 4. I have come across two of such cases,
namely ORI3317 and RE22704.35 ORI3317 presents a conflated version of the
pañcalakṣaṇa system following the mūla: a first stage joining padaccheda, an-
vayokti, vigraha, and padārthabodha, and a second stage offering a relatively
lengthy tātparya (the full text is given in Appendix 2 together with a tentative
translation). In RE22704 too we find the mūla text followed by a conflated version
||
34 The word vāruṅkoḷ is rather obscure. It could be a variant form of standard Tam. vāruṅkaḷ
(‘let’s come’) or of Brahmin Tamil vāruṅkō, here used in the sense of summoning the
vidvāṃsarkaḷ (‘sages’).
35 This is also the case for the Tamil annotations contained in an early printed edition of the
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana by a certain Rāmānujācāryyar (alias Citrakūṭaṃ Kandāḍai Śeṣādri), entitled
Amarapadakalpataru and dated 1849. Annotations to verses 1 to 4 are also here rather lengthy.
Interestingly, part of those to verse 1 are identical to those found in ORI3317.
212 | Giovanni Ciotti
of the pañcalakṣaṇa system, but in addition we also find an avataraṇikai (‘intro-
duction’) inserted before each verse.
RE22704 is particularly notable for it makes an even bigger commentarial
leap than ORI3317 thanks to its very sophisticated tātparya section at verse 1. It
reports extensively on alternative meanings for selected words and the religious
and sectarian bearing of such interpretations. Furthermore, this section seems to
adapt and extend many remarks already found in the Amarapadapārijāta, the
commentary of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana composed by Mallinātha Sūri (Rama-
nathan 1971), who is explicitly mentioned in the text.36
RE22704 clearly shows that Tamil annotations too can provide a platform for
complex exegetical exercises. It also questions the boundary between Sanskrit
and Tamil as access to more or less complex contents may have not been so
strictly regimented by the language choice. Although, statistically, the opposi-
tion between Sanskrit vs Tamil annotations seems to correspond to that between
sophisticated vs elementary annotations, manuscripts such as ORI3317 and
RE22704 are witnesses of the fact that there was room for relevant exceptions.
Unfortunately, at present I do not have enough elements in order to establish who
accessed these more complex Tamil annotations, whether intermediate students,
or more advanced ones and teachers.
7 Conclusions
In the Indian intellectual history memory was by far the most prestigious tool for
learning, but not at all the only one. It is in fact not easy to make sense of manu-
scripts such as those containing the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana with Tamil annotations,
if we do not understand them as learning and teaching tools. If a teacher had
doubts or memory gaps, he could certainly turn to such manuscripts, but it is also
||
36 For an in-depth study of the commentary of the first verse of the Amarakośa as found in
RE22704, see Ciotti and Sathyanarayanan forthcoming. A peculiarity of this manuscript is that
some Sanskrit words are not only glossed in Tamil, but also in Telugu. Similarly, the very begin-
ning of the manuscript [1r1] reads amarasiṃhuṃḍ[’] ane graṃdhakartta amarasiṃhan enkira
graṃdhakarttā, where the meaning ‘the author of the work, Amarasiṃha’ is repeated twice in
Telugu and Tamil, respectively. The insertion of Telugu glosses throughout the manuscript
seems rather idiosyncratic. We can make an educated guess and imagine its scribe, a certain
Veḷḷaṅkoḷḷi Kuruṉātayyaṉ, to have been a Telugu speaking scholar, who worked in an environ-
ment, such as perhaps the Śrīvaiṣṇava, in which Sanskrit and Tamil were the main languages of
intellectual exchange.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 213
true that he could have checked Nāmaliṅgānuśāsanas with more sophisticated
Sanskrit commentaries. Advanced students were expected to master enough San-
skrit to be able to access copies of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana with Sanskrit com-
mentaries, which would have provided also contents of a level of complexity
more suitable for their intellectual undertakings, such as remarks in vyākaraṇa-
and nirvacana-style. On the other hand, students who could already read, but
who were not yet fully proficient in Sanskrit, seem to be not only the most suitable
recipients of the content of the manuscripts, but also the recipients of the object
itself. What I argue is that given the kind of texts and paratexts found in the man-
uscripts analysed here, I would challenge the view that beginner students had no
access to written materials. Facts were most probably rather variegated: schools
with no manuscripts at all, either because too poor or because relying exclusively
on oral education, and schools in which the access to manuscripts was not for-
bidden, at least during study hours after class.
I am aware of the partial limits of my inquiry. For instance, I am puzzled by
the almost total absence – to the best of my knowledge – of Sanskrit grammatical
works annotated in Tamil. Whether such differences are indicative of the nature
of the curricula of students of Sanskrit, in other words of which texts could or
could not be studied with the help of vernacular explanations, is a possibility to
explore. Furthermore, the possibility to attribute a specific function to a manu-
script is hampered by the lack of visual variety. In manuscripts from North India
(Formigatti 2015, 79–80, passim), as well as in those of other manuscript cul-
tures,37 one could speculate, and at times convincingly argue, that different lay-
outs reflect different functions. On the contrary, the typically monotone layout of
Southern Indian palm leaves was not manipulated to reflect the function of the
texts they contained.38 At the commentarial level, instead, texts can be widely
disassembled and rearranged in order to meet different educational require-
ments, as in the case of the application of the pañcalakṣaṇa system.
In conclusion, this article calls for a more disenchanted view on Indic educa-
tion, which is often idealised as the realm of memory. Simply put, that was not
||
37 For instance, the way in which annotations can be accommodated on the page helps identi-
fying the educational function of a manuscript in the Islamic context (see Bondarev 2014, 129–
145 for the case of West Africa) and elsewhere.
38 There are basically two kinds of layouts in palm-leaf manuscripts from Tamil Nadu: (1) the
single text block, where the scriptio continua is sometimes interspersed with a very light punc-
tuation (daṇḍas, hyphens, etc.) and seldom, if ever, interrupted by short blank spaces, and (2)
the much rarer parallel columns (usually from two to four) employed for lists, such as nominal
declensions (see above RE45807) or akarātis (‘alphabetically arranged lexicons’). A richer vari-
ety of layouts appeared in the domain of written Tamil only with the introduction of printing.
214 | Giovanni Ciotti
always the case. In this respect, while describing the figure of the paṇḍita,
Aklujkar (2001, 45, n. 8) wrote an insightful remark about the relationship be-
tween orality and manuscripts:
[…] an intimate and wide connection with the older Indian way of preserving knowledge,
coupled with an ability to impart that knowledge, is at the core of what paṇḍita means to
us. The use of the term in performing arts also points in the same direction. It is based on
the elements (a) of study in the presence of a teacher outside the Western-style academic
institutions that have become common in South Asia and (b) of oral retention.
The above observation, however, does not imply that pandits do not build personal librar-
ies, do not prepare manuscripts and editions, or do not make a significant contribution to
the preservation and deciphering of manuscripts. Their association with reading, writing
and printing is also close. Their distinction from ‘Western’ and ‘westernized’ scholars con-
sists in the manner in which they relate to these latter activities.
Appendix 1
The transmission of Tamil annotations to the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana seems to be
rather fluid. Even in case of AL72614 and RE50420, both containing sets of anno-
tations ascribed to Vaidyanātha Yajvan, one comes across a remarkable number
of variants (see § 5.4). Hereafter, one can observe the different arrangement of the
annotations to verses 7 to 11 of the first book of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana. I have
underlined some difficult readings.
AL72614 [4r3–5r4]:
amarā nirjarā devās tridaśā vibudhās surāḥ | suparvāṇas sumanasastridiveśā
divaukasaḥ | āditeyā diviṣado lekhā aditinandanāḥ | ādityā ṛbhavo [']svapnā
amartyā amṛtāndhasaḥ | barhirmmukhāḥ ṛtubhujo gīrvāṇā dānavārayaḥ |
vṛndārakā daivatāni - puṃsi vā devatā striyāṃ | ṭīkā | amarāḥ - nirjarāḥ - devāḥ
- tridaśāḥ - vibudhāḥ - surāḥ - suparvāṇaḥ - sumanasaḥ - tridiveśāḥ - divaukasaḥ -
āditeyāḥ - diviṣadaḥ - lekhāḥ - aditinandanāḥ - ādityāḥ - ṛbhavaḥ - asvapnāḥ -
amarttyāḥ - amṛtāndhasaḥ - barhiḥ mukhāḥ - ṛtubhujaḥ - gīrvāṇāḥ - dānavārayaḥ
- vṛndārakāḥ - daivatāḥ - daivatāni puṃsi - napuṃsakaliṃgamuṃ uṇṭu | ayaṃ
puṃsa vā - daivataśabdaṃ vā - vikalpārthe - orukkāl puṃlliṃgattile vargattikkum –
devatā striyāṃ - | devatāśabdaṃ strīliṃgaṃ | yinta yiruvatti āṟum devatayaḷ per | 4 |
ādityaviśvavasavastuṣitābhāsvarānilāḥ | mahārājikasādhyāś ca rudrāś ca
gaṇadevatāḥ | vidyādharopsaroyakṣarakṣogandharvakiṃnarāḥ | piśāco
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 215
guhyakas siddho bhūto [']mi39 devayonayaḥ | ṭīkā | ādityāḥ - dvādaśādityākkaḷ
12 | viśve - viśve devarkaḷ - 10 - vasavaḥ - aṣṭavasukkaḷ - 8 - tuṣitāḥ - ṣaṭtriṃśattuṣitāḷ
- 36 | bhāsvarāḥ - 64 - anilāḥ | [?] mahārājikāḥ | 76 | sādhyāḥ - 12 - ca - gaṇḍapūraṇaṃ
| rudrāḥ - ekādaśarudrāḷ | 11 | ca - yivarkaḷ - gaṇadevataikaḷ | oruy inam40 āy iruppār
| vidyādharaḥ - apsarasaḥ - yakṣaḥ - rakṣaḥ - gandharvāḥ - kiṃnarāḥ - piśācaḥ -
guhyakaḥ - siddhaḥ - bhūtaḥ ami41 - yivarkaḷ devayonikaḷ - devayonayaḥ - yivarkaḷ
devayoniviśeṣaṅkaḷ eṇṭu42 collukai | 6 |
RE50420 [4r4-5r2] (corresponding to images 16–17 in the IFP file):
amarāḥ | nirjarāḥ | de(vāsv)āḥ | tridaśāḥ | vibudhāḥ surāḥ | suparvāṇaḥ |
sumanasaḥ | tridiveśāḥ divaukasaḥ | āditeyāḥ | divaṣadāḥ43 | lekhāḥ |
aditina(nda)nāḥ | ādityāḥ | ṛbhavaḥ | asvapnāḥ amartyāḥ amṛtāndhasaḥ |
barhirmukhāḥ ṛtubhujaḥ | gīrvāṇāḥ dānavārayaḥ | vṛndāra(kāḥ |) daivatāni puṃsi
vā - daivatā striyāṃ inda 26m devatayaḷ per - daivatāśabdaṃ strīliṃgaṃ | puṃsi vā
vikalpārthe daivatāśabdaṃ pulliṃgattile vargattikkum | ––– ādityāḥ
dvādaśādityarkaḷ - viśve devarkaḷ - 10 - vasavaḥ 8 - tuḻitāḥ44 36 - bhāsvāra45 - 64 -
anilāḥ - 39 - mahārājikāḥ 226 sādhyāḥ 12 - ca śraddhapūraṇaṃ - ru(drāḥ 11) ivarkaḷ
gaṇadevataiyaḷ oru yeṉattāḷ46 āy iruppāḷ - vidyādharāḥ - apsarasaḥ yakṣāḥ -
rakṣāṃsī - gandharvāḥ (kinnarāḥ |) piśācāḥ guh(y)akāḥ siddhāḥ bhūtaḥ ami47
ivarkaḷ devayonikaḷ devayoniviśeṣaṅkaḷ yeṉṉum collukai –
Appendix 2
Annotations to the first verse of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana found in ORI3317 [1r1–
1v5] (see 5.5 and Figs 3 and 4). I have underlined some difficult readings. The text
is followed by a tentative translation.
||
39 Emend to amī.
40 Read iṉam.
41 Emend to amī.
42 Possibly, read as viṣeśaṅkaḷ eṉṉu.
43 Emend to diviṣadāḥ.
44 Emend to tuṣitāḥ. Note that the rendering of Skr. ṣ into Tam. ḻ is rather common.
45 Emend to ābhāsvarāḥ.
46 Yeṉattāḷ is a colloquial form for iṉattāḷ.
47 Emend to amī.
216 | Giovanni Ciotti
avighnam astu | yasya jñānadayāsindhor agādhasyānaghā guṇāḥ | sevyatām
akṣayo dhīrās sa śriyai cāmṛtāya ca | 1 | jñānadayāsindhoḥ -
samastārtthaviṣayakam āṉa jñānam eṉṉa sarvarukkum upakarikkukaikki veṇṭiya
dayaiy eṉṉa ivaittuku ādhāraṉā48 āy iruppāṉ āy - agādhasya du(r)jñeyasvabhāvam
ākiṟa gāṃbhīryyataiyuṭaiyaṉ āy - yasya lokavedavedāntatadupabrahmaṇādikaḷile
guṇavigrahavibhūtyaiśvaryyādiyuktaṉ āṉa parabrahmaparamātmaparamapuru-
ṣapuruṣottamavāsudevanārāyaṇādiśabdavācyatvena prasiddhaṉ āṉa śriyaḥ-
patiyiṉuṭaiya | guṇāḥ āśrayaṇopayogikaḷ āy° āśritakāryyopayogikaḷ āy°
anubhavaparikaraṅkaḷ āyum irunt[’] uḷḷa vātsalyādyasaṃkhyeyakalyāṇaguṇaṅkaḷ
anaghāḥ āśritaviṣa(ya)ṅkaḷile nirduṣṭaṅkaḷ āka prakāśikiṟatukaḷ aṉṉikke49 -
guṇāḥ adhyetākkaḷuṭaiya prakṛtagrandhārthajñānapradānopayogikaḷ āṉa
niravadhikaniratiśayakalyāṇaguṇaṅkaḷ anaghāḥ āśritaviṣayattile doṣadarśitvam
ākiṟa agham uṇṭu doṣaṃ at[’] illātukaḷ - akṣayaḥ jñānapradatvam illāmai yākira
kṣayam uṇṭu50 nāśaṃ at[’] illātavaṉ āy irukkiṟa - saḥ kīḻ coṉṉapaṭi prasiddhaṉ āy
irukkuṟa anta śriyaḥpatiyāṉavaṉ - he dhīrāḥ dhiyāramataḷ ativyutpatyar āśrita-
vāñchitārtthapradaṅkaḷ āṉa śriyaḥpatiguṇaṅkaḷile saṃdehamaṟa dṛḍhaviśvastāḷ
āṉa vīvekikaḷ | śriyai ca prakṛtagrandhārtthajñānapūrvakasakalavedata-
tvārddhajñānāya | amṛtāya ca - jñānavirodhiy ākiṟav ajñānam ākiṟa mṛtiy uṇṭu
maraṇaṃ at[’] illāta avāṃtarapuruṣārtthapūrvakaniratiśayānaṃdarūpamahā-
puruṣārtthāya ca - sevyatāṃ uṅkaḷāle manovākkāyarūpatrividhakaraṇaṅkaḷāle
āśrayikkattakkavaṉ51 | ākavittāl prabandhādhyetākkaḷukku jñānasamṛddhyā-
dyaihikāmuṣmikapuruṣārtthapradānopayuktaniravadhikātiśayajñānadayāvātsal-
yādikalyāṇaguṇākaran52 āy°53 - heyaguṇarahitaṉ āy° yirukkuṟa śriyaḥpatin-
ārāyaṇane sarvakkum apekṣitasakalapuruṣārtthattukk[’] āka bhaktyādyu-
pāyaṅkaḷāle āśrayaṇīyan eṉṉu collit talaikkaṭṭittu54 |
||
48 Read ādhāraṉ.
49 Colloquial for aṉṟikke.
50 The word uṇṭu, which appears twice more in the text, has clearly the function of eṉṟu. How-
ever, its morphology and etymology are to me rather obscure (maybe a colloquial form?).
51 The structure of this sentence is ambiguous. From the point of view of Sanskrit syntax, one
can understand manovākkāyarūpatrividhakaraṇaṅkaḷāle as an apposition (possibly, a bahuvrīhi
compound) qualifying uṅkaḷāle. In this respect, the whole sentence can be translated as: ‘he is
fit to be resorted upon by you, who have a threefold means in the form of mind, speech, and
body’. On the other hand, one can recognise a Tamil syntactic construction, where manovākkā-
yarūpatrividhakaraṇaṅkaḷāle is the instrument by which the action is performed. Hence, the fol-
lowing translation: ‘he is fit to be resorted upon by you thanks to the threefold means in the form
of mind, speech, and body’. Below I have followed the latter interpretation.
52 Emend °samṛddhya° to °sāmṛddhya°.
53 Āy° is a standard abbreviation for āyum.
54 Colloquial for talaikkaṭṭiṟṟu.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 217
‘May there be no obstacle. O sages! The imperishable one, the unfathomable
ocean of knowledge and compassion, whose qualities are spotless, he
should be worshipped for śrī and immortality (1). Jñānadayāsindhoḥ (‘of the
ocean of knowledge and compassion’): him being the vessel for them, namely
knowledge, which concerns all meanings, and compassion, which everyone
needs for [their] assistance (? upakarikkukaikki). Agādhasya (‘unfathomable’):
being of him whose deepness is difficult to comprehend. Yasya (‘whose’): of the
husband of Śrī, known in the mundane world, the Vedas, the Vedāntas, their
ancillary works (upabrahmaṇas), etc. because of the fact of being called with the
words Parabrahman, Paramātman, Paramapuruṣa, Puruṣottama, Vāsudeva,
Nārāyaṇa, etc., who has qualities, [divine] form (vigraha), manifestation
(vibhūti), sovereignty, etc. Guṇāḥ (‘qualities’): the felicitous qualities to be
counted from tenderness onwards, which are helpful for taking refuge [in god]
(āśrayaṇopayogikaḷ), which are helpful for the protection of (lit. for the duty
concerning) those who took refuge [in god] (āśritakāryyopayogikaḷ), and which
are instrumental for experiencing [god] (anubhavaparikaraṅkaḷ). Anaghāḥ
(‘spotless’): those appearing as defectless (nir-duṣṭa) with regard to those who
took refuge [in god] (?). Alternatively, Guṇāḥ: infinite, unsurpassed, and
felicitous qualities, which are fit for teaching the knowledge of the meaning of
the foundational work [i.e. the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana] to the students. Anaghāḥ
(‘blameless’): they are without that, [namely] the fault, i.e. (? uṇṭu) the blame,
which is the fact of showing fault, with regard to those who took refuge [in god]
(?). Akṣayaḥ: he is without that, [namely] destruction, i.e. (? uṇṭu) the decay,
which is the incapacity (°tvam illāmai) of giving knowledge. Saḥ (‘he’): he, that
husband of Śrī, who is known according to what was said before. He dhīrāḥ (‘O
sages’): o wise ones who have a firm confidence without (-aṟa) [any] doubt in the
qualities of the husband of Śrī, which provide the meanings that are relied upon
and wished for.55 Śriyai ca (‘for Śrī’): for the abundant (? ārddha) knowledge of
the essence of all the Vedas, based on the knowledge of the meanings of the
foundational work [i.e. the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana]. Amṛtāya ca (‘for immortality’):
and for the great human aim [= mokṣa] consisting of unsurpassed bliss, which is
based upon the various human aims [i.e. dharma, artha, and kāma]; [mokṣa] that
is without that, [namely] death (maraṇam), i.e. (? uṇṭu) death (mṛti), which is
ignorance, the enemy of knowledge. Sevyatām (‘he should be worshipped’): he
is fit to be resorted upon by you thanks to the threefold means in the form of mind,
speech, and body.
||
55 I have left untranslated the passage dhiyāramataḷ ativyutpatyar as I am not sure about its
meaning, nor whether this is the correct reading of the manuscript.
218 | Giovanni Ciotti
Therefore, Nārāyaṇan, husband of Śrī, being the receptacle of infinite auspi-
cious qualities, such as preeminence, knowledge, compassion, and tenderness,
which are fit for teaching to the students of [this] work the human aims of this
and the other world, such as knowledge and wealth, and being deprived of bad
qualities, [he] should be resorted upon by the followers of bhakti, etc. for the sake
of all human aims [namely, dharma, artha, kāma (and mokṣa ?)], which are
looked for by all (sarvakkum apekṣita°). Having said so, it is completed.’
Fig. 3: Annotations to the first verse of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana found in ORI3317 ORI3317 [1r1–1v5].
Fig 4: Annotations to the first verse of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana found in ORI3317 [1v].
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 219
220 | Giovanni Ciotti
References
Anonymous (1977), A Descriptive Catalogue of Palm Leaf Manuscripts in Mahamahopadhyaya
Dr. U.V. Swaminatha Iyer Library. Vol. 6. Chennai: Mahamahopadhyaya Dr. U.V. Swa-
mintha Iyer Library.
Aklujkar, Ashok (2001), ‘The Pandits from a piṇḍa-brahmāṇḍa Point of View’, in Michaels 2001,
41–59.
Bondarev, Dmitry (2014), ‘Multiglossia in West African Manuscripts: The Case of Borno, Nige-
ria’, in Quenzer, Bondarev and Sobisch 2014, 113–155.
Brown, Charles Philip (1857), A Grammar of the Telugu Language. 2nd edition. Madras: Chris-
tian Knowledge Society’s Press.
Burnell, Arthur Coke (1877), Specimens of South-Indian Dialects Consisting of Versions of the
Parable of the Sower (St. Matthew xiii, 1–34) Collected by A.C. Burnell. No. 8. In the Brah-
man Dialect of Tamil̤ Spoken at Tanjore, from the Vulgate. Tranquebar: E.F. Hobusch, Ev. L.
Mission Press.
Campbell, A.D. (1834), ‘On the state of Education of the Natives in Southern India by A. D.
Campbell, Esq. M. C. S. (Extracted from Appendix to report from Select Committee on the
affairs of the East India Company)’, in The Madras Journal of Literature and Science, vol. I,
(Oct.): 350–359.
Chevillard, Jean-Luc (2009), ‘The Pantheon of Tamil Grammarians: A Short History of the Myth
of Agastya’s Twelve Disciples’, in Gérard Colas and Gerdi Gerschheimer (eds), Écrire et
transmettre en Inde classique / Writing and Transmitting in Premodern India, 243–268.
Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient.
Ciotti, Giovanni, and Marco Franceschini (2016), ‘Certain Times in Uncertain Places: A Study on
Scribal Colophons of Manuscripts Written in Tamil and Tamilian Grantha Scripts’, in Gio-
vanni Ciotti and Hang Lin (eds) 2016, 59–129.
Ciotti, Giovanni, and Hang Lin (eds) (2016), Tracing Manuscripts in Time and Space through
Paratexts (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 7), Berlin–Boston: DeGruyter.
Ciotti, Giovanni, and R. Sathyanarayanan (forthcoming), ‘A Multilingual (Tamil and Telugu)
Commentary of the First Verse of the Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana as Found in Ms. IFP RE22704’,
(Studies in Late Manipravalam Literature 1). In Suganya Anandakichenin and Victor
D'Avella (eds), The Commentary Idioms of the Tamil Learned Traditions [provisional title].
Pondicherry: EFEO-IFP. 2018.
Colebrooke, Henry Thomas (1808), Cósha or, Dictionary of the Sanskrit Language with an Eng-
lish Interpretation and Annotations, Serampore.
Davis, Donald R. Jr. (2009), ‘Law in the Mirror of Language. The Madras School of Orientalism
on Hindu Law’, in Thomas R. Trautmann (ed.), The Madras School of Orientalism: Produc-
ing Knowledge in Colonial South India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 288–309.
Ebeling, Sascha (2010), Colonizing the Realm of Words: The Transformation of Tamil Literature
in Nineteenth-Century South India, Albany: SUNY Press.
Formigatti, Camillo (2015), Sanskrit Annotated Manuscripts from Northern India and Nepal. Un-
published Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hamburg.
Fuller, Chris (2001), ‘Orality, literacy and memorisation: priestly education in contemporary
south India’, in Modern Asian Studies, 35.1, 1–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Teaching and Learning Sanskrit through Tamil | 221
Galewicz, Cezary (2011), ‘“Let Śiva’s favour be alike with scribes and with reciters:” Motifs for
copying or not copying the Veda’, in Travaux de Symposium International Le Livre. La Rou-
manie. L’Europe. Troisième édition – 20 à 24 Septembre 2010. Tome III: La troisième sec-
tion – Études euro- et afro-asiatiques, Bucharest: Éditeur bibliothèque de Bucarest, 113–
146
Genette, Gérard (1987), Seuils, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Goodall, Dominic, and Harunaga Isaacson (eds) (2003), The Raghupañcikā of Vallabhadeva be-
ing the earliest commentary on the Raghuvaṃśa of Kālidāsa. Vol. 1, Groningen: Egbert
Forsten.
Gopala Pillai, A.R. (1985), Linguistic Interpretation of Līlātilakam, Vanchiyoor (Trivandrum):
Dravidian Linguistics Association Kerala Paanini Buildings.
Gopal Iyer, T.V. (ed.) (2005), Vīracōḻiyam mūlamum paḻaiya urayum, Srī Raṅkam: Srimat
Āṇṭavaṉ Acciramam.
Gover, Charles E. (1874), ‘Pyal Schools in Madras’, in The Indian Antiquary (vol. II, 1873): 52–
56.
Grimal, François, and T. Ganesan (eds) (2002), Descriptive Catalogue of Manuscripts in the
French Institute of Pondicherry, vol. IV. mss. 376–475, Pondichéry: IFP-EFEO.
Kane, Pandurang Vaman (1941), History of Dharmaśāstra (Ancient and Mediaeval Religious and
Civil Law), Vol. II, Part I, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute
Klebanov, Andrey (2017), The Commentaries on kāvya: Texts Composed while Copying. A Criti-
cal Study of the Manuscripts of Selected Commentaries on the Kirātārjunīya, an Epic Poem
in Sanskrit. PhD dissertation, University of Hamburg.
Krishnamacharya, V. (1947), Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Adyar Li-
brary. Vol. VI Grammar, Prosody and Lexicography. Madras: The Adyar Library.
Kuppuswami Sastri, S. and P.P. Subrahmanya Sastri (1938), An Alphabetical Index of Sanskrit
Manuscripts in the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library Madras, Part I (a-ma),
Madras: Government Press.
Long, J. (1868), Adam’s Reports on Vernacular Education in Bengal and Behar, Submitted to
Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838: With a Brief View of its Past and Present Condition,
Calcutta: Home Secretariat Press.
Madhavan, Chithra (2013), Sanskrit Education and Literature in Ancient and Medieval Tamil
Nadu: An Epigraphical Study, New Delhi: Printworld.
McCann, Erin (2016), Ācāryābhimāna: Agency, ontology, and salvation in Piḷḷai Lokācārya’s
Śrīvacana Bhūṣaṇam. PhD dissertation, McGill University.
Michaels, Axel (ed.) (2001), The Pandit: Traditional Scholarship in India, New Delhi: Manohar.
Michaels, Axel (2001), ‘The Pandit as a Legal Adviser: rājaguru, rājapurohita and
dharmādhikārin’, in Michaels 2001, 61–77.
Narahari, H.G. (1951), Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Adyar Library, Vol. 5
Kavya, Nataka and Alankara. Madras: The Adyar Library.
Narayana Rao, Velcheru (2004), ‘Print and Prose: Pundits, Karanams, and the East India Com-
pany in the Making of Modern Telugu’, in Stuart Blackburn and Vasudha Dalmia (eds) In-
dia’s Literary History, Delhi: Permanent Black, 146–166.
Olaganatha Pillay, L. (1964), A Descriptive Catalogue of the Tamil Manuscripts in the Tanjore
Maharaja Sarfoji’s Saraswathi Mahal Library, Thanjavur. Vol II, Thanjavur: Ukkadai Sri
Ambal Press.
Parameswara Aithal, Kota (1968), Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts, Vol. 4 Stotra-
s Pts 1 and 2. Madras: The Adyar Library and Research Centre.
222 | Giovanni Ciotti
Quenzer, Jörg B. (2014), ‘Introduction’, in Quenzer, Bondarev and Sobisch 2014, 1–7.
Quenzer, Jörg B., Dmitry Bondarev, and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds) Manuscript Cultures: Mapping
the Field (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 1), Berlin: De Gruyter.
Raghavan Pillai, K. (1965), Alphabetical Index of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Manu-
script Library Trivandrum. Vol. II (ta to ma), Trivandrum: The Alliance Printing Works.
Raman, Bhavani (2012), Document Raj: Writing and Scribes in Early Colonial South India, Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press.
Ramanathan, A.A. (ed.) (1971), Amarakośa with the Unpublished South Indian Commentaries
Amarapadavivṛti of Liṅgayasūrin and the Amarapadapārijāta of Mallinātha, Madras:
Adyar Library and Research Centre.
Rāmānujācāryyar (Citrakūṭaṃ Kandāḍai Śeṣādryācāryyā [sic!] paranāmadheyam uṭaiya
Rāmānujācāryyar) (1849), Amarapadakalpataru veṉkiṟa Vyākhyānaṃ. [Madras]: Satkavim-
anoraṃjanam.
Sastri, Palamadai Pichumani Subrahmanya (1930), A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sanskrit
Manuscripts in the Tanjore Mahārāja Serfoji’s Sarasvatī Mahāl Library Tanjore, Vol. IX
Kośa, Chandas & Alaṅkāra. Srirangam: Sri Vini Vilas Press.
Sastri, Palamadai Pichumani Subrahmanya (1933), A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sanskrit Ma-
nuscripts in the Tanjore Mahārāja Serfoji's Sarasvatī Mahāl Library, Tanjore, Vol. 17, Gṛhya-
sūtras, Bhāṣyas and Prayogas, Nos. 11738-14179. Srirangam: Sri Vani Vilas Press.
Scharfe, Hartmut (2002), Education in Ancient India, Leiden–Boston–Cologne: Brill.
Trautmann, Thomas R. (2006), Languages and Nations: The Dravidian Proof in Colonial
Madras, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tubb, Gary A. and Emery R. Boose (2007), Scholastic Sanskrit: A Handbook for Students, New
York: American Institute of Buddhist Studies (distributed by Columbia University Press).
Varadachari, V. (ed.) (1986), Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits, vol. I. mss. 1–115, Pondi-
chéry: IFP-EFEO.
Varadachari, V. (ed.) (1987), Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits, vol II. mss. 116–275, Pondi-
chéry: IFP-EFEO.
Varadachari, V. (ed.) (1990), Catalogue descriptif des manuscrits, vol. III. mss. 276–375, Pondi-
chéry: IFP-EFEO.
Venkatachari, K.K.A. (1978), The Maṇipravāḷa Literature of the Śrīvaiṣṇava Ācāryas: 12th to 15th
Century A.D., Bombay: Ananthacharya Research Institute.
Vogel, Claus (1979/2015), Indian Lexicography, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz /revised edition po-
sthumous published by Jürgen Hanneder and Martin Straube, Verlag P. Kirchheim, Munich
2015.
Zvelebil, Kamil (1959), ‘Dialects in Tamil, I–II’, in Archiv Orientální, 27: 272–317, 572–603.
Zvelebil, Kamil (1960), ‘Dialects in Tamil, II (appendix)-III: Madurai’, in Archiv Orientální, 28:
220–224, 414–456.
Zvelebil, Kamil (1963), ‘Dialects in Tamil, IV: Erode, Tuticorin, Ramnad’, in Archiv Orientální, 31:
635–668.
Zvelebil, Kamil (1994), U.V. Swaminatha Iyer: The Story of My Life (Eṉ carittiram). 2 Vols,
Madras: Institute of Asian Studies.
Jürgen Hanneder
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and
Readers
Abstract: Fundamental assumptions in Sanskrit textual criticism hinge upon how
we conceive of pre-modern Indian text production and transmission. Our infor-
mation about these processes are highly deficient and theories about them must
remain speculative. This paper will try to get hold of some hardly known actors
in this process, as proof readers, or editors of literary bequests, through the traces
left by them in pre-modern Kashmirian texts and manuscripts.
1 Introduction
After some decades of reading Sanskrit manuscripts, I noticed that two questions
have regularly puzzled me. One is the fact that most manuscripts I could or
wanted to read were not aesthetically or calligraphically pleasing, and the other
is that many manuscripts were so full of errors that it makes one wonder how
these texts were actually understood or used. In the case of the first, one is re-
minded of the astonishment of A. W. Schlegel who once mentioned that despite
the fact that Indian artists were capable of such astounding masterpieces, one
may—he once wrote—seek in Indian prints for everything but a straight line. But
at that time Sanskrit printing in India had been practiced for merely a couple of
decades. It may have to do with our search for uncommon texts, for which no one
would have produced a calligraphic illuminated and aesthetically stunning apo-
graph, that we usually do not encounter anything of the sort in our daily work.
Often this perception has been distilled into a very critical view of the activities
of Indian scribes. As always, there are exceptions to this, there are beautiful man-
uscripts, there is of course a Sanskrit calligraphy, and we now know more about
scribal practices that show that there were sophisticated regional traditions.1
I would like to add that any attitude of Western hubris would be entirely out
of place here. Some time ago it was found out that a long standing manuscript
preservation project in Germany had used microfilms that are now already dis-
solving. Some of you may remember the scene in the movie by Quentin Tarantino
Inglorious Basterds, when a cinema filled with Nazis burns down because the film
||
1 See Bhattarai forthcoming.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-008, © 2017 J. Hanneder, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
224 | Jürgen Hanneder
roll catches fire. The latter phenomenon was in fact not uncommon. At that time
films were made of something closely resembling the explosive TNT. They caught
fire easily, in the worst case they exploded through mere shock. As a result his-
torical copies of films from that era are now kept in archives designed to hold
explosives, especially after a regular archive indeed exploded and burned down,
because one film had direct contact with metal and suddenly ignited. The histor-
ical solution for this problem was the acetate film, which replaced the old mate-
rial, but it has the disadvantage of disintegrating after some decades, first by ex-
uding a smell of vinegar, then by crumbling into small pieces. This seems to be
also the fate of the microfilms for ‘preserving’ much older manuscripts.
It is only by continuous reiteration of the fact that manuscripts in India had
to be copied frequently because the material would not survive too long in the
climate, that we tend to forget that no modern reproduction method has been
able to reach the life span of Indian manuscripts. If we think of Gandhāra manu-
scripts the acid paper of the late 19th and early 20th century does not cut a good
figure, the acetate film is still worse and digital media are more short-lived than
any other medium. It enthuses only as long as we ignore the task of copying and
converting. When that fails—as with the digital results of some academic projects
that have run out of funding—the rate of loss is quite spectacular.
Coming back to the apparent bad shape of our manuscripts, we all know the
text-book explanation for it, namely, that in India the mukhasthavidyā was trium-
phant over mere book learning, and that there were illiterate, uneducated or un-
interested scribes, who counted their syllables merely for the single reason
that they were paid in units of granthas. For Indian literati who had to read from
such materials, this state of affairs was undoubtedly a nuisance, and their inevi-
table corrections are now populating the apparati critici of our editions. A prac-
tising editor grows accustomed to this state of affairs and thus may even become
a little disinterested in the manuscripts themselves; precious and cherished, no
doubt, for their texts, but not so much as material objects. No resistance to theory
is needed to explain the fact that Sanskritists often do not care very much for the
physical side of their sources, simply because it is difficult to explain why it
would make sense to do so.
A similar development has taken place with anonymous literature, or litera-
ture about whose authors we know nothing but a name. We have almost stopped
to ask the question, who wrote this, who copied a manuscript, who edited it, etc.,
simply because we do already know the answer in most cases: that we simply do
not know and have no way of knowing it. This understandable attitude has not
encouraged reflection on the roles of the author, of proof readers, editors, critics,
readers and so forth.
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 225
All that is well-known and I mention it here, because when we do get a
glimpse of such realia, we are confused by such concrete information beyond our
expectation that we sometimes even fail to analyse it properly. In this article I
shall try to interpret some such passages and investigate what they imply. In
these passages we shall encounter editors, proof readers and individual readers,
who are, as it turns out, also potential editors.
2 Authors
First, I would like to introduce one specialized but related topic, regarding which
we have also been used to not noticing what we could call the realia around the
texts. It is the vexed issue of the author’s variant in textual criticism. In textual
transmission we sometimes distinguish between variants introduced by scribes
and variants that go back to the author. Our working hypothesis is that scribal
variants are many and that they are of a lower quality, whereas the author’s ver-
sion is only one, and that it can be recognized through being the best variant.
From modern philologies we know that authors often corrected and revised their
texts. There may be a first print, a second edition and even a ‘last hand edition’.2
All of these go back to the author, of course there are errors by the printer but
they might have been already corrected in the next edition. So why not print the
last edition? This is not necessarily a good idea, because the editions that were
read and reviewed are more interesting from the perspective of literary history,
and these are usually the first, not the last editions. So even when we do have—
unlike in Sanskrit editing—printed editions approved by the author, even his or
her last will, it is difficult to edit such texts simply because we have all of them.
Absurd as it may sound, we may be even forced to print a printer’s error as the
most authentic text.
To give you one telling example: There is a line in the opening of Goethe’s
Faust, surely one of the most-widely read pieces in German literature, where we
simply do not know whether Goethe meant to say ‘Mein Lied ertönt (my song
sounds)’, or ‘Mein Leid ertönt (my suffering sounds)’. Since more man power has
been spent in Germany on Goethe’s works than on most of Indian Literature, this
is by the way the only word in the whole work that is still in doubt.3
||
2 ‘Edition letzter Hand’, the last edition produced by the author himself.
3 Johann Wolfgang Goethe: Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil. Stuttgart: Reclam 1971. Editionsbe-
richt, p. 141.
226 | Jürgen Hanneder
The line is: ‘Mein Lied ertönt der unbekannten Menge’, which is literally: ‘My
song sounds to the unknown crowd’. But in fact the first edition of Goethe’s Faust
printed ‘Mein Leid (my suffering)’, to which Goethe’s secretary Riemer added a
note in 18094 ‘Leid lies: Lied’, which may seem obviously correct in the context,
because a song resounds rather than suffering. But Goethe never corrected the
line, it first appeared in an edition produced by the same Riemer and Eckermann
after the poet’s death.
A second look shows that this reading is not so unlikely in the context:
Mein Lied ertönt der unbekannten Menge,
Ihr Beifall selbst macht meinem Herzen bang,
Und was sich sonst an meinem Lied erfreuet,
Wenn es noch lebt, irrt in der Welt zerstreuet.
My verse is sounded to the unknown throng.
Their very praise my heart must anxious sway;
And those to whom my song delight could give,
err on the world dispers’d, if they still live.5
Here you see that ‘Lied’ occurs once more. But are the arguments for or against a
repetition weightier? And is the first reading ‘Leid’ not more accordant with the
general tone of the verses? Some scholars have argued that ‘Leid’ is original, and
that ‘Lied’ is a kind of lectio facilior and so forth.6 The subsequent major editions
until now print one or the other and are regularly followed by the lesser editions,
as if this were a fashion choice. From 1903 in the jubilee edition we read ‘Leid’ for
half a century, followed by almost all editions,7 then the ‘Akademie-Ausgabe’ in
1958 prefers ‘Lied’ and this is what we read at school. One almost forgets that
Goethe’s contemporaries were not aware of a reading ‘Lied’.
But the main question is of course: was it an oversight, or did the author in
the end prefer what is actually, or came into being originally, as a mere type-set-
ting error. If you imagine the mirror-inverted ie in front of the type-setter, you can
see that it can be confused with ei, although traditional type-setters would surely
have protested.
This is not the only example to show that the author is not necessarily the
solution to the problem of variation, but sometimes its source. But the readiness
to accept such interventions by the author and those working with him decreases
||
4 Baumgart 1898, 171.
5 Translation by William Barnard Clarke (Freiburg 1865), p. 4.
6 Baumgart 1898, 171, ‘unzweifelhaft die richtige Lesart’.
7 Thus, the Editionsbericht.
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 227
when we go back in history. Despite noteworthy exceptions the standard answer
to the problem of the author’s variant in antiquity, as we find in text-books for
criticism, is that there are practically no author variants. It seems that many clas-
sical scholars expect a good writer to work like Horace told his pupil in his Ars
Poetica, to publish only when the work has come to perfection, show it to no one
before and never change your mind afterwards. Common sense, the fact that this
admonition had to be given in the first place, and examples from modern philolo-
gies show that this may be an honoured rule, but not necessarily a wide-spread
practice. Some authors may have worked without leaving any trace of the pro-
duction of texts, but it would be quite naïve to assume that all or even most of
them did. It would also be unrealistic to assume that textual transmission itself,
the copying of texts, would naturally weed out those traces. The problem with
this observation is that its practical application remains difficult. If we shout au-
thor variant any time we encounter a second convincing variant we need not even
start editing.
There are further issues to be borne in mind for the following examples from
Indian literature. We tend to think that pre-modern authors were necessarily the
only ones involved in the production of texts: a man or woman, a reed pen and a
palm-leaf. What about the Goethe scenario: the author composing and dictating
to a scribe. Is that inconceivable in India? I think not.
Then there is a further unsolved problem: How did authors publish works?
Were they copied only privately by those interested? Did authors give their works
to a publishing, that is, copying house, was there a copy editor? Were copies pro-
duced only after completion of the work? Was there a second edition? Sanskritists
might reject all these deliberations as inapplicable: for many works we do not know
the author, how could we know the scribe, or the publisher, if there was one. So
what is the point of asking all these questions, when we cannot answer them? My
argument here is that without being aware of the questions and the implications of
the answers, there is the danger that crucial evidence is overlooked, since its impli-
cations are not realised. For instance, if we know that the text was written down
from the start, we need not, for that time and region, speculate too much about the
orality of literature. If we can prove that the author continued to work on a text after
publication we cannot rule out author variants easily.
One of the most interesting documents in this respect8 is the last Sarga of
Maṅkha’s Śrīkaṇṭhacarita, where the author describes how his work was read in
the illustrious literary salon of the author’s brother around the year 1144.9 Those
||
8 Some of the examples presented in this article are also discussed in Hanneder 2017.
9 See Slaje 2015.
228 | Jürgen Hanneder
present included his teacher Ruyyaka, Kalhaṇa and other well-known figures in
Kashmirian literary history. Maṅkha describes the assembly, all the scholars and
poets present, then he opens his manuscript of the Śrīkaṇṭhacarita (vyastārayat
pustakam 25.142) and reads his text. The audience is absolutely delighted and he
offers the work to Śiva.
We can infer at least two things from this account: (1) The main text was not
an oral, but a written one. (2) If we regard this public recitation as a sort of publi-
cation, we can deduce that Maṅkha had worked on the text after publication,
since he obviously added the last chapter, in which the sabhā is described. To
regard this chapter as a literary fiction is I think unlikely because he would prob-
ably not make his contemporaries including his teacher part of such a fictitious
meeting. The statement important for our topic is the following, it appears shortly
before he introduces the participants individually:
santaḥ tādṛśāḥ santi gaṇitāḥ sūktibheṣajaṃ
bhūṣaṇaṃ yaiḥ svavaiduṣyāt saujanyena vitanyate (25.14)
Such persons are counted as virtuous, who because of their learning and out of goodwill
furnish [a poem] with embellishment in the form of the remedy for well-turned sayings.
The verse can be interpreted in a variety of ways, and I have tried to give a neutral
rendering. The meaning given by Jonarāja in his succinct, but excellent commen-
tary is much more specific. He says that sūktibheṣajam means the remedy for a
Kāvya, in the present case for the Śrīkaṇṭhacarita, and that it consists of the removal
of errors through the kind experts present at its first recitation: yaiḥ sadbhiḥ sūkteḥ
kāvyasya bheṣajaṃ doṣanivāraṇaṃ saujanyena hetunā svavaiduṣyād vitanyate. If
we then regard the context, in which the participants of the literary circle, who are
about to hear the work of Maṅkha, are thus described, it would mean that these
experts—please mind that the Ālaṃkārika Ruyyaka was among the listeners—were
known or even expected to give hints and corrections to the author.
But if so, then the manuscript mentioned in the text to which these correc-
tions were applied and the last Sarga added, would not have looked like an auto-
graph, but like an exemplar that was corrected. Would all scribes know how to
apply the changes and ignore the first version?
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 229
3 Editors
If this seems a far-fetched questioning of what is generally not problematised, I can
assure you worse is yet to come. In one verse Somendra, who reports in his post-
scriptum to his father’s Avadānakalpalatā, tells the startled readers that he had
given the work to one ācāryaḥ:
yasya hastagataṃ sarvaśāstram āyāti śuddhatām
ācāryaḥ so ’tra sūryaśrīr lipinyāsārtham arthita (E.15)10
We have asked Ācārya Sūryaśīr, in whose hands all Śāstra becomes pure, to commit the [text]
to writing.
Now śuddha, when it comes to language and texts, means ‘correct’, often in the
sense of grammatically correct. What Sūryaśī was credited for was not to produce a
nicely written copy, but to purify the text of errors, in other words he acknowledges,
as we would do in a book, the help of an editor.
So far, we have not done badly. It seems, we could open the door behind some
texts a little and could get the impression that on the other side there are some hith-
erto unknown characters silently involved in the production of literature. My argu-
ment was that Sanskritists, frustrated by the paucity of sources that could illumi-
nate this background of particular texts, failed to notice it, even when it was staring
into their face.
One such failure is connected with the famous Śivastotrāvalī of Utpaladeva,
which has been edited11 and also translated a few times.12 The Śivastotrāvalī is a col-
lection of Stotras attributed to the author Utpaladeva, who lived in Kashmir two
generations before Abhinavagupta around the middle of the 10th century. It is avail-
able in a number of manuscripts, often with a commentary by Kṣemarāja, who is
the third in a line of religious transmission from the author.
A study of the manuscript material of this text has been made by Constantina
Rhodes-Bailly.13 She comes to the conclusion that ‘there were no major variants in
any of the manuscripts that I studied, and that the textual tradition of the Śivasto-
trāvalī remained intact, without varying recensions.’14 The actual variants, which
include synonyms as for instance śarīra for svarūpa, are not reported by the editor
||
10 See Formigatti 2005, p. 31.
11 In the following I refer to the text as edited by Rājānaka Lakṣmaṇa 1964.
12 Kotru 1985, Rhodes-Bailley 1987, Bonnet 1989.
13 Rhodes-Bailley 1987.
14 Rhodes-Bailley 1987, 3.
230 | Jürgen Hanneder
and the text of the first edition is made the basis. This is somewhat astonishing,
since the edition of 1964 lists quite a few variants, also in the verses itself, and more-
over the commentator Kṣemarāja himself mentions and comments upon variants
readings.15
Rhodes-Bailley understands Utpaladeva’s verses as a ‘spiritual diary’, and that
we, the readers, are ‘accompanying Utpala on the wanderings on a marvelous pil-
grimage.’16 In this context, the opening verse is interpreted as marking the ‘outset
of the journey’,17 the initial understanding. In other words, the interpretation of the
work is biographical and it is at least implicitly suggested that the journey ends,
when the accomplished devotee has become a siddha,18 and this is at the very end
of the work.
While I have no objections to such an interpretation in general, I am quite
astonished that the presupposition that the Stotras are autobiographical and
chronological is taken for granted. This is all the more astonishing, since no reader
of the Sanskrit text can avoid being told by the commentator Kṣemarāja in clear
terms that Utpaladeva is not really responsible for the form, in which his text ap-
pears:19
Īśvarapratyabhijñākāro vandyābhidhānaḥ śrīmadutpaladevācāryo ’smatparameṣṭhī sata-
tasākṣātkṛta-svātmamaheśvaraḥ svaṃ rūpaṃ tathātvena parāmraṣṭum arthijanānujighṛkṣayā
saṃgrahastotrajayastotrabhaktistotrāṇy āhnikastutisūktāni ca kānicin muktakāny eva baban-
dha |
The author of the Īśvarapratyabhijñā, whose name we have to honour, the glorious teacher
Utpaladeva, our parāmeṣṭi-[guru], who had realized his own self as Śiva for ever, composed a
saṃgrahastrotra,20 a jayastotra21 and a bhaktistotra,22 the verses of an āhnikastuti and some
single verses.23 [He did so] to reflect on his own self as Śiva 24 in order to bestow grace on those
approaching him.
||
15 For instance, ad 18.7 and 19.4.
16 Rhodes-Bailley 1987, .
17 Ibid.
18 Rhodes-Bailley 1987, 23.
19 For the interpretation of this passage, see also Sanderson 2007, 399f.
20 Stotra is called Saṃgrahastotra and Kṣemarāja gives a separate introduction for this.
21 The fourteenth Stotra in the Śivastotrāvalī is one such, since every line begins with the word
jaya.
22 The fifteenth is called bhaktistotra.
23 Sanderson takes the last two together: ‘also a number of single-verse poetic hymns for his
daily devotions.’
24 tathātvena ‘being thus’.
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 231
But then Kṣemarāja continues:
atha kadācit tāni eva tadvyāmiśrāni labdhvā śrīrāmaḥ (var. śrīrāmarājaḥ) ādityarājaś ca pṛthak
pṛthak stotraśayyāyāṃ nyaveśayat |
When Śrīrāma and Ādityarāja acquired them, they were mixed up and they placed them sep-
arately into Stotra compositions.
Two persons took care of the literary bequest of Utpaladeva, and they found his
verses in disarray, at least not as ready-made Stotras. So these verses were placed
separately into Stotras. In other words the mixed verses were arranged by the exe-
cutors of the literary bequest of Utpaladeva and it appears that Kṣemarāja, despite
living only few generations after the author, and in the same lineage, had no way
of cleaning up the transmission. The arrangement of the verses is not one conceived
of by the author, but by later redactors. If it reflects the author’s spiritual biography,
then the credit must go to the medieval editors, who arranged the materials.
And finally the same applies to the names of these Stotras, as Kṣemarāja further
informs us:
śrīviśvāvarttas tu viṃśatyā stotraiḥ svātmotprekṣitanāmabhir vyavasthāpitavān iti kila śrūyate
But as has been handed down, Śrīviśvāvartta produced [from these] as twenty Stotras, the
names of which he coined himself.
The editorial report by Kṣemarāja shows that no less than four persons were in-
volved in the redaction of the so-called Śivastotrāvalī: Rāma and Ādityarāja or-
dered the literary bequest into twenty groups, Viśvārtta named the resulting Sto-
tras and Kṣemarāja made sense of the collection by commenting on them in their
sequence. Neither the name of the text itself nor most of the names of Stotras are
original.
But Kṣemarāja is, apart from the parts he considers authentic—as for instance
the Saṅgrahastotra—, highly critical of the presentation of the transmitted text.
Already in the second verse he stumbles upon an incongruity, which he blames
on the redactor:
pūrvaśloke āmantraṇapadābhāvāt bhavadbhaktīti na saṅgatam eveti katham iyaṃ sto-
traśayyeti śrīviśvāvarta eva praṣṭavyaḥ (ad 1.2)
Since there is no term of address in the previous [i.e. first] verse the phrase bhavadbhakti- is
not appropriate. Viśvāvarta has to be asked how this can be a Stotra composition.
232 | Jürgen Hanneder
Viśvāvarta is criticized more frequently in the long commentary and Kṣemarāja
acts like an elegant reviewer by combining polemics with restraint. After com-
menting on some ślokas he considers inappropriate he says (ad 17.49) that this
disarray is due to the ‘grace’ (prasāda) of Viśvāvarta and that there are many
more instances he, Kṣemarāja, did not disclose, since he wants to comment on
the verses.
In one place Kṣemarāja even doubts the ascription to Utpaladeva for rea-
sons of style.
Kvacid apy asadṛśaśailīdarśanād anārṣa ivāyam ślokas tathāpi vyākhyāyate (20.21)
Since the style is in some places different this verse is not authentic, I explain it nevertheless.
Kṣemarāja says he has been sparse with his criticism, but what we infer from his
statements is this: he regards the status of the edition of his predecessors, which
really is a new composition of fragments, as problematic. The verses were often not
intended to be part of Stotras and to treat them as if they were does not do justice
to the author.
But as we know from more recent examples, such cautionary remarks never
work. A printed text almost invariably creates its own history. It seems that
Kṣemarāja mentions the history of the text in such unusual detail to alert the reader
to the nature of the text, to caution him that the author was not responsible for the
arrangement. This would be what we would expect from modern editors as well,
but it seems that while we find such text-critical awareness a millennium ago in
Kashmir, it is much harder to find it nowadays.
4 Readers
Up to now we have seen that a number of persons may have been involved in the
production of texts even before scribes could add transmissional variants. But what
would the function of the scribe actually be? It would no doubt differ considerably.
Even if we do not know much about the context of manuscript production we know
one thing. There was probably no market distribution for the texts Indologists typ-
ically read. It was more likely a copy on demand system. When Ranbir Singh of
Kashmir sent scribes into the Srinagar archives to have many manuscripts tran-
scribed into Nagari script, the collection which is now in Jammu, they were working
for a royal library. But in other scenarios an individual, the future reader, would
borrow a manuscript and have it copied. The copy then would be proof-read, maybe
also by the later owner by comparing it with the original. Thus the owner and reader
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 233
potentially had much more influence on the product than in a modern publication
scenario, but this as we all know has been changing rapidly. In 19th-century book-
production the reader was left with no more than choosing the binding, whereas in
the 20th century you could only individualize your books with your ex libris or if you
write into them. Nowadays you have web-based printers who will produce simple
or luxury versions of whatever scans you send them.
Bearing this in mind, it seems that the owners of manuscripts become very
much part of the process of transmission, not, as in our modern view, passive re-
cipients. The question would therefore not only be whether a manuscript was more
correct or more faulty, but to whom it belonged, that is, who wrote or commissioned
or corrected it. In some cases these people differed, in others they were one person.
In such cases the reader was safeguarding the integrity of the text, by comparing it
with the source etc., not so much the people producing the copy.
But how do we know about the activity of owners of manuscripts? I quote a
case where the owner somehow makes his appearance through the variants he has
produced. The following passage is from an unpublished ritual manual ascribed to
Sāhib Kaul, the Śyāmāpaddhati,25 written perhaps in the mid-17th century. It gives
the mantras to be employed for the meditation on or worship of the gurus of one’s
lineage. For the present purpose I need not give much context. After the completion
of one ritual action, the adept has to recite one mūla-mantra of the Śrīvidyā, then
follows the passage under consideration, where the adept has to worship the san-
dals of his Guru. The text up to the iti has to be recited.
oṃ aiṃ hrīṃ śrīm hasakhaphreṃ /
hasarakṣamalavaraya ūṃ /
sahakhaphreṃ sahakṣamalavarayaūm /
hsauṃḥ shauṃḥ śrīmacchrīvidyādharakaulānandanāthaśrīpādukāṃ
śrībhavānyāṃbāśrīpādukāṃ pūjayāmi namaḥ /
iti daśadhā vimṛśya manasā daṇḍapraṇāmaṃ kuryāt /
An editor publishing the text from one manuscript would not have to change any-
thing. But let us look at the middle portion in a second manuscript:
hsauṃḥ shauṃḥ śrīmacchryamukakaulānandanāthaśrīpādukāṃ
śryamukāṃbāśrīpādukām pūjayāmi namaḥ /
Now it seems that Bhavānī was like Vidyādhara a personal name. If we know that
initiation names for Śrīvidyā initiates end in -ānandanātha for men and deduce
||
25 For details see my forthcoming edition of the works of Sāhib Kaul.
234 | Jürgen Hanneder
from the text that those of the spouses or tantric consorts end in -ambā, then the
text gives the impression that it was the personal copy of someone whose tantric
gurus bore those names. It was in other words an individualized prayer book. Nat-
urally every such personal copy had to differ.
Before asking how one should edit such a text, we might first ask how such a
text was copied for someone else. In a living tradition reproducing individual
names of Gurus would not make any sense unless your guru’s name was
Prakāśānanda. One would have to indicate that this is to be filled in with one’s own
data. In one of the two manuscripts just quoted there is exactly such a correction
and the corrected text reads as follows:
hsauṃḥ shauṃḥ śrīmacchryamukakaulānandanāthaśrīpādukāṃ
śryamukāṃbāśrīpādukām pūjayāmi namaḥ /
In fact, this is not so much a correction in the sense of the word, but a preparation
of the manuscript for general reproduction. Here a personal copy used for one’s
daily ritual was turned into one for copying, possibly by the owner himself.
5 Dīlārāma, a reader, scribe and editor
My last example is one manuscript that highlights the activities of scribes vividly.
It is Ms. Stein Or. g.1, kept in the Bodleian Library, a multiple-text manuscript con-
taining several texts of Sāhib Kaul and his pupils or followers.
2r–2v Sahajārcanaṣaṣṭikā 20b–24d (single folio that fits in the gap
between fols 39 and 40)
11v–34r Citsphārasārādvaya
35v Saccidānandakandalī 1–4c
36r–48v Sahajārcanaṣaṣṭikā 3–62
48v–58v Svātmabodha
–119r Kashmiri texts
120 Postscriptum by Dīlārāma Kaula, partly Sanskrit, partly Kash-
miri
134v–135r verses ascribed to Sudarśana Kaul, Sadānanda Kaul, Cidrūpa
Kaul
135v Saccidānanda Kaul
136r verses ascribed to Sāhib Kaul
137r verses ascribed to Sudarśana Kaul
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 235
At first sight the manuscript is not particularly nicely written or arranged.
Fig. 1: Ms. Stein Or. g. , fol. 6v–7r, kept in the Bodleian Library.
The pages are written on from all sides, it gives the impression of having been a
sort of notebook with fragments of texts added. There is also a peculiarity in the
manuscript which I have not yet encountered elsewhere. Many of the pages are
covered with blue floral motives, against which the black ink is quite difficult to
read. For an editor in the nineties the manuscript for that very reason was a night-
mare, because it was impossible to read in a black and white microfilm copy.
Fig. 2: Ms. Stein Or. g.1, fol. 12v–13r (= 2v–3r), kept in the Bodleian Library.
This is the same page processed through a filter, giving one the feeling of having
recovered a palimpsest.
236 | Jürgen Hanneder
Fig. 3: Ms. Stein Or. g.1, fol. 12v–13r (= 2v–3r), kept in the Bodleian Library.
The manuscript was written by Dīlārāma Kaul who says on folio 130 mayādīlārā-
makaulena likhitam. Presumably he was also the author of a personal statement
added near the beginning of the manuscript.
Fig. 4: Ms. Stein Or. g.1, fol. 10r, kept in the Bodleian Library.
dattātreyakulotpannaḥ yajurvedy asmimaithilaḥ
tatra mādhyandinī śākhā sūtraṃ kātyāyanam smṛtam
Pre-modern Sanskrit Authors, Editors and Readers | 237
Dīlārāma here states that he is a maithila, which of course does not imply that he
was born there, but that his ancestry lies in Mithila, as he proudly says in the next
verses, the land of Janaka, famous for scholars in Mīmāṃsā and Nyāya etc. and
gives his Vedic affiliation.26
When I encountered this piece of information searching for Sāhib Kaul’s
works I had no idea about its impact, so I showed it to my supervisor at the time,
Alexis Sanderson, for whom it turned out to be one of the arguments to recon-
struct the history of the Kashmirian Kaul clan. The Kauls of Kashmir were really
Mithila Brahmins who had migrated to Kashmir and brought East-Indian Śāktism
with them, which merged with older Kashmirian cults,27 a fact that serves to ex-
plain some later developments of Śaivism in Kashmir.
But the scribe Dīlārāma, apart from accidentally supporting historical re-
search, aimed at collecting scattered pieces of Sāhib Kaul’s Stotras and verses,
some of which are written on the blank pages between texts. Then there are works
of disciples of Sāhib Kaul, mostly Guru-stotras directed to their teacher, and there
are other similar collections in manuscripts. It seems these booklets were used
for collecting and storing works connected to one famous author, and were the
places to add all sorts of additional information, in the case of Sāhib Kaul even
the etymology of his name. The owners of such manuscripts most likely were far
more than readers, they were collectors, and—in a next step—could become po-
tential editors.
I was hoping that with this you would be reminded of our first example, that
of the edition of the Stotras of Utpaladeva, which were in fact single verses post-
humously arranged and named by editors. In fact, our own modern approach
would not be too different, we would collect the Muktakas and publish them to-
gether, some might even invent names for these pseudo-Stotras. But if such a col-
lection was made by previous generations nearer to the author, we might argue,
for instance, and in good text-critical company with Bédier and others, that the
received text merits editing like it is, we would only add a note about the history
of the collection and the contribution of intervening generations. This seems to
be exactly what Kṣemarāja intended to do, when exposing the history of the col-
lection as he received it. In this he proves to be more of a sound textual critic than
some modern translators.
||
26 Sanderson 2003–2004, 363.
27 Sanderson 2007, 433.
238 | Jürgen Hanneder
References
Baumgart, Hermann (1898), Goethes Faust als einheitliche Dichtung. Erster Band. Königsberg.
Bhattarai, Bidur (forthcoming), Dividing Texts. Conventions of Visual Text-organisation in North
Indian and Nepalese Manuscripts up to ca. CE 1350 (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 10),
Berlin: De Gruyter.
Bonnet, Roseline (1989), Shivastotravali les hymnes de louange à Shiva, Paris: Maisonneuve
Clarke, William Barnard (trans.) (1865), Translation of Goethe's Faust I. and II. Parts. Freiburg.
Formigatti, Camillo (2005), Il poeta kaśmīro Kṣemendra. Le fonti. Roma.
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang: Faust. Der Tragödie erster Teil. Stuttgart: Reclam 1971.
Hanneder, Jürgen (2017), To Edit or Not to Edit, (Pune Buddhist Series 1). New Delhi: Biblia Im-
pex.
Kotru, N.K. (1985), Sivastotrāvali of Utpaladeva, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass.
Rājānaka Lakṣmaṇa (ed.) (1964), The Śivastotrāvalī of Utpaladevācārya with the Sanskrit Com-
mentary of Kṣemarāja. Varanasi.
Rhodes-Bailley, Constantina (1987), Shaiva devotional songs of Kashmir: a translation and
study of Utpaladeva’s Shivastotravali, Albany.
Sanderson, Alexis (2003–2004), ‘The Śaiva Religion among the Khmers Part I’, in Bulletin de
l'École française d'Extrême-Orient, 90–91: 349–469.
Sanderson, Alexis (2007), ‘The Śaiva Exegesis of Kashmir’, in Dominic Goodall and André Pa-
doux (eds), Tantric Studies in Memory of Hélène Brunner (Collection Indologie 106), Pondi-
chéry: IFP/EFEO, 231–442.
Slaje, Walter (2015), Bacchanal im Himmel und andere Proben aus Maṅkha, Wiesbaden: Har-
rassowitz.
Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page.
Forms and Graphic Artifices of Early Indic
Buddhist Manuscripts in a Historical
Perspective
Abstract: Rules of page-setting appear, albeit rarely, in Indian inscriptional rec-
ords dating to the 3rd c. BCE and reappear, even though not regularly, in the earliest
(1st BCE – 1st CE) and later Indian Buddhist MSS and their translations into Kho-
tanese, Tibetan, and Chinese. While continuing to be typologically identical, the
function of these rules in the economy of the page, and the intellectual practice they
reveal may, in some cases, be modified. This paper will focus on the variety of par-
allel patterns appearing in different historical and geographic contexts. The study
of data indicates that at an early epoch religiouses and intellectuals from peninsu-
lar India transmitted the rules and principles governing the Buddhist institution in
matters of architecture, religious teaching and monastic rules, chancery practice,
etc., to the northwestern regions. At the same time, they might have adopted local
use and techniques and introduced new elements in their narrative prose.
The data gleaned from the study of languages, monuments, artistic produc-
tion, and artefacts of this period show a common cultural pattern in which foreign
and local elements co-exist. The contribution of ‘mountain tribes’ (showing a
marked ethnic and linguistic diversity) are found along with Indian, Iranian and
Hellenistic components conveyed in the region long before. Practices of textual
criticism and biblio-economy that were in use among the scribes of Buddhist texts
indicate their concern for the aesthetic and intellectual use of the text, as for the
systems of classifying the book in the conspectus of a large organized collection
for the use of readers. The case of the Gandhāran use of counting the verses
(gāthā-metrics) appears to stay in between the practice attributed to the Alexan-
drian school of philology, and attested in Greek and Graeco-Egyptian papyri
(stichometric), and the practice adopted in Dunhuang, in the case of Chinese (jie-
/song-metrics) and Tibetan (bam po-metrics) translations of Buddhist Indian
texts. These practices, as the case may be, preserve part of the original prosody,
while the graphic disposition and marks, including blank space indicating the
unvoiced tune, appear to the modern reader as if they were beating rhythm, if not
time, upon the manuscript page. And all this shows the inseparability of textual-
ity and materiality.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-009, © 2017 C. Scherrer-Schaub, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
240 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
1 Legibility and intelligibility
akāntir vyāghātaḥ punaruktam apaśabdaḥ saṃplava iti lekhadoṣāḥ ||
tatra kālapatrakam acāruviṣamavirāgākṣaratvam akāntitaḥ ||
Arthaśāstra 2.10.57-581
Aesthetic concerns in matters of writing are attested quite early in India in the practice
of styling official documents, and the lack of accuracy in displaying written texts on
lithic supports prompted Aśoka (or his chancery), possibly as a consequence of the
famous ‘oddities’ of the Eṟṟaguḍi major rock edict (MRE),2 to recall some basic princi-
ples to be followed by the carvers, expressed in the 14th MRE:
G. — ayaṃ dhaṃmalipī devānaṃpriyena priyadasinā r(ā)ñā l(e)khāpitā asti eva saṃkhit(e)na asti
majhamena asti vistatena3 na ca sarvaṃ [sa]rvata ghaṭitaṃ mahālake hi vijitaṃ bahu ca likhitaṃ
likhāpayisaṃ ceva asti ca etakaṃ puna puna vutaṃ tasa tasa atthasa mādhūratāya kiṁti jano
tathā paṭipajetha tatra ekadā asamāt[a]ṃ likhita[ṃ] asa desaṃ va sacchāya [kā]raṇaṃ va [a]lo-
cetpā lipikarāparadhena va.
This escript [having the force of] Dharma has been engraved by order of the King Dear to the De-
vas, looking [over the world] with kindness. It exists in an abridged, medium and extensive
(vistriteṇa) length as each clause has not been engraved everywhere. Since the empire is large,
much has been engraved and much has yet to be engraved. This has been repeated again and
again: for the sweetness [of my escript] will cause the people to regulate their life accordingly.
In some places it may be inaccurately engraved, whether by omission of a passage or by lack of
attention, or the error of the engraver.4
The publication of edicts or official documents and their wide circulation implies that
the text was intended to be perfectly legible in order ‘to be known everywhere’ (see
Arthaśāstra II.10.46d: deśe ca sarvatra ca veditavyaḥ). The attention given to the set-
ting up of the text to favour its legibility contributes to the proper conveyance of the
meaning, just as the locutory and social praestatio of poets and rhetoricians, for in-
stance, expresses the intended meaning and message. Aśoka foresaw that in various
||
1 Arthaśāstra 2.10.57-58, Kangle 1960, I, 51. ‘The defaults of writing are unattractiveness
(akānti), contradiction (vyāghāta), repetition (punaruktam), incorrect use of words (apaśabda),
and confusion (saṃplava). Among these, unattractiveness consists in [writing the documents
on] a black leaf [and styling] graphemes that are unpretty, uneven, and faded’. The translation
follows here Kangle 1960, II, 96, and Olivelle 2013, 122, with minor changes.
2 See Scherrer-Schaub 2013, 139–170, 147 and n. 28.
3 See vistriṭena, Shāhbāzgarhi MRE XIV, Hultzsch CCI I: 70A, 71.
4 See Hultzsch CII I, 25–26, 26; Bloch 1950, 133–134. The translation partially follows Shadakshari
Settar 2003, 7.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 241
instances his edict would be heard or learnt, i.e. read, as in the case of the 2nd MRE at
Dhauli (Puri district, Orissa):
iyaṃ ca lipi anucātuṃmāsaṃ tisanakhatena sotaviyā | kāmaṃ cu khanasi khanasi aṃtalā pi tisena
ekena pi sotaviya | hevaṃ ca kalataṃ tuphe caghatha saṃpaṭipādayitave aṭṭhāya ||
This escript must be heard (or learnt) [by everyone] on [every day of the constellation] Tiṣya, every
four months [or three times a year]. And, at will (kāmam), [the escript shall be read on command]
and heard (or learnt) by a single person, or on the occasion of the intercalary days between the
Tiṣyas. And in so doing, the escript will be enacted.5
In the following centuries, the existence of a large corpus of Buddhist manuscripts
(MSS) spanning a period of several centuries raised a series of intriguing questions
that are still of interest to philologists and historians today. On the one hand, this
corpus maps part of the intellectual history of the Asian world, while on the other, it
retraces the itinerary of textual transmission.
Fig. 1: Monks reading and commenting in a cenacle. Gandhāra relief attesting various scholarly
practices (use of scrolls and gesture of argumentation). Repr. from Taddei 2003, I: 225 and fig. 3.
Compare with the scene in Fig. 6.
||
5 See Alsdorf 1962, 5–38, 28 and 38: ‘Und diese Inschrift ist am (ersten) Tiṣya-Tage (jedes Jahres-
drittels) (allen Beamten) zu Gehör zu bringen; und auch zwischen den Tiṣya(tagen) ist sie, sooft
sich die Gelegenheit ergibt, auch einem Einzelnen zu Gehör zu bringen. Und wenn ihr dies tut,
werdet ihr imstande sein, [meine Anweisung] vollkommen auszuführen’. See Hultzsch CII 1, 98
and 100; Bloch 1950 139. The translation here is not as literal (on purpose).
242 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Drawing on collections of Indian and Indic Buddhist manuscripts dating
back to around the 1st century BCE to the 8th century CE and which originated in
regions that are now part of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Xinjiang and
other areas of China, we will now take a look at some cases that represent the
most ancient specimens of Indian manuscripts extant to date. The complexity of
their page layout will be compared with some of the early manuscripts containing
the first translations of Indian and Indic texts into Tibetan (c. beginning of the 8th
to the mid-9th century), which were found in the oases of present-day Xinjiang
and the Gansu area, particularly Dunhuang. Similar editorial practices are also
attested in Chinese MSS from Dunhuang dating back to the period of the Tibetan
administration and later (see below, 247 and n. 19).
As will be shown, some rules of page-layout appear – albeit rarely – in in-
scriptional records dating to the 3rd century BCE and reappear occasionally in
early and later manuscripts dating to the period under consideration here. While
continuing to be typologically identical, the function of these rules in the econ-
omy of the page and the intellectual practice that they reveal may change in some
cases. In this article, the reader’s attention will be drawn to the variety of parallel
patterns appearing in different historical and geographic contexts rather than fo-
cusing upon the origin (and even less the archetype) of a particular social, cul-
tural, intellectual or religious practice. Taking the process into account in its mul-
tifarious aspects is only normal since, as so often noted,6 Buddhism in India has
found itself in a dynamic state of continuous adjustment to various languages,
scripts, political and cultural contexts, or social transactions from its very begin-
nings.
1.1 Questioning the economy of the page in light of
intellectual practice
In the majority of the early inscriptional records and manuscripts, the text in-
vades the writing surface or page in a sober, minimalistic way. The graphemes
follow, one after the other, with few or no interruptions (scriptio continua),7 they
creep unobserved into the lines, and the peculiarity of the text is its ability to be
||
6 The present author has been addressing this topic in various ways; see, for instance, Scherrer-
Schaub 2009a. The best illustration of the process is given in the citation on p. 151, drawn from
Philosophie zoologique, Influence des circonstances sur les actions des animaux by Jean-Baptiste
de Monet, Chevalier de Lamarck — an inexhaustible source of inspiring models for philologists.
7 Incidentally, the fact that ‘some’ early MSS attest this practice does by no means claim that
the scriptio continua is a marker of antiquity. See Eva Wilden’s contribution to this volume.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 243
‘indistinct’. The intellectual life concealed in it must be conjectured upon: either
the text was merely written down to be preserved – a simple and simplistic hy-
pothesis – or it was destined to be read in a cenacle, a fact well confirmed, pre-
sumably in a loud and clear voice, obeying the various rules of enunciation, the
scansion of the verse, a long-established Indian practice, substitute for critical or
lectional signs.8 In this case, the recitation evicts/overcomes indistinguishable-
ness (see below p. 267), the surface/page is activated and the text acquires multi-
dimensionality, revealing the actors participating in the process.
Early examples exist in which lectional signs have been introduced, albeit
not always with clear criteria, at least in the contemporary reader’s view. In his
study on the Gāndhārī MSS of the Anavataptagāthā, Richard Salomon draws at-
tention to the fact that the punctuation in this text, as in many other Gāndhārī
texts and indeed in Indic manuscripts generally, can be characterised as ‘casual’
or even ‘haphazard’.9 As this may well be the case, one cannot ignore the fact that
at least occasionally, particularly in the case of epigraphs, it could possibly con-
ceal a specific mode of reading or reciting on the part of the person who dictated
the original text, eventually copied by the lapicide. It could also reflect specific
social performances, such as the public declamation of the epigraph at special
days of the year, or the reading aloud of the scroll, in cenacles, as mentioned
above (Fig. 1). The fact that texts were ‘activated’ in specific circumstances is at-
tested in literary documents. Besides mentioning the presumed existence of a
chancery practice, the epigraph of the Sārnāth’s version of the so-called ‘Schism
Edict’ addressed to the Saṁgha by Aśoka (Hultzsch CII I, 161–164) foresaw that a
copy of the present written (act) (ikkhā lipī) would be deposited in the religious
assembly hall (saṁsalana) and further prescribes the ‘re-enacting’ of the royal
order (sāsana) on specific religious days. Finally, it orders the edict to be made
known to people and circulated everywhere, including ‘all fortress districts/cita-
dels’ (savvesu koṭṭaviṣavesu).10
||
8 See Gumbert 1989, 111–112: ‘Ce n'est qu'en lisant – à haute voix de préférence – que le sens et
la structure du texte apparaissent; il n’y a aucun emploi d’un arrangement spatial pour clarifier
la structure, les signes auxiliaires sont absents (ou peut s’en faut), il n’y a pas de différences
entre les lettres, de ‘distinctions’, pour marquer des différences de fonction; seulement, dans les
textes poétiques les lignes sont en général découpées pour correspondre à la structure métrique
du texte’.
9 See plate 17, for instance, with examples of the use of a small and large circle in Salomon 2008,
and idem 98, with contributions by Andrew Glass.
10 The interpretation of this text is not easy, and the general tenor suggested here is merely con-
jectural, mainly inspired by the diplomatic reading of what we may define as the prescriptio of
this specific public act. See Bloch 1950, 152. Jules Bloch, possibly inspired by Arthur Venis (1908,
244 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
In the early Buddhist MSS, we see that some of the oldest MSS, besides display-
ing lectional (and even critical) signs, employ space according to specific rules. This
is the case for the Gāndhārī version of the ‘Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra’ (*Khargaviṣaṇa-
sutra, Khvs-G), whose MS is preserved at the British Library. In his seminal work,
Richard Salomon gives a detailed description of the scroll (2000, 23–25), which he
dates to the 1st century CE. Among other things, it includes punctuation marks,
verse-line disposition and the presence of paratexts, such as the uddāna, or table of
contents. One peculiarity of this type of MS, to which we will return later (see below
p. 249 and 263), is pointed out by Salomon (2000, 25 and 116):
[T]he first verse line was laid out differently from the others, without spacing between the
quarters, and it was put in the upper margin, separated from the following lines by a larger
space (0.5–0.6 cm) than between the other lines. The special arrangement of the first line
was presumably intended for decorative purpose and perhaps also to set it off as ‘title line’.
The uddāna lines are also laid out differently from those of the text proper, with small dots
serving as punctuation signs between each verse citation but without spaces between quar-
ters, as in the first verse of the text.11
Salomon notes that the Khvs-G MS presents another distinguishing characteristic
(pertaining to codicology stricto sensu, for the purpose of conservation), which
the MS shares with other scrolls such as the Khotanese Dharmapada, namely,
[T]he margins of the Khvs-G were apparently sewn along their entire lengths, although the
only surviving traces of this are in the right margin next to uddāna lines 1 and 2, where three
[thread holes are still visible (2000)]. Although this binding was presumably intended to
||
1–7), translated the word saṃsalana as ‘salle de réunion’, something that, hypothetically, may
evoke Sanskrit *saṃ[gīti?-]śālā. Note, however, that D. C. Sircar, following Senart quoted by
Hultzsch (CII I, 163, n. 5), reads saṁsaraṇa and translates it as ‘house or road’. The later
Mahāvyutpatti renders the Sanskrit terms maṇḍapa and sabhāmaṇḍapa with the Tibetan equiv-
alents 'dun mkhaṅ and mdun khaṅ, which may be translated as ‘assembly hall’. Sircar again
takes sabhāmaṇḍapa (‘main hall in a shrine’, ‘hall in front of a shrine’) as a synonym for
raṅgamaṇḍapa (‘inner hall of a temple’; same as Tamil tiruv-araṅgu); Sircar IEG 276. Sircar IE 99,
in the footsteps of Émile Senart (The Inscriptions in the Caves at Nasik EI VIII: 82ff), who trans-
lated the word phalakavāra appearing in a Nasik inscription dating to the 2nd century (Tsukamoto
III Nasik 12), suggests the word should be interpreted as ‘store-room of original grants in a king’s
Akṣapaṭala’. The practice of depositing the copy of charters in specific ‘archives’ is attested in
early Tibetan inscriptions; see Scherrer-Schaub 2003, 265 and n. 10.
11 A similar use of graphic artifice to enhance the item by putting it into the upper margin is
attested, albeit in a literary different context, in Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts, see below p.
267 and n. 69. On the uddāna, see Salomon 2000, 33–37.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 245
prevent the separation of the scroll into horizontal fragments (Salomon 1999, 94); it does
not seem to have succeeded in this purpose in the case of the Khvs-G.12
More elaborate punctuation marks may also be introduced, not as much to give
emphasis to the text itself, but to locate its position in a collection. An interesting
5th-century compendium of mahāyānasūtras (Schøyen Collection MS 2378/1) in
poṭhī format on palm leaf,13 which reveals the existence of a system of foliation in
the left-hand margin of the recto where the margins have been preserved, pre-
sents two elaborate marks besides the usual punctuation marks (simple and dou-
ble daṇḍa): a circle with an inscribed four-petalled (?) flower at the end of the
text, and again, after the explicit, a larger circle with an inscribed multi-petalled
(?) flower,14 followed by what appears to be a flourish by way of a paraph.
[…] te sarve bhagavato bhāṣitam abhinandeti || ◎
samāpta(ṃ) śrīmālādevīsiṃha[nāda]nirde[śa’] ○ (sūtraṃ |) [e](kāyāna)ṃ [ma](h) [opā](ya)-
vaitulye abhijñā[taṃ] śrī[mā]lā[sūtra]m etat ||) ❂ || ♓
(Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa, fol. 392r, 3–4)15
||
12 Salomon 2000, 23–26, 25; and 1999, 94–96. Baums (2014, 200) mentions that ‘two of the BC
scrolls (long-format BC 3 and short-format BC 5) do not feature margin threads, but have ink lines
down the margins where a thread would have run’ and quotes Ingo Strauch, who noticed that
‘the margins’ threads had come to be perceived as an integral part of text layout’ (see Strauch
2008, 103–136, 107). See Fig. 9a, below 268, where the number of gāthās is followed by a series
of signs that recall the diplomatic practice of ‘document closure’, granting security and avoiding
alteration. If this is the case, it would give probability to the idea that the gāthā metric may in
some cases hint at more ‘mundane transactions’; see 271 and n. 75-76. MS C equally shows the
use of lectional signs, such as the small circle marking the beginning of the verse-line. Finally,
the presence of sewn margins, here as elsewhere, functions as a borderline to mark the mirror
page, indicating to the scribe that he must avoid writing into the margins of the scroll itself. This
indication may be compared with the hatching lines that encircle the knot-hole of the birch-bark
strip, which the scribe should avoid. On a document’s closure, see Scherrer-Schaub 2002, 269.
13 The compendium is ‘consistently written in a variant of the North Western Gupta Book
Script, which can be dated to the 5th c. on paleographical grounds’; see Sander 2000, 64, and
facsimile IV.
14 The circle with inscribed petalled or multi-petalled flowers and other punctuation marks
evoke the figures of some bracteae in precious metal, generally gold, inlaid with semi-precious
stones that circulated in Afghanistan and were found in very rich tomb deposits at Tillia tepe (1st
c. CE): see Cambon 2006–30 avril 2007, 164–213, catalogue no. 36–145, 82, 90.
15 See Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa (= SC 2378/1/3, SC 2379/3/2b) Kazunobo Matsuda BM I,
2000, 65–76, 67, and facsimile III.2.
246 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Fig. 2a: Example of siddham-monogram on a copper plate, dated to c. 5th century, Schøyen
Coll. (MS 2851); see L. Sander BM II 337–349. Copper plate, dated c. 5th cent. Repr. from Jens
Braarvig and Fredrik Liland (eds) 2010, 86.
Besides lectional signs, traditional auspicious symbols (maṅgala) appear with var-
ious levels of functionality (punctuation, ornamentation, protection, and so on).
The famous siddham,16 which is not included among the standard maṅgalas, alt-
hough it may be taken as a sign of auspiciousness,17 appears as an incipit and is
frequently attested in early inscriptions. During the Gupta Era, the verbatim sid-
dham began to be replaced by (but initially co-existed with) a symbolic sign, the
siddham-monogram’ (Fig. 2a).
The movable ‘ye dharmā’ copper-plate inscription (Schøyen collection MS
2851) published by Lore Sander (BM II 2002, 340 and plate XVIII) shows that the
symbolic sign, or ‘Ganeśa’s curl’, replaced the auspicious siddham in some cases.
The copper-plate’s script is written in ‘a North-eastern Indian Gupta type which
flourished between the 4th and the 6th centuries’. This sign is less easy to retrace
||
16 Compare with the Chrismon/ΧΡ used as a symbolic invocation at the beginning of European
mediaeval charters (like the cross was as well); see Guyotjeannin et al. 1993, 72.
17 See Sircar IE: 92, n. 4, 94–97, 127 and n. 3 and 4 quoting Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya on the first
vārttika (siddhe śabdārtha sambandhe) of Kātyāyana on Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, saying ‘that
Kātyāyana employs the word siddha at the very outset for the auspicious completion of his sci-
entific treatise’. The siddham is placed at the beginning of a text to ensure success, and may be
replaced by the siddham-monogram or curl-like sign. See Scherrer-Schaub 1999, 17–19.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 247
Fig. 2b: Sample of illustrated MS (SI P/11-1), from The Lotus Sutra and Its World. Buddhist Manu-
scripts of the Great Silk Road. Manuscripts and Blockprints from the Collection of the Institute of
Oriental Studies, St Petersburg, 1998, 12.2, 35, ‘Sanskrit MS of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka sūtra,
end of chapter 5 to beginning of chapter 6’. Assumed to have been copied in Khotan, q.v.
in early fragmentary MSS, partly because these are frequently broken in the up-
per part of the folio where the text begins. It is found together with the verbatim
‘siddham’ at the beginning of the Pravaraṇasūtra in the compendium of mahāyāna-
sūtras just mentioned, for instance. Incidentally, the curl-like symbol became an
important marker in the typology of Tibetan Buddhist manuscripts. It also appears
in a Chinese MS (P 2247, archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr)18, with interlinear annota-
tions in Tibetan that may have been made by pupils of the monk Facheng/Chos
grub, who is likely to have been teaching in Chinese and Tibetan, languages that
he mastered equally well. Two MSS of this kind bear the title Yuqie lun shouji (‘Notes
on the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra’) and Yuqie shidi lun fenmen ji (‘Notes [dealing with]
the doctrinal categories of the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra’), dating to the period of the
Tibetan administration of Dunhuang (781–848).19
The page of the Indian and Indic MSS became richer progressively, though not
necessarily from a diachronic perspective and not consistently either, gaining a set
of marks, illustrations (Fig. 2b), and commentarial and editorial notes. In short, the
practice evolves, showing that the manuscripts are possibly now used in a slightly
different context, where they circulate among a larger community of scholars and
possibly are part of a more or less structured corpus20; it becomes both the instru-
||
18 Available online at: http://idp.bl.uk/database/oo_scroll_h.a4d?uid=945930659;bst=1;
recnum=59328;index=1;img=1.
19 Moretti 2014a, 255–263, 255 and 260. Lectional signs are reproduced on p. 260 (Figs. 4, 5, 6); the
sign in the middle (Fig. 5) may be seen as a variant of the siddham-monogram, in this case with a
slightly different function.
20 Whenever this is the case, it may be useful to distinguish between ‘signs’ that reveal a particular
intellectual practice (lectional signs, punctuation, text divisions, subsidiary texts, comments, etc.)
248 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
ment and the mirror of learned intellectual life. In some cases, such as in early Ti-
betan translations kept in Dunhuang, the sole trace of its initial sobriety is the uni-
formity of the script, which does not employ capital letters (although tentative
scrawls may be seen in the collection of Dunhuang Tibetan MSS): the MS keeps the
art of ornamentation for the opening sign or curl-like symbol, the margins, the il-
lustrations, the signs of punctuation, and later on to embellish the traditional
string-holes appearing in the poṭhī-format MSS.21
The fact that one finds specimens among early Buddhist MSS that display the
text according to specific forms and rules or introduce lectional signs or paratexts
(i.e. rubrics, titles, etc., as well as longer texts such as lists of verses, chapters, ta-
bles of contents or indexes raisonnés) refers the reader to the peculiar use of the
text and is evidence of the high intellectual standard of its users. It thus invites us
to question some aspects of the historical and cultural factors that might have con-
tributed to the subsequent encounters that Indian Buddhists had with the regions
of North-western India.
2 Early Buddhist manuscripts in their historical
context
While the earliest Buddhist MSS known to date originate from the present-day re-
gions of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkestan and Xinjiang, it cannot simply be af-
firmed that Buddhist texts did not exist in written form in the same epoch in Central
India or in Śrī Laṅka; what may be said, however, is that while the conditions of
their effective production are certainly present, we nonetheless lack tangible evi-
dence of it. It is interesting to investigate the composite hallmark of the cultural
milieu of the north-western regions where these Buddhist texts were written or cop-
ied, studied and/or commented on, and to look at the question of how the refined
philological practice behind the use of lectional and critical signs22, of subsidiary
||
and ‘signs’ that are to be studied in the framework of biblio-economy, such as the system of pagi-
nation, marginal titles, the measurement of text by means of fixed or average specific units, etc. —
though, in some cases, the marker may admittedly refer to both practices. Lectional signs, and em-
bellished punctuation marks may be followed from Gandhāra to Dunhuang/Tibetan manuscripts;
see Baums 2009, pl. 21, and cf. IO 129 and 728 (http://idp.bl.uk) showing zig-zag śads with ‘petalled
‘head’.
21 See Scherrer-Schaub 1999, 17–19, and plate V; Scherrer-Schaub and Bonani 2002, 191–193.
22 See the Greek terminology given in Pfeiffer 1968, 310 s.v.: ἀντίσιγμα, ἀστερίκος, διπλῆ, ὀβελός,
σίγμα.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 249
texts, entered cenobitic life, so to speak, and the conditions in which this practice
flourished in these regions.
The inquiry benefits largely from the work of Richard Salomon and other schol-
ars who have brought textual, epigraphical, artistic, and architectural documents
to light over the last few decades or have directed their investigations at the histor-
ical and linguistic conditions of the introduction of the written word in the Indian
sphere in general. The intent of the present author is very restricted in scope and
concerns the layout of the manuscript page as a conveyor of textual meaning and
the disclosure of the history of Indian/Indic philological and intellectual practices.
Let us start in the present-day regions of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Uzbekistan
in the centuries around the beginning of the Common Era (1st century BCE – 1st cen-
tury CE), when Buddhist MSS were possibly circulating in Buddhist monastic com-
munities temporarily or permanently residing in religious centres where artistic
production, in the form of reliquaries and other monuments, was flourishing under
the Indo-Scythian and Śaka dynasties of Apraca and Oḍi-rāja, who were supporting
the Buddhist institution to various degrees, and also in light of the fact that, as ar-
chaeology and epigraphy tell us, Buddhist sites already existed in these regions
prior to this period.23
The ‘Rhinoceros Horn Sūtra’ (Khvs-G) (see p. 244) stands out as one of the old-
est specimens of MSS with a scroll format. Despite its antiquity, it displays a rela-
tively rich layout and at the same time its physical appearance shows that the text
was handled considerably (Salomon 2000, 23). Although its provenance is uncer-
tain, according to Salomon (2000, xii)
there are strong indications that [it] came from one of the sites in or around Haḍḍa in the Jala-
labad Plain of eastern Afghanistan, just west of the Khyber Pass.
The MS, which may be dated to the 1st century BCE – 1st century CE, reveals a refined
learned intellectual milieu in which a plurality of cultures co-existed. Like the ma-
jority of the early MSS, it is written on strips of birch bark that are glued together to
form a roll.24 The disposition of the strips in the roll, as noted by Salomon (1999, 87),
||
23 There is, of course, an important bibliography on the history of these regions. Close to the pre-
sent topic, see Salomon 1999, 2–13, 180–182; and 2007; Callieri 2007; Faccenna 2007; Neelis 2007.
24 In this case, the pieces of bark have the same function as kollema. In papyrology, the term kol-
lema designates the individual folios or pages that, when glued together, composed the Greek roll,
a practice which is attested in one of the earliest extant Greek papyri, the P.Derveni, dating to the
5th–4th c. BCE, and continues in the Hellenistic and Roman period. As is well known, the imprint of
a Greek papyrus was found at Aï Khanoum (see pp. 255–257), and the practice of gluing together
the standard folia that constitute the rolls, attested in China, may be equally observed in the Tibetan
250 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
attests the local / Gandhāran practice of reading the ‘book’25 by unrolling the scroll
vertically (as was the case for some of the Tibetan scrolls of Dunhuang), contrary to
Greek papyri (or Chinese scrolls), which were unrolled horizontally.
In a recent and very informative article, Stefan Baums retraces the origin of the
Gandhāran ‘scroll-type’ and returns to the practice of unrolling a scroll vertically,
which he associates with the Aramaic tradition in an Achaemenid context. After
carefully considering the peculiar physical characteristic of the documents, he con-
cludes:
In view of this long list of detailed arguments in the way that short-format documents were
prepared, inscribed and used in the Achemenid empire and in early Gandhāra, and on the
historical background of the Achemenid administration of Gandhāra at the time when the Ar-
amaic script was first adopted to the writing of the Gandhāran language, I therefore suggest
that Aramaic manuscript formats and scribal habits as practised in the Achemenid empire
likewise formed the starting point for the Gandhāran manuscript tradition.26
The question arises as to the actual historical and cultural context and conditions
in which Gandhāran Buddhism originated. It is noteworthy that, in the first part of
the 1st century CE, at the time when possibly the Khvs-G and the earliest Buddhist
MSS were circulating, the Buddhist communities that existed in the regional Indo-
Scythian and Śaka kingdoms were not beginners. This may be inferred from various
sources, for instance from the highly developed and complex Buddhist phraseology
||
rolls of Dunhuang. Again, this does not mean that I subscribe to the idea of a linear and chronolog-
ically successive transmission of this MS format, but rather that the scroll is one of the oldest types
of writing materials and that the practice – with unavoidable local variances, particularly with re-
gard to the material used – was shared by cultures across a very large area of the ancient and me-
dieval world.
25 For the sake of convenience, we shall use the term ‘book’ to designate that bibliothetic unit
consisting of intellectual content (i.e. a text) and a material support with specific codicological for-
mat’s characteristics (roll, poṭhī, etc.). The terminology fluctuates according to the epoch and/or
the context, and this is more or less universal in all cultures. One example in the Gandhāran context
may be seen in the use of the term pustaka, which may also, self-referentially, designate a book
written in roll-format. See Salomon 1999, 87: ‘All of the fragmentary manuscripts in the new collec-
tion are in the form of scrolls composed of strips of birch bark. From the fragmentary colophon in
fragment 3B and from the verse written at the top of the KDhP scroll […], we know that these scrolls
were referred to as postaka or postaga, an Iranian loanword which appears in Sanskrit as pustaka,
“book”’.
26 See Baums 2014, 218 and 220, where Baums distinguishes ‘three cycles of the introduction and
adaptation of manuscripts traditions in Gandhāra and surrounding areas’, with the first cycle start-
ing in the 6th c. BCE. See also the detailed description of Gandhāran rolls in Salomon 1999, 87–109;
see Baums 2014, 192–199.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 251
that appears in the (roughly) contemporary inscription of Senavarma.27 Moreover,
and via the links these petty kings had with the Śaka of Gandhāra, especially Taxila, the
local Buddhists were in contact with their religious fellows in Mathurā.28 Further ele-
ments come to compose the cluster of data that concerns Buddhism during the last part
of the 1st century BCE and the first part of the 1st century CE. To illustrate the Indian pres-
ence in the region at this time, the new disposition of the Buddhist area at Butkara I may
be mentioned as an example. Domenico Faccenna noted that this new disposition
transformed and adapted the new features to the peculiarly Indian monuments, namely the
vihāra and, in particular, the stūpa with its vedikā.29
This seems to indicate that, at that time, religious and intellectuals from peninsular
India were transmitting to the north-western regions the rules and principles govern-
ing the Buddhist institution in matters of architecture, religious teaching and monas-
tic rules, chancery practice,30 etc., while, at the same time, they were possibly able to
adopt local uses and techniques, for instance in the matter of writing implements and
practices, and they were equally able to introduce local elements in their narrative
prose. The art of composing literary texts was completely their own, however. This is
amply demonstrated by the existence of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts in these re-
gions, copied or put down in writing by local scribes.
As previously noted, the conditions for writing down the buddhavacana were
theoretically present at the time of Aśoka since, as we have seen, Mauryan chancery
practice made provision for a copy or the original of the edict written on stone to be
deposited in the archives. We do not know whether the text was written on cloth or
on any other support, but the fact remains that we have a testimony of the use of writ-
ing in the 3rd century BCE here. One century later or so, the monuments at Bharhut
bear evidence of short legends recalling the Buddhist texts that were possibly recited
to pilgrims and other visitors to the monastic site. Finally, and interestingly enough,
both the Ceylonese Chronicles and the extant early Gandhāran MSS converge in as-
signing the writing down of the buddhavacana to the 1st century BCE,31 although we
are tempted to think – following a narrative considered legendary up to now – that
||
27 See Scherrer-Schaub (in press). Other inscriptions of this period are evidencing the fact; see
Scherrer-Schaub 2016.
28 See Neelis 2011, 121–123 and notes.
29 Faccenna 2007, 170.
30 See the earliest donative acts attested in inscriptions, for example.
31 For a Ceylonese conspectus, see von Hinüber 1990 (XIII), 63–66. On pre-Mauryan evidence, see
Salomon 1998, 12 and notes.
252 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
the writing down of Buddhist texts, albeit on a reduced scale, may well have com-
menced in Mathurā sometime earlier. To return to the codicological investigation, we
may note that while the palaeography of ancient Buddhist MSS is relatively well es-
tablished on a sound basis, the systematic study of the layout, of the critical (σημεῑα)
and lectional signs (accentuation, punctuation) and of the art of displaying the com-
mentary – in short, of the various forms activating the text in their cultural and his-
torical perspective – is less studied.
2.1 The disposition of text on a surface
In his inspiring Footprints of Artisans in History. Some Reflections on Early Artisans
of India, Shadakshari Settar mentions the fact that the inscription in the minor rock
edict of Aśoka at Brahmagiri (Chitradurga Dist. Karnataka, Hultzsch CII I, 175–178)
ends with the word lipikareṇa written in Kharoṣṭhī from right to left. The same hap-
pens with the Siddhāpura and Jatiṅga Rāmeśvara minor rock edicts, both also lo-
cated in the Chitradurga District. Settar (2003, 24–26) finely points out a series of so
far unnoticed consequences of the Brahmagiri inscription, as the use of ‘Prākṛt lan-
guage and Brāhmī script among the regional elite’, while Chapaḍa the carver uses
the term isila (meaning a fortified town) in the three inscriptions, which is ‘a proto-
Kannaḍa term probably derived from the Draviḍian root iyal, meaning “arrow
shot”’.
Most interestingly, Settar (2003, 29–33, 32–33) notes that Chapaḍa was not only
a skilled artisan, but also a fine ‘philologist’, who improved his skill in the course
of carving the three minor edicts, producing ‘his best at Brahmagiri’. Besides mak-
ing corrections and additions, Chapaḍa achieved a degree of perfection in setting
the surface layout of the inscription.
First he carefully chose a massive boulder at the north-west base of this hill, which opened up a
near-even surface of about sixteen feet in width and twelve feet in height, and composed this
edict, balancing both its horizontality and verticality. This enabled him to gain better edges to the
frame, sharper alignment of left-margin, greater uniformity in spacing letters and lines, and bet-
ter configuration of characters. In just twelve and half lines he covered the entire text as against
twenty two he had taken at the earlier two centres. Though he followed Siddhapura version in
general, he had rewritten the text for the third time, incorporating some more changes in its vo-
cabulary, shuffling some sentences here and there (I, N-Q occuring in ll. 5, 9–12) and making
expressions shorter and sharper. He corrects the opening sentence by restoring the three words
before vataviyā, opens the second adding few more words (se hevaṃ Devāṇaṃ piye …) and even
goes to the extent of exhibiting the sophistication he had attained by playing with the verbs such
as hēvaṃ āha, with āṇapayati, sāvite with sāvāpite and such others.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 253
This tells us that at least some of the artisans who carved the Mauryan inscriptions in
the north-western regions32 were itinerants, and the same may apply to their artisan
fellows of peninsular India who were migrating or travelling in the opposite direc-
tion.33 It equally tells us that the aesthetic concern that Chapaḍa demonstrates was
possibly shared at large among those who were, like him, writing in Brāhmī. In this
way, the case of Chapaḍa, who – we can assume for several reasons that would take
us too far34 – could also write in Kharoṣṭhī, leads us, once again, to the complexity of
factors that should be taken into account when considering the intellectual, social
and cultural practices in a historical perspective.
To return to the early Buddhist MSS mentioned before, and in the absence of tan-
gible evidence of extant Buddhist MSS from peninsular India at such an early date (1st
century BCE – 1st century CE), the question arises as to the possible role of local or
itinerant scribes,35 who may have contributed to transmitting their technique to mi-
grants or natives Buddhist religious or lay masters. It is a well-known fact that a clus-
ter of data gleaned from the study of languages, monuments, artistic production and
artefacts of this period converge towards a common cultural pattern sharing a long
distance and local elements that do not only refer to the ‘mountain tribes’ (showing a
marked ethnic and linguistic diversity), but also to Indian, Iranian, and Hellenistic
components conveyed in the region – long before, at times. Moreover, even though this
has been said frequently, it should be stressed once again that Taxila, the capital city of
||
32 Settar (2003, 10) calls ‘Kharoshṭhīs’, named ‘after Kshatrapa Kharahostes’, the artisans who were
‘more adventurous and more dynamic than the rest of the artisans of this time’ and who were ‘a dis-
placed Iranian community, hungering for fresh outlets after the fall of the Achemenid empire’ and who
‘had become as fluent in Kharoshṭī letters as in Prākṛt language’. Settar advances the hypothesis that
Chapaḍa could have been a native of Karnataka ‘born in a family of migrants’; see 2003, 25.
33 See the avadāna staging the history of the artisan of North-west India, a wood-carver, inviting
a skilled painter from South India. See Scherrer-Schaub 2009b, 32 and n. 18. Some unpredictable
and uncontrollable factors have caused some distortions to the expectable presentation of Scherrer-
Schaub 2009b that the magnanimous reader will no doubt excuse.
34 Some centuries later, the ‘Kharoṣṭhī/Gāndhārī textual tradition was not, as it might once have
appeared, an isolated and ephemeral provincial phenomenon, but rather was well entrenched,
widely used, and highly influential over a vast area of south and central Asia’ (Salomon 1999, 137).
35 Salomon (1999, sections 6.6 and 6.7) noticed intrusions in inscriptions and early MSS, betraying
local vocabulary (Dardic, etc.) and scribal habits. He further adds (1999, 136): ‘Since it can be as-
sumed that our scribes learned to write through some formal training process, the preferences they
show for particular orthographical alternatives presumably reflect those of their teachers. Thus,
there must have been, in some form or other, different traditions of ways to write Gāndhārī’. We
would add that their teachers might have been teaching to them in faraway places or might have
come to the region from far away. Or they may even have learnt from MSS imported from distant
countries and circulating in the region.
254 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Gandhāra, was an important cultural centre frequented by Indian scholars, and that
some of them, like Pāniṇi (4th cent. BCE), were native of the region.
That the north-western (and southern regions) were connected with Egypt and
Alexandria is an equally well ascertained fact supported by the 13th MRE of Aśoka,
where Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r. 285–246 BCE) is mentioned together with four Hel-
lenistic kings who maintained diplomatic relations with the Mauryan empire. Ptol-
emy II Philadelphus is the king who ‘excavated a canal connecting the Nile to the Red
Sea and hence to the Indian ocean’.36 He is also the king who majestically staged a
Pompa Bacchica, on the occasion of which one could see ‘a cart representing the re-
turn of Dionysus [the evanescent ambassador of the Egyptian king] from India, with
elephants, parrots, peacocks, Indian dogs and oxen, and some real Indians. Columns
surrounding a dining salon were made of Indian marble.’37
Without going into the fascinating history of the close relationship between India
and Egypt following the campaign of Alexander the Great, it is worth mentioning here
that Ptolemy II Philadelphus (although well known, it is certainly useful to recall that
the Ptolemies were Macedonians!) instituted the Museum/Mouseïon, the cultural and
religious centre of Alexandria, and initiated a series of intellectual enterprises that
were momentous for the dawn of Alexandrian philology, whose influence traversed
the following centuries and is still perceptible nowadays.
In discussing a relief found in the Buddhist Sacred Area of Butkara I (Swāt, West
Pakistan), Maurizio Taddei mentions the case of the statuettes and representation of
Harpocrates that were found at Begram and Sirkap, dated ‘by Marshall to the 1st c.
AD’.38 Noting that the Harpocrates of Sirkap ‘seems to be a product of Alexandrian
craftsmanship of the 1st c. AD’, Maurizio Taddei adds that the ‘reliefs from Swāt only
provide us with a further confirmation of the close links relating Gandhāra to Alexan-
dria’. Taking a step further, he stresses the following point:
If all these elements point toward a transference of cultural motifs from Egypt to Gandhāra, on
the other hand one should not disregard the possibility that sometimes the same route was fol-
lowed in a backward direction, as it seems to be the case with a figurine of Harpocrates seated in
the “Buddha style” on a lotus flower,
examples of which are preserved in the Museum of Alexandria, among other places
(Figs 3a, b, c).
||
36 See Brancaccio 2007, 387 and n. 9.
37 Karttunen 1997, 330 and n. 48.
38 See Taddei 2003, 135 and n. 7, 136 and n. 15.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 255
Fig. 3a: Harpocrates from Begram. Kabul Museum, Francine Tissot Catalogue of the National
Museum of Afghanistan 1931-1985. Paris, Unesco Publishing, 2006, 283, K.p. Beg. 712.452 (ex
n° 153), bronze cast solid. Reproduced from Taddei 2003, I: 134–135 and Fig. 5.
Fig. 3b: Harpocrates from Hadra. Repr. from Breccia 1930, 55, no. 257 and Tav. XVI, 1. Height:
8.3 cm.
Further cultural links with Hellenistic Egypt closely connected with our concern
are attested at Aï Khanoum on the bank of the River Oxus in Hellenistic Bactria
(in present-day Afghanistan). In room 107 of the royal palace, which may have
hosted the library, the exceptional discovery of the impression left on a lump of
fine loam by some fragments of papyrus and two parchments of literary Greek
256 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
texts – a philosophical dialogue and a piece of drama, either a comedy or a trag-
edy39 – help to confirm the intellectual ‘vivacity’ of the far provinces of the Hel-
lenistic world in the 3rd century BCE. The philosophical fragment40 that Cavallo
dates to the mid-3rd century BCE is thus contemporary to Aśoka, Ptolemy II Phil-
adelphus and to the library annexed to the Museum, instituted at Alexandria.
Fig. 3c: Harpocrates
from Ibrahimieh,
seated on a lotus. Repr.
from Breccia 1930, 55,
no. 265 and Tav. XVII, 6.
Height: 8 cm.
||
39 See Cavallo/Hadot/Rapin 1987, 244–249 and 256–257. According to the palaeographical study,
Cavallo (236–237) dates the philosophical fragment to the mid-3rd century BCE and puts the frag-
ment in the context of the Greek-Egyptian papyri and scripts.
40 On the philosophical resonance between the Aï Khanoum fragment and the Indian philosoph-
ical conspectus of the time, see Scherrer-Schaub 2014, 167–171, and Scherrer-Schaub (forthcoming).
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 257
In her very ‘dotta’ analysis of this piece, Margherita Isnardi-Parente suggests with
caution that we are possibly confronted here with a dialogue written by Aristotle in
his youth, slightly Platonizing, and whose content could be added to the very frag-
ile and hypothetical pieces of evidence that lead us to the lost doctrine of Xenocra-
tes (339–314 BCE).41 We have also long known that those who were reading in Greek
at Aï Khanoum (whether or not this was their mother tongue) were most likely in
contact with Indians who were passing through or had migrated into the region
(not necessarily all Buddhists).42 Naturally, the bibliography on this subject does
not end here – in fact, it is amazingly vast. One element, however, may be of interest
in helping us repaint the context: the discovery of ink-pots dating to the turn of the
Common Era (1st century BCE–1st century CE) that were found at Aï Khanoum, Be-
gram and Taxila (Scherrer-Schaub 2009b, fig. 5.4), which patently shows that these
writing tools used by the scribes of early Buddhist MSS were possibly once imported
from the Hellenistic world and eventually manufactured in the region by artisans
skilled in the technique. It is worthwhile to read the description provided by Paul
Bernard here, which has rarely been taken into consideration so far:
Le dernier objet que je tiens à vous présenter est un petit récipient de bronze en forme de copule,
fermé sur le dessus par une plaque horizontale percée d’un trou central (fig. 21). À l’intérieur est
adapté à ce trou un petit godet en plomb. Une anse verticale mobile permettait de porter le récip-
ient. Nous avons là un encrier qui se rattache directement à un type d’encrier grec caractérisé par
la présence d’un petit godet destiné à recevoir l’encre, fixé à l’intérieur d’un récipient plus grand,
de forme variable, cylindrique ou à flancs arrondis. Les exemplaires les plus proches du nôtre par
la forme sont ceux qui ont été recueillis dans la fouille de Délos. Des encriers analogues ont égale-
ment été découverts à Bégram et à Taxila, où les couches du Ier siècle av. J.-C. et du Ier siècle ap. J.
C. en ont livré une riche série. Ce modeste objet éclaire d’une vive lueur la très large pénétration
de la culture grecque dans toute l’Asie centrale à partir de la Bactriane hellénisée, puisqu’il fut
imitée par l’artisanat local d’une des grandes capitales du Nord-Ouest de l’Inde et que le sanskrit
a emprunté au grec le nom de l’encre (melā) et celui de la plume (kalama).43
||
41 Isnardi-Parente (1992, 188), remarks: ‘La conclusione di questo discorso non oltrepassa i li-
miti dell’ipotesi. Avanzo la congettura che ci troviamo di fronte a un frammento di dialogo gio-
vanile platonizzante — ma nella forma più che nella sostanza — di Aristotele, dialogo che po-
trebbe essere identificato con il Zophistés; e che quanto vi è contenuto possa andare ad
aggiungersi alle diverse, pur fragili e ipotetiche testimonianze che ci conducono sulle tracce
della perduta dottrina di Senocrate’. Recently Ivanoe Privitera (2011, 132), while rejecting the hy-
pothesis that Isnardi-Parente had advanced extremely cautiously, suggests, ‘rather specula-
tively’ as he says, that the fragment could ‘also be, for example, Heraclides Ponticus Perí eidõn’.
42 But they could equally see Indian artefacts at Aï Khanoum where Eucratides possibly ‘stored
the booty from his expeditions in India’ in the royal treasury. See Rapin 1995, 277.
43 Bernard 1978, 462–463.
258 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Almost a century later, Nāgārjuna (1st to 2nd century CE) mentions the writing prac-
tice in his Ratnāvalī and recommends the king to diffuse/donate the buddhava-
cana, together with the writing material, book (pustaka, glegs bam), ink (maṣī, snag
tsha) and wooden pen (lekhanī, smyu gu). And in order for knowledge to be accrued,
says the Mādhyamika Master, the king should build a school or a hall for writing
(lipiśālā).44
Fig. 4: Lipiśālā. Relief fragment (Gandhāra) 2nd–3rd c. CE, 25 22 cm, grey schist, Kamakura,
Hiragama Collection. From Sérinde. Terre de Bouddha. Dix siècles d’art sur la Route de la Soie.
Paris, 24 octobre 1995 – 19 février 1996, 235, fig. 179.
||
44 See Scherrer-Schaub 2007, Part 2: 772.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 259
Fig. 5: Fragment of a panel with a scene from a writing school (lipiśālā): novices bearing ink-
pots and writing slabs. Museum of Lahore, from Tissot 2002, fig. 258.
The episode of the writing school (lipiśālā) in the life stories of Śākyamuni is fre-
quently represented in plastic reliefs, as in Figs 4 and 5. In the first case, Śākya-
muni is seated on a stool, with his dangling legs crossed, and is writing on a
wooden tablet, some specimens of which have been found in Khotan. (The same
type of wooden tablet was still in use in Himachal Pradesh more than twenty
years ago.) Śākyamuni writes with a wooden pen and his young attendant bears
an ink-pot like those displayed in the Taxila Museum. The central figure – possi-
bly the teacher – holds a written tablet showing the Arapacana alphabet. The sec-
ond relief, from Ostia (Fig. 6),45 displays a scene where a central figure, who may
||
45 The dating of this relief varies from the 2nd– 3rd to the 5th centuries CE; see Turner 1968, 189
‘Notes on the Plates’ and Plate VI: ‘Published by G. Calza in Le Arti (Rassegna industriale
dell’Arte, Firenze), I, 1939, opp. p. 391. Relief from a building in Ostia. Firm elements for dating
are not known to me. The bearded figures would suit the 2nd/3rd c. CE, or after Julian. (…) Behind
the scribe on the left are three men, one of whom is gesturing in dispute; behind the scribe on
the right are two men, one of whom turns to look at his neighbour, whose hand is raised to attract
attention. It has been suggested that the central figure is Christ, and that the scribes are the
260 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Fig. 6: Relief from Ostia, dating c. 2nd–3rd c. CE. Central figure with a roll in his left hand and
his open right hand raised in a gesture; for the complete description, see n. 45. From
Turner 1968, plate VI. Compare this with the scene in Fig. 1.
be a rhetorician or a teacher, stands on a platform, a roll in his left hand, his open
right hand raised in a gesture. At either side a scribe seated at a low wooden table
writes with a stylus (its blunt reverse end is readily identifiable) on wax tablets,
the six wooden folds of which are supported on the table.
Anna Filigenzi’s pregnant observation about Gandhāran painting helps to
achieve a better understanding of the context of the intellectual production of
literati, philosophers, and poets handed down to us thanks to the wealth of frag-
mentary MSS:
||
Evangelists writing down the Gospels. But the iconography is unusual and four Evangelists
would be expected. (…)’ q.v. Compare this scene with that of Fig. 1 ‘Monks reading and comment-
ing in a cenacle’ above p. 241.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 261
[If] Gandhara devised for painting — as indeed we are now able to judge for sculpture — an
original, organic language of its own, it is nevertheless in the far vaster world of eastern
Hellenism that it constructed a physiognomy for itself, and to this world it owed a number
of features. Of course, there was nothing like uniformity in this world, but it did see certain
common characteristics of Hellenistic origin blending with, but never overwhelming, other
local characteristics in a continuous process of generation. Moreover, the spread of Hellen-
ism came on top of other phenomena of cultural interaction, particularly evident in the spe-
cific case of Gandhara — a borderland where we sense a rich cultural substratum, funda-
mentally Indian but also Iranian and Central Asian.46
Richard Salomon, after a careful critical review of the opinions concerning the
origin of the scroll format, concludes:
If the new discoveries of numerous birch bark scrolls from the greater Gandhāra region
weaken the hypothesis of a Chinese background for the scroll format, they support the ar-
gument for a Hellenistic source. (…) [W]e now can see that the birch bark scroll was the
standard book format in a time and place — that is, in Gandhāra in the early centuries of
the Christian era — which was still under a strong influence of Hellenistic culture. For ex-
ample the discovery of a hybrid figure of Herakles-Vajrapāṇi at Tapa Shutur (Tarzi 1976,
396–7; Mustamandi 1984) illustrates the Hellenistic atmosphere of the Haḍḍa area itself,
which is likely to be the original provenance of the new manuscripts. Thus the Greek papy-
rus scroll must be considered a priori the more probable inspiration for the Gandhāran
scrolls, despite the difference in details of their construction noted by Janert.47
What is most important here is the fact that Richard Salomon points to the struc-
tural pattern, which is much more indicative than the series of functional diver-
sities, such as the use of the scroll in the horizontal position in Gandhāra versus
the vertical one in the case of papyri.48
||
46 Filigenzi 2006, 29.
47 Salomon 1999, 100–104, especially 102–103.
48 As noted by Turner 1968, 2, it is worth mentioning that ‘On Assyrian monuments rolls can be
seen in the hand of counting scribes, though they were perhaps made of skins, the great rival of
papyrus as writing material in the early period, even in Greece’. And also (ibid.: 4) ‘… it is worth
emphasizing that the manufacturer’s and retailer’s unit is the made-up roll, and that the Greek
word χάρτης, Latin charta, does not mean a sheet but a roll’.
262 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
3 Unveiling the page of early Buddhist MSS.
Alexandrian philology and its diffusion
Ptolemy II Philadelphus passed away in 246 BCE. Aristophanes of Byzantium
(255–180 BCE) was then a nine-year-old child destined for a brilliant future. Cal-
limachus of Cyrene (the Hellenistic province governed by Magas/Māga, one of the
five kings of Aśoka’s 13th MRE mentioned above), who was to pass away in 250
BCE, had been ordered by Ptolemy II to make the library accessible by making a
catalogue (pinakes) that would be a scientific inventory of Greek literature.49 Ar-
istophanes on his part would continue the work of his predecessors, and together
with other scholars he would be in charge of reordering the collection of Greek
texts that the father of Ptolemy II Philadelphus had started to gather. On this oc-
casion, the team developed the first organised system of textual culture and crit-
ical edition of the textual corpus, which they were able to see in use in the Library
of Alexandria for the very first time.
They introduced and/or established the use of critical and lectional signs, the
practice of commenting (hypomnemata), taking a passage from the original text
(lemma) and distinguishing it
by various methods of punctuation. Often it is made to project into the left-hand margin, or
is separated by space, or by a single or double stop, or by a dash, both from what precedes
and what follows.50
As previously seen, the use of space to separate words or parts of sentences is
known from the same epoch in Indian epigraphy, while the dash evokes the later
Indian daṇḍa/Tibetan śad. And there is more. In cataloguing the titles of Euripi-
des’ plays, Callimachus arranged [them] in order of the initial letter.
In the most important of these papyri, which gives summaries of the plots, the title is fol-
lowed by the formula οὗ (ἧς, ὧν) ἀρχή and the citation of the first line.
When the texts had no title
the only way to register them, it seems, was according to the ‘incipit’, a method still applied
in modern indexes of lyric poems of an author or of an anthology. 51
||
49 See Turner 1968, 102–103.
50 Turner 1968, 114. See above p. 244 and n. 11, below p. 267 and n. 69.
51 Pfeiffer 1968, 129–130.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 263
The Alexandrian system of textual criticism introduced the use of diacritics,
of laying out the lyrical poems on the page following the metrical units, displayed
in columns (colometry), and the recourse to critical signs. These practices were
not terra incognita as some of them had been known earlier in philosophical circles
and can be seen in ancient Greek papyri today. Diogenes Laertius (3rd century CE)
mentions the existence of an editio princeps of the work of Plato (427–347 BCE),
which had possibly been established in the context of the Academy after the phi-
losopher passed away or at the beginning of the 3rd century BCE, and explains to
the reader how to interpret the diacritics, adding that the reference edition was
accessible for a fee/consideration at Athenae.52
3.1 Textual criticism and text semiotics
Various features contributed to the legibility and intelligibility of the page: the pres-
ence of lectional and critical signs, the specific practice of highlighting the begin-
ning of a verse or the first verse of a poem by bringing it into prominence in the
upper margin of the scroll53 or in the lateral margins, the use of short and/or long
subsidiary/ancillary sub-texts (paratexts) (p. 244 and 247–248), or the use of verse-
line and blank space54 to separate the metrical units and display them in columns,
to quote but a few of the specific artifices seen in the Alexandrian tradition, which
may also be observed in Buddhist MSS, as mentioned above. The scribes of Bud-
dhist MSS show concern for the aesthetic and intellectual use of texts and for the
system of classifying the physical item/book in the context of a large, organised
collection for the use of readers. Sylvie Hureau55 gives a perfect example of how the
graphic devices used may betray the intention of directing the reader’s attention.
The fragmentary Dunhuang MS P. 2094 (www.archivesetmanuscrits.bnf.fr)56 of the
||
52 However, this may be a post-factum narrative; see D. L. III, 66. On the use of a master copy
in the process of editing, see Turner (1968, 112–113, and 184, n. 29), who notes the use of critical
signs in ‘[a] papyrus of the middle of the second century B.C. (P. Tebt. 4) – [i.e. the papyri of
Tebtynis in the Fayyūm, discovered in the cemetery of crocodile mummies; see Turner 1968, 31–
32] — [that] contains part of Iliad ii marked with these signs, and is probable the earliest known
example of them’. See del Corso 2011, 3–34, 29, and n. 118.
53 See the case of the Khvs-G MS in Salomon 2000, 25, above p. 244. On this practice, attested
in Graeco-Egyptian papyri, see Caroli 2007.
54 A blank space, between verses or verse-lines, indicates the ‘silent tune’, see below 269.
55 Hureau 2014a, 221–229, 226. The Jingang bore boluomi jing (P. 2094) is dated by a colophon
to 908.
56 Available online at: http://idp.bl.uk/database/oo_scroll_h.a4d?uid=1769466987;bst=1;
recnum=59133;index=1;img=1.
264 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Jingang bore boluomi jing or the Chinese translation of the Vajracchedikā use a se-
ries of lectional signs (point, circle and stroke in red ink) to mark various topics or
achieve other functions. If these practices reveal the text semiotics, then from a his-
torical point of view, forms and graphic devices function as markers indicating un-
seen or unsuspected parallel practices in different cultural milieus.
The scholarly practice of commenting on the ‘root’-text (mūla) or a passage,
and the hypomnemata57 or the practice of ‘taking notes’ common in Ancient Greece,
are equally in use in Gandhāran MSS. In early scholastic Buddhist treatises, the be-
ginning of the verse, the passage or the words (pratīka) that will be commented, is
followed by the expression ‘sutro tatra ṇideśo’, i.e. ‘[Thus], the sūtra; [now] the ex-
plication of it’ (Salomon 1999, 28–29). In later MSS, the commentarial practice that
we just saw expressed verbatim is graphically converted and transposed into the
layout.58 The verse or the pratīka are then isolated from the rest of the text either by
enhancing them in red ink (Fig. 7)59 or by making use of larger fonts, while the com-
mentary is inserted in small characters underneath the line (even, at times, invad-
ing the space). Examples exist among Buddhist MSS that seem to indicate that the
original text was initially written60 with wide spacing between the lines, which was
supposed to be filled with the commentary eventually. This practice is attested over
a large geographical area, and it is a marker of the work in progress in the case of
large-scale textual production, as on the occasion of the two periods of translation
of Indian/Indic Buddhist texts into Tibetan.61 In some instances, we find the mūla
||
57 Turner (1968, 113) notes: ‘The commentaries, hypomnemata, are complementary to the copy
of the text. The Greek word (which carries us back to Plato’s Phaedrus) shows that they originate
in the lecture room, as lecture notes of the scholar concerned. This oral origin is perhaps one
reason why the persons who draw on them shorten them or add to them without compunction;
it may also be why abbreviations are used regularly in them in an age when abbreviations are
not normally admitted to library texts. They in fact consist of an interpretation (verbal, historical,
rhetorical, etc. according to the commentator’s approach) of the author in the form of an expla-
nation of selected passages – those marked by the critical signs’.
58 See Turner 1968, 114: ‘A considerable number of hypomnemata on papyrus survive, and it is
worth pausing to note their form. The writer quotes a passage of the original and then comments
on it. This quotation, the lemma or “what is taken” from the original, is carefully distinguished
from the comment by various methods of punctuation. Often it is made to project into the left-
hand margins, or is separated by space, or by a single or a double stop, or by a dash, both from
what precedes and from what follows’.
59 The rubrica of the Classics; see Scherrer-Schaub 1999, 7 and n. 17.
60 This nicely fits in with rules of translating from Tibetan into Mongolian, which confirm a
practice noted in Indian philosophical texts; see Scherrer-Schaub 1999, 23 and n. 84.
61 Scherrer-Schaub 1999, 3–36, 21–28 and plates X–XII; Scherrer-Schaub and Bonani 2002, 187,
fig. 15, 203–208. Referring to the roll of Pindar’s Paeans, Turner (1968, 95 and n. 61) notes: ‘This
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 265
Fig. 7: Kamalaśīla’s Śālistambhaṭīkā. Dunhuang MS Pelliot tibétain (P.Tib 553), Biblio-
thèque nationale de France. A particularly refined MS on high-quality paper, beautifully
written; beginning of the 9th c. Reproduced from S. Breton-Gravereau and D. Thibault (eds),
L’aventure des écritures. Matières et formes, Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France,
1998, 105.
text displayed on the page with large intervals, mainly because of being written in
large-format script (Fig. 8): in this case, a possible functional interpretation would
be that the text was read and comments made on a separate MS (see below p. 278).
||
latter roll is also on a verso, has stichometric and critical notation, and seems to have been given
especially wide spaces between the columns so that annotations could be made’.
266 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Fig. 8: Fragment of a scholastic treatise. Berezovsky Collection SI B/31. From The Lotus Sutra
and Its World. Buddhist Manuscripts of the Great Silk Road. Manuscripts and Blockprints from
the Collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg, 1998: 14, fig. 6 and p. 35, § 6.
To return to the role played by these specimens in Buddhist scholarly practice, as the
art of translating or exegesis, the Chinese sources are extremely illuminating and pre-
cious records for us.62 Sylvie Hureau’s study on several Dunhuang MSS in Chinese re-
veals a persisting model in the art of graphically distinguishing the passages cited from
the original text, marked here by the commentator using the Chinese word zhe, and
eventually enhanced by other devices, such as varying the size of the characters.63
3.2 Stichometrics, gāthā-metrics, bam po-metrics, and jie-
/song-metrics64
There is a wealth of material that may be gathered from examining Greek (or Grae-
co-Egyptian) papyri and Buddhist MSS from North-western India and beyond. Our
attention will now focus on a particular form, more specifically verse form, along
with the uddāna, the table of contents65/ ‘mnemonic index’, and the numeral mne-
monics indicated by ga (= gāthā) followed by a number.66
||
62 The organisation and procedure followed in Chinese translating scriptoria is well known. It
is concisely and usefully sketched by Sylvie Hureau 2014b, 239.
63 Hureau 2014b, 241.
64 Costantino Moretti, whom I gratefully thank, informed me that the Preface to the Chinese
translation of the Dharmapada (see below pp. 272–274) gives the number of the jie, in some cases
the song, terms that both translate the Sanskrit ‘gāthā’: ‘Nella prefazione della versione cinese
dei Dharmapada questi scritti sono definiti come composti da un certo numero di jie 偈 (talvolta
definite song 頌) termini che in generale, in cinese, traducono precisamente il skr. gāthā.’
65 Sanskrit uddāna (> ud- DĀ-) corresponds closely to the English ‘content’; see Latin contineo.
66 Lenz 2003, 19.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 267
In early Buddhist manuscripts from North-west India, Khotan and Central Asia,
one can see – albeit not very often – a form, and an important one, which stands out
against the page: the verse form. In contrast to the ‘mute’ regular scriptio continua (see
above p, 243), the metrical line beats time upon the page for its reader.67
We have already noted the case of the Rhinoceros Horn sūtra (Khvs-G, Khargavi-
ṣaṇasūtra, Sanskrit Khaḍgaviṣāṇasūtra) MSS that may be dated to the turn of the era,
and whose text-layout presents various similitudes with the Graeco-Egyptian papyri.
Besides presenting the peculiarity of laying the first verse line in the upper margin with-
out any spacing between the quarters,68 the following
verses are laid out one to a line, with small spaces between the quarters, so that the reconstructed
scroll presents four parallel columns of text (Salomon 2000, 25, 116–117).
Although rare in Gandhāran MSS, the practice of placing the first verse or whatsoever
specific item in a prominent position, known in the Hellenistic world and in Gandhāra,
is equally attested in China. It appears in a different literary context on a fragmented
version of the Qieyun or Livre des rimes composed by Lu Fayan in 601 CE and recently
studied by Françoise Bottéro. The MSS of this text in the Dunhuang collection present
quite a number of interesting devices used to enhance the legibility of the text. The cop-
yist who wrote on an opistographic MS in the form of a ‘livre en tourbillon’ (Bottéro
2014, 61) used various artifices to put a new item in a prominent position. Among other
things, one may find the case where – very much like the verse in the Khvs-G and Greek
papyri (see above p. 244 and 262) –
la nouvelle rime peut également débuter sur une nouvelle colonne et mordre dans la marge supé-
rieure de manière à être encore plus visible, sans être nécessairement précédée de son numéro.69
To return to the verse form it also appears in the Dharmapada MS ‘Dutreuil de Rhins’
(i.e. the Dharmapada Gāndhārī MS of Khotan, Dhp-GK), possibly copied in Khotan, writ-
ten on birch bark in Kharoṣṭhī script and dated to the 1st/2nd century CE. The MS presents
the text following metrical units (Figs 9a, b), and the single pādas are separated by a
blank space (vacat). This very famous MS was named after the geographer and ‘en-
seigne de vaisseau’ (sub-lieutenant) Jules-Léon Dutreuil de Rhins, who directed the
||
67 See Matsuura 1996, 20–36, cited by Nattier 2008. See below, p. 273.
68 Salomon 2000, 33 further notes: ‘Some of the features of the format of the uddāna verses, especially
the absence of spaces between verse quarters and the use of a recut pen, resemble the special technique
used by the scribe for the first verse of a poem itself at the top of the scroll, no doubt also to set it off from
the rest of the poem’.
69 See Bottéro 2014, 63.
268 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
French mission in ‘Haute Asie’ and was assassinated in Tibet in 1894.70 The MS was
eventually taken to Paris from the region of Khotan by his colleague François Grenard
and presented to scholars by Émile Senart at the XIth Congrès international des orien-
talistes, an event held in Paris in 1897.71
Fig. 9a: Dharmapada MS Dutreuil de Rhins (Dhp-K), Bibliothèque nationale de France. From Brough
1962, pl. X, ll. 211–235, l. 211 (= MS C recto / Senart verso), verse 223, last verse of Chapter X (Jara/
Jarā). This verse is followed by the number of gāthās in the chapter (written under line 211). The num-
ber ‘25’ is followed by a series of signs that recall the diplomatic practice of ‘document closure’, grant-
ing security and avoiding alteration; see n. 12 above.
||
70 See Grenard 1904. The reason for the hostility manifested by the Tibetans towards the mission
was the fact that Dutreuil de Rhins, who wanted to ask for glowing embers, entered a tent despite
the Tibetans’ warning not to do so. He actually broke a taboo, since the tent hosted a dying person
and a lamb… (1904, 142). Grenard (1904, 165) records Dutreuil de Rhins’ last words: ‘Bandits!… Trav-
ail perdu… Beau temps pour partir’. Part of the MS Dutreuil de Rhins was given to the Library of the
Société Asiatique and is now kept at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris; the other part
was taken to Leningrad, now St Petersburg. See Brough 1962: xiii–xiv and 1–8.
71 Journal asiatique, Neuvieme serie, T. XII, 1898, 193–308.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 269
Fig. 9b: Dharmapada MS Dutreuil de Rhins (Dhp-K), Bibliothèque nationale de France. From
Brough 1962, pl. XII, ll. 255–275 (MS N recto), l. 269 = uddāna verse, whose beginning is sepa-
rated from the preceding verse (line 268) by a multi-petalled flower. The verse indicates the ti-
tles of chapters I–XIII and is followed by the number of gāthās in chapter XIII (Yamaka), ‘22’ in
all. The passage is once again ‘closed’ by a series of signs.
270 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Besides attesting the use of the verse-line form, the Dhp-GK (Figs 9a, b), the
Gāndhāri London Dharmapada MS (Dhp-GL) and the Khvs-G contain two addi-
tional devices that hint at the practice of memorisation and the use of recording
a text or a group of texts in a collection, and possibly also the counting of verses
in order to calculate the fees due to the scribe (see below). These are the uddāna
verses already mentioned above, which may also be considered a ‘mnemonic in-
dex’ in some respects (Lenz 2003, 19), and ‘numeral mnemonics’, or gāthā metric.
These numeral mnemonics are signalled by the grapheme ga, which Timothy
Lenz, following Brough, interprets as an abbreviation of gatha/gāthā, followed
by a number that
‘represents the number of verses included in a chapter’ (Brough 1962, 196–197).72 One pos-
sible interpretation of these numerical notations is that they acted as a kind of mnemonic
for a monk who wanted to memorise the varga. If so, the mnemonic would neither have
specified individual verses nor their order, but simply the total number of verses there were.
For example, the notation ga 10 4 4 1, which comes at the end of Dhp-GK text’s Theravarga,
would have reminded a monk to write or recite a set of nineteen verses.73
While this may well be the case, the uddāna and the ‘gāthā metric’ (an expression
coined on the basis of the Greek word stichometric) could equally have had more
prosaic functions.
It thus appears that the Gandhāran use of counting the verses lies in between
the practice attributed to the Alexandrian school of philology – and attested in
Greek and Graeco-Egyptian papyri (stichometric) – and the practice adopted in
Chinese and Tibetan translations of Buddhist MSS (see below, p. 272).
Turner’s 1968 introduction to papyrology, still a valuable source of infor-
mation, noted that the use of
stichometrical letters, usually placed in the left-hand margins of text to denote each hun-
dred lines of verse (the word ‘letter’ rather than ‘figure’ is to be preferred, since for these
signs the twenty-four letters of the Ionic alphabet are used, and it does not include vau, ς);
at the end of the work, the sum total of verses is given, usually in Attic notation. Such stich-
ometrical totals are of interest to us in indicating stages in the transmission of texts (e.g.
through Athenian copies) and either certifying that no passages are omitted, or showing
how the omissions occur.74
||
72 See Brough 1962, 13–14, 24, and examples of gāthā numbering at the end of the varga: chap-
ter I, after verse 50 (in the margin), after verse 90, etc., ibid. 125, 131.
73 Lenz 2003, 18.
74 Turner 1968, 94–95. See also Del Mastro 2011, 35–64, 38: ‘Le note sticometriche venivano
apposte negli intercolumni ogni cento stíxoi, sotto forma di lettere consecutive dell’alfabeto: uno
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 271
It is interesting to note the opinion of Kurt Ohly here, who is mentioned by
Turner (1968, 95 and n. 59), that the origin of the mode of counting verses may
well be due to more practical usage and refer to work done by the professional
copyist. Turner seems to agree and even adds that the presence of stichometrical
notations implies that the ‘copy was professionally made and paid for’. The pre-
sent author has expressed a similar opinion elsewhere with regard to the use of
counting bam po in Tibetan texts, where each bam po equals 300 ślokas. Further
noting that the necessity of calibrating a text was certainly imposed in the case of
placing an order of paper, a well-attested fact in Tibetan MSS from Dunhuang and
surrounding areas, and for ordering copies that were subsequently charged for
by professional scribes.75 In investigating the various uses of the term bam po in
the Tibetan early and classical tradition, Leonard van der Kuijp finds confirma-
tion of these practices. Particularly interesting is the testimony of Gu ge Paṇ chen
Grags pa rgyal mtshan (1415–1486), the author of the biography of lHa bla ma Ye
śes 'od (947–1019/24), where we may see that the work of copying and the perfor-
mance of reciting (klog pa) the Buddhavacana were the object of commercial
transactions.76
This way of counting verses is structurally related (though possibly semanti-
cally alien) to the mode measuring the volume of a text or of a series of texts into
a larger collection, which we may see in Tibetan MSS of Dunhuang and in the
contemporary and earliest Tibetan Library’s Indexes (dkar chag), where constant
text-units are counted in bam po and ślokas. Structurally related to the mnemonic
index (uddāna), i.e. the table of contents, are the lists that we find very early,
though extremely rarely, in Dunhuang and Tabo, or in the lHan dkar ma and
’Phaṅ thaṅ ma catalogues, issued at the royal residences. These were thematically
structured and sub-structured by title and measure of the volume calibration. But
the interesting finding of a list of a group of dhāraṇī/gzuṅs texts among the Tabo
MSS has also permitted researchers to reorder a particular collection of dhāraṇīs
kept in the monastery and supply the title of the missing texts.77
||
stíxos aveva la lunghezza standard di un verso omerico di 16 sillabe e, quindi, di 34–38 lettere.
Alla fine del rotolo, sotto il titolo, troviamo in molti casi il calcolo totale degli stíxoi, preceduto
dal termine ẚrithmós (per esteso o abbreviato), espresso secondo la numerazione attica. Ma nei
papiri ercolanesi (più frequentemente di quanto non avvenga nei rotoli greco-egizi) troviamo
spesso anche i numeri delle selídes, delle colonne e, in qualche caso, dei kollémata, dei fogli che
erano serviti a confezionare il rotolo’.
75 For the polysemy of the term bam po and its various uses in early Tibetan Buddhist manu-
script and textual practice, see Scherrer-Schaub 1992, particularly 219–220.
76 See van der Kuijp 2010, 122–132.
77 See Harrison 1996.
272 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
As said before, the practice of counting verses is equally attested in Chinese
MSS from Dunhuang. The 31 fragments of MSS of the Shijing, a collection of po-
ems dating back to the 10th to 6th century BCE, have been studied by Olivier Ven-
ture.78 The most complete examples of these MSS (S. 3951 + P. 2529, that according
to Xu Jiangping could be dated to the end of the Tang)79 are extremely valuable
for studying the practice of textual criticism in Dunhuang. Our attention will fo-
cus upon the first part of the MS where the text of the Shijing is given without any
commentary, in scriptio continua, and where Venture notes the presence of the
practice of counting the verses and verse-lines:
À la fin de chaque poème figure son titre ainsi que le nombre de strophes et de vers qu’il
comprend. Cette mention se détache du reste du texte grâce à la présence d’espaces blancs
(avant et après) qui constituent les seules coupures visibles dans une mise en texte relative-
ment compacte.
He further explains the meaning of this practice in the textual tradition of the
Shijing, where it was central to the understanding of how the text had been inter-
preted by the editor:
La notation du nombre de strophes et de vers a une importance particulière dans la tradition
du Shijing. En effet, comme le texte canonique est parfois obscur, il peut se prêter à diffé-
rentes lectures et, en l’absence de ponctuation ou de strophes graphiquement délimitées,
ces indications permettent au lecteur de saisir la manière dont l’éditeur découpait le poème
et donc comment il le comprenait (Venture 2014, 23–24).
Very close to our concern is the case of the Dunhuang MS P. 2381 (www.archive-
setmanuscrits.bnf.fr)80, which contains several sections of the Faju jing (T. 210),
in the opinion of Costantino Moretti one of the most popular Buddhist texts in
China, and the oldest translation of the Dharmapada. In his catalogue, Sengyou
(445–518) cites ‘l’upāsaka indo-scythe Zhi Qian (?–252/257)’ among the scholars
||
78 Venture 2014.
79 I sincerely thank Olivier Venture for the precious note about the dating of this MS that he
kindly addressed to me: Olivier Venture very cautiously notes that ‘La datation du texte repose
principalement sur la présence et l’absence de certains caractères tabous. Mais la situation sem-
ble assez complexe, c’est pourquoi différentes datations ont pu être proposées entre le début et
la fin des Tang. Xu Jianping propose, avec d’autres auteurs, une datation de la fin des Tang ou
phase finale des Tang. Ses arguments me paraissent a priori convaincants. Voir : Xu Jianping 許
建平, Dunhuang jingji xulu 敦煌經籍敘錄, Pékin, Zhonghua shuju 中華書局, 2006, p. 142’.
80 Available online http://idp.bl.uk/database/oo_scroll_h.a4d?uid=18046729110;bst=1;
recnum=59475;index=1;img=1.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 273
who translated the text into Chinese.81 Born in Northern China, Zhi Qian studied
in Luoyang and his teacher’s teacher was Lokakṣema. Sengyou praises him for
his excellence in the study of languages and his mastery of ‘foreign writings’.82
Jan Nattier (2008, 116) tells us that ‘a substantial number of his works are not
original translations but revisions – produced with or without an actual Indic-
language text – of the works of others’. And while ‘[i]t was long thought that all
verses found in Buddhist translations were unrhymed’ and despite the fact that
‘many examples of unrhymed verse can indeed be found in [the Zhi Qian] corpus,
in other cases it is clear that Zhi Qian was not only employing the use of meter,
but of pattern of rhyme as well’ (ibid. 117–118). The preface of his translation of
the Faju jing (Nattier 2008, 125), written by Zhi Qian himself, shows that his tem-
per was that of an expert in textual criticism rather than a mere translator. Be that
as it may, what is of interest here is the fact that his translation-cum-revision of
the Dharmapada (whose textual history is rather complex; its treatment far ex-
ceeds the scope of this paper) is very close in time to the MS Dutreuil de Rhins
(see above p. 267). I do not claim that this was the juncture between the
Gandhāran tradition and Chinese scholars, but rather that textual criticism is at-
tested in early Buddhist MSS, and possibly also that the scribe’s practice might
have been ‘carried to China’ via various itineraries by representatives of the ‘lin-
eage’ of the Indo-Scythian scholars as well as Kumārajīva (344–413).83
To return to the Faju jing, Costantino Moretti84 notes that among the Dunhuang
MSS those that are dated or datable in all probability prior to the 5th century CE are
particularly valuable for
l’étude du livre manuscrit chinois sur papier à cette période. Certains de ces manuscrits
fournissent notamment des informations importantes sur les plus anciennes méthodes at-
testées d’organisation de l’espace et de découpage des textes dans les ouvrages
bouddhiques comportant des passages versifiées (gāthā) (Moretti 2014b, 207).
While the MS P. 2381 may possibly be dated to the 4th century CE (see Moretti
2014b, 208, n. 8), it may have continued the tradition of displaying lectional and
||
81 Moretti 2014b, 208. On the multiple recensions of this text, see Brough 1962, 30–39, and 35–
36 on the Faju jing.
82 The book by Jan Nattier (2008) is a mine of information. On Zhi Qian, see Nattier 2008, 116-148.
83 We have been dealing with this question in Scherrer-Schaub 2016; and ‘The Quintessence
of the Mādhyamika Teaching Blossoms Again. Some consideration in view of the 5th-7th c. A. D.
(I). Reading the Alchons’s document (Schøyen MSS 2241) in religious and political context’
(forthcoming).
84 Moretti 2014b.
274 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
critical signs inherited from the Indo-Scythian tradition alluded to before. In-
deed, the MS displays the practice of counting the gāthā or ‘gāthā-metric’, i.e. jie-
/song-metric, as at the beginning of the pin (ibid. 209) in the first column (from
right to left), where the number of verse is indicated under the title, it even adds
the sophisticated procedure of dividing the space in ‘registers’ that facilitates the
counting.
Le décompte du nombre de gāthā dont se compose chaque pin [i.e. section] semble, en ré-
alité, revêtir une certaine importance. En effet, sous le titre de chaque pin, qui est mis en
évidence par un point noir tracé au-dessus de la réglure supérieure de la feuille, figure
toujours une indication du nombre de stances contenues dans le pin lui-même. (Moretti
2014b, 209).
Moretti observes this practice in other cases, such as a MS of the translation of the
Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra by Kumārajīva found in Kučā and in another
Dunhuang MS (P. 4506) written on silk and dated to 471 CE, or a copy of the Su-
varṇabhāsottamasūtra whose translation is attributed to Dharmakṣema (385–
433/436 CE), who was born in India and, like Kumārajīva, spent some time in
Kāśmīr and then in Kučā.85
The verse-form further arranged in columns that appears in Greek and
Graeco-Egyptian papyri, in early Indic and in Chinese and Tibetan translations of
Buddhist MSS is equally present in Khotan (Fig. 10) before the 5th century CE, al-
beit with some variants, e.g. in fragmentary MSS of the Book of Zambasta studied
by Mauro Maggi.
Manuscript Z1 is peculiar in that each manuscript line contains a verse-line and the text is
further arranged in columns so that each verse-line is divided into four equal sections
mostly corresponding to metrical pādas. (…) Such an arrangement also characterizes a
number of variant fragments of Z, so far as it is possible to judge from their fragmentary
condition, but is not found in the manuscripts of any Khotanese work other than Z. On the
other hand, a similar arrangement is found in early manuscripts of religious poetry in
Gandhārī in Kharoṣṭhī script and in Sanskrit in Brāhmī script from Central Asia. Among the
Sanskrit Manuscripts, there is an almost complete paper folio of the fourth/fifth century
from Charkhlik, which contains a hymn to the Buddha in Sanskrit. On this folio each man-
uscript line contains exactly one śloka and the beginning of the second hemistich of each
śloka is roughly aligned vertically so as to obtain a division of the text into two columns.86
||
85 Moretti 2014b, 211.
86 See Maggi 2004, 184–190, 187.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 275
Fig. 10: MS Z of the Zambasta (SI P 6) kept at the Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg.
From On the Trail of Texts along the Silk Road. Russian Expeditions [and] Discoveries of Manu-
scripts in Central Asia. Kyoto National Museum, 2009: 38. See Maggi 2004, 184, 187: verse-
lines and columns.
The MS from Charkhlik referred to here was published independently in 1988 by
Richard Salomon and Collett Cox, and by Jens-Uwe Hartmann. Salomon and Cox
note the peculiar disposition of verses:
There are five lines of writing on each side, each line corresponding to a single verse in
anuṣṭubh (śloka) meter, with a space in the middle between hemistichs. The verses, 10 in
all, are not numbered.87
Hartmann, while mentioning the graphic artifices of the MS, notes the affinities
presented by the stotra with Mātṛceṭa’s Prasādapratibhodbhava – ‘[the Canticle]
originating from the inspired serene disposition [towards the Buddha, the
Dharma and the Saṅgha]’ – and suggests that despite the differences,
[d]as Stotra muss entweder dem Prasādapratibhodbhava als Vorbild gedient haben oder
unter dem unmittelbaren Eindruck dieses Werkes verfasst worden sein: in jedem Fall be-
steht eine enge literarische Beziehung, die es als gerechtfertigt erscheinen lässt, das vorlie-
gende Blatt mitzubearbeiten, obwohl es strenggenommen nicht als Mātṛceṭa-Fragment be-
zeichnet werden kann.88
||
87 Salomon and Cox 1988, 141–153, 141.
88 Hartmann 1988, 1–40, 88–89, 89 and n. 149.
276 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
4 On poetics and performance
Form is never more than an extension of content
Charles Olson, Projective Verse (1959)89
Rhythm is a form cut into TIME, as a design is determined SPACE
In making a line of verse (and thence building the lines into passages) you have certain
primal elements:
That is to say, you have the various ‘articulated sounds’ of the language, of its alphabet,
that is, and the various groups of letters in syllables.
These syllables have differing weights and durations
A. original weights and durations
B. weights and durations that seem naturally imposed on them by the other syllable groups
around them.
Those are the medium wherewith the poet cuts his design in TIME.
Ezra Pound, Treatise on Metre (1973)90
While particular ways of displaying the page layout and the use of lectional signs and
other artifices may facilitate reading, understanding, and recollection, they equally
question the art of the poetic from the perspective of its performance. The fact that an
interplay exists between orality and the written word is ‘obvious and trite’, and the
written word does not necessarily supersede the first – far from that, in fact.
That Buddhist texts were read in cenacles, that they were recited or chanted,
is an equally well-attested fact. Experts in recitation appear in early Buddhist in-
scriptions, for example in Bharhut (dharmakathika, dharmabhāṇaka) or Śrī
Laṅka (eka-uttirika, śayutaka, majhima),91 and continue to be active even when
the Buddhavacana is put down in written form.92 For its part, the practice of ad-
dressing eulogies to the Buddha is recorded in the oldest sources such as the last
sutta of the Sutta Nipāta (Piṅgiya Sutta, vv. 1120–1149), where the Brahmin
Piṅgiya praises the Buddha, accompanying his own recitation with tunes
(v. 1132), and even spends his nights praising the Buddha (v. 1142). A Brahmin,
||
89 See Olson 1959, 4. This formula expressed by Robert Creeley in a letter to Charles Olson on 5
June 1950 was incorporated into his manifesto by him (see Butterick, Olson and Creeley 1980, 79
and n. 83).
90 Allen and Tallman 1973, 62.
91 See Endo 2014, 103–134, 124, n. 67, with reference to Paranavitana 1990: no. 407, 666, 708,
852 and 1061.
92 See Scherrer-Schaub 2009a, 166–167.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 277
this time Paiṅgika by name, reappears in several versions of the Mahāparinir-
vāṇasūtra addressing verses of praise to the Buddha, and being rewarded by the
Vṛji with munificent gifts for this pious act, the Brahmin in turn hastens to offer
gifts to the Buddha.93
In 1915, Sylvain Lévi published a pioneering article in Journal asiatique bear-
ing the title ‘Sur la récitation primitive des textes bouddhiques’. Lévi followed the
various versions of the episode of the Brahmin Śroṇa Koṭikarṇa/Kuṭikaṇṇa,94
which appears in Vinayas and in the Divyāvadāna, among other places. Śroṇa
Koṭikarṇa is famous because he spends a night with the Buddha and, at dawn, is
asked by him to recite the Dharma. Koṭikarṇa consents to the Bhagavat’s request
and entunes the recitation, that is, he recites it with a rhythmical succession of
tune95 – something that Śroṇa Koṭikarṇa certainly knew how to do since, as tra-
dition has it, before entering religious life, he played the lute, a motif that is ech-
oed in the hagiography of Aśvaghoṣa, who accompanied the recitation with
chants and music.96
After the recitation, Bhagavat congratulates Śroṇa Koṭikarṇa for his excellent
performance. The sources vary in their description of the vocal qualities of the
reciter. The MSarvVin and the Sarv-Vin (Bechert 1990, 107) add an interesting de-
tail in referring to the sober/restrained (guptika)97 mode of intoning typical of the
||
93 Bareau 1995, 357. It is worth noting here that in the Sutta Nipāta, Piṅgiya, after reciting the
gāthās, adds that his mind never departs from Gotama, and he spends days and nights with the
Buddha in his mind.
94 See Lévi 1915, 402. See the entry on ‘bombai’, Hōbōgirin I, 93-II, 113. Lévi (1915, 401–417)
analyses the various versions of the episode recorded in the Vinaya of the major ancient schools
(Nikāya) and centres his inquiry on a terminological cluster related to the practice of prosody (in
its wider sense). Some of these terms have been revisited in various ways recently, particularly
the expression chandaso āropema; see David Ruegg 2000, 283–306. Gregory Schopen gives a
comprehensive overview of the various occasions and liturgical events where the recitation took
place; see Schopen 2004, 260–284.
95 Lit. ‘he recites with the intonation/tune’ (Sanskrit svara, Pāli sara), MSarvVin svareṇa
svādhyāyaṃ karoti ‘accomplishes the recitation [of the sacred text] with tunes’.
96 See the episode of Aśvaghoṣa, Lévi 1915, 433 and Hōbōgirin I, 94a: Aśvaghoṣa, ‘[s]ponta-
nément il battit la cloche et le tambour; il accorda le luth et la guitare ; le son modérait la douleur,
redressait la courbe ; ses accords faisaient aussitôt régner l'harmonie. Il proclamait les dharma,
[et leur caractères, à savoir] douleur (duḥkha), vide (śūnya), absence de soi (anātman)’.
97 See Schopen 2004, 260–284, 265 and n. 26, quoting a passage from the Kṣudrakavastu where
the ‘Buddha himself says that “the Proclamation of the Qualities of the Teacher […] must be re-
cited with measured intonation”, 'di ltar ston pa'i yon tan yang dag par bsgrag pa …skad kyi
gtang rag gis gdon par bya'o, which Guṇaprabha paraphrases as kuryāt śāstṛguṇasaṃkīrt-
tane…svaraguptim’.
278 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
region of (A)parāntika (Divyā 20.23 parāntikayā guptikayā udānāt) and Avanti
(Sarv-Vin).98
To return to the early Buddhist MSS and the forms and graphic artifices that
the Buddhists of the north-western regions introduced in their MSS, notwith-
standing the alleged fact that they could have embraced the text-critical tech-
niques current at that time in North-west India, the adoption of new writing prac-
tices must have been extremely easy for them, since it was but a matter of
graphically transposing their own long tradition of recitation. And as happens
with a change in technique, the beginning of the use of a script did simply take
up the model of orality, at least for a while.99 The Vinayas of the various schools
bear evidence of the much-debated question of the ‘proper’ way of reciting or in-
toning the Buddhavacana; these passages are actually a mine of information on
Buddhist scholarly practice. An interesting observation is made by the MSarvVin
(see Lévi 1915, 431–432) when discussing the enthusiastic impulse shown by cer-
tain monks, who intoned the Buddhavacana while letting their emotions flow
freely, or in doing several things at the same time. These monks recited without
paying attention to accents or tunes, to pronunciation or rhythm, and they merely
enounced one word/verse (pada) after the other. The Buddha sent them back to
study the tune.100
Further evidence of the consequences of improper recitation comes from the
colophon of the Tibetan translation of the Vinayottaragrantha, preserved in the
commentary of Kalyāṇamitra, which bears testimony to two important facts.101 The
first is that the mūla text was put down in writing in order to be commented (see
above p. 265). The second states that the corruption that crept into the various ver-
sions of the Vinayottaragrantha was due to the fact that the complete text was not
available in Mathurā. The monks of Mathurā knew that a reciter of the Vinayottara
lived in Kāśmīr, so they went there and learnt about the recitation. Then, consider-
ing that the word and meaning would have to be explained orally, they put the mūla
text down in writing. The text then continues, and to make a long and interesting
story short, our colophon concludes by saying that other monks, who were residing
||
98 See Lévi 1915, 407: ‘Quand il eut fini, le Bouddha le loua en disant : Très bien, ô moine; vous
déclamez bien la Loi ; vous savez déclamer avec la prononciation du pays d'Avanti ; votre élocution
est parfaitement claire et nette; elle est parfaitement facile à comprendre.’ And ibid., 427–428.
99 See Scherrer-Schaub 2012, 2014 and 2016.
100 The concern about correct intonation and rhythm was – and still is – central to Buddhism;
regarding Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, see the article on ‘bombai’, Hōbōgirin I, 93- II, 113,
which has already been mentioned.
101 See Scherrer-Schaub 2009a, 166–167 and notes.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 279
in other countries, started to intone the text differently. Subsequently, the Vina-
yottara, which had previously been collected correctly, was debased by usage. As
a result, the text which had been recited/intoned differently ended up getting a dif-
ferent meaning.102 This tells us something that the poets always knew,103 but that
some of the enthusiastic paladins of cultural materiality may occasionally ignore.
Coming back to our theme again, we may note that the way of setting the lay-
out, the verse-form and the counting of metrical units (gāthā-metric, bam po-metric
and jie-/song-metric) seem to preserve at least part of the prosody in early Buddhist
manuscripts, and the graphic disposition and marks, including blank space indi-
cating the unvoiced tune, which, to a modern reader, appear to beat rhythm (if not
time) upon the extant manuscript’s page.104
||
102 Close to our own concern, it is worth pointing out that, in his article (1989, 369–392, 380–
382), K. R. Norman refers to Buddhaghosa, who ‘lists ten sound changes which he says must be
avoided by anyone performing a kammavācā’ in his commentary on the Vinaya Piṭaka. While
noting the difficulty of the passage, Norman remarks: ‘The examples which Buddhaghosa gives
make it clear that he is warning against types of pronunciation which actually produce incorrect
forms, e.g. bante saṅgo instead of bhante saṅgho. It is, therefore, very appropriate that an expert
in the Vinaya, when performing a kammavācā, should not commit any such fault’. In what fol-
lows (1989, 380–382), the problem developed by Norman taking his stand upon Buddhaghosa
very much illuminates the context of the colophon of the Vinayottaragrantha. Equally interest-
ing, Matsuura (1996, 22) distinguishes between ‘linguistic rhythm’ and ‘musical rhythm’ in a
passage of his essay on ‘Rhythm in Chinese Poetry’ that is worth quoting at length: ‘Among the
traps into which it is easy to fall when discussing poetic rhythm is that of confusing ‘linguistic
rhythm’ and ‘musical rhythm’. In view of the general tendency of ancient poetry throughout the
world to have been sung as songs, the question of poetic rhythm is frequently considered in re-
lation to musical rhythm. But as it is evident from the fact that (i) the same words are often sung
to different tunes and (ii) the continuity or discontinuity of the rhythm of verses of a song often
changes under the influence of musical rhythm, song (or verse) rhythm and musical rhythm,
although interrelated, clearly belong to different levels of discourse. In such cases, the rhythm
of the all-important words of the song (or verse) themselves is determined by linguistic rhythm
(viz. the rhythm of reading either silently or aloud) and not by musical rhythm (viz. the rhythm
of singing and chanting). It is linguistic rhythm that in terms of time (that is, historically) and space
(that is, regionally) represents the most stable element and one that does not change or change
only with difficulty [This passage is put in italics by the present author, for easily comparison with
the tenor of the just mentioned colophon of the Vinayottaragrantha]. Therefore, any examination
of poetic rhythm must be undertaken with reference to, above all, linguistic rhythm, while musical
rhythm should be discussed only to a limited degree as a secondary issue’.
103 See Bhāmaka (7th cent. CE): śabdārthā sahitau kāvyaṃ, Kavyālaṃkāra I.16a, P. V. Naganatha
Shastry. Tanjore, 1927. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1970, 6.
104 See Vinson 1915, 464: ‘Les poètes indiens ne s’astreignent pas à l’observation raisonnées des
règles de la prosodie; ils s’y conforment d’instinct. Chaque espèce de vers a son ton, son rythme,
280 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Abbreviations
Arthaśāstra R. P. Kangle The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra. Part I: A Critical Edition with a Glos-
sary. Bombay, 1960. Part II: An English Translation with Critical and Ex-
planatory Notes. Bombay, 1963.
BM I Jens Braarvig (gen. ed.), Buddhist Manuscripts, Volume I. Oslo, Hermes,
2000. Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection I.
BM II Jens Braarvig (gen. ed.), Buddhist Manuscripts, Volume II. Oslo, Hermes,
2002. Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection III.
BM III Jens Braarvig (gen. ed.) Buddhist Manuscripts, Volume III. Oslo, Hermes,
2006. Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection III.
Dhp-GK John Brough, The Gāndhārī Dharmapada Edited with an Introduction and
Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962.
Dhp-GL Timothy Lenz, A New Version of the Gāndhārī Dharmapada and a Collec-
tion of Previous-Birth Stories. British Library Fragments 16 + 25. With con-
tributions by Andrew Glass and Bhikshu Dharmamitra. (Gandhāran Bud-
dhist Texts 3), Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2003.
Divyā The Divyāvadāna, a Collection of Early Buddhist Legends. First edited from
the Nepalese Sanskrit MSS in Cambridge and Paris by E. B. Cowell and
R. A. Neil. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1886. Delhi, Indologi-
cal Book House, 1987.
Hultzsch CII I E. Hultzsch, Inscription of Aśoka, New Edition. Corpus Inscriptionum In-
dicarum vol. I. Oxford, Clarendon Press, for the Government of India,
1925, 1969 (reprint).
Khvs-G Richard Salomon, A Gāndhārī Version of the Rhinoceros Sūtra. British Li-
brary Fragment 5B. Seattle and London, University of Washington Press,
2000.
MSarvVin Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya
Quaestio 11/2011 Luca del Corso and Paolo Pecere (eds), Il libro filosofico. Dall’ antichità al
XXI secole /Philosophy and the Books. From Antiquity to the XXI Century.
Annuario di storia della metafisica /Annuaire d'histoire de la métaphy-
sique/Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Metaphysik/ Yearbook of the History of
Metaphysics. Quaestio 11/2011.
Salomon IE Richard Salomon, Indian Epigraphy. A Guide to the Study of Inscriptions in
Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the Other Indo-Aryan Languages. New York and Ox-
ford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Sarv-Vin Sarvāstivāda Vinaya
Sircar IEG D. C. Sircar, Indian Epigraphical Glossary. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass,
1966.
Sircar IE D. C. Sircar, Indian Epigraphy. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1996.1965
||
ou, si l’on veut, son air, sa mélodie propre, plus ou moins elastique, qui est un guide suffisant et un
régulateur spontané. N’a-t-on pas ainsi fait dans tous les pays et dans tous les temps?’
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 281
References
Allen, Donald M., and Warren Tallman (eds) (1973), The Poetics of the New American Poetry,
New York: Grove Press.
Alsdorf, Ludwig (1962), Aśoka Separatedikte von Dhauli und Jaugaḍa, Akademie der Wissen-
schaften und der Literatur (Abhandl. der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaftlichen Klasse,
Jahrgang 1962, Nr. 1), Wiesbaden: Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Lite-
ratur in Mainz, 5–38.
Bareau, André (1995), Recherches sur la biographie du Buddha dans les Sūtrapiṭaka et les
Vinayapiṭaka anciens III. Articles complémentaires, Paris, PEFEO.
Brancaccio, Pia (2007), ‘Close Encounters: Multicultural Systems in Ancient India’, in Doris
Meth Srinivasan (ed.), On the Cusp of an Era. Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World, Leiden–Boston,
Brill, 385–397.
Braarvig, Jens, and Fredrik Liland (eds) (2010), Traces of Gandhāran Buddhism. An Exhibition of
Ancient Buddhist Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection, Oslo and Bangkok: Hermes Publ.
in collaboration with Amarin Printing and Publ.
Baums, Stefan (2014), ‘Gandhāran Scrolls: Rediscovering an Ancient Manuscript Type’, in Jörg
B. Quenzer, Dimitry Bondarev and Jan-Ulrich Sobisch (eds), Manuscript Cultures: Mapping
the Field (Studies in Manuscipt Cultures 1), Berlin: De Gruyter, 183–225.
Bernard, Claude (1978), ‘Campagne de fouilles 1976–1977 à Aï Khanoum (Afghanistan)’, in
Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 122e année,
no. 2: 421–463.
Bloch, Jules (1950), Les inscriptions d’Aśoka, Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
Bottéro, Françoise (2014), ‘Les livres de rimes’, in Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti
(eds), La fabrique du lisible. La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et
médiévale, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Etudes chinoises, 61–66.
Breccia, Evaristo (1930), Terrecotte figurate greche e greco-egizie del museo di Alessandria.
Monuments de l’Egypte Gréco-romaine, Tome II, Facs. I. Bergamo: Officine dell’Istituto Ita-
liano di Arti grafiche.
Breton-Gravereau, S., and D. Thibault (1998), L’aventure des écritures. Matières et formes,
Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Brough, John (1962), The Gandhārī Dharmapada. Edited with an Introduction and Commentary,
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Butterick, George F. (ed.) (1980), Charles Olson & Robert Creeley: The Complete Correspond-
ence, Volume I, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press.
Callieri, Pierfrancesco (2007), ‘Barikot. An Indo-Greek Urban Center in Gandhāra’, in Doris
Meth Srinivasan (ed.), On the Cusp of an Era. Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World, Leiden–Boston:
Brill, 133–164.
Cambon, Pierre (2007), ‘Tillia Tepe’, in Afghanistan: les trésors retrouvés. Collections du
musée national de Kaboul. Exposition organisée au Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-
Guimet, Paris, 6 décembre 2006 – 30 avril 2007, 164–213.
Caroli, M. (2007), Il titolo iniziale nel rotolo librario greco-egizio, Bari: Levante.
Cavallo, Guglielmo, Pierre Hadot, and Claude Rapin (1987), ‘Les textes littéraires grecs de la
Trésorerie d’Aï Khanoum’, in Bulletin de correspondance hellénique, Volume 111, Numéro
1: 225–266.
282 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Endo, Toshiichi (2014), ‘The Sumaṅgalavilāsinī and the Dīgha-bhāṇakas’, in Dhammadinnā
(ed.), Research on the Dīrgha-āgama, Taipei: Dharma Drum Publications, 103–134.
del Corso, Lucio (2011), ‘Il libro e il logos. Riflessioni sulla trasmissione del pensiero filosofico
da Platone a Galeno’, in Luca del Corso and Paolo Pecere (eds), Il libro filosofico. Dall’anti-
chità al XXI secolo/Philosophy and the Books. From Antiquity to the XXI Century. Annuario
di storia della metafisica/Annuaire d’histoire de la métaphysique/Jahrbuch für Ges-
chichte der Metaphysik/Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics. Quaestio, 11: 3–34.
Del Mastro, Gianluca (2011), ‘Filosofi, scribi e glutinatores; i rotoli della Villa dei Papiri di Er-
colano’, in Quaestio, 11: 35–64.
Faccenna, Domenico (2007), ‘The Artistic Center of Butkara I and Saidu Sharif I in the Pre-
Kuṣāṇa Period’, in Doris Meth Srinivasan (ed.), On the Cusp of an Era. Art in the Pre-
Kuṣāṇa World, Leiden–Boston: Brill, 165–199.
Filigenzi, Anna (2006), ‘From Mind to Eye. Two-dimensional illusions and pictorial suggestions
at Saidu Sharif I’, in Pierfrancesco Callieri (ed.), Architetti, capomastri, artigiani. L’or-
ganizzazione dei cantieri e della produzione artistica nell’Asia ellenistica. Studi offerti a
Domenico Faccenna nel suo ottantesimo compleanno. Roma: IsIAO / Serie orientale Roma
C, 17–40.
Grenard, François (1904), Le Tibet. Les pays et les habitants, Paris: Librairie Armand Colin.
Gumbert, Johan Peter (1989), ‘La page intelligible: quelques remarques’, in Olga Weijers (ed.),
Vocabulaire du livre et de l’écriture au moyen âge, Turnhout: Brepols, 111–119.
Guyotjeannin, O. et al. (1993), Diplomatique médiévale, Turnhout: Brepols.
Harrison, Paul (1996), ‘Preliminary Report on a gZungs 'dus Manuscript from Tabo’, in Michael
Hahn, Jens-Uwe Hartmann and Roland Steiner (eds), Suhṛllekhāḥ: Festgabe für Helmut
Eimer (Indica et Tibetica 28), Swisttal-Odendorf: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 49–68.
Hartmann, Jens-Uwe (1988), ‘Neue Aśvaghoṣa- und Mātṛceṭa-Fragmente aus Ostturkistan‘, in
Nachrichten der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen. I. Philogisch-Historische
Klasse 1988/2 (Sitzung vom 22. Januar 1988): 1–40, 88–89.
von Hinüber, Oskar (1990), Der Beginn der Schrift und frühe Schriftlichkeit in Indien, Mainz: Aka-
demie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur /Abhandl. der Geistes- und sozialwissenschaf-
ten Klasse, Jahrgang 1989, Nr. 11, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag.
Hureau, Sylvie (2014a), ‘Le Sūtra du Diamant’, in Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti (eds),
La fabrique du lisible. La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale,
Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, 221–229.
Hureau, Sylvie (2014b), ‘Les commentaires des sūtra bouddhiques’, in Jean-Pierre Drège and Cos-
tantino Moretti (eds), La fabrique du lisible. La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine an-
cienne et médiévale, Paris: Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, 239–
246.
Isnardi-Parente, Margherita (1992), ‘Il papiro filosofico di Aï Khanoum’, in Studi su codici e papiri
filosofici. Platone, Aristotele, Ierocle. Florence: Leo Olschki Editore, 169–188.
Karttunen, Klaus (1997), India and the Hellenistic World, Helsinki (Studia Orientalia, edited by the
Finnish Oriental Society, 83).
van der Kuijp, Leonard (2010), ‘Some Remarks on the Meaning and Use of the Tibetan Word bam
po’, Bod rig pa'i dus deb’, in Journal of Tibetology 5, 114–132.
Lenz, Timothy (2003), A New Version of the Gāndhārī Dharmapada and a Collection of Previous-
Birth Stories. British Library Fragments 16 + 25. With contributions by Andrew Glass and
Bhikshu Dharmamitra (Gandhāran Buddhist Texts), Seattle, University of Washington Press.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 283
Lévi, Sylvain (1915), ‘Sur la récitation primitive des textes bouddhiques’, in Journal asiatique 1995,
no. 3, 401–447.
Maggi, Mauro (2004), ‘The manuscript T III S 16: Its Importance for the History of Khotanese Liter-
ature’, in Desmond Durkin-Meisterernst et al. (eds), Turfan Revised: The First Century of Re-
search into the Arts and Cultures of the Silk Road, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 184–190.
Matsuda, Kazunobo (2000), Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa. BM I, 65–76.
Matsuura, Tomohisa (1996), ‘Rhythm in Chinese Classical Poetry. With a Focus on “Beat Rhythm”
and “Silent Syllables” (Rhythms Vacuums)’, in Acta Asiatica (Bulletin of the Institute of East-
ern Culture), vol. 70 (Tokyo, The Tōhō Gakkai), 20–36.
Moretti, Costantino (2014a), ‘Notes et catégories doctrinales du Traité des étapes de la pratique
du Yoga’, in Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti (eds), La fabrique du lisible. La mise en
texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, Paris: Collège de France/Institut des
Hautes Études chinoises, 255–263.
Moretti, Costantino (2014b), ‘Les registres surimposés de deux copies anciennes du Dhar-
mapada’, in Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti (eds), La fabrique du lisible. La mise
en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale, Paris, Collège de France, Institut
des Hautes Études chinoises, 207–213.
Naganatha Shastry, P. V. (1970), Kavyālaṃkāra. Tanjore, 1927. Delhi, Motilal Banarsidass, 1970.
Nattier, Jan (2008), A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Texts from the Eastern
Han and Three Kingdoms Periods, Tokyo: IRIAB/Soka Daigaku.
Neelis, Jason (2007), ‘Passages to India: Śaka and Kuṣāṇa Migration in Historical Context’, in Do-
ris Meth Srinivasan (ed.), On the Cusp of an Era. Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World, Leiden/Boston:
Brill, 55–94.
Neelis, Jason (2011), Early Buddhist Transmission and Trade Networks. Mobility and Exchange
within and beyond the Northwestern Borderlands of South Asia, Leiden/Boston, Brill.
Norman, K. R. (1989), ‘Dialect forms in pāli’, in Colette Caillat (ed.), Dialects dans les littérature
Indo-Aryennes, Pris: Collège de France, ICI, 369–392.
Olivelle, Patrick (2013), King, Governance, and Law in Ancient India. Kauṭilya’s Arthaśāstra. A New
Annotated Translation, New York: Oxford University Press.
Olson, Charles (1959), Projective Verse, New York: Totem Press.
Paranavitana, S. (1990), Inscription of Ceylon, Containing Cave Inscriptions from 3rd Century B.C.
to 1st Century A.C. and Other Inscriptions in the Early Brāhmī Script, Colombo: Department of
Archaeology.
Pfeiffer, Rudolf (1968), A History of Classical Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the
Hellenistic Age, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Privitera, Ivanoe (2011), ‘Aristotle and the Papyri: the Direct Tradition’, in Luca del Corso and Paolo
Pecere (eds), Il libro filosofico. Dall’antichità al XXI secolo/Philosophy and the Books. From
Antiquity to the XXI Century. Annuario di storia della metafisica/Annuaire d’histoire de la
métaphysique/Jahrbuch für Geschichte der Metaphysik/Yearbook of the History of Meta-
physics. Quaestio, 1: 115–140.
Rapin, Claude (1995), ‘Hindouisme in the Indo-Greek Area. Notes on some Indian finds from Bactria
and on two temples in Taxila’, in Antonio Invernizzi (ed.), In the Land of the Gryphons. Papers on
Central Asian Archaeology in Antiquity, Florence: Casa Editrice Le Lettere, 275–291.
Salomon, Richard (1999), Ancient Buddhist Scrolls from Gandhāra. The British Library Kharoṣṭhī
Fragments, Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Salomon, Richard (2000), A Gāndhārī Version of the Rhinoceros Sūtra. British Library Fragment
5B, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
284 | Cristina Scherrer-Schaub
Salomon, Richard (2007), ‘Dynastic and Institutional Connection in the Pre- and Early Kuṣāṇa Pe-
riod: New Manuscript and Epigraphic Evidence’, in Doris Meth Srinivasan (ed.), On the Cusp
of an Era. Art in the Pre-Kuṣāṇa World, Leiden–Boston: Brill, 267–286.
Salomon, Richard (2008) [with contributions by Andrew Glass], Two Gāndhārī Manuscripts of the
Songs of the Lake Anavatapta (Anavatapta-gāthā). British Library Kharoṣṭhī Fragments I and
Senior Scroll 14, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press.
Salomon, Richard, and Collett Cox (1998), ‘Two New Fragments of Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts
from Central Asia’, in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies,1.1: 141–
153.
Sander, Lore (2000), ‘The Mahāyāna Sūtra Manuscript’, in BM I: 63–64.
Sander, Lore (2002), ‘An Unusual ye dharmā Formula’, in BM II: 337–349.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (1992), ‘Śa cu : Qu’y-a-t-il au programme de la classe de philologie
bouddhique?’, in Ihara Shōren and Yamaguchi Zuihō (eds), Tibetan Studies. Proceedings of
the IATS, Narita 1989. Naritasan Shinshoji, volume I, 209–220.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (1999), ‘Towards a Methodology for the Study of Old Tibetan Manu-
scripts: Dunhuang and Tabo’, in Cristina Scherrer-Schaub and Ernst Steinkellner (eds), Tabo
Studies II: Manuscripts, Texts, Inscriptions, and the Arts (Serie Orientale Roma, vol. LXXXVII),
Rome: IsIAO, 3–36.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina, and George Bonani (2002), ‘Establishing a typology of the old Tibetan
manuscripts: a multidisciplinary approach’, in Susan Whitfield (ed.), Dunhuang Manuscript
Forgery. Dedicated to Professor Fujieda, London: The British Library, 184–215.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2002),2003 ‘Enacting Words. A Diplomatic Analysis of the Tibetan Impe-
rial Decrees (bkas bcad) and their Application in the Sgra sbyor bam po gñis pa’s tradition’,
in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 25.1-2: 263–340.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2007), ‘Immortality extolled with reason. Philosophy and politics in
Nāgārjuna’, in Birgit Kellner, Helmut Krasser et al. (eds), Pramāṇakīrtiḥ. Papers dedicated to
Ernst Steinkellner on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, Vienna, ATBSUW, Part 2, 757–793.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2009a), ‘Copier, Interpréter, transformer, représenter ou des modes
de la diffusion des écritures et de l’écrit dans le bouddhisme indien’, in Gérard Colas and
Gerdi Gerschheimer (eds), Écrire et transmettre en Inde classique, Paris: École française
d’Extrême-Orient, 151–172.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2009b), ‘Scribes and Painters on the Road: Inquiry into Image and Text
in Indian Buddhism and its Transmission to Central Asia and Tibet’, in Anupa Pande (ed.),
The Art of Central Asia and the Indian Subcontinent in Cross-Cultural Perspective, New Delhi,
National Museum, 29–40.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2013), ‘Classifying, Questioning and Interpreting Tibetan Inscriptions’,
in Kurt Tropper and Cristina Scherrer-Schaub (eds), Tibetan Inscriptions. Proceedings of the
Seminar of the IATS, Vancouver 2010, Leiden: Brill, 139–170.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2014), ‘Le roi Indo-grec Ménandre discuta-t-il avec les philosophes
bouddhistes?’, in Pierre Leriche (ed.), Art et civilisations de l’Orient hellénisé. Rencontres et
échanges culturels d’Alexandre aux Sassanides. Hommage à Daniel Schlumberger, Paris:
Picard, 167–171.
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (2016), ‘Perennial Encounters: Does Technology Shape the Mind? The
Simile of the Painter, the Irruption of Representation, and the Disclosure of Buddhism in
Early and Classical India’. Presidential address, 16th IABS Conference, Taiwan, 20 June 2011,
in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, vol. 39: 1–50.
The Poetic and Prosodic Aspect of the Page | 285
Scherrer-Schaub, Cristina (in press), ‘Conveying India to the Pamir and further away. On divine
hierarchies and political paradigms in Buddhist texts’, presented at the workshop entitled
‘Ancient Central Asian Networks: Rethinking the Interplay of Religions, Art and Politics
across the Tarim Basin, 5th to 10th c.’, organised by Dr Erika Forte, University of Bochum, 25–
26 June 2014.
Scherrer-Schaub Cristina (forthcoming) ‘The Quintessence of the Mādhyamika Teaching Blos-
soms Again. Some consideration in view of the 5th-7th c. A. D. (I). Reading the Alchons’s doc-
ument (Schøyen MSS 2241) in religious and political context’, presented at the International
Workshop on Bhāviveka vs. Candrakīrti, organized by Akira Saito and Anne MacDonald at
the University of Tokyo on August 26-28, 2015.
Schopen, Gregory (2004), ‘Marking Time in Buddhist Monasteries. On Calendars, Clocks, and
Some Liturgical Practices’, in Gregory Schopen (ed.), Buddhist Monks and Business Matters.
Still More Papers on Monastic Buddhism in India, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press,
260–284.
Senart, Émile (1905–1906), The Inscriptions in the Caves at Nasik. Epigraphia Indica VIII, Archaeol-
ogy Survey of India.
Sérinde. Terre de Bouddha. Dix siècles d’art sur la Route de la Soie. Paris 24 octobre 1995 – 19
février 1996.
Settar, Shadakshari (2003), Footprints of Artisans in History. Some Reflections on Early Artisans of India.
General President’s address, Sixty-fourth Session of the Indian History Congress, Mysore.
Seyfort Ruegg, David (2000), ‘On the expression chandaso āropema, āyataka gītassara,
sarabhañña and ārṣa as applied to the “Word of the Buddha” (buddhavacana)’, in Ryutaro
Tsuchida and Albrecht Wezler (eds), Harānandalaharī. Volume in Honour of Professor Mi-
noru Hara on his Seventieth Birthday, Reinbeck: Dr Inge Wezler, 283–306.
Strauch, Ingo (2008), ‘The Bajaur collection of Kharoṣṭhī manuscripts – a preliminary survey’, in
Studien für Indologie und Iranistik, 25: 103–136.
Taddei, Maurizio (2003), ‘Harpocrates – Brahma – Maitreya: a Tentative Interpretation of a
Gandharan Relief from Swāt’, in Giovanni Verardi and Anna Filigenzi (eds), Maurizio Taddei
On Gandhāra. Collected Articles, Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L’Orientale’, Col-
lana ‘Collectanea’ III, 131–157.
Thapar, Romila (2012), ‘Aśoka: A Retrospective’, in Olivelle, P. Leoshko J., H. P. Ray (eds), Reimag-
ining Aśoka. Memory and History, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 17–37.
The Lotus Sutra and Its World. Buddhist Manuscripts of the Great Silk Road. Manuscripts and
blockprints from the collection of the Institute of Oriental Studies, St Petersburg, 1998.
Tissot, Francine (2002)1985 Gandhāra. Paris: Librairie Adrien Maisonneuve.
Tissot, Francine (2006), Catalogue of the National Museum of Afghanistan 1931-1985. Paris:
Unesco Publishing.
Turner, Eric G. (1968), Greek Papyri. An Introduction, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Venis, Arthur (1908), ‘Some Notes on the Maurya. Inscription at Sarnath’, in Journal of the Asiatic
Society of Bengal N. S., vol. III, 1–7.
Venture, Olivier (2014), ‘Le Livre des Odes’, in Jean-Pierre Drège and Costantino Moretti (eds), La
fabrique du lisible. La mise en texte des manuscrits de la Chine ancienne et médiévale. Paris:
Collège de France, Institut des Hautes Études chinoises, 23–28.
Vinson, Jules (1915), ‘Notes sur la prosodie tamoule’, in Journal asiatique, 449–466.
Xu Jianping 許建平 (2006), Dunhuang jingji xulu 敦煌經籍敘錄, Peking: Zhonghua shuju 中華書
局.
Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century
Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs
Abstract: This article presents some preliminary results of the study of the drawn
frames found in the title pages of 16th-century Tibetan xylographs from the kingdom
of Mang yul Gung thang (South-western Tibet). Usually the title pages of Gung
thang prints have very similar and characteristic drawn frames, which are typical
of xylographs printed in this area in the 16th century. They may vary from a simple
to a more elaborated design, which may differ even in xylographs produced at the
same printing house. Title pages have been examined by the authors with the aim
of understanding whether the different designs of drawings could be associated
with a certain artist or a certain printing house. A description of identified types of
drawings and minor variations is provided in the article. An appendix with infor-
mation on artists working on title frames is also included.
1 Introduction
This essay has the aim of presenting preliminary results on one of the characteristic
stylistic features of 16th-century Tibetan xylographs from Mang yul Gung thang, a
small kingdom that played a significant role in the introduction and spread of print-
ing into Tibet.1 This research was carried out for the project Tibetan Book Evolution
and Technology (TiBET), funded through a Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship
granted to Michela Clemente (May 2013–April 2015) and hosted at the University of
Cambridge (Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit). The Project collected and ex-
amined more than 200 extant Tibetan 15th- and 16th-century prints coming from the
South-Western area of the country.2 The research mainly focused on 16th-century
||
1 On the Mang yul Gung thang kingdom and its role in the Tibetan printing history, see
Clemente 2016a; Clemente 2017; Diemberger and Clemente 2013; Clemente, Diemberger, Hel-
man-Ważny and Lunardo (forthcoming); Ehrhard 2000a; Ehrhard 2000b; Ehrhard 2000c;
Everding 2000; Everding 2004; Petech 1990, 52.
2 The TiBET Project, in collaboration with a correlated AHRC Project entitled Transforming Tech-
nologies and Buddhist Book Culture: The Introduction of Printing and Digital Text Reproduction in
Tibetan Societies (Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit, 2010–2015), developed a database which
contains detailed description of prints, transliteration and mark-up of colophons, entries of per-
sonal and place names, and information on paper and pigments, if available. Michela Clemente
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-010, © 2017 M. Clemente/F. Lunardo, published by De
Gruyter.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
288 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
xylographs from Mang yul Gung thang, since the majority of the surviving prints
were produced in this kingdom at that time.
One of the aims of the TiBET Project was the identification of characteristic sty-
listic features that may help locating the provenance of a certain xylograph, that is
to say the printing house where this was produced. Mang yul Gung thang xylo-
graphs are recognisable through at least five distinctive features:
(a) front page (i.e. the drawn frame of the title);
(b) layout;
(c) ductus;
(d) orthographic peculiarities;
(e) woodcut representations. 3
This essay will focus on the drawn frame of title pages which were analysed in col-
laboration with Filippo Lunardo.4 Usually the title pages of Gung thang prints have
very similar and characteristic drawn frames. They may vary from a simple to a
more elaborated design, which may differ even in xylographs produced at the same
printing house. This drawn frame is typical of xylographs printed in this area in the
16th century, although it is also possible to find Gung thang prints with a simple title
page.
||
wishes to thank Burkhard Quessel, Terry Chilvers, Camillo A. Formigatti, Agnieszka Helman-Ważny,
Filippo Lunardo, Michael Pahlke, Christopher Kaplonski, Fabio Miarelli, Paola Ricciardi and Anura-
dha Pallipurath for their help and advice.
The Indo-Tibetan Books and Technology (ITBT) database is available at http://booksdb.socanth.
cam.ac.uk:8080/exist/apps/TTBBC/index.html, and also accessible from the website of the TiBET Pro-
ject at www.tbevoltech.socanth.cam.ac.uk. Michela Clemente would also like to thank all the people
who helped her with the TiBET Project in many ways: Hildegard Diemberger, Libby Peachey, Elena De
Rossi Filibeck, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Marta Sernesi, Katie Boyle, Alessandro Boesi, Daniel Sterling, and
Bruce Huett. On both the above-mentioned projects, see Clemente 2016a; Clemente 2016b; Clemente
2017; Clemente (in press); Clemente (forthcoming a); Clemente, Diemberger, Helman-Ważny and Lu-
nardo (forthcoming); Diemberger and Clemente 2013.
3 The art of decorating Tibetan books was first employed in manuscripts. All embellishments
made to enrich manuscripts were later presented on xylographs, but, to our knowledge, a study
of title frames in Tibetan manuscripts has not been carried out yet. Our research appears to be
the first on this subject. Since an examination of title frames in Tibetan manuscripts in general,
and a comparison with those produced in the Mang yul Gung thang kingdom in particular, goes
far beyond the aims of the TiBET project, such study remains to be done. For information on the
other characteristic stylistic features, see Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (forthcom-
ing a).
4 On this subject, see Clemente and Lunardo (forthcoming); Lunardo (forthcoming a); Lunardo
(forthcoming b).
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 289
Title pages of Mang yul Gung thang prints have been examined by the authors
of this essay with the aim of understanding whether the different designs of draw-
ings could be associated with a certain artist or a certain printing house. It seems
that at least two artists were involved in the creation of title frames: the painter,
who depicted the drawing, and the carver, who cut it into the wooden block. Artists
involved in printing projects were often mentioned in Gung thang colophons
and/or signatures placed under the last line of folios, usually on the verso side.5
Craftsmen were in fact allowed to sign their work, a peculiarity that was typical of
the earliest stage of printing.6 By comparing the different signatures and patterns
of carving, writing or drawing, we might learn to distinguish the diverse style of
each artist. This would help us in identifying those who worked on xylographs that
lack signatures and do not mention their names in the colophons. Unfortunately,
colophons never refer to the craftsmen who depicted and carved the title frames.
This might imply that the artists who drew and engraved the illustrations of a cer-
tain xylograph were also in charge of its title page. This may be true since each artist
seems to have specialised in only one art, that is to say, calligraphy, drawing, carv-
ing of blocks, and carving of illustrations.7 Assuming that the craftsmen who
worked on the illustrations of a certain print were also responsible for its title frame,
by analysing the typology of the drawing and looking for the name of the artists in
the colophon and/or signatures, we might be able to understand whether the style
of a certain drawn frame is associated with the artists who created it. If this is not
the case, we might suppose that the style of title pages is instead a characteristic
feature of a given printing house, which could come from guidelines suggested by
the promotor of the projects of that printery. In order to understand this, it is nec-
essary to examine a certain amount of extant prints and to gather data on printing
projects and their supervisors. This essay presents preliminary results obtained
with the first stage of research. So far we have indeed analysed sixty 16th-century
xylographs from the Mang yul Gung thang area. The research is ongoing, and fur-
ther results will be provided in due course.
||
5 Only one signature has been found so far above the first line. Cf. NGMPP AT167/5-168/1, fol.
59b. See also Clemente (forthcoming b).
6 See Ehrhard 2000a, 69, 75; Eimer 1996, 12.
7 On this subject, see Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017.
290 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
2 Typology of title pages
So far we have identified three types of drawings for the title pages. Each type ex-
hibits several minor variations. A description of the types with all variations is pro-
vided below.
TYPE 1
General description: title inscribed in a simple rectangular frame:
– Variation 1a: title inscribed in a rectangular frame consisting of two simple
black lines with a simple base of lotus petals;
– Variation 1b: rectangular frame composed by an external thick line and an in-
ternal line (see Fig. 1):
Fig. 1: Type 1b: The Eightieth Life-story of Buddha Śākyamuni written by Āryaśūra, Brag dkar rta so
1541 or 1553 (Tucci Tibetan Collection, Vol. 707, IsIAO, Italy). Photograph by L&C Service.
– Variation 1b1: same features as 1b. Additionally, the frame is inscribed into a
bigger one that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame has an external
thick line and an internal line. Both sides of the bigger frame have two col-
umns, the outer one bigger than the inner;
– Variation 1b2: same features as 1b and 1b1. Moreover, both sides of the bigger
frame have a column and a floral decoration that covers the four corners of the
internal line;
– Variation 1b3: same features as 1b. Additionally, the frame is inscribed into a
bigger one that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame has two lines.
Both sides of the bigger frame have two columns, the outer one bigger than the
inner;
– Variation 1c: the rectangular frame is composed by an external simple line, an
internal thick one, and another simple line. This frame is inscribed in a rectan-
gular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame has an
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 291
external thick line and an internal line. Both sides of the bigger frame have two
columns, the outer one bigger than the inner;
– Variation 1d: rectangular frame composed by two lines;
– Variation 1d1: rectangular frame composed by two lines. This frame is in-
scribed into a bigger one composed by a thick line.
– Variation 1e: rectangular frame composed by a single thick line. It exhibits an
arch in the middle of the upper side;
– Variation 1e1: rectangular frame composed by a thick and a simple line. It ex-
hibits a flame in the middle of the upper side;
– Variation 1f: rectangular frame composed by a single thick line.
TYPE 2
General description: title inscribed in a frame that exhibits phytomorphic patterns
and a circular shape in the middle of the upper side, which may have plant ele-
ments or jewels surrounded by flames. Both sides of the frame may have two further
decorations (plant elements with different decorations in the centre).
– Variation 2a: inside the floral frame there is a rectangular frame composed by
a thick external line and a double line. A base of lotuses is drawn underneath.
The title frame is inscribed in a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the
entire folio. This bigger frame has four lines. Both sides of the bigger frame ex-
hibit two columns and a floral decoration that covers the four corners of the
internal line;
– Variation 2a1: inside the floral frame there is a rectangular frame composed
by a thick external line and a simple line. A base of lotuses is drawn under-
neath. The title frame is inscribed in a rectangular bigger frame that almost co-
vers the entire folio. This bigger frame has double lines. Both sides of the bigger
frame exhibit two columns — the outer one bigger than the inner — and a floral
decoration that covers the four corners of the internal line;
– Variation 2a2: inside the floral frame there is a rectangular frame composed
by two simple lines. A base of lotuses is drawn underneath. The title frame is
inscribed in a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This
bigger frame has a thick external line and a simple internal one. Both sides of
the bigger frame exhibit a floral decoration that covers the four corners of the
internal line. Leaves are drawn at the bottom of the bigger frame above the in-
ternal line;
– Variation 2a3: inside the floral frame there is a rectangular frame composed
by two simple lines. A base of lotuses is drawn underneath. The title frame is
inscribed in a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This
292 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
bigger frame has a double simple line. Both sides of the bigger frame have a
column;
– Variation 2a4: inside the floral frame there is a rectangular frame composed
by a thick external line and a simple line. A base of lotuses is drawn under-
neath. The title frame is inscribed in a rectangular bigger frame that almost co-
vers the entire folio. This bigger frame has a thick external line and a simple
line. Both sides of the bigger frame exhibit a column and a floral decoration
that covers the four corners of the internal line.
– Variation 2b: inside the floral frame there is a rectangular frame composed by a
single thick line;
– Variation 2c: it exhibits a double simple line inside the phytomorphic frame;
– Variation 2c1: same features as 2c. Additionally, the title frame is inscribed in a
rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame has
an external thick line and an internal line. Both sides of the bigger frame have a
column and a floral decoration that covers the four corners of the internal line;
– Variation 2c2: same features as 2c. Additionally, the title frame is inscribed in
a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame
has a double line. Both sides of the bigger frame have two columns, the former
of which is bigger than the latter;
– Variation 2c3: same features as 2c. Additionally, the title frame is inscribed in
a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame
has a double line. Both sides of the bigger frame have a column and a floral
decoration that covers the four corners of the internal line;
– Variation 2c4: same features as 2c. Additionally, the title frame is inscribed in
a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame
has a double line. Both sides of the bigger frame have two columns — the outer
one bigger than the inner — and a floral decoration that covers the four corners
of the internal line;
– Variation 2d: it exhibits an external thick line and a simple internal line inside
the floral frame (see Fig. 2). The title frame is inscribed in a rectangular bigger
frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame has an external
thick line and an internal line. Both sides of the bigger frame have two columns
- the outer one bigger than the inner — and a floral decoration that covers the
four corners of the internal line;
– Variation 2d1: it exhibits the same first three features as 2d. However, both
sides of the bigger frame have a column and a floral decoration that covers the
four corners of the internal line;
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 293
Fig. 2: Type 2d: Nam mkha' rdo rje's Spiritual Songs, Glang phug (La 'debs Valley), 1554 (Tucci Ti-
betan Collection, Vol. 709/3, IsIAO, Italy). Photograph by L&C Service.
– Variation 2e: it exhibits three lines — the central of which is thick — inside
the floral frame. This frame is inscribed in a rectangular bigger one that almost
covers the entire folio. This bigger frame has an external thick line and an in-
ternal line. Both sides of the bigger frame have two columns — the former of
which is bigger than the latter - and a floral decoration that covers the four cor-
ners of the internal line;
– Variation 2e1: it exhibits three lines — the central one thick and split with a
central empty space -—inside the floral frame (see Fig. 3). This frame is in-
scribed in a rectangular bigger one that almost covers the entire folio. This big-
ger frame has an external thick line and an internal line. Both sides of the big-
ger frame have two columns — the outer one bigger than the inner — and a
floral decoration that covers the four corners of the internal line.
Fig. 3: Type 2e1: Nam mkha' rdo rje's Biography, Glang phug (La 'debs Valley), 1554 (Tucci Tibetan
Collection, Vol. 709/2, IsIAO, Italy). Photograph by L&C Service.
TYPE 3
General description: title inscribed in a frame that is similar to the second type but
exhibits fewer plant decorations. This frame is placed upon a throne which is com-
posed by two elements: the upper element presents lotus petals facing down; the
lower element exhibits a sort of frame or platform which may have more or less
elaborated decorations. Both sides of the frame may exhibit two further decorations
(plant elements with different ornaments in the centre). The title frame is inscribed
294 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
in a rectangular bigger frame that almost covers the entire folio. This bigger frame
has an external thick line and an internal line. Both sides of the bigger frame have
a column and a floral decoration that covers the four corners of the internal line.
– Variation 3a: it exhibits three lines — the central one thick — inside the floral
frame (see Fig. 4).
Fig. 4: Type 3a: The Biography of lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal, Brag dkar rta so (Tucci Tibetan
Collection, Vol. 657/6, IsIAO, Italy). Photograph by L&C Service.
3 Examination of drawn frames in 16th-Century
Mang yul Gung thang xylographs
We analysed the sixty xylographs taken into account according to the printing houses
in which they were produced in order to locate the characteristic features that may
help discovering the provenance of each print. We tried to identify the artists who
worked on the title frames, compared their dating and also contrasted these data
against the literary genre to which the works belong. The examined xylographs were
produced in nine printing houses located within the kingdom. The exact location of
most printing houses is still unknown and information on their history is still scarce.
Only two of these printeries seem to have been located near a monastery, but the ar-
eas in which they were established appear to have had a direct or close access to ma-
terials for book production. We list the printing houses hereafter starting from the
most productive (according to data gathered so far) in descending order:
1) Brag dkar rta so: 24
2) Kun gsal sgang po che: 12
3) rDzong dkar/Khyung rdzong dkar po: 7
4) gNas: 5
5) 'Tsho rkyen: 5
6) Chab rom phug: 3
7) Glang phug (La 'debs Valley): 2
8) Ati sha'i chos 'khor (La 'debs Valley): 1
9) mDzo lhas: 1.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 295
rDzong dkar
Rud
sNving
Brag dkar rta so
La ‘debs
gNas
Tibet
Nepal
Fig. 5: Printing houses of the 16th-century Tibetan xylographs from the kingdom of Mang yul
Gung thang (South-western Tibet). © Google Maps.
Brag dkar rta so
We were able to identify twenty-four prints produced at Brag dkar rta so, a print-
ing house located between Mang yul and Gung thang, close to the small monas-
tery with the same name. Both buildings were founded by a bka' brgyud master
called lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557) who established his seat there
in 1525 and, until his death, printed several works associated with his religious
school. His literary activity was mostly sponsored by the Mang yul Gung thang
rulers since he himself was a member of the royal family.8
||
8 On lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal and his activities at Brag dkar rta so, see Clemente 2007;
Clemente 2009; Clemente 2014a; Clemente 2015; Clemente 2016a: 397–98; Clemente 2016c;
Clemente (in press); Diemberger and Clemente 2013; Larsson 2012: 229–76; Schaeffer 2009: 58–
63; Schaeffer 2011; Sernesi 2011; Smith 2001, 73–79.
296 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Among the examined prints produced at Brag dkar rta so, twelve present a
drawn frame belonging to the second type with ten different variations, namely
2a2, 2a3, 2b, 2c, 2c1, 2c2, 2c3, 2c4 and 2d. The frame of two xylographs, that is to
say NGMPP E2518/119 and L969/4,10 corresponds to variation 2c. The frame of vol.
1089/2 (Tucci Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome)11 and NGMPP E2518/412 matches
with variation 2c1. The drawn frame of two further prints, NGMPP E2517/613 and
L456/14,14 belongs to variation 2c3. Unfortunately, the names of the drawers of
the illustrations in the first four xylographs are not mentioned in colophons or
signatures. We know instead the name of the carver of the blocks of E2517/6
(printed in 1550), which corresponds to the artist who drew and engraved the il-
lustrations of L456/14. This artist is bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan, who was ac-
tive in Gung thang at least between 1533 and 1563. According to Clemente’s re-
search, rDo rje rgyal mtshan is one of the few artists who had three speciali-
||
9 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 191; Clemente 2016a, 406; Clemente (in press b); Schaeffer
2011, 473. For a translation, see Stearns 2000. Cf. NGMPP L970/2 and L456/8; dPal brtsegs 2013:
text no. 28. Images and detailed descriptions including the transliteration of colophons and in-
formation on people involved in the production of all xylographs cited in this article are available
in the aforementioned database. Cataloguing entries of these prints are also available in the
NGMPP database (Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, 1970–2001, and the Nepa-
lese-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (NGMCP, 2002–2014, both funded by the German
Research Foundation (DFG)).
10 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 191; Clemente 2016a, 408; Clemente (in press); Schaeffer
2011, 470; Sernesi 2011, 201; Smith 2001, 77. Cf. also NGMPP L194/7 and E2518/2.
11 It is catalogued in De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 394. The IsIAO Library was shut down in 2011, and
the Collection is no longer accessible. Fortunately, these texts were digitised before the closure
thanks to the aforementioned AHRC project and are now available in the above-mentioned da-
tabase. For the story of this work, cf. vol. 657/6: 22b4. See also Clemente 2007, 124–25, 138;
Clemente 2015, 189; Clemente 2016a, 407; Clemente (in press); Cutillo and Kunga Rinpoche 1978;
Cutillo and Kunga Rinpoche 1986; Diemberger and Clemente 2013, 137; Roberts 2007, 37–38;
Sernesi 2004; Sernesi 2011, 198.
12 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 192; Clemente (in press); Schaeffer 2011, 475; Smith 2001,
77; vol. 657/6: fols 22a5–22b4. Cf. NGMPP L970/5.
13 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 191; Clemente 2016a, 407; Clemente 2016b; Schaeffer 2011,
469; Smith 2001, 76. Cf. NGMPP L1107/4; dPal brtsegs: text no. 32; U rgyan rDo rje 1976, 37–83.
14 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 191; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press).
See also NGMPP L969/4; dPal brtsegs (text. no 22_1); U rgyan rdo rje 1976, 85–105.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 297
sations, namely as calligrapher, carver of blocks and carver of illustrations, there-
fore we may guess that he worked on both the above-mentioned prints as en-
graver of the title pages.15
The remaining six xylographs that the title frames match with the second
type are NGMPP L512/8,16 L477/14,17 L969/4_1,18 E2518/6,19 L250/8-251/120 and vol.
706.21 We do not have any available data on L477/14. The carvers of the illustra-
tions of vol. 706, which was printed in 1543, are dpon btsun Padma and bcu dpon
rDo rje rgyal mtshan. rDo rje rgyal mtshan is also mentioned as the carver of the
blocks of L250/8-251/1, which was printed in 1555. The same artist is also cited as
carver of E2518/6, while dpon btsun Padma is mentioned as engraver in both
L512/8 (printed in 1561) and L969/4_1.
Ten xylographs from Brag dkar rta so exhibit instead a drawn frame belong-
ing to the first type with four different variations (1a, 1b, 1e1, 1f). In particular, half
of the frames in the xylographs belong to variation 1b. We are referring to vols
657/3,22 707,23 135624 — all preserved in the Tucci Tibetan Collection of the IsIAO
||
15 Detailed files of all the artists mentioned in this article are available in the ITBT database. On
this artist, see also Clemente 2007, 131, 132, 137, 146, 153; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017;
Ehrhard 2000a, 73–79; Eimer and Tsering 1990, 71–72; Roesler 2000, 228; Schaeffer 2011, 470.
16 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 193; Clemente 2016a, 408; Clemente (in press); Ehrhard
2004, 593, n. 6; Schaeffer 2011, 476. Cf. NGMPP L194/9, L1219/3, L503/2 and L956/8.
17 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 192; Clemente 2016a, 406; Clemente (in press b); Schaeffer
2011, 471. Cf. NGMPP E1256/1.
18 For a translation of this work, see Guenther 1963. See also Clemente 2015, 190; Clemente
2016a, 406–07; Clemente (in press b); Sernesi 2004, 257; Smith 2001, 76. Cf. NGMPP L36/1;
AT29/5. See also PBP 2007, 346.
19 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 190; Clemente 2016a, 406; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017;
Clemente (in press); Diemberger and Clemente 2013, 135; Schaeffer 2011, 472; Smith 2001, 76. Cf.
NGMPP L194/11; L12/1; L581/5.
20 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 408; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Diemberger and
Clemente 2013, 135; Eimer 2010; Eimer and Tsering 1990, 71–72; Roesler 2000, 227–229; Schaeffer
2009, 62; Schaeffer 2011, 470; Sernesi 2011, 184, 188–89, 200, 225–26. Cf. BL 19999a3.
21 On this work, see Clemente 2007, 124, 135–37; Clemente 2015, 188; Clemente 2016a, 407;
Clemente 2016b; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 341; Diemberger and Clemente
2013, 134; Larsson 2012; Schaeffer 2011, 474; Vol. 657/5: fols 16a6–16b5.
22 On this work, see Clemente 2007, 125, 142–43; Clemente 2015, 189; Clemente 2016a, 408;
Clemente 2016b; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 330; Diemberger and Clemente
2013, 135; Roberts 2007, 7–9, 37. Cf. NGMPP E2518/3.
23 On this work, see Clemente 2011, 60–61; Clemente 2015, 190; Clemente 2016a, 407; Clemente
2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 341.
24 On this work, see Clemente 2007, 125, 141; Clemente 2015, 192; Clemente 2016a, 408;
Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 447; Schaeffer 2011, 476. Cf. NGMPP E1784/3; L567/5.
298 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Library in Rome — and to NGMPP E2518/525 and L569/10.26 By comparing the
known dates of the analysed xylographs, we discovered that most prints with a
drawn frame matching with variation 1b were produced during the last years of
lHa btsun's life. These data can also be cross-checked with the available infor-
mation about the craftsmen who worked on those prints. The importance of iden-
tifying artists involved in the production of 16th-century xylographs for locating
the place of printing of Tibetan works has already been pointed out.27 Unfortu-
nately, the names of the painters and carvers who worked on the illustrations of
the above-mentioned five prints are not cited in colophons and signatures of
those works. We only know the name of the carvers who worked on the blocks of
three of these prints, namely vols 707, 657/3 and NGMPP L569/10. We may there-
fore suppose that the carvers involved in the engraving of the blocks also worked
on the title frames. As stated above, artists with different specialisations seem to
have been extremely rare, but we know the names of some carvers who used to
work on both blocks and woodcut illustrations. Two of these correspond to the
carvers involved in the production of the above-mentioned three prints. We are
referring to dpon btsun Padma and, again, bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan. dpon
btsun Padma worked on vol. 707 and L569/10, while rDo rje rgyal mtshan was
employed in the production of vols 657/3 and 707. Both artists were also active
during the years in which the other two xylographs belonging to variation 1b —
E2518/5 and vol. 1356 — were produced, that is to say 1552 and 1556 respectively.
So far we do not have any clues about the drawers of the title frames of the afore-
mentioned four xylographs, but we are currently examining 16th-century Gung
thang illustrations and trying to understand the style of painters, therefore we
hope we will have a clearer picture when this research is completed.28 As for the
genre of the five examined prints, two are hagiographies (rnam thar/rnam mgur),
two are Mahāmudrā instruction manuals, and the last one is a narrative of former
lives (skyes rabs).
||
25 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 191; Clemente 2016a, 407; Clemente (in press); Schaeffer
2011, 472. Cf. NGMPP L194/13; L970/3; E693/4; U rgyan rDo rje 1976, 1–35.
26 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 407; Clemente (in press); Diemberger and Clemente 2013,
135; Schaeffer 2011, 476.
27 See Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017. Detailed information on the identified craftsmen is avail-
able in the database of the above-mentioned projects. Information on fifteen artists is also pro-
vided in the appendix of this essay.
28 On this subject, see Clemente and Lunardo (forthcoming); Lunardo (forthcoming a); Lunardo
(forthcoming b).
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 299
The title frame of three further xylographs associated with the first typology,
that is to say NGMPP E908/3,29 L10/2130 and L10/22,31 matches with variation 1f.
Unfortunately, the last line of the last folio of E908/3 in which the artists’ names
appear is unreadable. Only one name is legible, i.e. Padma. We know the names
of the carvers of the blocks of L10/21 and L10/22; nevertheless, only one carver
mentioned in L10/21 and two cited in L10/22 have the appropriate specialisation,
that is to say is skilled in carving both blocks and illustrations. The artist of the
former print is also one of the two of the latter, namely bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal
mtshan. The other is, once again, dpon btsun Padma.
Lastly, the frame of two xylographs, vols. 657/532 and 657/6,33 belongs to the
third type. We know the name of the drawer of the illustrations of the former
print, namely mkhas pa dPal chen, a famous Gung thang painter.34 The carver of
the illustrations is not specified, but the colophon mentions dpon btsun Padma,
mkhas pa bSod nams bkra shis and bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan among the
carvers of the blocks. bSod nams bkra shis had two specialisations, as carver of
blocks and carver of illustrations. He actually was a well-known engraver of il-
lustrations and participated in many printing projects in Mang yul Gung thang at
least from 1523 to 1555.35 The drawers of the illustrations of vol. 657/6 are mkhas
pa Don bzang and mkhas pa Dri med,36 both renowned painters associated with
||
29 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 195; Clemente 2016a, 407; Clemente (in press).
30 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 193; Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000a, 78; Schaeffer 2011,
476.
31 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 193; Clemente 2016a, 408; Clemente 2016b, 78; Clemente
(in press); Roesler 2000; Roesler 2011; Schaeffer 2011, 476. Cf. NGMPP L813/2 and E2617/9.
32 On this work, see Clemente 2007, 124, 130–32; Clemente 2009; Clemente 2014a; Clemente
2015, 187–88; Clemente 2016a, 408; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press);
Clemente 2016c; De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 331; Diemberger and Clemente 2013. Cf. NGMPP L477/13;
dPal brtsegs, text no. 31.
33 On this work, see Clemente 2007, 124, 130–35; Clemente 2009; Clemente 2014a; Clemente
2015, 188; Clemente 2016a, 408; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2016c; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in
press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 331; Diemberger and Clemente 2013, 123, 130, 131, 134–137. Cf.
NGMPP L456/7.
34 On this master, see also Clemente 2017; Clemente and Lunardo (forthcoming); Ehrhard
2000a, 77, 79; Jackson 1996, 122; Lunardo (forthcoming a).
35 On this artist, see also Clemente 2016b, 87–88; Clemente 2017; Ehrhard 2000a, 71–73, 75, 79.
36 On this master, see Clemente 2016b, 85–87; Ehrhard 2000a, 71, 73-76; Jackson 1996, 122-25;
Lunardo (forthcoming a); Sernesi 2016.
300 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
sman thang pa sMan bla don grub's tradition.37 Again, the carvers of the illustra-
tions are not cited in the colophon, but among the carvers of the blocks we find
bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan.
To sum up, the Brag dkar rta so prints examined so far exhibit title frames
belonging to all three types. The drawn frames belonging to the first type were
carved by both dpon btsun Padma and rDo rje rgyal mtshan. The frames of the
xylographs associated with the second type were probably carved by bcu dpon
rDo rje rgyal mtshan. Those belonging to the third type are associated with three
famous painters, mkhas pa dPal chen, mkhas pa Dri med and mkhas pa Don
bzang, as well as with three well-known carvers of illustrations, dpon btsun
Padma, rDo rje rgyal mtshan and bSod nams bkra shis. Since we do not know the
name/s of the artist/s who drew the title frames belonging to the first two types,
we can only suggest that the more elaborated drawing of the third type is due to
the involvement of different painters, or else that the innovation might have been
favoured by the collaboration of the painters with bSod nams bkra shis, an artist
who is never mentioned in the colophons and/or signatures of the prints belong-
ing to the first two types.
Kun gsal sGang po che
We were able to locate twelve prints produced at Kun gsal sGang po che, near the
village of gTsang, to the south-east of rDzong dkar, in Gung thang. This hermitage
was one of the residences of bo dong Chos dbang rgyal mtshan (1484–1549),38 a
religious master who promoted many printing projects in the Mang yul Gung thang
kingdom. All projects carried out here but one were supervised by him.
The drawn frame of seven examined xylographs belongs to the first type with
two variations, that is to say 1b and 1c. Six frames match with variation 1c and are
||
37 On sman thang pa sMan bla don grub's painting tradition, see Jackson 1996, chapt. 3. See
also Clemente 2009, 3.7; Clemente 2016b, 85–86; Denwood 1996; Lo Bue-Ricca 1990, 27–28.
38 On this master, see Ehrhard 2000a, 23–50.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 301
those included in vols 361/1_1,39 361/2,40 361/3,41 361/4,42 363/243— preserved in the
Tucci Tibetan Collection — and in NGMPP L560/23.44 The first five were all printed
in 1538–39 (the first four during the same printing project) and belong to the bka'
gdams pa school. According to their colophons and signatures, mkhas pa bSod
nams bkra shis is the carver of the illustrations of vols 361/3 and 363/2. The name
of the artist who drew the illustrations of the former xylograph is not mentioned,
but we know the drawers who worked on vol. 363/2, namely mkhas pa Dri med,
mkhas pa Chos dpal and mkhas pa sMon lam. The colophons and signatures of
other two prints, that is to say, vols 361/1_1 and 361/3, tell us only the name of the
scribe, mkhas pa sKyab pa, an eclectic artist who, according to Clemente’s re-
search, appears to have been trained in several specialisations. He seems to have
worked as a master scribe, draftsman and carver of illustrations, so that he might
have acted as drawer and/or carver of the frames of the above-mentioned xylo-
graphs. As for vol. 361/4, we only know the name of the carver of its blocks, namely
bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan, who might have also been the carver of its title
frame. The sixth xylograph, NGMPP L560/23, was instead printed in an unspecified
Mouse Year, which may correspond to 1516, 1528, 1540, 1552 or 1564. According to
the colophon, the scribe of the xylograph was mkhas pa sKyab pa and the drawer
of illustrations mkhas pa dPal chen. From what Clemente has discovered so far,
mkhas pa sKyab pa was active from 1521 to 1546, whereas mkhas pa dPal chen's
worked as drawer of illustrations from 1546 until after 1555. Information gathered
so far shows that mkhas pa sKyab pa worked as scribe between 1538 and 1540. We
would therefore tend to exclude 1516, 1528 and 1564 as the date of printing of
NGMPP L560/23. This xylograph was likely produced in 1540. As for the artists who
drew and carved the title page, both mkhas pa sKyab pa and mkhas pa dPal chen
could be the draftsmen. The carver may instead have been either mkhas pa sKyab
pa or the carver of the blocks, namely gsol dpon Nam mkha' dkon mchog, but we
||
39 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 410; Clemente (in press).
40 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck
2003, 132. Cf. BDRC (= Buddhist Digital Resource Centre): W00KG09688.
41 On this work, see Clemente 2016a: 411; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press);
De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 132. Cf. BDRC: W00KG09688.
42 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente 2016b; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Fili-
beck 2003, 132. Cf. BDRC: W1KG4473.
43 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press);
De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 132; Diemberger and Clemente 2013, 129–130, n. 67; Ehrhard 2000a, 118–
129.
44 On this work, see Clemente (in press).
302 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
do not have any information regarding the work of this latter artists. So far he is
only mentioned as an engraver of NGMPP L560/23.
The frame matching with variation 1b belongs to NGMPP L189/5-190/1. This xy-
lograph was printed in 1531 by Chos dbang rgyal mtshan. We do not have any spe-
cific information on the artists who worked on the print. We only know that five
carvers were involved in its production. 45
The frames of the remaining five prints, that is to say NGMPP AT53/17-54/1,46
printed in 1533, vols 286/147 and 286/2,48 produced in 1523–24 (during the same
printing project), NGMPP L66/5,49 printed in 1551, and vol. 363/1,50 produced in
1539–40, belong instead to the second type with four different variations, 2a1, 2c,
2c2 and 2e respectively. The drawer of the illustrations of AT53/17-54/1 and vol.
286/1 is mkhas pa Dri med, while the carver of illustrations is bSod nams bkra shis.
This latter also carved the illustrations of vol. 363/1. We do not have any infor-
mation on the artists who were involved in the production of vol. 286/2 but they
were probably the same found in the colophon of vol. 286/1. The carver of the illus-
trations of L66/5 is bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan. L66/5 is the only one xylograph
which was not produced by Chos dbang rgyal mtshan. This is one of the volumes
included in his Collected works, which were printed after his death51.
To sum up, the frames of the twelve examined xylographs belong to the first and
second types. Five of the seven prints with a first-type frame were produced in 1538–
39. NGMPP L189/5-190/1 was printed in 1531 whereas L560/23 was likely printed in
1540. The drawers of the frames of these six prints were mkhas pa Dri med, sMon lam
and Chos dpal—who worked together—, mkhas pa dPal chen, and mkhas pa sKyab
pa. This latter artist may have acted as both drawer and carver. The frames of the five
remaining xylographs belong to the second type and were drawn by mkhas pa Dri
||
45 On the story of the printing, see Ehrhard 2000a, 37.
46 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 410; Clemente 2016b; Ehrhard 2000c, IX. The printing col-
ophon of this xylograph is provided in Ehrhard 2000a, 104–114. Facsimile edition in Ehrhard
2000c, 1–510. Cf. vol. 743 no. 2 (National Archives, Katmandu); NGMPP L1121/3–L1122/1.
47 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 410; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press);
De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 2; Diemberger and Clemente 2013, 131; Ehrhard 2000a, 29–30. Cf. NGMPP
L755/4-L756/1; L211/2.
48 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 410; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 2. Cf.
NGMPP L755/4-756/1.
49 On this work, see also Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in
press). The colophon is provided in Ehrhard 2000a, 165–170.
50 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente 2016b; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Fili-
beck 2003, 132; Diemberger and Clemente 2013, 129–130, n. 67.
51 See Ehrhard 2016, 225–228.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 303
med (in 1523–24 and 1533) and carved by bSod nams bkra shis (in 1523–24, 1533 and
1539–40). The frame of one of the prints was carved by rDo rje rgyal mtshan in 1551.
rDong dkar/Khyung rdzong dkar po
We identified seven xylographs produced in the printing house of rDzong dkar/
Khyung rdzong dkar po, close to the rDzong dkar chos sde monastery, located in
the capital of the Gung thang area. The drawn frame of all these prints but one be-
longs to the first type with five variations, that is to say 1b, 1b1, 1b3, 1c and 1d. The
frame of vols NGMPP AT61/21_152 and L189/4,53 both preserved at the National Ar-
chives of Kathmandu, matches with variation 1b. The former xylograph belongs to
the bo dong pa school and is associated with the Mahāmudrā tradition. It was pro-
duced in 1521. The latter print is instead associated with the rnying ma pa school. It
belongs to the literary genre of hagiographies and is later than the bo dong xylo-
graph since it was produced in 1527. Both xylographs were printed by Chos dbang
rgyal mtshan. The name of the artists responsible for the illustrations of these two
prints can be found in the colophons of both texts. mkhas pa Dri med is cited as the
drawer of the illustrations of both works. The carver of the illustrations of AT61/21_1
is not mentioned in the colophon, but we know the names of the carvers who
worked on the blocks. Among these, only bSod nams rnam rgyal seems to have
been trained also as a carver of illustrations, therefore he may be the engraver in
charge of the drawn frame of this print. The name of the carvers of the illustrations
in L189/4 are instead mentioned in the colophon, namely bSod nams bkra shis and
lha ris sKyab pa. lHa ris should be an epithet of mkhas pa sKyab pa.
The other four prints that exhibit a frame matching with type 1 are vol. 671/7,54
NGMPP L143/6-144/1,55 vol. 671/556 and NGMPP E2934/3-2935/1.57 These present the
||
52 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 409; Clemente (in press b); Ehrhard 2000a, 87. This text
is reproduced in Ehrhard 2000b, 349–85. Cf. NGMPP L189/3; L390/4; vol. 754 no. 1 (National
Archives, Kathmandu).
53 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 409; Clemente 2016b; Ehrhard 2000a, 32–33, 72–73, 101–
103. Cf. dPal brtsegs: text no. 16; NGMPP L9/3.
54 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 410; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 335–36.
Cf. NGMPP L195/12.
55 The colophon of this work is provided in Ehrhard 2000a, 115–17. See also Clemente (in press);
Ehrhard 2000a, 73.
56 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 410; Clemente 2016b; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press);
De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 335. Cf. NGMPP L195/10; L1208/4.
57 On this work, see Clemente 2014b; Clemente 2016a, 409; Ehrhard 2000d; Ehrhard 2013. Cf.
Tibetan 149.
304 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
following variations respectively: 1b1, 1b3, 1c and 1d. We do not have any infor-
mation on the artists who worked on vol. 671/7; we know instead the name of the
carver of illustration involved in the production of vol. 671/5, namely mkhas pa
bSod nams bkra shis. These two xylographs were printed during the same project
undertaken in 1540 by Nam mkha' rdo rje (1486–1553), a master belonging to the
'ba' ra bka' brgyud sub-school, with the help of Chos dbang rgyal mtshan.58 The
drawer of illustrations of L143/6-144/1, which was printed in 1537, is mkhas pa Dri
med, whereas the carver of illustrations is mkhas pa bSod nams bkra shis. The
drawers of the illustrations of E2934/3-2935/1, which was produced in 1521, are in-
stead mkhas pa Dri med and mkhas pa rDor mgon, while the carvers are Chos
skyabs dpal bzang — a skilled engraver of blocks and also a carver of illustrations
who was active at least from 1514 to 152559 — bSod nams rnam rgyal and mkhas pa
sKyab pa. Both the above mentioned projects were supervised by Chos dbang rgyal
mtshan.
The only print with a frame belonging to the second type, variation 2e, is vol.
671/1, printed in 1540 during the same project of vol. 671/7 and 671/5.60 According
to the signature, the carver of the illustrations is mkhas pa bSod nams bkra shis.
The drawer of the illustrations is not mentioned in the colophon or signatures. How-
ever, according to Lunardo’s examination of the style of illustrations, it is possible
that the painter is mkhas pa Dri med.61
To sum up, the drawn frame of six xylographs matches with the first type.
mkhas pa Dri med is the drawer of four of these—associated with rDo rje mgon po
in one of the prints—, bSod nams bkra shis is the carver of three of these, and bSod
nams rnam rgyal and mkhas pa sKyab pa should be the carvers who worked on two
of the frames each. The frame matching with the second type is also associated with
mkhas pa bSod nams bkra shis and, likely, with mkhas pa Dri med.
||
58 See Ehrhard 2000a, 55–66.
59 On this artist, see also Ehrhard 2000a, 70.
60 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 335;
Ehrhard 2000a, 45 n. 38, 61–63.
61 On this subject, see Clemente and Lunardo (forthcoming); Lunardo (forthcoming a).
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 305
gNas
gNas is located in the vicinity of sKyid grong, in Mang yul, and is the birthplace
of Rab 'byams pa Byams pa phun tshogs (1503–1581), a religious master who un-
dertook many printing projects in the Gung thang kingdom starting from 1555.62
Five examined prints were produced at gNas. The title frame of three of these
works – NGMPP L109/11,63 L535/564 and vol. 135565 – is associated with the first
type, with three different variations, 1b2, 1d1 and 1e respectively. Unfortunately,
we do not have any information about the artists who worked on these prints.
The drawn frame of the remaining two xylographs – vols 58766 and 657/467 –
belongs to the second type and matches with variation 2c1. The drawer of the il-
lustrations of the former print produced in 1561 is mkhas pa Don bzang, while the
carver should be bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan. The latter xylograph was printed
in 1559, and the carver involved in its production is rDo rje rgyal mtshan.
'Tsho rkyen
Five identified prints were produced at the hermitage of 'Tsho rkyen, which
should be located not far from Chab rom phug, in Mang yul Gung thang.68 The
drawn frame of all but one matches with the first type, variation 1b. The latter,
NGMPP AT 150/7,69 exhibits a frame belonging to the second type, variation 2c.
All these xylographs actually belong to a unique printing project undertaken by
bTsun pa Chos legs in 1514, during which he printed a textbook (yig cha) on
Mahāmudrā he himself had written at Chab rom phug some years earlier, be-
tween 1501 and 1504.70
||
62 On this master, see in particular Ehrhard 2012.
63 On this work, see Bacot 1954, 292; Clemente 2016a, 412; Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2012,
173; Schaeffer 2011, 473. Cf. dPal brtsegs: text no. 36; U rgyan rdo rje 1976, 451–501.
64 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 411; Clemente (in press).
65 On this work, see De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 447.
66 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 412; Clemente 2016b, 76–80; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in
press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 314; Ehrhard 2012, 163.
67 On this work, see Clemente 2007, 125–126, 143–150; Clemente 2016a, 411–12; Clemente 2016b,
79; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 330–331; Ehrhard 2012, 158; Roberts 2007, 40–
47; Smith 2001, 76. Cf. Tibetan 155.1 (Cambridge University Library).
68 See Ehrhard 2000b, XIII–XV. See also Clemente (in press).
69 See Ehrhard 2000b, XIII-XIV. See also Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000b, 1–20.
70 See Ehrhard 2000a, 24; Ehrhard 2000b, XIII-XV.
306 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
The four xylographs with the drawn frame matching with the first type,
namely NGMPP AT61/21_2,71 AT61/21_3,72 AT61/21_4,73 AT61/21_5,74 share the
same drawer of illustrations, namely ltas dgaʼ Chos bzang, an artist associated
with the bo dong pa monastery of lTas dgaʼ/rTa sga.75 The carvers of AT 61/21_2
were gnas brtan dge slong Seng ge and dge bshes Chos skyong. The former came
from lHa mdun76 and was active at least between 1514 and 1521;77 the latter was
involved in printing projects from 1514 up to 1555. Unfortunately, so far we have
no evidence that they used to carve illustrations as well. The engravers of AT
61/21_3 were dpon yig dPal ldan rgyal po and bSod nams rnam rgyal. dPal ldan
rgyal po was both a master scribe and an expert carver. He worked as an engraver
at least from 1514 until 1546.78 However, he did not work as a carver of illustra-
tions, thus bSod nams rnam rgyal must have been responsible for the engraving
of the illustrations and, likely, of the title page of AT 61/21_3. The engravers of AT
61/21_4 were instead Chos skyabs dpal bzang and dKon mchog. So far Clemente
has found the latter artist mentioned only in this xylograph, therefore the carver
of the illustrations – and of the drawn frame – was probably Chos skyabs dpal
bzang. The wooden blocks of AT 61/21_5, the last print of this project, were carved
by dpon yig dPal ldan rgyal po and bSod nams rnam rgyal, and the latter probably
engraved the illustrations.
The carvers of the blocks of AT 150/7, which exhibits a frame matching with
the second type, were gnas brtan Seng ge and dpon yig dPal ldan rgyal po. Nei-
ther of them seems to have been trained as a carver of illustrations. Since this
xylograph also belongs to the same printing project as the prints described above,
it also shares the same painter of the illustrations, namely Chos bzang.
||
71 On this work, see Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000a, 70; Ehrhard 2000b, XIV, 21–96. This
work was erroneously identified as a rDzong dkar print in Clemente 2016a, 409.
72 On this work, see Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000a, 70; Ehrhard 2000b, XIV, 97–143. This
work was erroneously identified as a rDzong dkar print in Clemente 2016a, 409.
73 On this work, see Ehrhard 2000b, XIV, 145–210. See also Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000a,
70. This work was erroneously identified as a rDzong dkar print in Clemente 2016a, 409.
74 On this work, see Ehrhard 2000b, XIV, 211–240. See also Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000a,
70. This work was erroneously identified as a rDzong dkar print in Clemente 2016a, 409;
Clemente 2016b, 81.
75 This monastery is located in the Nub ris region, in Mang yul Gung thang. See Ehrhard 2000a,
70.
76 lHa mdun is located in the Nub ris region, in Mang yul Gung thang.
77 On this artist, see also Ehrhard 2000a, 70.
78 On this artist, see also Clemente 2017; Ehrhard 2000a, 70; Ehrhard 2013, 145.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 307
4 Chab rom phug, Glang phug, A ti sha'i chos
'khor, and mDzo lhas
The number of identified prints from Chab rom phug, mDzo lhas and A ti sha’i
chos 'khor analysed so far is extremely limited, therefore it is not possible to make
significant remarks. However, here we can provide the available data in the hope
of supplementing these with further information in the coming months.
Chab rom phug
Chab rom phug is a hermitage located near the village of Rud, south of Kun gsal
sGang po che and west of rDzong dkar. It was established by bTsun pa Chos legs
as one of his retreat places, therefore the works printed there seem to be associ-
ated with the bo dong pa tradition. Chos dbang rgyal mtshan also moved there in
1511.79
So far we have identified three prints from Chab rom phug, vol. 286/3,80
NGMPP AT 61/21_781 and L18/3.82 The drawn frame of all prints belongs to the first
type and to the same variation, 1b. The two first xylographs were printed in 1515
during the same project. The name of the drawer of the illustrations is not cited
in any of these prints. Among the carvers mentioned in vol. 286/3, Chos skyabs
dpal bzang and bSod nams rnam rgyal should be those who engraved the title
frames. The carvers of the blocks of AT 61/21_7 were instead bSam grub seng ge
and dPal ldan rgyal po.83 Unfortunately, so far we have no evidence that they used
to carve illustrations as well. The third xylograph was printed in 1525. The drawer
of the illustrations is dpon chen Grags mgon, whose name appears only in this
print. The carver is again Chos skyabs dpal bzang.
||
79 See Ehrhard 2000a, 24.
80 This text is also reproduced in Ehrhard 2000b, 241–321. See also Clemente 2016a, 412;
Clemente 2016b, 81–82; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 2; Ehrhard 2000a, 24, 71;
Ehrhard 2000b, XV.
81 This text is also reproduced in Ehrhard 2000b, 323–47. See also Clemente (in press); Ehrhard
2000a, 71; Ehrhard 2000b, XV.
82 The colophon is transliterated in Ehrhard 2000a, 95–100. See also Clemente 2016a, 412;
Clemente 2016b, 82; Clemente (in press); Ehrhard 2000a, 72.
83 The name of the second carver is found in the biography of bTsun pa Chos legs. Cf. NGMPP
L18/3, fol. 110a5.
308 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Glang phug
We were able to locate only two prints from Glang phug (La ’de/’debs Valley),
namely vols 709/284 and 709/3,85 both produced in 1554 by Nam mkha' dpal 'byor,
a disciple of Nam mkha' rdo rje. The frame of both xylographs matches with the
second type with two variations, 2e1 and 2d respectively. The carver of the frame
of the former print should be dpon btsun Padma. The drawer of the frame of the
latter xylograph seems to be mkhas pa bSod nams 'od zer, who is actually a re-
nowned scribe.86 The carver is bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal mtshan.
A ti sha'i chos 'khor
So far we have identified only one print from A ti sha'i chos 'khor (La ’de/’debs
Valley), that is to say vol. 1466,87 which was produced in 1546 by Nam mkha' rdo
rje and rtogs ldan dPal mgon. Its frame belongs to the second type, variation 2a.
The drawer of the frame should be mkhas pa sKyab pa and the carver dpon btsun
Padma.
mDzo lhas
mDzo lhas should be situated on the banks of the dPal khud mtsho, not far from
Chos sdings, in Gung thang. So far we have been able to locate only one print
from this place, vol. 671/6,88 which was produced in 1540. Its frame belongs to the
first type, variation 1c. The drawer of the frame should be mkhas pa sKyab pa and
the carver bSod nams bkra shis.
||
84 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 412; Clemente 2017; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck
2003, 342; Ehrhard 2000a, 55–66; Sernesi 2013, 205.
85 On this work, see Clemente 2016a, 412; De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 342; Ehrhard 2000a, 55–66,
77, 171–75; Sernesi 2013, 205.
86 On this artist, see also Ehrhard 2000a, 73–74, 76–78; Jackson 1996, 122; Roesler 2000, 229.
87 The text is available in U rgyan rdo rje 1976, 381–449. On this work, see also Clemente 2016a,
413; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 458–59; Ehrhard 2000a, 65, 162–64.
88 On this work, see Clemente 2015, 190; Clemente 2016a, 413; Clemente 2016b, 77; Clemente
2017; Clemente (in press); De Rossi Filibeck 2003, 335; Ehrhard 2000a, 75–76, 130–41.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 309
5 Conclusion
This article has been undertaken with the aim of presenting the identified typology
and variations of the drawn frames of 16th-century Mang yul Gung thang xylographs
and making some preliminary remarks on sixty prints that have been examined so
far.
Preliminary results show that the drawn frames matching with the first type
can be found in xylographs produced in all the printing houses except Glang phug
and Ati sha'i chos 'khor, although the number of prints from the latter places is too
limited to provide us with the necessary amount of data. Xylographs with a title
frame belonging to the second type come from all printing houses but Chab rom
phug and mDzo lhas. Unfortunately, we do not have enough specimens even from
the latter places. The third type is only present in prints from Brag dkar rta so, which
is the most productive printing house in the Mang yul Gung thang kingdom.
It seems that the first type of drawn frames goes back to 1514 and is associated
with 'Tsho rkyen. The first variation of this type appears to be 1b. In the following
year a xylograph with the same variation was printed at Chab rom phug. The carvers
of the illustrations seem to have been the same, namely Chos skyabs dpal bzang
and bSod nams rnam rgyal. Both prints were produced by bTsun pa Chos legs. Ac-
cording to our study, the second type appears for the first time in the same year,
1514, at ’Tsho rkyen, during the same printing project of the above-mentioned xylo-
graphs under the supervision of bTsun pa Chos legs. The artists are therefore the
same. However, it seems that this type starts to be widely used from 1523-24. It seems
indeed comprehensible that the first type, which exhibits the simplest drawing, was
the first to be adopted. The third type, which is the more elaborated, appears to have
been developed many years later, after 1555; however, we do not have enough ex-
amples of this kind of drawn frame to hazard a guess.
While examining the colophons and signatures of these sixty prints, we noticed
that most artists were employed in several printing houses, especially those who
were specialised in two or more tasks. It appears that supervisors of projects used
to summon the same group of artists for all their enterprises. Some of these super-
visors, such as bTsun pa Chos legs and Chos dbang rgyal mtshan, had several resi-
dences, therefore they organised printing projects in different places. Only fifteen
artists are mentioned as drawers and carvers of illustrations. As explained above,
we think that the same artists were also responsible for the title frames. Among the
fifteen artists, nine acted as draftsmen and five as engravers, only one craftsman
was specialised in both arts. Five of the nine drawers, namely bSod nams 'od zer,
dpon chen Grags mgon, rDo rje mgon po, mkhas pa Chos dpal and mkhas pa sMon
310 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
lam, worked in the production of one xylograph each. Information on the activities
of these artists can be found in the appendix of this essay.
Since this field of research is completely new, at this stage of the research we
are not able to suggest whether the typology of the title pages is associated with the
specific style of a certain printing house or rather with a particular artist. Since the
identification of the provenance of early xylographs was one of the aims of the Ti-
BET project, and the location of characteristic stylistic features is one of the ele-
ments that may help discovering the origin of each print, all these features have
been investigated according to place of production. This is also the reason why pre-
liminary results on the study of title frames have been listed according to printing
houses. Although these results seem not to indicate that the style of drawn frames
depends on a certain place of production, the fact that several supervisors organ-
ised projects in different printing houses does not allow us to exclude this possibil-
ity. It is indeed likely that the style of drawn frames is associated to the guidelines
given by the supervisors of these enterprises, therefore the fact that these organisers
moved from one place to another makes our research much more complicated. This
question will possibly find an answer only when further prints and projects of the
same period and area are analysed. It is our hope to expand this research in the
coming months.
Appendix
A chart with the available information on the activities of the above-mentioned fif-
teen artists is provided below. Names appear in Tibetan alphabetical order. The
third column shows the printing houses where each artist was employed. Printing
houses are indicated with abbreviations: BK for Brag dkar rta so; KS for Kun gsal
sgang po che; ZK for rDzong dkar; GN for gNas; TK for 'Tsho rkyen; CR for Chab rom
phug; GP for Glang phug; ACK for Ati sha'i chos 'khor; ZH for mDzo lhas. The fourth
column shows the specialisation of each artist. In this chart we only took into ac-
count two specialisations, namely drawer and carver of illustrations and title
frames. The specialisations are marked with D and C respectively. In case of an artist
skilled in two tasks, the specialisation for which he is more renowned goes first. The
fifth column indicates the types on which the artist worked.
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 311
Artist’s name Years of activity Printing Specialisa- Typology of drawn
houses tion frame
mkhas pa sKyab pa 1521–1546 KS ZK ACK ZH D & C Type 1 & Type 2
dpon chen Grags mgon 1525 CR D Type 1
Chos skyabs dpal bzang 1514–1525 ZK TK CR C Type 1
mkhas pa Chos dpal 1538/39 KS D Type 1
ltas dga' Chos bzang 1514 TK D Type1 & Type 2
mkhas pa Don bzang After 1557–1561 BK GN D Type 2 & Type 3
mkhas pa Dri med 1521–after 1557 BK KS ZK D Type1, Type 2 &
Type3
mkhas pa rDo rje mgon 1521 ZK D Type1
po
bcu dpon rDo rje rgyal 1538/39–1563 BK KS GN GP C Type1, Type 2 &
mtshan Type3
dpon btsun Padma 153889–1561 BK GP ACK C Type1, Type 2 &
Type 3
mkhas pa dPal chen 1540/52–after BK KS D Type 1, Type 3
155590
mkhas pa sMon lam 1538/39 KS D Type1
mkhas pa bSod nams 1523/24–after BK KS ZK ZH C Type1, Type 2 &
bkra shis 1555 Type 3
bSod nams rnam rgyal 1514–1521 ZK TK CR C Type 1
mkhas pa bSod nams 1554 GP D Type 2
'od zer
||
89 dPon btsun Padma started to work as a carver of blocks in 1533. We know that he was respon-
sible for the engraving of the xylograph of Nam mkha' rgyal mtshan's biography, which was
produced in one of the printing houses of the La 'de Valley. Cf. NGMPP L18/14: fol.19b (carver’s
signature at the bottom of the folio) and fol. 48a6.
90 mkhas pa dPal chen also worked as the drawer of illustrations of a xylograph printed at
bTsum in 1546. The data about this xylograph were not included in this essay because prints
produced at bTsum are still under examination.
312 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
References
Primary sources
dPal brtsegs 2013 = dPal brtsegs bod yig dpe rnying zhib ’jug khang, Bod kyi shing spar lag
rtsal gyi byung rim mdor bsdus. Bod ljongs bod yig dpe rnying dpe skrun khang 2013.
NGMPP AT53/17-54/1 = Klong chen rab ’byams pa Dri med ’od zer (1308–1364), Theg pa’i
mchog rin po che’i mdzod. Xylograph kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–
510a).
NGMPP AT61/21_1 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), Nyams yig ma ṇi'i lu gu rgyud. Microfilm
kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–37a).
NGMPP AT61/21_2 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), blTa ba'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa. Mi-
crofilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–76a).
NGMPP AT61/21_3 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), sGom pa'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa. Mi-
crofilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–47a).
NGMPP AT61/21_4 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), sPyod pa'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa. Mi-
crofilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–66a).
NGMPP AT61/21_5 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), 'Bras bu'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa. Mi-
crofilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–30a).
NGMPP AT61/21_7 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), Phyag rgya chen po’i dka' ba'i gnas gsal
byed sgron ma. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–25a).
NGMPP AT167/5-168/1 = Srong btsan sgam po, Chos skyong ba'i rgyal bsrong btsan rgan po’i
bka’ ‘bum las smad kyi cha zhal gdams kyi bskor ba. Microfilm kept at the National Ar-
chives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–319a).
NGMPP E908/3 = rJe ras chung pa’i rnam thar mdor bsdus. Microfilm kept at the National Ar-
chives, Kathmandu (fols 1a-39a).
NGMPP E2517/6 = gTsang smyon Heruka (1452–1507), Sangs rgyas thams cad kyi rnam ‘phrul
rje btsun ti lo pa’i rnam mgur. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols
1a–24a).
NGMPP E2518/4 = sGam po pa (1079–1153), Chos rje dags po lha rje’i gsung / bstan chos lung
gi nyid ’od. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–25a).
NGMPP E2518/5 = bSod nams dpal, bDe gshegs phag mo gru pa’i rnam thar. Microfilm kept at
the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–18a).
NGMPP E2518/6 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), edited by, Grub thob gling ras
kyi rnam mgur mthong ba don ldan. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu
(fols 1a–61b).
NGMPP E2518/11 = Ko brag pa bSod nams rgyal mtshan (1170–1249), Khams gsum ‘dran bral
grub thob ko rag pa’i mgur ‘buṃ bzhugs / badzra dho dza. Microfilm kept at the National
Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–16a).
NGMPP E2934/3-2935/1 = Chos skyong ba'i rgyal po bsrong btsan rgam po'i bka' 'bum las
smad kyi cha zhal gdams kyi bskor. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu
(fols 1a–371a).
NGMPP L10/21 = Po to ba (1027–1105), dPe chos rin chen spungs pa’i zhung. Microfilm kept at
the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a-7a).
NGMPP L10/22 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), dPe chos rin po che spungs pa’i
‘bum ‘grel. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–170a).
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 313
NGMPP L18/3 = dPal ldan bla ma dam pa chos legs mtshan can gyi rnam thar yon tan ‘brug
sgra. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–150a).
NGMPP L66/5 = Chos dbang rgyal mtshan (1484–1549), mTshan ldan bla ma dam pa mnyam
med chos dbang rgyal mtshan gyi rnam par thar pa / rin po che nor bu'i phreng ba. Micro-
film kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–129b).
NGMPP L109/11 = Zla ba rgyal mtshan, mKhas grub sha ra rab 'jam pa sangs rgyas seng ge'i
rnam thar mthong ba don ldan ngo mtshar nor bu'i phreng ba shar 'dod yid 'phrog blo
gsal mgul brgyan. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–26a).
NGMPP L189/4 = mChog ldan mgon po (1497–1531), sPrul sku rig 'dzin mchog ldan mgon po'i
rnam thar mgur 'bum dad ldan spro ba bskyed byed. Microfilm kept at the National Ar-
chives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–241a).
NGMPP L189/5-190/1 = mChog ldan mgon po (1497–1531), Rig 'dzin sprul sku mchog ldan
mgon po'i rnam thar mgur 'bum gyi smad cha rnams. Microfilm kept at the National Ar-
chives, Kathmandu (fols 1a-52a).
NGMPP L250/8-251/1 = gTsang smyon Heruka (1452–1507), rJe btsun mi la ras pa rnam thar
rgyas par phye pa mgur 'bum. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols
1a–250a).
NGMPP L456/14 = Tilopa (928-?), rGyal ba rdo rje ‘chang yab yum gyi rnam thar. Microfilm kept
at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–11a).
NGMPP L477/14 = Mi la ras pa (1040–1123), Thun mong ma yin pa rdo rje mgur drug sogs /
mgur ma 'ga ‘yar. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–19a).
NGMPP L512/8 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), rGyud kyi dgongs pa gtsor ston
pa / phyag rgya chen po yi ge bzhi pa’i ‘grel bshad gnyug ma’i gter mdzod. Microfilm kept
at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–50a).
NGMPP L535/5 = 'Ba' ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang (1310–1391), rJe btsun 'ba' ra ba rgyal
mtshan dpal bzang po'i rnam thar mgur 'bum dang bcas pa. Microfilm kept at the Na-
tional Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–214b).
NGMPP L560/23 = 'Brom ston rGyal ba'i 'byung gnas (1008-1064), Jo bo rje’i bstod pa ‘brom
ston rgyal ba’i ‘byung gnas kyis mdzad pa’i phun tshog bham ga ma. Microfilm kept at the
National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–3a).
NGMPP L569/10 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473-1557), Phyag rgya chen po yi ge bzhi
pa’i sa bcad sbas don gsal ba’i nyi ma. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kath-
mandu (fols 1a–9a).
NGMPP L969/4 = gTsang smyon Heruka (1452–1507), sGra bsgyur mar pa lo tstsha’i mgur
‘bum. Microfilm kept at the National Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–40a).
NGMPP L969/4_1 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), mKhas grub kun gyi gtsug
rgyan / paṇ chen nā ro pa’i rnam thar / ngo mtshar rmad ‘byung. Microfilm kept at the Na-
tional Archives, Kathmandu (fols 1a–46a).
PBP 2007 = Pho brang po ta la do dam khru'u rig dngos zhib 'jug khang, Pho brang po ta lar
tshags pa'i bka' brgyud pa'i gsung 'bum dkar chag. Lhasa: Bod ljongs mi dmangs dpe
skrun khang, 2007.
U rgyan rdo rje (1976), Rare dkar brgyud pa Texts from Himachal Pradesh. A Collection of Bio-
graphical Works and Philosophical Treatises. Reproduced from Prints from Ancient West-
ern Tibetan Blocks. New Delhi: Instituts d’Asie. Centre d’Études Tibétaines.
Vol. 286/1 = Yang dgon pa rGyal mtshan dpal (1213–1258), rGyal ba yang dgon chos rje’i mgur
’bum. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–165a).
314 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Vol. 286/2 = Yang dgon pa rGyal mtshan dpal (1213–1258), rGyal ba yang dgon chos rje’i bka’
’bum yid bzhin nor bu. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome
(fols 1a–128a).
Vol. 286/3 = bTsun pa Chos legs (1437–1521), Phyag rgya chen po’i khrid yig bzhugs || skal
bzang gso ba’i bdud rtsi snying po bcud bsdus. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Col-
lection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–81a).
Vol. 361/1_1 = 'Brom ston rGyal ba'i 'byung gnas (1004/5–1064), Jo bo rin po che rje dpal ldan
a ti sha rnam thar rgyas pa yongs grags. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan Collection,
IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 20a–119a).
Vol. 361/2 = 'Brom ston rGyal ba'i 'byung gnas (1004/5–1064), dGe bshes ston pas mdzad pa’i
glegs bam gyi bka’ rgya. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library,
Rome (fols 120a–123a).
Vol. 361/3 = 'Brom ston rGyal ba'i 'byung gnas (1004/5–1064), Zhus lan nor bu’i phreng ba lha
chos bdun ldan gyi bla ma brgyud pa rnams kyi rnam thar. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Ti-
betan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 124a–246a).
Vol. 361/4 = Legs pa'i shes rab, edited by, Jo bo yab sras kyi gsung bgros pha chos rin po che'i
gter mdzod / byang chub sems dpa'i nor bu'i phreng ba rtsa 'grel sogs. Xylograph kept in
the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 247a–365a).
Vol. 363/1 = A.A.V.V., 'Brom ston pa rgyal ba’i ’byung gnas kyi skyes rabs bka’ gdams bu chos
le’u nyi shu pa. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols
1a–214a).
Vol. 363/2 = A.A.V.V. bKa’ rgya / khu chos gnyis / lung bstan / rdor glu / kha skong rnams. Xy-
lograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 215a–343a).
Vol. 587 = Shākya btsun pa Kun dga’ chos bzang (1433–1503), ʼJam dbyangs zhal gyi pad dkar
’dzuṃ phye nas | lung rigs gter mdzod ze ’bru bzheng la | blo gsal rkang drug ldan rnaṃ
’phur lding rol | legs bshad sbrang rtsi’i dga’ ston ’gyed pa. Xylograph kept in the Tucci
Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–124a).
Vol. 657/3 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), Tshe gcig la ’ja’ lus brnyes pa rje ras
chung pa’i rnam thar rags bsdus mgur rnam rgyas pa. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan
Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–93a).
Vol. 657/4 = rGod tshang ras chen (1482–1559), rJe btsun ras chung rdo rje grags pa’i rnam
thar rnam mkhyen thar lam gsal bar ston pa’i me long ye shes kyi snang ba. Xylograph
kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–243a).
Vol. 657/5 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), dPal ldan bla ma dam pa mkhas grub
lha btsun chos kyi rgyal po’i rnam mgur blo ’das chos sku’i rang gdangs. Xylograph kept
in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–54a).
Vol. 657/6 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), rNal ’byor dbang phyug lha btsun
chos kyi rgyal po’i rnam thar gyi smad cha. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection,
IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–32a).
Vol. 671/1 = ’Ba’ ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang (1310–1391). rJe btsun ’ba’ ra pa rgyal mtshan
dpal bzang po’i rnam thar mgur ’bum dang bcas pa. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan
Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–190b).
Vol. 671/5 = ’Ba’ ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang (1310–1391), sKyes mchog ’ba’ ra bas mdzad
pa’i sgrub pa nyams su blang ba’i lag len dgos ’dod ’byung ba’i gter mdzod. Xylograph
kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 223a–365a).
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 315
Vol. 671/6 = ’Ba’ ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang (1310–1391), sKyes mchog gi zhus lan thugs
kyi snying po zab mo’i gter mdzod. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO
Library, Rome (fols 366a–397a).
Vol. 671/7 = 'Ba' ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang (1310–1391), sKyes mchog 'ba' ra pas mdzad
pa'i mdo sngags kyi smon lam. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Li-
brary, Rome (fols 398a–401a).
Vol. 706 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), Grub thob gtsang pa smyon pa’i rnam
thar dad pa’i spu long g.yo ba. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Li-
brary, Rome (fols 1–65a).
Vol. 707 = Aśvaghoṣa, sTon pa sangs rgyas kyi skyes rabs brgyad bcu pa slob dpon dpa’ bos
mdzad pa bzhugs. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome
(fols 1a–170a).
Vol. 709/2 = Chos rgyal lhun grub, Shā kya’i dge slong rdo rje ‘dzin pa chen po / na<m> mkha’
rdo rje’i rnaṃ par thar pa ngo mtshar gsal ba’i me long. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Ti-
betan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–53a).
Vol. 709/3 = Shākya'i dge slong rdo rje 'dzin pa / nam mkha' rdo rje'i mgur 'bum / yid bzhin
nor bu'i bang mdzod. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome
(fols 1a–25a).
Vol. 1089/2 = lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557), edited by, rJe btsun mi la ras pa’i
rdo rje mgur drug sogs gsung rgyun thor bu ‘ga’. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Col-
lection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–109a).
Vol. 1355 = sGam po pa (1079-1153), Chos rje dags po lha rje'i gsung / bstan chos lung gi nyi
'od. Xylograph kept in the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a-27a).
Vol. 1356 = Yang dgon pa rGyal mtshan dpal (1213–1258), Phyag rgya chen po rnal ‘byor bzhi’i
rim pa snying po don gyi gter mdzod. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan Collection, IsIAO
Library, Rome (fols 1a–18a).
Vol. 1466 = ‘Ba’ ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang po (1310–1391), rGyal ba yang dgon pa'i thugs
kyi bcud ngo sprod bdun gyi mgur ma. Xylograph kept at the Tucci Tibetan Collection,
IsIAO Library, Rome (fols 1a–34a).
Secondary sources
Bacot, J. (1954), ‘Titre et colophons d’ouvrages non canoniques tibétains. Textes et traduction’,
in Bulletin de l’école Française d’Extreme-Orient 44/2: 275–337.
Clemente, M. (2007), ‘Colophons as Sources: Historical Information from some Brag dkar rta so
Xylographies’, in Rivista di Studi Sudasiatici 2: 121–160.
Clemente, M. (2009), The Life of lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557) according to His
rnam mgur and rnam thar, Unpublished PhD Thesis, ‘La Sapienza’ University of Rome.
Clemente, M. (2011), ‘From Manuscript to Block Printing: In the Search of Stylistic Models for
the Identification of Tibetan Xylographs’, in Rivista degli Studi Orientali 84: 51–66.
Clemente, M. (2014a), ‘Shedding Some Light upon lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal (1473–1557):
A Study of Two Untranslated Works from the Tucci Tibetan Collection’, in Proceedings of
the Sino-Italian Seminar of Tibetan Studies, China Tibetology Research Centre, Beijing, 17
June 2011, edited by F. Sferra and Dramdul, Beijing: The China Tibetology Research Centre,
442–510.
316 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Clemente, M. (2014b), ‘The Mani bka' 'bum’, in Buddha's Word: The Life of Books in Tibet and
Beyond, edited by M. Elliott, H. Diemberger and M. Clemente, Cambridge: Museum of Ar-
chaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 88–89.
Clemente, M. (2015), ‘The Literary Work of lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal’, in H. Havnevik and C.
Ramble (ed.), From Bhakti to Bon. Festschrift for Per Kvaerne, Oslo: Novus Forlag, 185–
200.
Clemente, M. (2016a), ‘The Unacknowledged Revolution? A Reading of Tibetan Printing History
on the Basis of Gung thang Colophons Studied in Two Dedicated Projects’, in H. Diem-
berger, F.-K. Ehrhard and P. Kornicki (eds), Tibetan Printing: Comparisons, Continuities,
and Change, Leiden: Brill, 394–423.
Clemente, M. (2016b), ‘Different Facets of Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs’, in O. Almogi (ed.),
Tibetan Manuscript and Xylograph Traditions. The Written Work and Its Media within the
Tibetan Cultural Sphere (Indian and Tibetan Studies 4), Hamburg: Department of Indian
and Tibetan Studies, University of Hamburg, 67–103.
Clemente, M. (2016c), ‘The Patronage Network of lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal: From Brag
dkar rta so to the ‘Phags pa lha khang’, in E. De Rossi Filibeck, M. Clemente, G. Milanetti,
O. Nalesini and F. Venturi Studies in Honour of Luciano Petech: A Commemoration Volume
1914-2014, RSO 89/1: 103–110.
Clemente, M. (2017), ‘On a Particular Aspect of the Identification of Tibetan Xylographs: Prelim-
inary Remarks on the Importance of Craftsmen’, in D. Cuneo, E. Freschi and C.A. Formigatti
(eds), Not Far Afield: Asian Perspectives on Sexuality, Testimony and Print Culture. A Cof-
fee Break Project. Kervan-International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies 21: 373–95.
Clemente, M. (in press), ‘A Condensed Catalogue of 16th Century Tibetan Xylographs from South-West-
ern Tibet’, in M. Clemente, O. Nalesini and F. Venturi (eds), Perspectives on Tibetan Culture.
A Small Garland of Forget-me-nots offered to Elena De Rossi Filibeck, Kathmandu: Vajra
Publications.
Clemente, M. (ed.) (forthcoming a), Traditional Paths, Innovative Approaches and Digital Chal-
lenges in the Study of Tibetan Manuscripts and Xylographs.
Clemente, M. (forthcoming b), ‘The Xylographic Print’, in M. Kapstein (ed.), Tibetan Manu-
scripts and Early Prints: Towards a Manual of Tibetan Manuscript Studies, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press.
Clemente, M., H. Diemberger, A. Helman-Ważny, and F. Lunardo (forthcoming), Catalogue of
Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Prints from South-Western Tibet.
Clemente, M., and F. Lunardo (forthcoming), ‘Woodcut Illustrations in Sixteenth Century Mang
yul Gung thang Prints’, in M. Clemente, H. Diemberger, A. Helman-Ważny and F. Lunardo,
Catalogue of Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century Prints from South-Western Tibet.
Cutillo, B., and Kunga Rinpoche (1978), Drinking the Mountain Stream. Songs of Tibet’s Be-
loved Saint Milarepa, Boston: Wisdom Publications.
Cutillo, B., and Kunga Rinpoche (1986), Miraculous Journey. Further Stories and Songs of Mi-
larepa, Yogin, Poet, and Teacher of Tibet, California: Lotsawa.
Denwood, P. (1996), ‘The Artist’s Treatise of sMan bla don grub’, in The Tibet Journal, 21/2: 24–
30.
De Rossi Filibeck, E. (2003), Catalogue of the Tucci Tibetan Fund in the Library of IsIAO. Vol. 2,
Rome: Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente.
Diemberger, H., and Clemente, M. (2013), ‘Royal Kinship, Patronage and the Introduction of
Printing in Gung thang: From Chos kyi sgron ma to lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal’, in F.-K.
Ehrhard and P. Maurer (eds), Nepalica-Tibetica: Festgabe for Christoph Cüppers, Beiträge
Typology of Drawn Frames in 16th Century Mang yul Gung thang Xylographs | 317
zur Zentralasienforschung 28 & 29, Andiast: International Institute for Tibetan and Bud-
dhist Studies GmbH, 119–142.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2000a), Early Buddhist Block Prints from Mang-yul Gung-thang, Lumbini: Lum-
bini International Research Institute.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2000b), Four Unknown Mahāmudrā Works of the Bo dong pa School, Lumbini:
Lumbini International Research Institute.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2000c), The Oldest Block Print of Klong-chen Rab-ʻbyams-pa’s Theg mchog
mdzod, Lumbini: Lumbini International Research Institute.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2000d), ‘The Transmission of the dMar khrid Tshems bu lugs and the Maṇi bka’
‘bum’, in C. Chojnacki, J.-U. Hartmann and V. M. Tschannerl (eds), Vividharatnakaraṇḍaka:
Festgabe für Adelheid Mette, Swisttal-Odendorf: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 199–215.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2004), ‘“The Story of How bla ma Karma Chos bzang Came to Yol mo”: A Family
Document from Nepal’, in S. Hino and T. Wada (eds), Three Mountains and Seven Rivers:
Prof. Musashi Tachikawa’s Felicitation Volume, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 581–600, 607.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2010), ‘Editing and Publishing the Master’s Writings: The Early Years of rGod
tshang ras chen (1482-1559)’, in A. Chayet, C. Scherrer-Schaub, F. Robin, and J.-L. Achard
(eds), Editions, éditions: l’écrit au Tibet, évolution et devenir, Munich: Indus Verlag, 129–
161.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2012), ‘gNas rab ‘byams pa Byams pa phun tshogs (1503–1581) and His Contri-
bution to Buddhist Block Printing in Tibet’, in C. Ramble and J. Sudbury (eds), This World
and the Next: Contributions on Tibetan Religion, Science and Society. Proceedings of the
11th Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Königswinter 2006,
Halle: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 149–176.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2013), ‘The Royal Print of the Maṇi bka’ ’bum: Its Catalogue and Colophon’, in F.-K.
Ehrhard and P. Maurer (eds), Nepalica-Tibetica: Festgabe für Christoph Cüppers, Andiast: In-
ternational Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 143–171.
Ehrhard, F.-K. (2016), ‘Collected Writings as Xylographs: Two Sets from the Bo dong pa School’,
in H. Diemberger, F.-K. Ehrhard and P. Kornicki (eds), Tibetan Printing: Comparisons, Con-
tinuities, and Change, Leiden: Brill, 212–36.
Eimer, H. (1996), ‘Two Blockprint Fragments of Mi la ras pa’s Mgur ‘bum Kept in the Wellcome
Institute, London’, in Zentralasiatische Studien, 26: 7–20.
Eimer, H. (2010), ‘Notizen zu frühen Blockdrucken von Mi la ras pas Mgur ‘bum’, in J.-L. Ach-
ard (ed.), Études tibétaines en l’honneur d’Anne Chayet, Genève: Librairie Droz S. A.,
51–66.
Eimer, H., and P. Tsering, (1990), ‘Blockprints and Manuscripts of Mi la ras pa’s Mgur ‘bum
Accessible to Frank-Richard Hamm’, in H. Eimer (ed.), Frank-Richard Hamm Memorial
Volume. Oct. 8, 1990, Bonn: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 59–88.
Everding, K.-H. (2000), Das Königreich Mang yul Gung thang. Königtum und Herrschaftsgewalt
im Tibet des 13.-17. Jahrhunderts. Teil 1: Die Chronik Gung thang rgyal rabs. Edition und
Übersetzung. Teil 2: Studien zur Geschichte des Reiches, Monumenta Tibetica Historica,
Abteilung 1, Band 6/1–2, Bonn: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag GmbH.
Everding, K.-H. (2004), ‘rNying ma pa Lamas at the Court of Mang yul Gung thang – The Meet-
ing of the gTer ston bsTan gnyis gling pa with King Kun bzang Nyi zla grags pa’, in C. Cüp-
pers (ed.), The Relationship Between Religion and State (chos srid zung ‘brel) in Tradi-
tional Tibet. Proceedings of a Seminar Held in Lumbini, Nepal, March 2000, Lumbini:
Lumbini International Research Institute, 267–291.
Guenther, H. V. (1963), The Life and Teachings of Náropa, Oxford–London: Clarendon Press.
318 | Michela Clemente and Filippo Lunardo
Jackson, D. P. (1996), A History of Tibetan Painting: The Great Tibetan Painters and Their Tradi-
tions (Phil.-Hist. Klasse, Denkschriften 242 / Beiträge zur Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte
15), Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Larsson, S. (2012), Crazy for Wisdom. The Making of a Mad Yogin in Fifteenth-Century Tibet, Lei-
den–Boston: Brill.
Lo Bue, E., and F. Ricca, (1990), Gyantse Revisited, Firenze: Le Lettere.
Lunardo, F. (forthcoming a), ‘A Preliminary Analysis on Four Illustrations of 16th Century Mang
yul gung thang Blockprints’, in M. Clemente (ed.), Traditional Paths, Innovative Ap-
proaches and Digital Challenges in the Study of Tibetan Manuscripts and Xylographs.
Lunardo, F. (forthcoming b), ‘Particular elements of Mang yul Gung thang Illustrations: A Brief
Note on the Iconography of bTsun pa Chos legs and Gling ras pa Padma rDo rje.’
NGMPP= Nepal-German Manuscript Preserving Project (1970–2002) available at
https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/forschung/ngmcp
Petech, L. (1990), Central Tibet and the Mongols. The Yüan-Sa skya Period of Tibetan History,
Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.
Roberts, P. A. (2007), The Biography of Rechungpa: The Evolution of a Tibetan Hagiography,
Abingdon–New York: Routledge.
Roesler, U. (2000), ‘Zusatzbemerkung zu Helmut Eimers Beitrag’, in C. Chojnacki, J.-U. Hart-
mann and V. M. Tschannerl (eds), Vividharatnakaraṇḍaka: Festgabe für Adelheid Mette,
Swisttal-Odendorf: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 227–232.
Roesler, U. (2011), Frühe Quellen zum Buddhistischen Stufenweg in Tibet: Indische und tibeti-
sche Traditionen im “dPe chos” des Po-to-ba Rin-chen-gsal, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag.
Schaeffer, K. R. (2009), The Culture of the Book in Tibet, New York: Columbia University Press.
Schaeffer, K. R. (2011), ‘The Printing Projects of Gtsang smyon He ru ka and His Disciples’, in R.
R. Jackson and M. T. Kapstein (eds), Mahāmudrā and the Bka’-brgyud Tradition. Proceed-
ings of the Eleventh Seminar of the International Association for Tibetan Studies, Kö-
nigswinter 2006, Halle: International Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH,
453–479.
Sernesi, M. (2004), ‘Mi la ras pa’s Six Secret Songs. The Early Transmission of the bde mchog
snyan brgyud’, in East and West, 54/1–4: 251–284.
Sernesi, M. (2011), ‘A Continous Stream of Merit: The Early Reprints of gTsang smyon Heruka’s
Hagiographical Works’, in Zentralasiatische Studien, 40: 179–237.
Sernesi, M. (2013), ‘Rare Prints of bKa' brgyud Texts: A Preliminary Report’, in F.-K. Ehrhard and
P. Maurer (eds), Nepalica-Tibetica: Festgabe für Christoph Cüppers, Andiast: International
Institute for Tibetan and Buddhist Studies GmbH, 191–210.
Sernesi, M. (2016), ‘Works and Networks of mkhas pa Dri med. On the Illustrations of 16th Cen-
tury Tibetan Printed Books’, in H. Diemberger, F.-K. Ehrhard and P. Kornicki (eds), Tibetan
Printing: Comparisons, Continuities, and Change, Brill: Leiden.
Smith, E. G. (2001), Among Tibetan Texts. History and Literature of the Himalayan Plateau, Bos-
ton: Wisdom Publications.
Stearns, C. (2000), Hermit of Go Cliffs: Timeless Instructions from a Tibetan Mystic, Boston:
Wisdom Publications.
BDRC = Buddhist Digital Resource Centre available at www.tbrc.org
Emmanuel Francis
The Other Way Round: From Print to
Manuscript
Abstract: The Tirumurukkāṟṟuppaṭai, possibly dated to the 7th century, is one of the
earliest Tamil texts to have been published in the first half of 19th c. in Tamil Nadu.
It is a poem in 317 lines praising the god Murukaṉ and it has been popular in at least
three different circles as one among the Pattuppāṭṭu of the so-called Caṅkam cor-
pus, as part of the canon of devotional Tamil Śaiva texts (the Tirumuṟai), and as a
devotional text of its own, independent of Śaivism. Among the more than fifty ex-
tant manuscripts from the Tirumurukkāṟṟuppaṭai that I have been so far able to ex-
amine, I had the surprise to find that four are in fact palm-leaf copies of earlier
printed editions. This fact raises several questions that I will try to address in this
paper. Why would one have ordered a manuscript copy of a printed book? Is it re-
lated to economical, religious or ritual preoccupations? Was ōlai (palm-leaf)
cheaper than paper? Was the printed book no more available? What was the use of
such a manuscript? Are there other such manuscripts in India?
1 Introduction
A systematic search, for a project of critical edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai as
well as for a study of the paratexts and commentaries of this possibly 7th-century
devotional Tamil poem to Murukaṉ, has yielded so far more than 50 manuscript
witnesses―all on palm leaves―of that text (mūlam) and/or its commentary (urai).1
Among these, four stand in an interesting relationship with early printed editions.
One has a title-page identical with that of a printed edition (mentioning the name
of the editor-commentator, the date, and the year of publication). Another has a
less explicit title-page, but nonetheless one of the print culture type, as opposed to
briefer mentions of titles in the manuscript tradition. All have an introduction to
the book that is similar in content. This introduction variously called pirapantava-
ralāṟu or nūl varalāṟu, ‘history of the work,’ is not found in other manuscripts, but
appeared in several of the early printed editions. Even though some of these man-
uscript witnesses could theoretically be pre-print drafts sent to the press, there are
||
1 I have accessed these manuscripts through digital photos and, for some among them, seen
the physical objects in the libraries safekeeping them.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-011, © 2017 E. Francis, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
320 | Emmanuel Francis
good reasons, expounded below, for assuming that they are indeed manuscript
copies of printed editions.
The study of such manuscript copies of printed books is instructive in several
respects. It puts the focus on the period of transition between manuscript and print
culture, a slow process indeed, as print did not rapidly cause the disappearance of
manuscripts. It also enables us to observe scribes’ habits of writing and editing
since we can compare the master printed version to the manuscript copy and see
the transformations and additions made by the scribe when copying the printed
edition (scribal blessings, colophons, headings). In the present case, the manu-
scripts of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai raise questions that pertain to the history of that
text only, but other issues concern also the whole Indian and Indic manuscript cul-
ture in the age of print culture.2
As for the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, how to account for such a proportion of man-
uscript witnesses (approximately one in ten) copied from printed books? Is it an
exceptional proportion? What do we know about other manuscript copies of
printed books in the Indian and Indic world? Is it a widespread phenomenon? Why
would one have commissioned a manuscript copy of a printed book? Is the reason
for having such a copy made linked to economic, technological, sociological, reli-
gious or ritual reasons? In the case of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, why was palm-leaf
used and not paper? Was it cheaper? Was the printed book no longer available?
What was the raison d’être of such a manuscript? The merit of the scribe and/or the
commissioner? Its cultural value or symbolism? Was the handwritten palm-leaf
book―that is a traditional book―considered different and more valuable than the
modern book printed on paper?
These are just a few of the issues at stake and I am afraid I cannot even respond
to most of the questions asked here, but I hope that the following discussion on the
four examples of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai can throw a ray of light and suggest
paths to explore.
I will describe these four examples, make codicological observations, compare
their texts to those of the printed editions they were (or are suspected to be) copied
from. I will check if some of the reasons that prompted, in these four particular
cases, the creation of a manuscript copy of a printed edition, are assessable from
an examination of the physical witnesses. I will then come back to the problem in
the larger perspective of Indian and Indic manuscript culture. But to begin with,
some more information about the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai might be useful.
||
2 Under Indic I include other regional manuscript cultures (insular and continental Southeast
Asia, central Asia) that have much in common with Indian manuscript culture (writing support,
related scripts, sometimes same language and similar literary and religious culture).
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 321
2 The Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai
The Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is one of the long poems of the so-called Caṅkam corpus
of classical Tamil texts, itself comprised of the Pattuppāṭṭu (‘The Ten Long Poems,’
of which the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is traditionally the first) and the Eṭṭuttokai (‘The
Eight Anthologies’ of shorter poems). The root-text of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai
dates maybe to the end of the 6th or the beginning of 7th century CE and has been the
object of commentaries at least from the 14th century. The poem, in 317 metrical lines
(aṭis), praises the god Murukaṉ, a name in fact attested only once in the work, while
Muruku is used twice. This deity already combines in this text northern Sanskritic
and southern features; in other words Murukaṉ is here already identified with
Skanda.
The poem lauds Murukaṉ in six different abodes, most only vaguely described
geographically. These abodes are identified with the major temples of the god in
present-day Tamil Nadu (see Francis 2015). The division of the text into six sections
is reflected in the inter-titles used in the manuscripts (most of which seem to date
to the 19th century).
Besides being one of the Caṅkam poems, the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is also part
of another textual canon, as it is found in the eleventh Tirumuṟai. The twelve Tiru-
muṟais or the twelve books of The Tirumuṟai constitute the devotional Śaiva corpus
in Tamil, compiled in the 12th century. Murukaṉ was accommodated in the Tiru-
muṟai because of his identification with Skanda, the son of Śiva.
It thus appears that the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai has been cherished in different
circles. First, as one among the Pattuppāṭṭu of the so-called Caṅkam corpus, it was
appreciated as a literary work. Second, as part of the eleventh Tirumuṟai, it was
considered a devotional Tamil Śaiva text. The extant manuscripts however show
that it is rarely transmitted in serial Tirumuṟai and Pattuppāṭṭu manuscripts. In fact,
it is more often found either alone (whether mūlam only, urai only, or mūlam with
urai) or in multiple-text manuscripts, some of which are compilations of Śaiva
Tamil texts while, for some others, the rationale of the collection remains unclear.
The manuscript history of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, which is mainly a history of the
19th century situation (the period of most of the manuscripts), shows that the text
has been transmitted as a devotional text, sometimes in a Śaiva context, sometimes
with no apparent relation to an exclusive Śaiva devotion.
322 | Emmanuel Francis
This devotional quality of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai explains why among the
works of the Caṅkam corpus it is the one for which we have today the largest num-
ber of manuscripts.3 Additional stanzas to the root-text attest to the salvific or pro-
tective power of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai. Such is the case of the so-called
kāppu―the most frequent of the ‘satellite stanzas,’ as Wilden (2014, 202, and see
also Wilden in this volume) calls them, found in the manuscripts of the Tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai. This stanza―which also appears in printed editions; see, for in-
stance, Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai 1956, 82―may perhaps be read at the same time as an
initial benediction, as it is mostly found in the beginning of the manuscripts, and
as a phalaśruti, since it seems to imply that the recitation of the text will urge
Murukaṉ’s help for his devotee:
orumuru kāveṉṟe4 ṉuḷḷaṅ kuḷira vuvantuṭaṉē
varumuru kāveṉṟu vāyveru vāniṟpak kaiyiṅṅaṉē
tarumuru kāveṉṟu tāṉpulam pāniṟpat taiyaṉmuṉṉē
tirumuru kāṟṟup paṭaiyuṭa ṉēvaruñ cēvakaṉē
While my heart/mind cools saying ‘O unique Murukaṉ!’
While my mouth keeps being in awe saying ‘Come, O Murukaṉ, as soon as pleased!’5
While it keeps speaking grievingly saying ‘Give, O Murukaṉ, presently (in my) hand!’
The warrior comes with the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, in front of the lady.6
This stanza, as I understand it,7 means that if one worships Murukaṉ with the Tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai, the god will shower his grace. The text also gained wide popular-
ity as Murukaṉ became an identity-marker of Tamilness (see Clothey 1978, 2). Fur-
thermore the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai had―and still has―a marked devotional and
ritual dimension, as a recited text. These particulars might explain the nature of its
recent manuscript transmission (as a devotional text rather than a literary or strictly
Śaiva text) and probably also account for the fact that it is one of the earliest Tamil
texts to have been printed in the first half of the 19th century in Tamil Nadu (the first
||
3 For comparative figures of the extant manuscripts of Caṅkam works, see Wilden 2014, 42ff.
(especially 43 and 139 concerning the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai).
4 Printed editions have kāveṉṟa, while most of the manuscripts have kāveṉṟe, which I have thus
adopted here.
5 Alternatively: While my mouth keeps being in awe and rejoicing at the same time saying
‘Come, O Murukaṉ!’
6 The warrior is Murukaṉ. The lady is Murukaṉ’s consort. One might equally understand that as
soon as the Tirumurukāṟruppaṭai has been recited, the god, correctly praised by the poetry, ap-
pears before the devotee, who, as suggested to me by Dominic Goodall, imagines him- or her-
self as the god’s consort.
7 For another translation, see Wilden 2014, 206.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 323
edition known to me, by Caravaṇapperumāḷ, appeared in 1834). At the same time,
this also means that quite early in the history of print-culture in Tamil Nadu several
printed editions of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai were available as master texts for man-
uscript copies. The four witnesses of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai that I will describe
were, I believe, probably such copies.
3 Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai manuscript copies of
printed books
Table 1 provides a general overview of the four manuscripts that can be considered,
with a varying degree of certainty, as manuscript copies of printed editions of the
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai. It shows the correspondence between the manuscripts and
the supposedly master printed editions (when identified or suspected). The four
manuscript witnesses are designated here and in the following pages as the Anna-
malai MS (A1) (Figs 1–2), the Pondicherry MS (I2) (Figs 3, 5–8), the Chennai MS (G9)
(Fig. 4) and the Trivandrum MS (T4).8
Tab. 1: Manuscript copies of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai and their master printed editions.
Manuscripts Printed books
Annamalai MS (internally dated to Edition (mūlam) by Caṇmuka Aiyar, probably pub-
1853/1854 or 1913/1914). lished in the 1850s.
Pondicherry MS (internally dated to March Edition (mūlam + urai) by Āṟumukanāvalar, pub-
1864). lished several times (18531, 18662, 18733, 18814,
Chennai MS (not internally dated). 18865, 19068, 19119, 191310, 191711, 192312,
193515).
Trivandrum MS (not internally dated). Undetermined edition.
||
8 The sigla are those used in Francis 2016, where the reader will find more information about
the more than 50 manuscript witnesses of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai so far accessed. See ‘Refer-
ences: Manuscript Sources’ below for more details about these four manuscripts.
324 | Emmanuel Francis
Fig. 1: Annamalai MS, fol. 1r: title-page. Photo: E. Francis.
Fig. 2: Annamalai MS, fol. 1v: title-page and nūl varalāṟu. Photo E. Francis.
The Annamalai MS, with an internal date of 1853/4 (or, among other possibilities,
1913/4) is a copy of an edition of the root-text probably printed in the 1850s. The Pon-
dicherry MS, internally dated to 1864, and the Chennai MS, undated, are copies of
an edition of the root-text and commentary by Āṟumukanāvalar, first published in
1853 and later republished several times. In the case of the Pondicherry MS, we
know which edition was used since the title-page with the date of publication (Pi-
ramātīca year of the Jovian cycle, Aippaci month, i.e. 1853) is reproduced. The Tri-
vandrum MS has no internal date and I have not yet definitely identified the edition
of which it may be a copy.
As for the two manuscripts with no internal date (the Chennai and the Trivan-
drum MSS), our knowledge of the palaeography of Tamil manuscripts is still too
superficial to assess their age with confidence,9 but they might equally date to the
second half of the 19th century.
Concerning these four manuscripts of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai of which the
text closely follows that of printed editions, I see at first sight two possibilities. Ei-
ther they are copies of these printed books or they are the final ōlai draft given to
the press and as such an element of the chain that lead to the advent of the poem
into the print culture. Several reasons make me believe that these four manuscripts
belong to the first category.
||
9 I discuss below in detail the internal dates of the Annamalai MS and the Pondicherry MS.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 325
Firstly, as far as we know, in the 19th century, when printing gradually became
widespread in Tamil Nadu, drafts of printed books were written on paper, the usage
of which spread at that period and the price of which became more affordable.10
The Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai might however be an exception to this pattern as none of
its manuscript witnesses is paper.11
Secondly, one would expect to find specific instructions for the press if our four
manuscripts were pre-print drafts. I found none. Besides, the vertical format of pa-
per being that of most printed book, the horizontal format of palm-leaf manuscript
does not seem very suitable for a draft. Furthermore, the title-pages in our manu-
scripts, when there is one, are not particularly helpful in guiding the press towards
the layout we find in the printed editions, as they are in scriptio continua with min-
imal punctuation. They look rather like typical title-pages of palm-leaf manu-
scripts.12 But as they are longer than usual for manuscript titles, they look like the
result of retro-conversion of printed title-pages into manuscript format. The Pondi-
cherry MS looks friendlier to a printer, as it uses punctuation much more than the
others, but its internal date indicates that it is later than the printed edition whose
date is reproduced on the title-page. Finally, the Trivandrum MS, which does not
use the puḷḷi to mark consonants that are not followed with a vowel, with the result
that any consonant without puḷḷi could be read in two ways (either C [for consonant]
or C + vowel a), would not be of great help to printers in an age when most printed
books use the puḷḷi to dispel ambiguities.
Thirdly, I would presume that, given the relative affordability of paper and the
technical skills required to write―that is actually incise―on palm leaf, the editor of
a text would preferably use paper (although a traditional scholar might in fact be
more at ease with a stylus than with a pen). And I see at first sight no reason why,
once his work finished, an editor would have commissioned a professional scribe
to write down on palm leaf the final draft (unless motivated by a conservative pre-
dilection for the traditional palm-leaf support).
||
10 On paper manuscripts or transcripts of Caṅkam texts, at the transition between palm-leaf
manuscript and print, see Wilden 2014, 367ff.
11 On the lack of paper manuscripts of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, Wilden (2014, 368) comments:
‘The most likely explanation for this situation is that a) the text was still so familiar that it was
not necessary to experiment with transcribing it on paper, and b) print remained for quite some
time either too expensive or questionable as a medium for a religious work that was meant to be
used in daily worship.’
12 Only the Annamalai MS has the minimal characteristics of a printed title-page in the sense
that it has a horizontal strike to separate the mention of the title of the book and that of the editor
(Fig. 1) and isolates the word iḵtu, alone at the centre of a line. Note also the use of columns. Still
scriptio continua is used and punctuation is minimal.
326 | Emmanuel Francis
Fourthly, when such a manuscript is internally dated and when the details of
the date are enough to obtain a corresponding date in the Common Era, the manu-
script appears as later than the printed edition. Admittedly this is the case for only
one out of the four manuscripts (the Pondicherry MS).
Such arguments are not fully conclusive, I must admit. For the sake of exposi-
tion, however, I will provisionally assume that the four manuscripts of the Tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai dealt with below are indeed copies of printed editions. Let us now
examine them individually, looking especially at the differences (missing parts, ad-
ditions, variants) as compared to the printed editions.
4 The Annamalai MS
The Annamalai MS is an almost exact copy of an edition by Caṇmuka Aiyar, which
probably appeared in the 1850s. I say 1850s because this edition does not contain
any year of publication. This date in the 1850s is a guess by the compilers of the
catalogue of the RMRL, from which I obtained a digital copy (which seems com-
plete) of the book. The date approximation is seemingly based on the fact that
Caṇmuka Aiyar published other books during this decade.
The Annamalai MS gives, like Caṇmuka Aiyar’s edition in the form in which it
is available to me, a title-page (fols 1r–1v1–3, left margin), an introduction (fols 1v–
2v) referred to in the left margin as nūl varalāṟu (fol. 1v4, lm) (Figs 1–2), the so-called
kāppu (fol. 3r), and the root-text (mūlam) (fols 3v–22r). The Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is
followed in the same manuscript by another text, still to be identified, and possibly
also copied from a printed book.
Differences between the Annamalai MS and Caṇmuka Aiyar’s edition are found
in the title-page as shown in Table 2.13
||
13 I have not fully checked the manuscript, in which further possible scribal variants might oc-
cur.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 327
Tab. 2: Text of title-pages of the Annamalai MS (fols 1r–1v3, lm) and Caṇmuka Aiyar’s edition (un-
dated, p. 1). The title-page of the Annamalai MS (in scriptio continua) has been arranged so as to
parallel the printed version. I have also introduced space between words. Differences are marked
in bold.
Annamalai MS Caṇmuka Aiyar’s edition
(fol. 1r1, c1) [t]irucciṟṟampalam (1) ௳
(fol. 1r2, c1) kaṭavuḷ tuṇai (2) kaṇapati tuṇai.
(fol.1r3, c1) tirumurukāṟṟup(fol.1r4, c1)paṭai ௳ (3) tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (4) mūlapāṭam.15
[mūla]pāṭam14 (small horizontal separation)
(fol. 1r5, c1) teyvattaṉmai (fol. 1r6, c1) poruntiya (5) teyvattaṉmaiporuntiya
maturaik(fol. 1r7, c1)kaṭaiccaṅkattu (fol. 1r1, c2) (6) maturaikkaṭaiccaṅkattumakāvitva
makāvittuva
cirōṉmaṇi(fol. 1r2, c2)yākiya (7) cirōṉmaṇiyākiya
nakkīratēvar (8) nakkīratēvar
(fol. 1r3, c2) °aruḷicceytatu (9) °aruḷicceytatu.
(horizontal line) (long ornamented horizontal separation)
(fol. 1r4, c2) °iḵtu (10) °iḵtu
(fol. 1r5, c2) ti – caṇmuka°aiyaravarkaḷāl (11) ti – caṇmuka°aiyaravarkaḷāl
(fol. 1r6, c2) pārvaiyiṭappaṭṭu (12) pārvaiyiṭappaṭṭu,
(small horizontal separation)
(fol. 1r1, c3) ti – cupparāyatē(fol. 1r2, c3)cikara- (13) tiru – cupparāyatēcikaravarkaḷatu
varkaḷatu
(fol. 1r3, c3) kalvippiravākavac(fol. 1r4, c3)cuk- (14) kalvippiravākavaccukkūṭattil
kūṭattil
patippi(fol. 1r5, c3)kkappaṭṭatu – (15) patippikkappaṭṭatu.
(fol. 1r6, c3) °ivvaccukkūṭatut
(fol. 1r7, c3) talaivar paccaiya(fol. 1r8, c3)ppa-
perumāḷ
(fol. 1v1, lm) n[āyak]ar
(fol. 1v2, lm) piramātīca ((varuṣam))
(fol. 1v3, lm) mārkaḻi ((mācam))
Note first that the piḷḷaiyār cuḻi (௳, an auspicious symbol also used as punctuation
mark) and the kaṇapati tuṇai blessing (‘Gaṇapati is help’) of the printed edition
have been substituted by the words tirucciṟṟampalam―that is Cidambaram, the
temple of which is the Śaiva epicentre, so to speak, of Tamil Nadu―and by a more
||
14 The final m is in Grantha.
15 The final m is in Tamil script.
328 | Emmanuel Francis
general blessing, that is kaṭavuḷ tuṇai (‘God is help’). There are also minor ortho-
graphic variants: makāvittuva against makāvitva; [mūla]pāṭam, with final Grantha
m, against mūlapāṭam, with final Tamil m; ti against tiru. The printed edition uses
full stops, which are only sometimes reproduced, as dashes, in the manuscript. The
title-page in the manuscript is immediately followed in the left margin by the inter-
title nūl varalāṟu ௳ (fol. 1v4, left margin) while, in the printed edition, this inter-
title appears as ௳ varalāṟu. on top of page 2.
More significant is an apparent addition in the manuscript, after the legal men-
tion of the press’ owner (fol. 1r6–8, c3 to fol. 1v1–3, lm):
ivvaccukkūṭatut [i.e. ivvaccukkūṭattut] talaivar paccaiyappaperumāḷ n[āyak]ar piramātīca
((varuṣam)) mārkaḻi ((mācam))
‘The head of this printing house (that is the kalvippiravākavaccukkūṭam mentioned in the pre-
ceding sentence) Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar. Piramātīca year, Mārkaḻi month.’
This addition consists in the name of an individual who was the head (talaivar) of
the press―namely Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar, who is different from the owner
of the press mentioned in the previous sentence, namely Cupparāya Tēcikar―and
a date (piramātīca year of the Jovian cycle, mārkaḻi month).
As for the date, by want of further information (such as the day of the week and
the number of the day), I cannot determine with certainty the correspondence with
the Gregorian calendar. It might be any day between mid-December 1853 and mid-
January 1854, or between December 1913 and January 1914 (or even between mid-
December 1973 and mid-January 1974). The years 1793-1794 are impossible, because
the press mentioned on the title-page was then not yet established.
This date in the manuscript seems at first sight that of the publication of the
printed book copied. No date however appears on the title-page or elsewhere in the
copy held in the RMRL (provided this is, as it indeed seems to be, a complete copy).
One thus wonders if this date is that of the copy of the manuscript and if the manu-
script was commissioned by Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar. A further issue is
whether Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar, head of the press, was a contemporary of
Cupparāya Tēcikar, owner of the press? Could the manuscript be a preprint draft
with a mention of this second man of the press, a mention that somehow was left
out in the print version? Or is Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar the successor of Cup-
parāya Tēcikar at the head of the press? Did he fail to find a print copy of this earlier
publication of his press and did he commission a copy from a printed copy he had
access to but did not own?
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 329
Some of these conjectures can be dismissed as, according to Ayyappaṉ (2009,
96–97), there is another edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai by the Kalvippiravākam
Press dated to 1850, with the following title-page:
tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, mūlapāṭam, teyvataṉmai poruntiya, maturaik kaṭaic caṅkattu makāvit-
tuva cirōmaṇiyākiya nakkīratēvar aruḷic ceytatu. iḵtu tamiḻppulavar, vētakiri mutaliyārāl pār-
vaiyiṭappaṭṭu, pā. maturaimutaliyārāl, tiru. cupparāyatēcikaravarkaḷatu, kalvippiravākavac-
cukkūṭattil patippikkappaṭṭatu. ivvaccukkūṭattalaivar, paccaiyappa perumāḷ nāyakar, cātāraṇa
varuṭam, aippaci. (text as in Ayyappaṉ; this edition not available to me)
In this publication, the editor of the text is not Caṇmuka Aiyar but Vētakiri Mutali-
yār. We furthermore learn that Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar and Cupparāya
Tēcikar were most probably contemporary people.
It thus appears that the Kalvippiravākam Press published at least two editions
of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, each with a different editor for the text. The title-page
of the Annamalai MS is a kind of mix of the title-pages of these two printed editions:
the editor is Caṇmuka Aiyar, as in the copy held by the RMRL; there is a date and
the mention of Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar, as in the edition mentioned by Ay-
yappaṉ.
In the present state of knowledge, we face different possibilities. The Annama-
lai MS could have been copied from the two editions and the date (1853/4?) given
on its title-page would not be that of the master printed edition, but that of the copy
of the manuscript. Or there was a third edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai by the
Kalvippiravākam Press in 1853/4 and our manuscript is a copy of that. I have how-
ever not been able to trace the 1850 edition mentioned by Ayyappaṉ nor the puta-
tive 1853/4 edition in any of the resources available to me (RMRL, WorldCat). I can-
not therefore reach definite conclusions concerning the Annamalai MS. Is it a copy
mixing the respective editions of Vētakiri Mutaliyār and Caṇmuka Aiyar? Is it a copy
of an untraced 1853/4 printed edition? And in that case it cannot be ruled out that
this is the draft manuscript of this untraced third edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟup-
paṭai by the Kalvippiravākam Press (whether it eventually was printed or not).
5 The Pondicherry MS and the Chennai MS
Two manuscript witnesses, the Pondicherry MS and the Chennai MS, are copies of
Āṟumukanāvalar’s printed edition of the root-text of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai with
commentary.
The Pondicherry MS is an explicit copy as it reproduces the text of the title-page
of the printed edition with the date of the original publication (Fig. 3). This date
330 | Emmanuel Francis
Fig. 3: Pondicherry MS, unfoliated fol. 1r: title-page. © IFP
being Piramātīca year of the Jovian cycle, Aippaci month, we thus apparently know
which among the several successive editions of the printed book was copied,
namely the first edition of 1853.
Besides this date reproduced from the printed book, we also find, inside the
manuscript, at the end of five of the six sections of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, in-
termediary dated scribal colophons seemingly providing intermediary comple-
tion dates for the copying. Here are their transcriptions and correspondences in
the Gregorian calendar, which I could establish only with the invaluable help of
Marco Franceschini:
mutalāvatu | tirupparaṅkuṉṟamuṟṟum | (fol. 34v8) rudrotkāri varṣaṃ māśi ((mācam)) 22
((nāḷ)) ௳16
‘First (section). Tirupparaṅkuṉṟam complete (literally: “wholly, entirely”) (i.e. end of section
1 of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, which deals with the abode of Murukaṉ at Tirupparaṅkuṉṟam).
Rudrotkāri year, Māśi month, 22(nd) day.’ The date corresponds to March 3, 1864 (a correspond-
ence with 1924 can be ruled out as this date stands in a sequence with the last three dates, two
of which can correspond only to 1864).
°iraṇṭāvatu • tiruccīralai(fol. 51b4)vāy muṟṟum ௳ rudronkāri [i.e. rudrotkāri] (fol. 51b5)
varṣaṃ māśi ((mācam)) na na ga ((nāḷ)) virodhi varṣaṃ siṃha (fol. 51b6) māsaṃ na na na
ṭa ((nāḷ)) śa[n]ivāraṃ dinaṃ °eḻutiya yadu śrī ௳
‘Second (section). Tiruccīralaivāy complete. Rudrotkāri year, Māśi month, 3(rd)/30(th) day, Vi-
rodhi year, Siṃha month 1(st)/10(th) day, Saturday, day when Yadu Śrī wrote (?).17’ The first
date corresponds to February 13, 1864/February 15, 1924 or March 11, 1864/March 13, 1924. The
||
16 There are two piḷḷaiyār cuḻis here one after the other: the first one is an abbreviation for ‘day’,
the second a punctuation mark.
17 As explained to me by Marco Franceschini, the kaṭapayādi expressions na-na-ga and na-na-
na-ṭa can be interpreted either as 3 (0-0-3) and 1 (0-0-0-1), or as 30 (3-0[-0]) and 10 (1-0[-0-0])
respectively.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 331
second date corresponds to Saturday August 15, 1829 or August 24, 1889 (as the weekday, Sat-
urday, is stated, the corresponding year could not be 1949).
mūṉṟāvatu tiruvāviṉaṉkuṭi muṟṟum • (fol. 66v3) rudrotkāri ((varuṣam)) māci ((mācam)) 26
((nāḷ)) °amāvāsai18 – śrī |
‘Third (section). Tiruvāviṉaṉkuṭi complete. Rudrotkāri year, Māci month, 26(th) day, new
moon, Śrī (wrote ?).’ The date corresponds to March 7, 1864 (this correspondence is certain
because amāvāsya, ‘new moon night,’ is the special name for ‘1st tithi’).
kuṉṟutō(fol.78r5)rāṭal muṟṟum ௳ rudrotkāri ((varuṣam)) māśi ((mācam)) 27 ((nāḷ))
maṅkaḷavāram ௳
‘Kuṉṟutōrāṭal complete. Rudrotkāri year, Māśi month, 27(th) day, Tuesday.’ The date corre-
sponds to March 8, 1864 (this correspondence is certain because of the mention of the day of
the week: maṅkaḷavāram, i.e. the Tamilised form of Sanskrit maṅgalavāra).
paḻamutircōlai muṟṟum - (fol. 106v1) rudrotkāri varurṣaṃ [i.e. varṣaṃ] māśi ((mācam)) 28
((nāḷ)) muṭintatu ௳
‘Paḻamutircōlaimalai complete. Rudrotkāri year, Māśi month, 28(th) day. Completed.’ The date
corresponds to March 9, 1864 (a correspondence with 1924 can be ruled out as this date stands
in the sequence of four dates, two of which can correspond only to 1864)
No date was given at the end of section 4, most probably because it is the shortest
one (only 13 aṭis) and was thus written the same day as section 5 (on Kuṉṟutōrāṭal).
After the fifth date, at the end of section 6, 20 more folios follow. We thus have five
dates in Rudrotkāri (Tamil Rutirōṟkāri, Rutrōtkāri) year of the Jovian cycle, in the
Māśi month (Tamil Māci), four of which in ascending order (22, 26, 27, and 28).
There is one date in Virodhi (Tamil Virōti) year of the Jovian cycle coupled with the
only Rudrotkāri year that breaks the ascending order. These latter two dates at-
tached to the section 2 are enigmatic and might refer to another event than simply
the completion of copy of the section. Note that for these two dates only the number
of the day is stated in ambiguous kaṭapayādi expressions, as opposed to Tamil fig-
ures. This double date in any case somehow pertains to the act of writing, as the
word eḻutiya appears at its end. The details of some of the Rudrotkāri years in as-
cending order can correspond only, as pointed out to me by Marco Franceschini, to
1864 CE, which thus is most probably the year of copying of this manuscript (March
3, 7, 8 and 9 for the concerned sections). The intermediary dated colophons for com-
pletion of the sections 5 and 6 show that the copyist did write 10 to 20 folios per day.
||
18 Cf. Tamil amāvācai, from Sanskrit amāvāsya, ‘new moon.’
332 | Emmanuel Francis
Fig. 4: Chennai MS, fol. 1r: introduction. © EFEO
The Chennai MS (Fig. 4) is a ‘silent’ copy since the title-page is not reproduced (un-
less it was lost, even if the manuscript seems complete). It is not internally dated.
This witness of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is actually found in a multiple-text manu-
script, that is one codicological unit, uniform in the size of its leaves and seemingly
entirely written by the same hand, but containing three different texts. The bundle
has an unfoliated title-folio that mentions the content of the manuscript:
(fol. 1a1–2, c1) ta[t]tuvakkaṭṭalai mūlapāṭam
‘Root-text of Tattuvakkaṭṭalai.’
(fol. 1a3, c1) makāvākkiyamūlapāṭam
‘Root-text of Makāvākkiyam.’
(fol.1a1–2, c2) tirumurukāṟṟuppatai °uraipāṭam (fol. 1a1–2, c3) mūla[m a]llāmil
[i.e. illāmal]
‘Commentary to the Tirumurukāṟṟūppaṭai, without root-text.’
We thus have here the root-text of Tattuvakkaṭṭalai (GOML catalogue No. R2686)
and Makāvākkiyam (GOML catalogue No. R2687), two Śaivasiddhānta works, fol-
lowed by Āṟumukanāvalar’s edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai with commentary
(GOML catalogue No. R2688). The three texts are independently foliated. It is pos-
sible that the whole manuscript was copied from printed editions, but I have not
been able to assess that concerning the two Śaivasiddhānta works. I found no in-
ternal date in the whole manuscript.
The Pondicherry MS and the Chennai MS are not exact copies of Āṟu-
mukanāvalar’s printed book. There are minor differences, such as the use of spe-
cific blessings in the manuscripts (see for instance the left-marginal blessings and
mantras śrī hrī[ṃ*] °om hrīṃ śrī on the unfoliated fol. 1r of the Pondicherry MS,
which are probably specific to the scribe (Fig. 3)). Table 3 shows the most substan-
tial differences.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 333
Tab. 3: Content of Āṟumukanāvalar’s 1st edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai with commentary
(1853), Pondicherry MS and Chennai MS compared.
Āṟumukanāvalar’s ed. Pondicherry MS Chennai MS
(mūlam + urai) 1864 (undated)
1853
Title-page Title-page (unfoliated fols
1r–1v)
pirapantavaralāṟu (unfoli-
ated fols 2r–4v)
[Preface] (pp. 1–5) [Preface] (fols 1r–4v)
mūlam and urai (6 sections) urai (6 sections) (fols 1r– mūlam (incomplete) and urai
(pp. 5–80) 106v) (6 sections) (fols 5r–68v4)
°itaṉatu tāṟpariyam (pp. 80–83) °itaṉatu tāṟpariyam (fols
68v4–71v)
urai (4th section, repeated)
(fols 107r–110r)
[Preface] (fols 111–118r)
°itaṉatu tāṟpariyam (fols
119r–124v)
Additional stanzas (pp. 83–84) Additional stanzas (fols Additional stanzas (fols 72r–
125r–126v) 73r)
From the likely hypothesis that it was copied from the 1853 edition, the Pondi-
cherry MS of 1864 contains two additions.
First, after the title-page, four unfoliated folios provide a ‘history of the poem’
as the left-margin heading pirapantavaralāṟu indicates (Fig. 5). This introduction
consists in a text almost similar to the nūl varalāṟu (‘history of the book’) found
in other printed editions and manuscripts. But this introduction is not found in
Āṟumukanāvalar’s edition of 1853, which however starts with a preface (pp. 1–5,
not named as such however, that is without title) by Āṟumukanāvalar. This pref-
ace is also found in the Pondicherry MS, but not at the place expected (in the
beginning, as in the printed edition), for it comes after the commentary (fols 111r–
118r). The pirapantavaralāṟu is however found from the second edition of Āṟu-
mukanāvalar (1866) onwards.
334 | Emmanuel Francis
Fig. 5: Pondicherry MS, unfoliated fol. 2r: pirapantavaralāṟu. © IFP.
The second addition is found right before this original preface by Āṟu-
mukanāvalar that appears as a kind of post-face in the manuscript. We find there
repeated in seven pages (fols 107r–110r) (Fig. 6) the commentary about the fourth
section of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (which concerns the abode of Murukaṉ at
Ērakam). In fact this commentary is already found in the manuscript in the pre-
ceding folios at its expected place (fols 67r–70r) (Fig. 7). The difference is that in
the repeated version there is no introductory sentence specifying the chain of
words (toṭar) commented upon, that the text is now arranged in columns (two
columns, sometimes three) and that the bits of the root-text are not systematically
reproduced (if not reproduced, they are ‘indicated’ by an horizontal line, except
when passing from one page to another, where no indication is made). Maybe
this second version was an attempt at a different layout (the hand is the same as
in the rest of the manuscript). The fourth section of the work would have been
selected for this experiment because it is the smallest (13 aṭis only). And in any
case it is a minimalist version, as the root-text is not fully quoted as in the origi-
nal.
Fig. 6: Pondicherry MS, fol. 107r: beginning of the second version of the commentary on Ēra-
kam section of Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai. © IFP.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 335
Fig. 7: Pondicherry MS, fol. 67r: beginning of the first version of the commentary on Ērakam
section of Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai. © IFP.
The Pondicherry MS also differs from Āṟumukanāvalar’s first edition by the fact
that one portion of the commentary―namely the final concluding portion called
itaṉatu tāṟpariyam, ‘explanation of this,’ where Āṟumukanāvalar explains the
meaning of the book―is found not directly after the commentary on the sixth and
final section of the root-text, but after the repeated commentary on the fourth
section on Ērakam and the original preface by Āṟumukanāvalar now turned into
a post-face.
There is one major difference between Āṟumukanāvalar’s first printed edition
and both our manuscripts. In the printed edition, Āṟumukanāvalar provides first
the continuous root-text (mūlam) of the first section of the work (describing an
abode of Murukaṉ, which is a mountain west of Maturai), then the commentary
(urai) on that section, then the root-text of the second section of the work, fol-
lowed by its commentary, and so on, up to the sixth section. In the Pondicherry
MS there is no continuous root-text given before the commentary (in which the
root-text is at any rate quoted by bits), which, for the bits I checked, follows ex-
actly Āṟumukanāvalar’s edition. As for the Chennai MS, it reproduces the contin-
uous root-text section by section only partially and for the first two sections only
(in other words, we have approximately 15% only of the root-text). However, for
the following sections, spaces and even entire folios have been left blank at the
place of the missing root-text, allowing for the possibility of adding it later on.
This is illustrated in Table 4.
336 | Emmanuel Francis
Tab. 4: Content (mūlam and urai) of Āṟumukanāvalar’s 1st edition of Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai with
commentary (1853), Pondicherry MS and Chennai MS compared.
Āṟumukanāvalar’s ed. Pondicherry MS Chennai MS
(mūlam + urai) 1864 (undated)
1853
1st section, mūlam (pp. 5–9) 1st section, mūlam (fols 5r–
6v), but up to first cīr of line
48 only.
1st section, urai (pp. 9–26) 1st section, urai (fols 1r–34v) 1st section, urai (fols 7r–22v)
2nd section, mūlam (pp. 27–29) 2nd section, mūlam (fol. 23r),
but first 3 cīrs of line 78 only.
fols 23v–24v left blank.
2nd section, (pp. 29–38) 2nd section, urai (fols 35r– 2nd section, urai (fols 25r–33r)
51v)
3rd section, mūlam (pp. 38–40) fols 33v–34v left blank.
3rd section, urai (pp. 41–49) 3rd section, urai (fols 52r– 3rd section, urai (fols 35r–43r)
66v)
4th section, mūlam (pp. 49–50) fol. 43v left blank.
4th section, urai (pp. 50–52) 4th section, urai (fols 67r– 4th section, urai (fols 44r–45v)
70r; fol. 70v blank)
5th section, mūlam (pp. 52–53) fols 46r–46v left blank
5th section, urai (pp. 54–58) 5th section, urai (fols 71r– 5th section, urai (fols 47r–51r)
78v)
6th section, mūlam (pp. 58–62) fols 51v–53v left blank
6th section, urai (pp. 63–83) 6th section, urai (fols 79r– 6th section, urai (fols 54r–71v)
106v)
From this observation one could conclude that the commissioner or copyist of the
Pondicherry MS was not interested in the root-text so much as in the commentary
(which however also contains the root-text, but not as a continuous text, since it
is quoted piecemeal interspersed with the commentary), while having a continu-
ous root-text, section by section, was also not a priority for the commissioner or
copyist of the Chennai MS.
In both cases, it is quite plausible that the root-text was already available to
the intended user of the manuscripts. As already mentioned the Tirumurukāṟṟup-
paṭai is among the earliest printed Tamil classical texts. In the 1850s, there were
already several different printed editions of it. And Āṟumukanāvalar, before pub-
lishing the root-text with commentary in 1853, had already published the root-
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 337
text in 1851.19 Alternatively the root-text could have been available in manuscript
form too.
If the Pondicherry MS is indeed dated to 1864, it makes sense that that very
year someone ordered a manuscript copy of Āṟumukanāvalar’s commentary. The
first edition of this was published in 1853 and could then be out of stock. Its sec-
ond edition appeared in 1866.
Furthermore, as we have seen, the Pondicherry MS contains material not
found in Āṟumukanāvalar’s first edition, namely the pirapantavaralāṟu (unfoli-
ated fols 2r–4v), which is a slight variation upon the nūl varalāṟu known other-
wise in several printed editions and only in manuscripts that are (surely or plau-
sibly) copies of printed editions. The Pondicherry MS thus appears more clearly
than the Chennai MS as the work of a copyist commissioner interested in any in-
formation or explanation about the root-text.
Another interesting feature of the Pondicherry MS is that at the end of the
title-page, right after the Jovian cycle date equivalent to 1853 a price is mentioned
(unfoliated fol. 1v2) (Fig. 8). One reads:
Fig. 8: Pondicherry MS, unfoliated fol. 1v: end of title-page, date and price. © IFP
°itaṉ vilai • ((currency symbol)) 1 • |
‘Price of this: 1 Rupee/Ringgit (?)’
The currency is expressed by a symbol that might stand for Rupee (È in modern
typed script). The symbol seems however to be based on the consonant ற் . But,
as pointed out to me by T. Ganesan, ற் and ர் are often confused in script. Alter-
natively, as suggested to me by Jean-Luc Chevillard, the symbol could stand for
||
19 See Zvelebil (1992, 156) and Rajesh (2014, 101), who however do not provide details about this
1851 edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai by Āṟumukanāvalar. I surmise this is in fact his first edi-
tion of the 11th Tirumuṟai (not available to me), of which the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is a part. This
edition of the 11th Tirumuṟai was quickly reprinted (in 1851/2).
338 | Emmanuel Francis
Ringgit, the name of the actual currency of Malaysia.20 The history of the term
Ringgit needs further investigation in order to assess when it started to be used
as a currency name. Information in the records of the IFP concerning this manu-
script is inconclusive as to its provenance, as indicated to me by Dominic
Goodall.21
Whatever the currency indicated, it is noteworthy that there is no mention of
price in the printed book of 1853 (unless the copy available to me is incomplete).
But I have found at least one edition of Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai by Āṟumukanāvalar
with a price printed in the book itself, i.e. the 5th edition of 1886, sold for four
Annas (aṇā – 4), i.e. a quarter of a Rupee.22
So what is this price in the Pondicherry MS standing for? Is it the price of the
manuscript? It seems not very common to have such mention by the scribe him-
self. This would be the only case in the more than 50 manuscripts of the Tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai available to me. About prices of manuscripts, it seems they were
quite high before the print culture became widespread.23 Further investigations
about the cost of manuscripts and books in Tamil Nadu is yet to be done, but if
the Pondicherry MS is indeed dated to 1864 and if the price in it is its cost of one
Rupee, it was indeed a high price.24
||
20 Jean-Luc Chevillard directed me to a post in Jaybee’s Notebook (http://jaybeesnotebook.
blogspot.fr/2012/02/tamil-accountancy-symbols-1.html, accessed June 15, 2015) which shows
Tamil accountancy symbols used in Malaysia until 1972. One of them, based on the consonant
ர், for rūpāy (i.e. Rupee), is similar to the symbol of modern typed script. Another, based on the
consonant ற் , for riṅkiṭ (i.e. Ringgit), is strikingly similar to the one used in the Pondicherry MS.
21 The Pondicherry MS accession No. at the IFP is RE 25365. In the accessions’ register, which
Dominic Goodall kindly checked for me, from RE 25296 up to and including RE 25331 (at the top
of p. 147) or possibly up to and including RE 25344 (at the bottom of p. 147) the manuscripts are
all plainly marked as being those of a gift: ‘don de Toṇḍamaṇḍalādhīnam Jñānaprakāśa (svami-
gal) Maṭham Coñjeevaram.’ They were all accessioned on 5th May 1970. All the following acces-
sions are also manuscripts registered from 5th May 1970, up to and including RE 25410 on p. 151
of the register. They are also entered by the same hand and with the same blue ink, but there is
no continuation of the ditto-marks in the columns devoted to provenance (‘Source: Achat, don
etc.,’ and ‘Observations’), and so it is not made absolutely explicit (though it seems quite possi-
ble) that they, including RE 25365, were part of the same gift.
22 I have not been able to check all the editions of Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai by Āṟumukanāvalar.
23 See for instance Naregal (2000, 277–279), for 18th-century Western India, and, as pointed out
to me by Jonas Buchholz, Mayilai Ciṉi. Vēṅkaṭacāmi (Pattoṉpatām nūṟṟāṇṭil tamiḻ ilakkiyam,
Madras 1962, p. 114; also cited by Zvelebil 1975, 15) stating that before 1835, Reverend P. Percival
had to pay 10 pounds, i.e. 150 Rupees for a manuscript copy of the Caturakarāti, while after the
text had been printed, a printed copy would cost 2½ shillings (1 Rupee, 14 Annas).
24 A search in Murdoch (1865) about prices of books published in 1864 yielded no such a high
price for a single book. See, for instance, p. 12 (Christian lyrics, 475 pages, 10 Annas), p. 26 (an
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 339
Unfortunately I cannot clear all the doubts concerning these two manuscript
copies of printed Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, nor those concerning the last one to be
examined.
6 The Trivandrum MS
The Trivandrum MS is less obviously a copy of printed edition, but some of its
peculiarities make it a probable fourth instance of this. The manuscript starts
with three pages that contain an introduction to the work (fols 1r–2r), that is the
nūl varalāṟu (‘history of the book’) already mentioned, which is referred to as such
in the left-marginal heading. Then on the fourth page (that is fol. 2v), which is
divided into two columns, we find on the left column a title-page, the structure of
which is reminiscent of print rather than of manuscript culture. It looks indeed in
part like a copy of a printed title-page (with small variants, see Table 5) followed
by blessings and other paratextual elements. In the second column, we find the
traditional invocation (kāppu). Then we have the mūlam (fols 3r–6r).
The text of the title-page on fol. 2v appears very similar to that of two editions
I am aware of, namely the first edition of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, published in
1834, and an edition published in 1845. Their respective title-pages are compared
in Table 5.
||
Old Testament history, 278 pages, 6 Annas), p. 240 (Tirukkuṟaḷ, 94 pages, 8 Annas). NB: 1 Rupee
= 16 Annas. Although some of these books were tools for proselytising and thus relatively cheap,
the figures are nonetheless telling.
340 | Emmanuel Francis
Tab. 5: Title-pages of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai edition by Caravaṇapperumāḷ (1834), of the
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai edition by Maḻavai Makāliṅkaiyar (1845) (not available to me) and of the
Trivandrum manuscript. The segments of texts have been aligned for the sake of comparison. I
have introduced spaces between words. Differences are marked in bold.
Caravaṇapperumāḷ ed. Maḻavai Makāliṅkaiyar ed. Trivandrum MS
1834 1845 (undated)
(1) tirumurukāṟruppaṭai (2) tirumurukāṟruppaṭai (fol. 2v1) tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai
mūlapāṭam. mūlapāṭam. mūlapāṭam
(small horizontal line)
(3) teyvattaṉmai poruntiya teyvataṉmai poruntiya [t]eyvī(fol. 2v2)cattaṉmai poruntiya
(4) maturaikkaṭaic caṅkattu maturaikkaṭaic caṅkattu maturaikaṭaic caṅka(fol. 2v3)ttu
(5) makāvittuvāṉākiya makāvittuvāṉākiya makāvittu[v]āṉākiya
(6) nakkīraṉār (7) °aruḷiccey- nakkīraṉār aruḷicceytatu. narkkīrar tēvar °aru(fol.
tatu. 2v4)ḷiceytatu –
(ornamented horizontal sep-
aration)
(8) nacciṉākkiṉiyār nacciṉārkiṉiyār uraippaṭiyē nacciṉārkkiṉiyārr urai(fol.
uraippaṭiyē … ... 2v5)ppaṭiyē - …
Given that only the 1834 edition is available to me and that I know of the 1845 edi-
tion only thanks to WorldCat, I am not yet able to determine with confidence if one
of these two printed books is the master copy of the Trivandrum MS.
There are slight differences between the Trivandrum MS version and the 1834
printed edition: the headings for the sections of the work consist in the name of the
abode only in the manuscript as opposed to the number and name of the abode in
the edition; furthermore the nūl varalāṟu is found at the end in the 1834 edition (pp.
13–14) and not at the beginning as in the manuscript (fols 1a–2r), where, strangely
enough, it precedes the title-page and kāppu (fol. 2v) and the root-text (fols 3r–16v).
These differences might be due to the scribe not copying exactly the 1834 printed
book, but could also indicate that the 1845 printed edition is a better candidate for
the model of the Trivandrum MS.
But the printed model might equally be another edition not yet available to me
(as there are two printed editions with a very similar title-page, one may suspect
that there are more), which would explain the small variants compared to the two
printed title-pages known to me.
From the specificities of the Trivandrum MS arises another question. Why does
the title-page come after the nūl varalāṟu, which is an introduction? The reason
might be that it was not in the printed book taken as model for the root-text but
imported from yet another printed book (or manuscript). If so, the Trivandrum MS
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 341
would be another instance―like the Pondicherry MS―of a manuscript made, like a
patchwork, from different versions of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, in order to get a
(more) complete version.
7 Conclusions
The four manuscript witnesses of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai described above are ap-
parently copies of printed books, even though it cannot be ruled out that one or the
other might in fact be the manuscript prepublication draft of a printed book. If we
place ourselves in the wider context of Indian and Indic manuscript culture, there
are other instances known of such manuscripts. I have given in an appendix a list
of Indian and Indic manuscript copies of printed books compiled on the basis of
feedback from colleagues.
Let us come back, in this broader context, to the reasons for which one might
have a manuscript copy of a printed book made. When I asked this question to the
Indology list (http://listinfo.indology.info), several colleagues kindly shared their
insights with me (search the thread ‘Manuscript copies of printed books’). I can
summarize the reasons put forward―which are not mutually exclusive―as follows.
A manuscript copy remained for a long time the only way of having a copy of a
book, be it handwritten or printed. ‘In those days there was no coffee’ wrote Va.
Ramaswamy Iyengar in 1943, reflecting on the 19th-century context (Venkatachala-
pathy 2006, 12). There were no Xerox-machines either. In case a physical copy of a
printed book was needed, there were not many possibilities other than having a
handwritten copy made.
A manuscript copy was also the cheap way. For instance, as pointed out by
Matthew T. Kapstein, in the case of Tibetan books hiring a copyist was cheaper and
easier than commissioning xylographic printing. It seems also that with the devel-
opment of print culture, the cost of hiring a copyist decreased (very high prices, as
mentioned above, belonged to a time when there were no printed books). Depend-
ing on place and time, printed books could simply be more expensive than manu-
scripts.
A manuscript copy could also serve the purpose of making a printed edition,
considered as valuable, accessible to a reader not familiar with the specific script
in which it had been printed. Dominic Goodall pointed out to me the case of a De-
vanāgarī manuscript copy (of the 20th century) of a Sanskrit text printed in Grantha
characters, a script read mostly in South India (see appendix No. 8). A similar case
might be that of the manuscripts of Ratnakīrti’s Apohasiddhi and/or
Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi in the Nepal National Archives, which are, as pointed out to me
342 | Emmanuel Francis
by Elliot M. Stern, copies in Nepālākṣara script of the Devanāgarī edition of Hara-
prasād Shāstri (see appendix No. 2).
These last examples show that printed editions could simply be considered,
like manuscripts, valuable exemplars. Furthermore, as Chris Clark and Whitney
Cox pointed out to me, there are examples of manuscripts emended or collated by
a later hand on the basis of printed editions.25 As Judit Törzsök further suggested, it
is also plausible that, depending on place and time, such valued printed editions
were rare and thus worthy of being copied.
Finally, a manuscript copy was the traditional form of a book and as such could
be preferred to modern printed books. In our own century, in Bali, written, type-
written and published texts are transcribed on palm leaf (lontar), as Andrea Acri
informed me, in the belief that these texts should be part of the Balinese manuscript
heritage (Acri 2013, 72, n. 4, 75, n. 12; see appendix, Nos 3 and 11). This practice has
to be understood in the context of a ‘revival of traditional forms’: books as manu-
scripts are considered ‘as sacred heirlooms inherited from ancestors’ and prized
items of Balinese culture. But such practice is also part of the ‘anti-reactionary
agenda of westernised Balinese urban intellectuals’ in an effort to ‘desacralize’ and
‘democratise’ the ‘production and sharing of knowledge,’ which are ‘activities in-
volving lontar that were traditionally carried out by high-status people’ (Acri, forth-
coming). The prestige of palm leaf is also attested in present-day Tamil Nadu, as
Dominic Goodall pointed out to me: in functions such as marriages, guests are
often given palm leaves printed (i.e. not incised, as traditionally) with verses from
the Kuṟaḷ (Fig. 9). Richard Weiss (2009, 185ff.) demonstrated that the authority of
manuscripts is central to contemporary Siddha medical discourse and practice.
But it is noteworthy that this concerns unpublished medical texts, which the Sid-
dha Medical Literature Research Centre proposes to collect, research and publish
(p. 189). Bhoi (2005, 73–74) observes in contemporary Orissa a preference for palm
leaf, instead of paper, for handwritten documents (most notably for noting down
the horoscopes of new-born babies or as material support of the ‘ceremonial invi-
tation sent to the bridegroom from the bride’s family’) and texts (otherwise availa-
ble in printed form).26
||
25 Chris Clark pointed out a manuscript of Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā, possibly dated to the
13th century, emended, in the process of its restoration, on the basis of a twentieth-century
printed edition (see Emmrich 2009, especially pp. 146ff.). Whitney Cox indicated that one of the
Śāradā manuscripts of Maheśvarānanda’s Mahārthamañjarī which he collated contained a con-
siderable number of marginal annotations in a second Śāradā hand correcting the text according
to the readings of Ganapati Sastri’s 1918 edition of the text in the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series.
26 See also Bhoi 2005, 77, for the example of a manuscript of Nirvedasādhanāgītā sold for a
rupee and four Annas in 1916 ‘when the printed book would have been much cheaper.’
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 343
Fig. 9: Kuṟaḷs printed on palm leaves. Photo E. Francis, from an item kindly supplied by Domi-
nic Goodall.
But one should be cautious not to read back into the 19th century (provided that
the manuscript witnesses of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai discussed here date to that
period) contemporary practices, inspired by a revivalist or traditionalist ap-
proach. In another study, Richard Weiss (2015) argues that in the 1860s, as far as
religious texts are concerned, the materiality of the printed object in which such
texts appeared sustained assertions for authority. His example is that of the po-
ems of a living author (the Tiruvaruṭpā, a collection of devotional poems by
Irāmaliṅka Aṭikaḷ, who lived 1823–1874), not of one transmitted for centuries in
manuscript form. Weiss convincingly contends that ‘the material form organiza-
tion, and content of the 1867 publication’ of this work were adopted from the ex-
pensive and handsome printed volumes―that were produced at that time in an
effort to re-establish the Śaiva canon―so as ‘to garner religious and textual au-
thority’ for the poems of an author at the margins of influential and institutional
Śaiva circles (p. 651). As for the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai it was among the first clas-
sical texts that appeared in print in the early decades of the 19th century. In a
sense, its printing at an early date derives from its popularity and authority, not
the reverse, although it doubtless enhanced its canonicity by a mass diffusion.
Furthermore, as Rick Weiss pointed out to me, it remains possible that someone
just saw the act of transcribing on palm leaf a text such as the Tirumurukāṟṟup-
paṭai to be a devotional achievement, yielding religious merit.
To sum up, the absence of mechanical reproduction such as Xerox-machines,
the availability at a relatively cheap cost of the skills of copyists, the need of a
script conversion, the valued status of printed editions, the attachment to the tra-
ditional book form and the merit that derives from making a copy of a devotional
work are all reasons that might explain why manuscript copies of printed books
were made (whether the printed version was out of stock or not).
344 | Emmanuel Francis
The four Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai witnesses might attest to other or complemen-
tary reasons, not exclusive of those just mentioned. The commissioner’s intention
could have been to compile or to supplement the printed editions. The Pondi-
cherry MS of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai is based on an edition by Āṟumukanāvalar,
seemingly the first edition of 1853, but it reproduces only the commentary part,
not the continuous root-text of each section, and it supplements this master edi-
tion with an introduction about the work (pirapantavaralāṟu) not found in Āṟu-
mukanāvalar’s first edition. If this manuscript was really written before the sec-
ond edition appeared, its commissioner wanted, it seems, to have in the same
volume all relevant information and commentary about a text, the root-text of
which was otherwise available to him. This is a valid reason also for ordering the
copy of a manuscript. The difference here is that the work considered valuable,
of which a copy was needed, was printed and not handwritten. In the case of the
Pondicherry MS, the cheapest and only way to have such an enriched copy of the
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai edition by Āṟumukanāvalar was to produce a manuscript
copy. The Trivandrum MS might be a similar case.
A manuscript copy of a printed book could also be the work of a copyist in
want of business, due to the success of printing and paper writing. Imagine that
a popular edition, like that of Āṟumukanāvalar, was out of stock or very expen-
sive; a copyist could decide to make a copy of it, without being commissioned, as
a commodity to be sold. Could the Pondicherry MS, which is an enriched version
in some aspects of Āṟumukanāvalar’s first edition and thus a value-added edi-
tion, be such a case, as, quite exceptionally, its price is specified on its title-page?
Another issue concerns the choice of palm leaf, instead of paper, for the man-
uscript copy of a printed book. Was not paper easier for writing, increasingly
available and reasonably priced? Was palm-leaf really cheaper than paper? Was
the available paper not considered of good quality or seen as worthy material?
Were professional scribes on palm leaf still largely available while people skilled
in writing on paper were not? It seems that in South India, in contrast to North
India, paper remained rare and more expensive compared to palm leaves.27 As K.
Nachimuthu pointed out to me, palm leaf was used in Kerala as government sta-
tionary till the middle of the 20th century. In that configuration, the selection of
the material support of a book was not a matter of choice: paper was simply less
available and more expensive than palm leaf. But one still wonders. Was palm
leaf chosen instead of paper out of respect for the traditional material, like in the
||
27 On the use of paper in India, see Brac de la Perrière 2008, 87–101, Falk 1993, 312, Janert 1956,
75–87.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 345
case of the modern Indonesian practice mentioned by A. Acri? Could the commis-
sion of a manuscript copy of a printed book on palm leaf be more often than
thought linked to the prestige and status of the traditional book―or even the cult
of the book? In other words, from a traditional point of view, a book should be a
manuscript, and thus it was felt necessary to have a printed edition―the more so
for a valuable work such as that of Āṟumukanāvalar―converted into manuscript
form. Was the act of writing a text still considered a meritorious act?
I must admit that there is much speculation here. Unfortunately, no paratext
in the four manuscript copies of the Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai can help us clarify the
reasons of their existence. In fact these manuscripts raise more questions than
they answer. Their value, for the time being, is that they brought forth these ques-
tions, which further investigations might help to answer.
Acknowledgements:
This research has been made possible thanks to the digital collections of manuscripts of the
École française d’Extrême-Orient (Pondicherry Centre), the Institut français de Pondichéry, the
Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC, SFB 950 ‘Manuskriptkulturen in Asien, Afrika
und Europa’, University of Hamburg) and NETamil (ERC Advanced Grant, project No. 339470). I
would like first to thank the amici from Cambridge―Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo and Ca-
millo Formigatti―for having organised the workshop at Cambridge in September 2014 and ac-
cepted my presentation, of which this paper is the outcome. Hearty thanks are also due to many
other colleagues. Marco Franceschini helped me to convert the internal dates of the manuscripts
into the Gregorian calendar. Andrea Acri, Jonas Buchholz, Giovanni Ciotti, Richard Davis, T. Ga-
nesan, Dominic Goodall, Jürgen Hanneder, the late S. Jayabharathi (Dr Jay Bee), K. Nachimuthu,
Muthu Nedumaran, Shriramana Sharma, Jayandra Soni, and Rick Weiss shared information and
materials with me. Jean-Luc Chevillard, Chris Clark, Whitney Cox, Steve Farmer, Elisa Freschi,
Matthew T. Kapstein, Tim Lubin, Elliot M. Stern, Judit Törzsök and Michael Witzel answered my
queries on the Indology list. Last but not least Dominic Goodall polished the English of a draft of
this paper and made further useful comments upon it.
Appendix
Selected list of (proven, strongly suspected or possible) manuscript copies of
printed books. This list is very basic, providing information (when available) con-
cerning the name of the work, the language and script of the manuscript, its ma-
terial, location, catalogue/access No. and internal date, the printed book copied,
references (if any) and, if appropriate, the name of the scholar to whom I owe the
first information about this manuscript.
346 | Emmanuel Francis
1) Aintiṇai Eḻupatu ― Tamil language and script ― Palm leaf ― Sri Chandra-
sekharendra Saraswathi Viswa Mahavidyalaya, Kanchipuram ― No.
903488 ― Seemingly copied from a printed edition28 ― Information ob-
tained from Jonas Buchholz.
2) Apohasiddhi and/or Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi of Ratnakīrti ― Sanskrit, Nepālā-
kṣara script ― Nepal National Archives, Kathmandu ― All or some copied
from Six Buddhist Nyāya Tracts in Sanskrit, ed. Haraprasād Shāstri, Calcutta:
Asiatic Society, 1910 (Bibliotheca Indica, New Series; 1223) ― Information ob-
tained from Elliot M. Stern.
3) Dharma Pātañjala ― Old Javanese (prose) and Sanskrit (a few verses), Ba-
linese script ― Palm leaf ― In possession of Ida Dewa Gede Catra of Amla-
pura ― Copy made in 2007 from an early draft of the edition of the text (in
Roman script) established by Andrea Acri and later published in Dharma
Pātanjala, A Śaiva Scripture from Ancient Java Studied in the Light of Re-
lated Old Javanese and Sanskrit Texts, by Andrea Acri, Groningen: Egbert
Forsten, 2011 (Gonda Indological Studies; 16) ― See Acri (2013, 72 n. 4;
forthcoming) ― Information obtained from Andrea Acri.
4) Kaivalliya Navanītam ― Tamil language and script ― Palm leaf ― Oriental
Research Institute & Manuscripts Library, University of Kerala, Trivan-
drum ― No. 12491 ― Dated to Malayalam Era 1016 = 1840/1 CE ― See Cat-
alogue, No. 1399: ‘copy from a printed book.’
5) Kaḷavaḻi Nāṟpatu ― Tamil language and script ― Palm leaf ― Sri Chandra-
sekharendra Saraswathi Viswa Mahavidyalaya, Kanchipuram ― No.
903710 ― Seemingly copied from a printed edition29 ― Information ob-
tained from Jonas Buchholz.
6) Kaṇakkatikāram ― Tamil language and script ― Palm leaf ― EFEO, Pondi-
cherry ― No. EO-0541 ― Incomplete copy of Kaṇakkatikāram, ed. by Āṟu-
mukamutaliyār, [Ceṉṉai]: Vittiyāvilācamuttirākṣaracālai, Pirapava year,
Paṅkuṉi month (i.e. March–April 1868) ― Information obtained from Jean-
Luc Chevillard.
||
28 Provenance and features shared with No. 10 in this appendix lead to consider that this manu-
script is copied from a printed edition.
29 Provenance and features shared with No. 10 in this appendix lead to consider that this manu-
script is copied from a printed edition.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 347
7) Kātyāyanaśrautasūtra ― Sanskrit, Devanāgarī ― Material not specified ―
Nepal National Archives, Kathmandu ― No. 4/211 ― Dated to 1986 (of un-
specified era) ― Copied from The Çrautasûtra of Kâtyâyana, With Extracts
from the Commentaries of Karka and Yâjnikadeva, ed. Albrecht Weber, Ber-
lin: Dümmler & London: Williams and Norgate, 1859 ― NGMCP: id: 119037
― Information obtained from Michael Witzel.
8) Kriyākramadyotikā of Aghoraśiva ― Sanskrit, Devanāgarī ― Paper ― Tran-
script used by Richard Davis and made accessible to him as early as 1984
when working on that text at the Kuppusvami Sastri Research Institute,
Chennai30 ― Copied from Kriyākramadyotikā of Aghoraśivācārya with the
commentary (Prabhāvyākhyā) of Nirmalamaṇi, ed. by Rāmaśāstrin and
Ambalavānajñānasambandhaparāśaktisvāmin, Chidambaram, 1927 ― In-
formation obtained from Dominic Goodall and Richard Davis. 31
9) Patārttakuṇa Vaittiya Cintāmaṇi ― Tamil language and script ― Palm leaf
― Oriental Research Institute & Manuscripts Library, University of Kerala,
Trivandrum ― No. 12151A ― Dated to Malayalam Era 1043 = 1867/8 CE ―
See Catalogue, No. 3417: ‘seems copied from a printed book?’
10) Tiṇaimālai Nūṟṟaimpatu ― Tamil language and script ― Palm leaf ― Sri
Chandrasekharendra Saraswathi Viswa Mahavidyalaya, Kanchipuram ―
No. 901659 ― Copied from an edition later than 193632 ― Information ob-
tained from Jonas Buchholz.
11) Tutur Aji Sangkya ― Balinese language and script ― Palm leaf ― Pusat
Dokumentasi Budaya Bali ― No. T/I/12 = K31 ― Copied from or model for
one of the printed editions of Aji Sangkya by Ida Ketut Jelantik (first pub-
lished, as a mimeographed pamphlet, in 1947) ― See Acri (2013, 75 n. 12),
||
30 The e-text available on the Muktabodha site under catalogue number M00126 (http://muk-
talib5.org/DL_CATALOG/DL_CATALOG_USER_INTERFACE/dl_user_interface_frameset.htm) is
based on that transcript.
31 Dominic Goodall also pointed out to me a partial Pauṣkarasaṃhitābhāṣya of Umāpati, tran-
scribed into Devanāgarī, that Jayandra Soni used in the 1980s and guesses was prepared by
someone at the Madras University Library. R.H. Davis 2010, 4 mentions a Devanāgarī transcript
of the Grantha edition of Aghoraśiva’s Mahotsavavidhi published in Chennai in 1910, which was
prepared at the Kuppusvami Sastri Research Institute.
32 Several features of the manuscript (unusual lay-out, with columns and line-splits; use of
puḷḷi; distinction between rakaram and kāl; use of single and double kompu; western punctua-
tion such as exclamation mark; sandhi mostly resolved; lacunae in the text restored as per
printed editions) have lead Jonas Buchholz to the convincing conclusion that this was copied
from a printed edition.
348 | Emmanuel Francis
who however informed me that he found out later that the present manu-
script’s provenance is Kasimpar, Abang, Karangasem; in other words his
initial impression of 2013 that there were two different manuscripts copies
of the Aji Sangkya (one in Pusat Dokumentasi Budaya Bali and another in
a private collection in Kasimpar, Abang, Karangasem) proved wrong ―
Information obtained from Andrea Acri.
12) Yogavāsiṣṭha ― Sanskrit, Śāradā script ― Paper ― Research and Publica-
tion Department, Jammu & Kashmir Government, Śrīnagar ― No.
4797/2281 ― Written over a period of four years, between 1934/5–1938/9 ―
Copied from The Yogavâsiṭha of Vâlmîki, With the Commentary Vâsisṭha-
mahâramayaṇatâtparyaprakâsha, ed. by Wâsudeva Laxmaṇa Shâstrî
Paṇsikar, Bombay: Nirṇaya-Sâgar Press, 19111, 19182, 19373 ― See Slaje
(2005, 46) ― Information obtained from Jürgen Hanneder.
Abbreviations
EFEO École française d'Extrême-Orient
GOML Government Oriental Manuscript Library, Chennai, IFP: Institut français de
Pondichéry
MS/MSS manuscript/manuscripts
RMRL Roja Muthiah Research Library, Chennai
Conventions
The sign ‘°’ precedes initial vowels.
Tamil characters in Roman. Unless otherwise mentioned bold marks Grantha characters.
((mācam)): word mācam, ‘month,’ expressed by the abbreviation ௴.
((nāḷ)): word nāḷ, ‘day,’ expressed by the abbreviation ௳, which is identical to or very similar
to the piḷḷaiyār cuḻi.
((varuṣam)): word varuṣam, ‘year,’ expressed by the abbreviation ௵.
c = column.
lm = left margin.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 349
References
Manuscript sources
Annamalai MS = A1. Aṇṇāmalai University Library. Accession No. 860. Catalogue No. 97.
Pondicherry MS = I2. Institut français de Pondichéry. Accession No. RE25365.
Chennai MS = G9. Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai. Accession No. TR1506.
Catalogue No. R2688.
Trivandrum MS = T4. Oriental Institute Research and Manuscripts Library, University of Kerala,
Trivandrum. Accession No. 8849. Catalogue No. 2672.
Catalogues of manuscripts
Aṇṇāmalai University Library. tamiḻ ōlaiccuvaṭikaḷiṉ paṭṭiyal. Aṇṇāmalai Nakar: Aṇṇāmalaip
palkalaik kaḻaka nūlakam, 1987.
Government Oriental Manuscripts Library, Chennai. A Triennial Catalogue of Manuscripts Col-
lected during the Triennium 1950-51 to 1952-53 for the Government Oriental Manuscripts
Library, Madras. Part II: Tamil. Madras: Government Press, 1963.
Oriental Institute Research and Manuscripts Library, University of Kerala, Trivandrum. Descrip-
tive Catalogue of Tamil Manuscripts. 3 volumes. Ed. by O. Padmakumari. Oriental Re-
search Institute & Manuscripts Library, University of Kerala, 2013 (The Kerala University
Tamil Series; 6–8).
Primary sources
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1834). Ed. by Caravaṇapperumāḷ. tirumurukāṟruppaṭai mūlapāṭam. tey-
vattaṉmai poruntiya maturaikkaṭaic caṅkattu makāvittuvāṉākiya nakkīraṉār aruḷicceytatu.
nacciṉārkkiṉiyār uraippaṭiyē paricōtittuc ceṉṉapaṭṭaṇam vivēkakkalviccālait tamiḻtta-
laimaippulavarākiya caravaṇapperumāḷaiyarāl kalviviḷakkavaccukkūṭattil acciṟpatippik-
kappaṭṭatu. Dated to caya ((varuṣam)) āvaṇi ((mācam)).
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1850). Ed. by Vētakiri Mutaliyār. tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai, mūlapāṭam, tey-
vataṉmai poruntiya, maturaik kaṭaic caṅkattu makāvittuva cirōmaṇiyākiya nakkīratēvar
aruḷic ceytatu. iḵtu tamiḻppulavar, vētakiri mutaliyārāl pārvaiyiṭappaṭṭu, pā. maturaimu-
taliyārāl, tiru. cupparāyatēcikaravarkaḷatu, kalvippiravākavaccukkūṭattil patippikkap-
paṭṭatu. ivvaccukkūṭattalaivar, paccaiyappa perumāḷ nāyakar. Dated to cātāraṇa varuṭam,
aippaci. (title-page as in Ayyappaṉ 2009, 96–97; this edition not available to me)
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (undated, but seemingly from the 1850s). Ed. by Caṇmuka Aiyar. tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai mūlapāṭam. teyvattaṉmai poruntiya maturaikkaṭaic caṅkattu makāvitva
cirōmaṇiyākiya nakkīratēvar aruḷicceytatu. iḵtu ti caṇmuka aiyaravarkaḷāl pārvaiyiṭap-
paṭṭu tiru cupparāya tēcikaravarkaḷatu kalvippiravākavaccukkūṭattil patippikkappaṭṭatu.
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1851). Ed. by Āṟumukanāvalar. Details not available to me. See Zvelebil
(1992, 156) and Rajesh (2014, 101).
350 | Emmanuel Francis
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1852/3). Ed. by Āṟumukanāvalar. In: tiruvālavāyuṭaiyār tirumukappācu-
ram mutaliya pirapantaṅkaḷ aṭaṅkiya patiṉōrāntirumuṟai (pp. 114–126). 2nd printing/edi-
tion. Ceṉṉapaṭṭaṇam: Vittiyānupālaṉayantiracālai. Dated to paritāpi ((varuṣam)) mārkaḻi
((mācam)), i.e. December 1852–January 1853.
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1853). Ed. by Āṟumukanāvalar. tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai. maturai kaṭaic
caṅkattu makāvittuvāṉākiya nakkīratēvar aruḷicceytatu. iḵtu perumpāṉmaiyum nacciṉārk-
kiṉiyār uraikkaruttait taḻuvi, yā ḻppā ṇ attir ̲ caivappirakācavittiyācālaik katipatiyākiya nallūr
āṟumukanāvalar ceyta uraiyuṭāṉ. [Ceṉṉai]: Vittiyānupālaṉayantiracālai. Dated to pi-
ramātīca caya ((varuṣam)) aippaci ((mācam)).
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1886). Ed. by Āṟumukanāvalar. tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai. maturai kaṭaic
caṅkattu makā vittuvāṉākiya nakkīratēvar aruḷicceytatu. iḵtu perumpāṉmaiyum nacciṉārk-
kiṉiyār uraikkaruttait taḻuvi, yā ḻppā ṇ attu nallūr āṟumukanāvalarkaḷ ceyta vuraiyuṭaṉ. 5th
edition/printing. Ceṉṉapaṭṭaṇam: Vittiyānupālaṉayantiracālai. Dated to viya ((varuṣam))
āṉi ((mācam)).
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai (1956). Ed. by U. Vē. Cāminātaiyar. In: pattuppāṭṭu mūlamum maturai-
yāciriyar pārattuvāci nacciṉārkkiṉiyaruraiyum (pp. 1–82). 5th edition. Ceṉṉai: Kapīr Accuk-
kūṭam.
Secondary sources
Acri, Andrea (2013), ‘Modern Hindu Intellectuals and Ancient Texts: Reforming Śaiva Yoga in
Bali’, in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, 169: 68–103.
Acri, Andrea (forthcoming), ‘Palm-leaf manuscripts in Today’s Bali’, in Inside Indonesia.
http://www.insideindonesia.org/editions
Ayyappaṉ, Kā. (2009), ‘tamiḻ patippu varalāṟu: tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai’, in tolkāppiya vācippu:
cila aṭippaṭaikaḷ (pp. 95–102). Ceṉṉai: Kāvyā.
Bhoi, Panchanan (2005), ‘The Writer and the Text: The Palmleaf Scribe as Chronicler’, in Social
Scientist, 33 (5–6) (May–June 2005): 73–92.
Brac de la Perrière, Éloïse (2008), L’art du livre dans l’Inde des sultanats. Paris: PUPS.
Clothey, F.W. (1978), The Many Faces of Murukaṉ. The History and Meaning of a South Indian
God (Religion and Society; 6),The Hague [etc.]: Mouton Publishers.
Davis, R.H. (2010), A Priest's Guide for the Great Festival: Aghoraśiva's Mahotsavavidhi. Trans-
lated with Introduction and Notes. New York: Oxford University Press (South Asia Re-
search).
Emmrich, Christoph (2009), ‘Emending Perfection: Prescript, Postscript, and Practice in Newar
Buddhist Manuscript Culture’, in Stephen C. Berkwitz, Juliane Schober and Claudia Brown
(eds), Buddhist Manuscript Cultures: Knowledge, Ritual, and Art, London–New York:
Routledge, 140–156.
Falk, Harry (1993), Schrift im alten Indien. Ein Forschungsbericht mit Anmerkungen (ScriptOra-
lia; 56), Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag
Francis, Emmanuel (2016), ‘Found in Paratexts: Murukaṉ’s Places in Manuscripts of the Tiru-
murukāṟṟuppaṭai, in Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid (eds), The Archaeology of
Bhakti II: Royal Bhakti, Local Bhakti. Pondicherry: Institut français de Pondichéry & École
française d’Extrême-Orient (Indologie), 495–532.
The Other Way Round: From Print to Manuscript | 351
Janert, Klaus Ludwig (1956), Von der Art und den Mitteln der indischen Textweitergabe. Bericht
über mündliche und schriftliche Tradierungsmethoden sowie die Schreibmaterialien in In-
dien. Jahresarbeit dem Bibliothekar-Lehrinstitut des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen zur Dip-
lomprüfung für den Höheren Dienst an Wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken im Wintersemes-
ter 1955/56.
Murdoch (1865), Classified Catalogue of Tamil Printed Books With Introductory Notices,
Madras: The Christian Vernacular Education Society.
Naregal, Veena (2000), ‘Language and Power in Pre-colonial Western India: Textual Hierar-
chies, Literate Audiences and Colonial Philology’, in Indian Economic and Social History
Review, 37(3): 259–294.
Rajesh, V. (2014), Manuscripts, Memory and History: Classical Tamil Literature in Colonial In-
dia, Delhi [etc.]: Foundation Books.
Slaje, Walter (2005), ‘The Mokṣopāya Project III: Manuscripts from the Delhi and Srinagar Col-
lection’, in Jürgen Hanneder (ed.), The Mokṣopāya, Yogavāsiṣṭha and Related Texts (In-
dologica Halensis 7), Aachen: Shaker, 37–54.
Venkatachalapathy, A.R. (2006), In Those Days There Was No Coffee: Writings in Cultural His-
tory, New Delhi: Yoda Press.
Weiss, Richard S. (2009), Recipes for Immortality: Medicine, Religion, and Community in South
India, New York: Oxford University Press.
Weiss, Richard S. (2015), ‘Print, Religion, and Canon in Colonial India: The Publication of Rama-
linga Adigal’s Tiruvarutpa’, in Modern Asian Studies, 49: 650–677.
Wilden, Eva Maria (2014), Manuscript, Print and Memory: Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu
(Studies in Manuscript Cultures 3), Berlin [etc.]: De Gruyter
Zvelebil, K.V. (1975). Tamil Literature (Handbuch der Orientalistik; 2.2.1), Leiden [etc.]: Brill
Zvelebil, K.V. (1992). Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature (Handbuch der Ori-
entalistik; 2.5), Leiden [etc.]: Brill.
|
Palaeography
Kengo Harimoto
The Dating of the Cambridge
Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702
Abstract: Cecil Bendall gave special attention to two manuscripts, Add.1049 and
Add.1702, as the oldest manuscripts in the Cambridge collections. He reckoned
that those two manuscripts had been produced in the 9th century. This article is
an attempt to update the dating of the manuscript Add.1702, a manuscript of the
Bodhisattvabhūmi section in the Yogācārabhūmi, relying on the knowledge we
have gained after Bendall first reported about those manuscripts. We are much
better informed than Bendall was in the 19th century, in particular in areas such
as the chronology of the Licchavis, the calendars used in Nepal, and palaeogra-
phy. We also have access to a greater number of old written documents compara-
ble to Add.1702. The result of this re-evaluation is that we should assign the man-
uscript to the mid-8th century CE, a little earlier than Bendall thought.
1 Introduction
Cecil Bendall showed a particular interest in Add.1702, an old palm-leaf manu-
script from Nepal. It is one of the two manuscripts he thought to be the oldest in
the Cambridge collections (he dated it to the 9th century). Since then, we have
gained much more knowledge about the history of scripts in the Kathmandu Val-
ley. It is perhaps about time that such new insights contributed to a re-evaluation
of Bendall’s initial assessment. The conclusion put forward here does not contra-
dict his evaluation very much, but we may now be able to assign the oldest part
of the manuscript to the 8th century, a little earlier than what Bendall thought.
2 Add.1702
MS Add.1702 is a manuscript in the Bodhisattvabhūmi section of the Yogācārab-
hūmi. Bendall dedicated a chapter (pp. ixl–li) to that and another manuscript,
Add.1049, in his Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University
Library, Cambridge (1883). In the chapter entitled ‘Excursus on Two MSS. of the
IXth Century, ADD. 1049 and 1702,’ he assigned the manuscripts to the 9th cen-
tury. The manuscript is one of the rare artefacts containing the Sanskrit text of
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-012, © 2017 K. Harimoto, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
356 | Kengo Harimoto
the Yogācārabhūmi. Unrai Wogihara used the manuscript in his edition of the Bo-
dhisattvabhūmi (Wogihara 1930–36).
Bendall (1883) discussed the age of the two manuscripts extensively.
Add.1702 bears no date as such, while Add.1049 does include one, although the
year is mentioned without specifying the era (he read the year as 252). Based on
its archaic palaeography, he rejected the idea that the year was in the Nepāla
Saṃvat, in which most other old Nepalese manuscripts are dated. As a conse-
quence, Bendall assumed the era used there was that of Harṣa — which he con-
sidered to have started in 606 CE — and concluded that the year when Add.1049
was written was 857 CE.1 Again, no separate mention of the date of Add.1702 is
made. Bendall essentially treated the two manuscripts as coming from the same
period. He acknowledged that one hand in Add.1702 is more archaic than the
other (Bendall 1883, xliii), but nonetheless, no effort was made to evaluate the
difference in time between the two hands or between the older hand of Add.1702
and the more modern one used in Add.1049. Understandably, this was due to the
paucity of material available to him in the late 19th century. I speculate that, de-
spite noticing that Add.1702 was possibly the more archaic of the two from a pal-
aeographic viewpoint, Bendall did not think Add.1702 was created more than 57
years earlier than Add.1049, which would have meant dating Add.1702 to the 8th
century. Another point of reference for him was the Paśupatinātha temple in-
scription that had been reported by Indraji and Bühler (1880). The two read the
year of the inscription — there is no mention of the era — as 153 and ascribed it,
again, to the Harṣa era. Bendall followed them on both counts.2 Thus, according
to Bendall, the inscription must have gone back to around 758 CE. Having com-
pared the palaeographical features of the two documents separated by about a
hundred years (the year 153 of the Paśupatinātha inscription and the year 252 of
Add.1049), he probably considered the palaeographical difference between
Add.1049 and Add.1702 not big enough to date Add.1702 closer to the inscription.
This, I think, was the reasoning on the basis of which he assigned Add.1702 to the
9th century as well.3
||
1 Bendall mentioned a view expressed by Cunningham regarding the beginning of the Harṣa
era and noted the possible range of the date of the manuscript to be 857–859 (Bendall 1883, xli).
2 The inscription is No. 81 in Gnoli 1956, No. 148 in Vajrācārya 1973, and No. 142 in Regmi 1983.
Indraji and Bühler read the date as 153, but Gnoli (1956) read it as 159, and Vajrācārya (1973) and
Regmi (1983) as 157.
3 Wogihara did not quite agree with Bendall’s assessment and ascribed the manuscript to the
late 8th or the early 9th century (Wogihara 1936, 6).
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 357
2.1 Things that have changed since Bendall’s assessment
I do not see anything wrong in Bendall’s observations or reasoning, given the
state of knowledge at that time. But a few things have changed since he published
his catalogue in the late 19th century. Most importantly, we have come to know
many more Nepalese inscriptions and manuscripts. The most thorough collection
of early (pre-Nepāla Saṃvat) inscriptions by Dhanavajra Vajrācārya (1973) in-
cludes 190 items. Bendall could only rely on the collection of Nepalese inscrip-
tions by Indraji and Bühler published in 1880, where just 15 inscriptions are from
the same time period.
One fruit that these discoveries have borne is the recognition of the Aṃśuvar-
man (or Mānadeva) Saṃvat (era). There have been controversies4 surrounding
the name and precise origin of this era, but now there is substantial agreement
among historians concerned with Nepal that the same era was used in inscrip-
tions by the Licchavis of the Kathmandu Valley from the beginning of the 7th cen-
tury up to the 9th century — probably in between the use of the Śaka era and the
Nepāla Saṃvat. This reckoning of years, started by Aṃśuvarman, commences on
14 March 576 CE5 and was probably devised by dropping 500 from the previously
used Śaka. Its oldest surviving use is in an inscription dated saṃvat (year) 29.
There was also a change from the caitrādi system to the kārttikādi system and
from the expired year (āgata) to the current one (vartamāna). The material that
proved most helpful in establishing the epoch of this calendar was a manuscript
of the Suśrutasaṃhitā preserved at the Kesar Library, Kathmandu;6 it records the
day of the week, making the date verifiable.
Now, even if everything else stayed the same, Add.1049 would be thirty years
older. We are also aware of three manuscripts whose dates are recorded in this cal-
endar: that of the Skandapurāṇa, Add.1049 and the Suśrutasaṃhitā. Their palaeo-
graphy will now be compared to that of Add.1072 below.
||
4 See Petech 1988, 149 ff. and Malla 2005.
5 Petech 1988, 154.
6 For more on this manuscript and its colophon, see Regmi 1983, vol. 1, p. 162; vol. 2, pp. 162–3;
vol. 3, pp. 250–51; Petech 1984, 29; Malla 2005, 7, Harimoto 2012, 87–8. The manuscript is often
wrongly referred to as that of the Sahottaratantra, which is actually only part of the description
of the manuscript’s contents. Perhaps reflecting some awareness that the Uttaratantra (the 6th
part) of the Suśrutasaṃhitā was added material, the colophon of the manuscript refers to it as
sahottaraṃ tantram.
358 | Kengo Harimoto
2.2 The two hands of Add.1702
Bendall (1883, xlii) notes ‘[…] Add.1702 is undated, but is in two hands, one of
which especially is even more archaic than that of the MS. just noticed
[Add.1049].’ The difference is easily noticed when two folios are compared, as in
Figs 1 and 2.
The second hand (Fig. 2) may appear more recent because the top of the let-
ters is more defined and appears to form a straight horizontal line. Letters having
a more or less straight top line that appears to form a connected straight line are
one of the most recognizable features of the Northern Brāhmī-derived scripts (or
the descendant scripts of the Siddhamātṛkā, since it reunites the Northern scripts
once again in the 7th or 8th century). Most letters have a closed top. On the other
hand, the letters written in the first hand (Fig. 1) appear more independent, and
many letters have an open top. Another reason why the second hand gives us the
impression of being more modern is that it neatly packs letters together, making
the top of the letters appear more connected. As we will see below, however,
when we compare each glyph, we can see that these two hands use more or less
the same corresponding glyphs.
In addition, as Bendall notes, the two hands change mid-folio, as shown in
Fig. 3.7 This indicates that the transition did not happen after centuries or dec-
ades, but more or less immediately. The first hand ended mid-text, and the sec-
ond hand continued the writing from that point onwards. A change of hands mid-
folio is unlikely to happen where a manuscript consists of original folios and re-
placements due to damage to the original folios, for instance. The two hands were
most likely involved in the original production of this manuscript. Hence, even
though one hand might appear more archaic than the other, we should not auto-
matically assume that any significant gap in time existed between them.
Let us take a closer look at some of the letters now to illustrate the difference
between the two hands. Table 1 compares some letters penned in the two hands.
Those are the ones whose shapes vary more widely through the palaeographical
history of Northern scripts.8 I will compare them with the oldest dated manu-
scripts from Nepal below.
||
7 Bendall himself included a reproduction of this folio in his catalogue as plate 1.
8 Ye 2008 is a comprehensive study of palaeographical changes in Nepal from the 5th century to
the early 8th century. As will be seen below, the period we are concerned with regarding
Add.1702, namely, the late 8th century, is not covered.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 359
Tab. 1: Two hands of Add.1702
First hand Second hand
i
krā/kri/kra
g
c
ja
jā
ṇa
ṇā/ṇo
ta
thā/r(t)tha
dhaḥ/dhā
naṃ/ni/na
pa
bhi/bhā
bhū
ma/mā
ya
r
lā/laṃ/la/lāṃ
ṣ
360 | Kengo Harimoto
The glyphs I would like to call attention to are g(a), c(a), th(a), dh(a), y(a), and
l(a):
– ga The consonant sign standing for g looks archaic in both hands. However,
if we compare the two hands, we can see a later development in the second
one in that it was starting to be written with three strokes rather than two.
– ca Note that the upper stroke of the wedge-shaped part is almost horizontal
rather than going down, starting from the vertical line in both hands. The first
hand even writes the stroke as slightly going up from the vertical line and
may seem rather more archaic than the second one in that sense. In other old
manuscripts that have been dated, the top stroke of the wedge-part goes
down.
– tha The second hand writes this sign in two different ways. The difference is
in the way the stroke inside the enclosing stroke is written. In one style, the
second hand is not clearly distinguishable from the first hand: the internal
stroke appears as a horizontal line that goes across. In the other style, it looks
like a curved internal stroke, effectively a small semicircle touching the top
line inside the enclosing stroke. As we will see below, this is how 9th-century
scribes wrote the same sign in manuscripts.
– dha This appears almost identical in both hands, but one can see that the first
hand wrote the curved part with two strokes, while the second did so with
just one. The sign was generally written with three strokes in Northern scripts
— top, vertical, and a curve connecting the left side of the top stroke to the
vertical stroke — until more modern forms appeared. The first hand shows
remnants of that writing style.
– ya The notable thing about y in this manuscript is that neither hand uses the
old tripartite y. Both hands show signs of archaism, retaining some features
of the tripartite y without quite having reached the more Devanagari-like y
shape.
– la Both hands write l with some variations. The first hand writes it in a more
archaic shape, one upward loop and a bottom one connected to the vertical
stroke from the left, but it is conceivable that this archaic shape anticipates
the two-loop l of modern Devanagari. The second hand, while still maintain-
ing the one loop and a flat bottom in some variations, tends toward the two-
loop sign. Moreover, the first loop does not reach the height of the top hori-
zontal stroke, further strengthening the impression of the modern Devana-
gari l.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 361
To summarize, both hands roughly appear to belong to the same palaeographical
developmental stage, but the second hand shows some degree of new develop-
ments. Interestingly, such new features are found in signs that are written in more
than one way. The scribe employing the second hand used both old and new
styles, i.e., an established/traditional one (for him) and possibly a more “fashion-
able”, modern style. At any rate, I do not think we should assume much of a gap
in time existed between the two hands.
Having established that, I now would like to compare the writing with other
examples whose dates are known to us.
3 Dated 9th-century manuscripts
The possible dated examples of writing are manuscripts and inscriptions. Since
we are not always certain whether inscriptions and manuscripts of the same pe-
riod shared the exact same palaeography, we would like to compare manuscripts
to manuscripts if possible. The oldest dated Sanskrit manuscripts I am aware of
are all from Nepal, and they are from the 9th century.9 Older dated examples of
writing are inscriptions. The oldest dated manuscripts are the following:
– A manuscript of the Skandapurāṇa from 811 CE (National Archives Kath-
mandu, 2-229, photographed by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation
Project as B 11/4);
– that of the Pārameśvaratantra from 829 CE (Cambridge University Library
Add.1049.1);10 and
– that of the Suśrutasaṃhitā from 879 CE (Kesar Library Accession No. 699,
photographed by the Nepal–German Manuscript Preservation Project as C
80/7).
All these manuscripts have dates in the Aṃśuvarman (Mānadeva) Saṃvat men-
tioned above, although only the Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript specifies the calen-
dar. They are dated to 234, 252, and 301 respectively. All of them have their own
problems regarding the date and palaeography.
||
9 Not to be confused with ‘the oldest manuscripts’. There are many more manuscripts that are
older than them, but they are either not dated or the colophon (part) that mentions the date has
been lost.
10 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01049-00001/1
362 | Kengo Harimoto
3.1 The three hands used in the Skandapurāṇa manuscript
The Skandapurāṇa manuscript records the earliest date among the three manu-
scripts. Figure 4 shows the page where the date is found.
This particular manuscript was written by at least three scribes. Figures 5, 6,
and 7 show examples of the three different hands, which give quite different im-
pressions at first glance, namely, the first hand being the best executed (estheti-
cally most pleasing), the third appearing the least masterly, and the second in
between. However, if we give them a closer look, the letter shapes that the scribes
intended to produce are not much different. Nevertheless, the scribes had differ-
ent ideas about how certain letters should be written. Table 2 shows some of the
letters that display notable differences between the hands.
Tab. 2: Three hands of NAK Skandapurāṇa MS
First Second Third
thā
la(ṃ/ḥ)
bhū
ṇa/ṇi
śa/śā
||
Regarding the letter th, we can see that the first hand starts writing it with a coun-
terclockwise outward spiral from top-left to lower-right where the loop is con-
nected to the vertical stroke. The second and the third hands both appear to write
the outside loop and the vertical stroke first and then the inside stroke. While they
both appear to write the inside stroke as a loop that originates at the same point
as the outside loop, the second hand writes it with stronger gravity from the bot-
tom-left, and the third hand writes it almost directly from the top to the vertical
stroke.
As for the letter l, the first and second hands retain the archaic form of the
letter, while the third hand writes it in the shape closer to the later form (or simply
more lazily).
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 363
The syllable bhū is written by the first hand as a combination of normal bh
and the diacritic for the vowel ū, which could be attached to any other conso-
nants. However, the syllable is highly stylized by the third hand. The way the
second hand writes this syllable is in between: more stylized than the first hand,
but not as much as the third hand.
We can distinguish the three hands by observing the distance between the
top bar and the second horizontal bar for the sign ś. The second horizontal line is
very close to the top bar in the first hand, but not as much in the second and third.
The second and the third hands differ, in that the former writes the lower bar
more or less horizontally, while the third hand gives the lower bar a slight down-
stroke from left to right.
The three hands differ in the way they write what we could call the double
daṇḍa. The first scribe does not use it at the end of a stanza — he uses a single
daṇḍa after every two pādas. The second hand writes a very distinguishable hook
attached to the left of the first vertical stroke of the double daṇḍa, but the third
hand only makes a triangular bulge to the left of the first vertical stroke.
I cannot draw any clear conclusions about the chronology from the observa-
tions made above. Based on the shape of the letter ṇ and l, I suggest that the third
hand is the most recent one. What’s more, since the first scribe made mixed use
of the old style ṇ alongside the new style, the hand may be younger than the sec-
ond hand. Thus, I tentatively propose the following sequence from the oldest to
the youngest: (1) the second hand, (2) the first hand, (3) the third one.
We will now discuss the hand that records the date. This hand appears to be
similar to the third hand, but its quality as handwriting is inferior to it. I suspect
that it was produced as a replacement for the last folio, which got damaged. The
scribe might have been an inexperienced calligrapher or trying to imitate an old
style of writing he was not familiar with, or both. Hence, the date recorded by that
hand is probably the date of the original, not of the time when it was written in
the surviving folio. Accordingly, I am not going to assume that the palaeography
found in this hand/folio was current in 811 CE; it is more likely that the earlier
forms of writing found in that manuscript — the first or the second hand, espe-
cially the second one — were from that year.
3.2 The composite manuscript of the Suśrutasaṃhitā in the
Kesar Library
The Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript in the Kesar Library records a verifiable date on
folio 209v (Fig. 8). Again, however, some considerations need to be made before
364 | Kengo Harimoto
comparing its palaeography with that of Add.1702. The Suśrutasaṃhitā manu-
script was also written by several hands, as figure 9 shows. In this case, it is quite
possible that the leaves that now form one bundle may not have been originally
conceived as a single manuscript. First of all, the manuscript is not complete;
many portions are missing. With regard to folio numbers, the foliation covers the
range from 1 to 219, but many folios in between are missing. Furthermore, various
folios exist that share the same number; we have two folios each numbered 112,
113, 167, 168, 169, 187, 188, 189, 191, 192, and 193, for instance. Even the contents
found in folios with identical numbers are duplicated in other places. As an ex-
ample, there are two folios numbered 167 and another two numbered 168. One
pair numbered 167–168 contains a text that continues from the folio numbered
166 and proceeds to the folio numbered 169 (only one of which exists in each
case). We find that the contents of the other pair of folios numbered 167–168 par-
tially appear in folio 176 (there are no folios numbered 177–186). These two series
of folios come from different manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. What makes
matters even more complicated is that not all the folios with duplicate or alternate
numbering11 are written by the same hand; two different hands were involved, if
not more.12
Now, the question is which hand is responsible for the date. In the case of the
NAK Skandapurāṇa manuscript, I have postulated that the writing in which the
date is written does not actually correspond to the date itself. I assigned the date
to the older-looking writing found on different folios than the one recording the
date. In the case of the Kesar Library Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript, I do not think
such an assumption is necessary. That is, I consider the palaeography of the folio
numbered 209 as indeed corresponding to the year 879 CE. This folio belongs to
the main series of folios in the manuscript. The writing does not appear to be any
different from what is found in the rest of the series. I see no reason to associate
the date with the writing found in the other folios that do not share the same pro-
duction backgrounds as the main series of the folios.
||
11 We could observe that the majority of folios are in a continuous sequence, but some of them
break it. Some of the disruptions are clear because of the duplicate folio numbers, but not all the
folios in the alternate series have a counterpart (i.e. folios with the same number) in the main
series. Because of that, we cannot state that all the folios not found in the main series have du-
plicate folio numbers. The tell-tale sign of a folio not coming from the main series is the foliation
itself: the folio numbers are written vertically in the main series of folios, but horizontally on the
folios that do not belong to the main series.
12 See Andrey Klebanov, ‘On the Textual History of the Suśrutasaṃhitā (1): A Study of Three
Nepalese Manuscripts’, to be published in the proceedings for the conference entitled ‘Asian Di-
versity in a Global Context’ held in Copenhagen in 2009.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 365
3.3 Palaeographical comparison between Add.1702 and other
dated 9th-century Nepalese manuscripts
Having established which hands are responsible for the dates recorded in old
dated Nepalese manuscripts, we will now compare the writing of Add.1702 with
the hands that wrote those manuscripts. My overall impression is as follows:
some letter shapes in Add.1702 appear to be just as archaic as those in the 9th-
century manuscripts, while others look even more archaic than the same letters
in the 9th-century manuscripts. (The remaining letter shapes do not appear signif-
icantly different in any of the manuscripts in question, and those similar shapes
do not tell us much about their age — archaic or modern — as they were in use for
a long period of time.) Those letters that attract my attention are g, bh, m, y, r, and
l. Table 3 summarizes these comparisons:
Tab. 3: Comparisons of some letters between hands of Add.1702 and dated 9th century Nepa-
lese MSS
1st hand 2nd hand 811 829 878
g
bh
m
y
r
l
– g in Add.1702 is written in a different way than the same letter in the 9th-cen-
tury manuscripts, in that its top and the right-hand vertical line are written
in one stroke in Add.1702, while they are written with a separate top bar and
downstroke in the 9th-century manuscripts. This one stroke, which first
moves horizontally and then vertically, is common to both the older and
younger hands in Add.1702. I see some variations in the way the hook at the
bottom of the shorter vertical stroke on the left-hand side is written. The
younger hand of Add.1702 and the oldest hand in the Skandapurāṇa manu-
script write the hook in a similar fashion: they move the pen from the upper
366 | Kengo Harimoto
left to lower right after drawing the vertical line. They may or may not com-
pletely lift the tip of the pen from the writing surface, but they clearly empha-
size the short diagonal stroke. The scribes who worked on the other two 9th-
century manuscripts may not have emphasized the last short stroke much,
but they must have moved their pens slightly from the upper left to the lower
right to produce the bottom hook. These may all be contrasted with the old
hand in Add.1702, where the scribe simply moved the tip of the pen upward
and to the left to produce the hook. It is these two features that make the old
hand of Add.1702 appear quite archaic compared to the others.
– bh written by the first hand of Add.1702 shows an archaism in the circular
movement of the pen the scribe used to produce the downward stroke of the
letter. Other scribes used an almost straight line to produce the downward
stroke on the right-hand side of the letter.
– A major difference in m is also apparent in whether its top is open or closed.
With the exception of the Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript of 878 CE, all the others
have the open-top m.
– As has already been noted above, y in Add.1702 is unique, being in between
the archaic tripartite y and Devanagari-like y. All the dated old Nepalese man-
uscripts use the latter. I am not aware of this shape of y in Add.1702 being
used anywhere else.
– The bulge toward the bottom of the vertical stroke in r is relatively inconspic-
uous in Add.1702. This is especially true of the first hand; it is almost a hook
at the bottom. This gives the letter in Add.1702 a very archaic, Gupta-like ap-
pearance, in that it was an almost T-shaped letter with a small hook at the
bottom of the vertical stroke.
– As noted above, the two hands write l differently in Add.1702. The first hand
writes it in a more archaic manner, and the other one closer to modern Deva-
nagari l. Now, if we look at the different versions of the letter in chronological
order, we can clearly see how the letter developed; the first hand in Add.1702
is clearly in the earliest stage of development.
Thus, palaeographically, Add.1702 shows signs of being written before 811 CE.
The archaism is slightly more pronounced in the first hand. Since the NAK
Skandapurāṇa manuscript was written only ten years after the beginning of the
9th century, a manuscript made earlier than that could easily have been produced
in the 8th century. I would like to assign Add.1702 to the 8th century on these
grounds.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 367
4 Comparisons with similarly dated inscriptions
from Nepal
So far, I have compared the palaeography of Add.1702 with dated manuscripts
from Nepal. Add.1702 appears to have been produced earlier than any of the sur-
viving dated manuscripts, but we do not know how much earlier. Now I will turn
to inscriptions.
It is reasonable to assume that the manuscripts we have looked at up to now
can be dated in the same calendar, namely the continuation of the year-reckoning
system started by Aṃśuvarman by dropping the hundreds (subtracting 500) from
a Śaka calendar. These manuscripts recorded the year 234 (the NAK Skandapurāṇa
manuscript), 252 (the Cambridge Pārameśvaratantra manuscript), and 301 (the
Kesar Library Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript).13
There are two inscriptions that are of interest in the present context. We can
be relatively certain that they record years in the Aṃśuvarman Saṃvat, and they
are a little earlier than our dated manuscripts.14
4.1 The Paśupatinātha temple inscription of saṃvat 153/157/159
The first one is No. 81 in Gnoli’s collection and 142 in Regmi’s collection (Fig. 10). It
is a famous inscription consisting of 35 stanzas found in the Paśupatinātha temple
complex in Kathmandu and is significant in many ways.15 This inscription was
||
13 Perhaps the last date also corresponds to the last year (or is very close to the last year) in
which this system of year reckoning was used in Nepal. The Nepāla Saṃvat is essentially Śaka
minus 800, which is Aṃśuvarman minus 300. I do not think there is any other manuscript or
inscription that records a year later than 301 in the Aṃśuvarman Saṃvat.
14 There are other inscriptions that were written even closer to the dates of the dated manu-
scripts. Using Vajrācārya’s numbering (1973), nos 174–179 are dated saṃvat 182 to 250. I have
been unable to glean any useful information by comparing them palaeographically with
Add.1702 due to their length (they are too short), the quality of published rubbings or photo-
graphs (they could have been badly damaged in the first place), and so forth. The year in Va-
jrācārya’s 180 is variously read as 171 (Gnoli), 271 (Vajrācārya), and 272 (Regmi). I cannot make
any meaningful observations regarding this inscription either, using published rubbings in
Gnoli 1956 and Regmi 1983. If Vajrācārya or Regmi is correct, this inscription would be the young-
est of those that record the year in the Aṃśuvarman Saṃvat. I do not expect to find inscriptions
that record a year in that calendar later than 300. See the previous note.
15 One reason is that it describes the lineage of the Licchavis, and another is that some of the
stanzas that express devotion to Śiva are ascribed to Jayadeva, the king himself.
368 | Kengo Harimoto
known when Bendall compared its palaeography with Add.1049 and Add.1702. The
year of this inscription was read as 153 by Indraji-Bühler, 159 by Gnoli and 157 by
Vajrācārya and Regmi.16
A few things can be observed when we compare the writing in this inscription
with that of Add.1702. One point is that the inscription uses both styles of the letter
ya (see Table 4), the old tripartite one and the more modern one, typically when it
is part of yā or other ligatures such as ryā.
Another set of letters that attract one’s attention is the pair ja and jā. This pair
is very noticeable when reading relatively old manuscripts written in northern Sid-
dhamātṛikā-derived scripts. For example, Table 5 lists ja and jā from Add.1702 and
the old dated manuscripts from Nepal. They look essentially identical. On the other
hand, in the Paśupatinātha temple inscription, ja is written in a more archaic form
that resembles roman capital ‘E’ and jā is written in a similar way to the same letter
in old Nepalese manuscripts (see Table 4).
Tab. 4: y and j in the Paśupatinātha temple complex inscription of the year 153/157/159
ya yā ryā ja jā
Tab. 5: ja and jā in old Nepalese manuscripts
Add. 1702 Add. 1702 Saṃvat 234 Saṃvat 234 Saṃvat 234 Saṃvat Saṃvat
(1st hand) (2nd hand) (1st hand) (2nd hand) (3rd hand) 252 301
ja
jā
||
16 See Indraji-Bühler (1880, 183), Vajrācārya (1973, 548), Regmi (1983, vol. 2, 95), Gnoli (1956,
115, 119).
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 369
4.2 The Jñāneśvara inscription
Another inscription of interest is the one from the Jñānésvara (Gyaneshwar) area of
Kathmandu. It is Vajrācārya’s no. 150 and Regmi’s no. 144. The date of the inscrip-
tion has been lost, but it is likely to be close to the previous one. In the Jñāneśvara
inscription, the dūtaka (messenger) is recorded as yuvarāja (Crown Prince) Vijaya-
deva, but the name of the king, who is usually mentioned before the dūtaka, is
missing. The name Vijayadeva first appears simply as bhaṭṭāraka Vijayadeva in an
inscription dated saṃvat 137. He is the dūtaka in that inscription, too, and the king
is Jayadeva. Similarly, in another inscription dated saṃvat 148, Vijayadeva is
yuvarāja and again the dūtaka. Jayadeva was still king in saṃvat 153/157/159, as we
have seen above. By saṃvat 180, however, it appears that the era started to be re-
ferred to as that of “the kingdom of Mānadeva.”17 We do not know whether Vijaya-
deva ever became king, but it seems unlikely.18 Whatever happened to him, the pe-
riod in which Vijayadeva may have been crown prince was between saṃvat 137 —
when he probably had not been designated yuvarāja yet — and 180. Thus the
Jñāneśvara inscription also falls into that time window.
Again, I have difficulty reading this inscription from the rubbing published in
Regmi (1983), but a few observations are possible nonetheless. One is that the new
form of ya is used even without the diacritics for vowels or without being part of a
ligature (see Figure 11). This indicates that the non-use of the old-style tripartite ya,
as seen in Add.1702, does not necessarily mean that the writing was done later than
saṃvat 157.
4.3 The pedestal inscription of the Lokeśvara image in Patan
The last inscription to which I would like to draw attention comes from saṃvat
180 (Vajrācārya’s no. 172 and Regmi’s no. 156). This is a three-line inscription,
and again I have difficulty reading it from Regmi (1983)’s reproduction of the rub-
bing (Figure 12). Still, the writing in this inscription generally seems very similar
to that of Add.1702. I do not find anything significantly different from the writing
||
17 Vajrācārya’s 172/Regmi’s 156: rājye śrīmānadevasya varṣe śītyuttare śate; cf. also the colophon of
the Kesar Library Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript: rājñi śrī[m]ānaeve pṛthusitayaśasi prodyadindu-
prakāśe… These references to King Mānadeva caused some controversy regarding how many kings
named Mānadeva actually existed. I prefer the view according to which the reference to the name
Mānadeva is intended as referring to the founder of the kingdom, the ancient Licchavi king,
Mānadeva.
18 See Regmi 1983, vol. 3, 249.
370 | Kengo Harimoto
in Add.1702 in this inscription, while there were a few points that distinguished
Add.1702 from the Paśupatinātha temple inscription of saṃvat 153/157/159. Like
the Jñāneśvara inscription above, this inscription does not use the old-style ya.
Furthermore, the letter ya is written in a style somewhat similar to the unique ya
of Add.1702, in that the stroke that comes from above creates an acute-angled
corner by almost going up again rather than gently turning to the left, making a
round corner. Table 6 shows all the instances of akṣaras that I can decipher as
using ya. Compare them with those used in Add.1702 in Tables 1 and 3.
Tab. 6: y in Patan Lokeśvara pedestal
ye yā yā
By comparing it with the inscriptions, I find the writing in Add.1702 appears to be
quite similar to the kind written in the 2nd century of the Aṃśuvarman Saṃvat
(100s); certain features in Add.1702 point to the latter half of that century. This
would allow the manuscript to be dated to the mid-8th century CE on palaeo-
graphic grounds.
Fig. 1: The first hand of Add.1702.
Fig. 2: The second hand of Add.1702.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 371
Fig. 3: Mid-folio hand change of Add.1702.
372 | Kengo Harimoto
Fig. 4: Colophon page of the NAK Skandapurāṇa MS.
Fig. 5: A page written by the first hand of the NAK Skandapurāṇa MS.
Fig. 6: A page written by the second hand of the NAK Skandapurāṇa MS.
Fig. 7: A page written by the third hand of the NAK Skandapurāṇa.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 373
374 | Kengo Harimoto
Fig. 8: Folio 209 verso of the Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript in the Kesar Library (acc. no. 669). The
colophon starts in the middle of line 5.
Fig. 9: Folio 192 recto of the Kesar Library Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscript.
The Dating of the Cambridge Bodhisattvabhūmi Manuscript Add.1702 | 375
Fig. 10: Paśupatinātha temple inscription Regmi 1963, vol.3.
376 | Kengo Harimoto
References
Bendall, Cecil (1883), Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge, with Introductory Notices and Illustrations of the Palæography and Chronol-
ogy of Nepal and Bengal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gnoli, Raniero (1956), Nepalese Inscriptions in Gupta Characters. Part 1, Text and 2, Plates
(Serie Orientale Roma, vol. 10), Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.
Harimoto, Kengo (2012), ‘In Search of the Oldest Nepalese Manuscript’, in The Study of Asia
between Antiquity and Modernity. Proceedings of the first Coffee-Break Conference, ed-
ited by E. Freschi et al., Rivista degli Studi Orientali, Nuova Serie, vol. LXXXIV (2011),
fasc. 1–4,: 85–106.
Indraji, Bhagvânlâl and Georg Bühler (1880), ‘Inscriptions from Nepal’, in Indian Antiquary, 9:
163–194.
Malla, Kamal P. (2005), ‘Mānadeva Saṃvat: An Investigation into an Historical Fraud’, in Contri-
butions to Nepalese Studies, vol. 32, no. 1: 1–49.
Petech, Luciano (1961), ‘The Chronology of the Early Inscriptions of Nepal’. Originally pub-
lished in East and West, 12 (1961): 227–232. Included in Petech (1988) on pp. 149–160.
Petech, Luciano (1984), Mediaeval History of Nepal. Serie Orientale Roma LIV, Rome: Istituto
Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.
Petech, Luciano (1988), Selected Papers on Asian History (Serie Orientale Roma LX), Rome: Isti-
tuto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente.
Regmi, D. R. (1983), Inscriptions of Ancient Nepal. Volume 1: Inscriptions. Volume 2: Transla-
tions. Volume 3: Introduction to Inscriptions, Plates, Delhi: Abhinav Publications.
Vajrācārya, Dhanavajra (1973), Licchavikālikā Abhilekha, Kathmandu: Joraganesha Press.
Wogihara, Unrai (1908), Asaṅga’s Bodhisattvabhūmi: Ein dogmatischer Text der Nordbuddhis-
ten, nach dem Unikum von Cambridge im allgemeinen und lexikalisch untersucht. Pub-
lished by Kreysing. Leipzig. [His dissertation submitted in 1905 in Strasbourg. Included in
Wogihara 1936 below.]
Wogihara, Unrai (ed.) (1930–1936), Bodhisattvabhūmi: A Statement of Whole Course of the Bo-
dhisattva (Being Fifteenth Section of Yogācārabhūmi), vols 1 and 2. Tokyo. [Reprinted edi-
tion by Sankibo, 1971.
Ye, Shaoyong (2008), ‘A Paleographical Study of the Manuscripts of the Mū lamadhya-
makakā rikā and Buddhapā lita’s Commentary’, in Annual Report of The International Re-
search Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University [ARIRIAB] 11 (2008): 153−175.
Marco Franceschini
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha
Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha
Belonging to the Cambridge University
Library (Or.2366)
Abstract: The present article deals with a peculiar system of markers used in a
manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha written in the Grantha script, belonging to
the Cambridge University Library (Or.2366). In the northern ‘orthodox’ manu-
script tradition of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha, basically only four markers are used to
analyse and rearrange the text of the Saṃhitāpāṭha, i.e. daṇḍas (for separating
the words), avagrahas (for separating the members of the compounds), circles
between daṇḍas (for marking the galitas), and the particle iti. Besides these four,
however, in the Grantha manuscript a full system of additional markers is used.
These markers, all illustrated in the article, apparently served the purpose of flag-
ging peculiar or ‘irregular’ euphonic modifications and other alterations in the
Saṃhitāpāṭha, possibly to provide the reciter with all the information needed to
accurately convert the Padapāṭha into the Saṃhitāpāṭha.
1 Introduction
The present article deals with a group of unusual markers found in a manuscript
written in the Grantha script transmitting the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha. The manuscript
belongs to the Cambridge University Library and is part of its extremely rich col-
lections of South Asian manuscripts: it consists of ninety-four palm leaves (in-
cluding five guard-leaves) and covers the first two aṣṭakas of the Ṛgveda, corre-
sponding to sūktas 1.1 to 3.6, in Padapāṭha form.1
||
1 The manuscript (shelfmark Or.2366, not dated) was examined and catalogued by the author
of the present article – together with all the Grantha manuscripts belonging to the Cambridge
University Library collections – in the course of his six-month collaboration (autumn 2013 and
summer 2014) to the AHRC-funded project ‘The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia
as seen through the Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge’. The
online catalogue entry of the manuscript is available at: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-
02366/1.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-013, © 2017 M. Franceschini, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
378 | Marco Franceschini
The Padapāṭha, ‘word-for-word recitation’, is traditionally recognised as one
of the three basic (prakṛti) forms of Vedic recitation, the others being the Saṃhitā-
pāṭha, ‘continuous recitation’, and the Kramapāṭha, ‘progressing (or step-by-
step) recitation’.2 In this article, the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha (henceforth also Pp.) and
its relationship with the corresponding Saṃhitāpāṭha (henceforth also Sp.) will
be discussed. The Kramapāṭha, important as it is, falls outside the scope of this
work.3 The redaction of the only recension of the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā surviving to our
days is ascribed to the Śākala school and especially to the clansman Śākalya, who
is also credited with the composition of the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā.
Śākalya lived during the late Brāhmaṇa period, possibly in Videha (present-day
North Bihar) (Gonda 1975, 16; Witzel 1989, 135–138 and passim; Witzel 1997, 265–
266, 322–324). Śākalya’s Padapāṭha is regarded as ‘an early commentary upon the
Saṃhitā’ (Arnold 1905, 5), ‘the oldest surviving philological treatment of the
Ṛgveda’ (Scharfe 2009, 73), and ‘the first linguistic analysis of the Saṃhitāpāṭha’
(Levy/Staal 1968, 5), in that it ‘avoids sandhi and includes pauses between the
words, uses repetitions and deviations which serve to clarify the nature of com-
pounds and it presents word forms unchanged by, for example, metrical require-
ments’ (Falk 2001, 181). This linguistic analysis is accomplished in Śākalya’s Pa-
dapāṭha by means of a few symbols and markers. In the northern manuscripts
written in Devanāgarī, they are represented by daṇḍas (to separate words), ava-
grahas (to separate the members of compounds), circles between daṇḍas (to mark
the galitas), and the particle iti (to mark the pragṛhya vowels and for other pur-
poses).4 Symbols and markers serving these same purposes are found in the Cam-
bridge manuscript as well, although in most of the cases their graphical repre-
sentation differs from that in the Nāgarī manuscripts. Besides this, however, a
peculiar system of additional markers is used in the Cambridge manuscript,
which has no equivalent nor counterpart in Śākalya’s Padapāṭha as it is known
from the northern, ‘orthodox’ manuscript tradition.
||
2 The three prakṛtis were soon complemented by eight vikṛtis, ‘modifications, derivatives’. Of
the vikṛtis, the Jaṭāpāṭha is the oldest, the Ghanapāṭha the most complex. See Gonda 1975, 17;
Aithal 1991, 5–6; Falk 2001, 181.
3 The Ṛgveda Kramapāṭha as we know it is ascribed to Bābhravya, and is later than the
Saṃhitāpāṭha and the Padapāṭha. Other arrangements of the text of the Ṛgveda, such as the
Jaṭāpāṭha and the Ghanapāṭha, are based on it (Gonda 1975, 17). However, Falk (2001) assumes
the existence of an earlier Kramapāṭha lost to us, ‘nothing more than a teaching technique’,
which may possibly predate the Saṃhitāpāṭha and the Padapāṭha forms of the text.
4 For the different purposes served by the marker iti in the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha, see Rastogi 1970
and Jha 1975.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 379
In the following pages, all the markers found in the Cambridge manuscript
will be presented and illustrated, with the notable exception of those strictly re-
lating to the Vedic accent.5 The present work consists of two sections. The first
section deals with those symbols and markers in the Cambridge manuscript that
have a counterpart in the northern manuscripts of Śākalya’s Padapāṭha. The sec-
ond section, by contrast, is devoted to the examination of those markers that are
characteristic of the Cambridge manuscript, as they have no equivalent in the
northern transmission of the text.
2 First section
2.1 Compound boundary marker
The analysis of compounds in the Padapāṭhas6 consists primarily in the separation
of their members, which are always two and are, as a rule, given in their pausa
form.7 In manuscripts, the separation is indicated by a ‘compound boundary
marker’ (henceforth CBM), a special sign interposed between the two members of a
compound. In manuscripts written in Devanāgarī, the symbol used for this purpose
is the Nāgarī avagraha sign, and this practice is reflected in the printed editions
since Müller’s editio princeps. The term avagraha, ‘separation’, designates the in-
terval between the two members of a compound in the Padapāṭha in such an early
text as the Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya. However, it is difficult to decide whether the term
refers there to the recited or to the written form of the text,8 and even if the latter is
the case, we still do not know what graphic sign was intended by the word avagraha
||
5 These latter will be dealt with in another article by the same author (forthcoming), together
with the particular signs and the different methods used for marking the Vedic accent in manu-
scripts written in the Grantha script.
6 In the present article, under the term ‘compound’ are included all the pairs of words or word
elements which are analysed (i.e. separated by an avagraha) in the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha, including
those consisting in the stem with certain prefixes, suffixes and endings.
7 The exception to this rule is represented by the possible combination of the initial or final
sound of a compound with the marker iti; see Rastogi 1970, 5–10.
8 There is no doubt that, at least in some occurrences, in the Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya the term ava-
graha must refer (at least primarily) to the recitation of the Padapāṭha, since it denotes an inter-
val of time, e.g.: mātrā hrasvaḥ || tāvad avagrahāntaram || (I.27–28), ‘A short vowel has one mora.
That much is the interval of an Avagraha’ (Shastri 1922–1937, II.36 [text], III.6 [translation]).
380 | Marco Franceschini
in the Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya, given that the first known written attestation of the ava-
graha dates from as late as the 9th century CE.9 Be that as it may, the sign used as
CBM in the Cambridge manuscript is shown in the pictures below: it looks like a
hybrid between the Grantha avagraha and the Grantha pluta (protracted vowel)
marker (both of which, incidentally, are hardly ever found in manuscripts).10
| doṣā-vastaḥ | (ṚV 1.1.7, Or.2366 [1r3])11
| mandayat-sakham || (ṚV 1.4.7, Or.2366 [1v8])
2.2 Pragṛhya vowel markers
The term pragṛhya, ‘separated’, is used by the ancient Indian phoneticians to refer
to those vowels that are not subject to the rules of sandhi and, as such, remain un-
changed before any following sound. Pragṛhya vowels include ī, ū and e, when rep-
resenting dual endings (both in declension and conjugation) and when expressing
the Vedic locative case; the pronoun amī and some Vedic pronominal forms (tve,
asme, yuṣme); the final vowel of an interjection; and the particle ū̆, also when com-
bined with a preceding final ā̆ resulting in o (e.g. o < ā u, atho < atha u, uto < uta u,
||
9 ‘The mark Avagraha […] first appears in the Baroda Copper-plate of the Rāṣṭrakūta king
Dhruva, dated A.D. 834–35’ (Pandey 1952, 109). On the contrary, the daṇḍa is already repre-
sented by a vertical line in the Aśokan inscriptions (Pandey 1952, 105).
10 For printed samples of the two signs, see Grünendahl 2001, 76 and the chart of the Grantha
script in the Unicode Standard (Version 7.0) at: http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/
U11300.pdf.
11 In the present article, the CBMs are represented in transcriptions with a hyphen.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 381
mo < mā u).12 Although strictly speaking not a pragṛhya vowel, the o of the vocative
singular of u-stems is nonetheless treated in Śākalya’s Padapāṭha as if it were one.13
Turning to the written text, in the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda the pragṛhya vowels are
marked by appending the particle iti14 to them; the pragṛhya particle ū̆, however, is
peculiarly treated, being always lengthened and nasalised (Arnold 1905, 72 (§ 120);
Macdonell 1910, 65 n. 13). For example:15
Sp.: asme dhehi = Pp.: || asme iti | dhehi | (ṚV 1.9.8)
Sp.: kavī no = Pp.: || kavī iti | naḥ | (ṚV 1.2.9, Nom. dual)
Sp.: vāyav ā = Pp.: || vāyo iti | ā | (ṚV 1.2.1, Voc. sing.)
Sp.: imam ū ṣu = Pp.: || imam | ūṁ iti | su | (ṚV 1.27.4)
On the other hand, if the pragṛhya vowel is the final of a compound, the Padapāṭha
first gives the compound followed by iti (marking the pragṛhya vowel), and then by
the compound repeated in analysed form, i.e. with its two members separated by
an avagraha.16 However, the so-called devatā-dvandvas, ‘deity-dvandvas’,17 are an
exception, in that they are never analysed in the Padapāṭha and, therefore, they are
treated as they were a single word: as such, if they have a pragṛhya vowel as their
final, they are simply followed by iti, without being repeated. For example:
||
12 On the pragṛhya vowels, see Whitney 1889, 48 (§ 138); Macdonell 1910, 59 n. 9, 63 (§ 69c), 65–67
(§ 71.2abc, § 72.1b, § 72.2abc, § 72.3b); Rastogi 1970, 2–5.
13 This fact was also acknowledged by Pāṇini: see Bronkhorst 1982, 184 (§ 2.4). Possibly the o of
the vocative singular of u-stems was included under the pragṛhya category following the analogy
with the final o of particles such as o, atho, uto, mo, which are actually pragṛhya, being the result
of the combination of the final ā̆ of ā, atha, uta, mā with the unchangeable particle ū̆: see Arnold
1905, 132 (§ 171b); Macdonell 1910, 67 (§ 72.3).
14 The Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya (I.58) defines the particle iti used as a marker in the Padapāṭha as
anārṣa, ‘not coming from the ṛṣis (i.e. not belonging to the Vedic hymns)’, to distinguish it from the
same particle when it is part of the text of the saṃhitā (Rastogi 1970, 1). A clear and useful survey of
the uses of iti in the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda is given in Rastogi 1970; see also Jha 1975.
15 In the present article, quotation from both the Saṃhitāpāṭha and the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda
are based on Max Müller’s edition (1877, 2nd edition). When it has been considered necessary, the
readings have been checked against the Poona edition (Sontakke and Kashikar 1933–1951).
16 For layout reasons, in Müller’s edition of the Ṛgveda the ‘simple’ iti and the iti followed by the
analysed compound have been replaced with a dot and a circle respectively, both aligned to the top
line of the Devanāgarī script (Müller 1877, vii–viii).
17 The devatā-dvandvas, also known as ‘doubly dualized dvandvas’ (Oliphant 1912, 46), are copu-
lative compounds, whose two members refer to conventionally associated pairs of divinities, or
other personages, or personified natural objects. See Whitney 1889, 486–487 (§ 1255); Oliphant 1912;
Insler 1998 (according to whom the oldest – as well as the most common – type of devatā-dvandvas
in the Ṛgveda are not real dual dvandvas, but pairs of independent words).
382 | Marco Franceschini
Sp.: rudravartanī || = Pp.: | rudravartanī iti rudra-vartanī || (ṚV 1.3.3, Voc. dual)
Sp.: śatakrato | = Pp.: | śatakrato iti śata-krato | (ṚV 1.5.8, Voc. sing.)
Sp.: indravāyū ime = Pp.: | indravāyū iti | ime | (ṚV 1.2.4, Voc. dual, devatā-dvandva)
In the Cambridge manuscript, the pragṛhya vowels are indicated as in the north-
ern manuscripts, but with two notable differences. The Grantha character for the
independent (or initial) vowel i is used in place of the particle iti for marking a
pragṛhya vowel at the end of a single word (and of a devatā-dvandva). Moreover,
when a pragṛhya vowel occurs at the end of a compound, only the first member
of the compound is repeated after iti, in pausa form and followed by the CBM; the
second member is omitted in the repetition. The pictures below show how the
words and the compounds given above as examples of the analysis in Śākalya’s
Padapāṭha are written in the Cambridge Grantha manuscript.
|| asme i | (Pp.: || asme iti | – Sp.: asme) ṚV 1.9.8 (Or.2366 [3r1])
|| kavī i | (Pp.: || kavī iti | – Sp.: kavī) ṚV 1.2.9 (Or.2366 [1r8])
| vāyo i | (Pp.: || vāyo iti | – Sp.: vāyav) ṚV 1.2.1 (Or.2366 [1r5])
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 383
| ūṁ i | (Pp.: | ūṁ iti | – Sp.: ū) ṚV 1.27.4 (Or.2366 [7v10])
| rudravarttanī iti rudra- || (Pp.: | rudravartanī iti rudra-vartanī || – Sp: rudrava-rtanī)
ṚV 1.3.3 (Or.2366 [1r10])
| śatakrato iti śata- || (Pp.: | śatakrato iti śata-krato | – Sp: śatakrato)
ṚV 1.5.8 (Or.2366 [2r2])
|| indravāyū i | (Pp.: | indravāyū iti | – Sp: indravāyū) ṚV 1.2.4
(Or.2366 [1r6])
2.3 Galita markers
The galitas or galantas (or samayas, as they are called in the Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya)
are conventional omissions from the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha of passages that have
384 | Marco Franceschini
previously occurred in the text.18 Without going into the intricate rules governing
the use and structure of the galitas, it will suffice here to note that in the manu-
scripts in Devanāgarī, the sign marking the galitas (which is also called galita) is
a circle between daṇḍas (Falk 2001, 183). However, in the Grantha manuscript
under scrutiny two different signs are used to mark the galitas: the Grantha full
(initial) vowels o and the plus-sign. It appears that the following pattern is fol-
lowed in the manuscript: the first occurrence of a repeated passage is given with-
out alteration or added symbols, in regular Padapāṭha fashion, whereas all the
subsequent occurrences are enclosed by a pair of Grantha full vowels o19 and are
given in Saṃhitāpāṭha form; on its second occurrence, the passage is quoted in
full, whereas from the third repetition onwards, only the initial and final syllables
are written, and a plus-sign (or the cursive form thereof) marks the omission of
the missing syllables. For example:
First occurrence: || marut-bhiḥ | agne | ā | gahi || ṚV 1.19.1 (Or.2366 [5r7])
Second occurrence: || o marutbhir agne ā gaha [for gahi] o || ṚV 1.19.2 (Or.2366
[5r7])
||
18 An introduction to the galitas, as well as a detailed analysis of the galitas in the first four
maṇḍalas of the Ṛgveda, are given in Falk 2001; see also Kashikar 1947 and Kashikar 1951. The gali-
tas are not recorded in Max Müller’s edition of the Ṛgveda, since the editor, disregarding their occur-
rence in the manuscripts, ‘provided a Padapāṭha to every word of the Saṃhitāpāṭha’ (Falk 2001, 183).
19 Occasionally one of the two os is missing, probably due to oversight.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 385
Fifth occurrence: || o marut + hi o || ṚV 1.19.5 (Or.2366 [5r8])
Seventh occurrence: || o marutbhi + hi o || ṚV 1.19.7 (Or.2366 [5r9])
The cursive form of the plus-sign is occasionally used, as in the picture below.
|| o prātaḥ + mmyāt o || ṚV 1.63.9 (Or.2366 [22r7–8])
2.4 Final r markers
In some cases, words and compounds with an original final r are analysed in
Śākalya’s Padapāṭha, although their treatment is not straightforward, being
characterised by several inconsistencies and special cases.20 By way of simplifi-
cation, whenever in the Saṃhitāpāṭha an original final r is converted into any
other sound (i.e. a sibilant or visarga) or is dropped (because of a following initial
r), in the Padapāṭha the final r is restored and an iti-marker is appended to it; in
cases where that r is the final of the last member of a compound, the compound
is repeated in analysed form (i.e. with its two members separated by an avagraha)
||
20 For the rules of sandhi concerning final r, see Whitney 1889, 61 (§§ 178–179). For a brief but
quite accurate survey of the different cases and methods used for marking the final r in Śākalya’s
Padapāṭha, see Rastogi 1970, 7–9 and Jha 1975.
386 | Marco Franceschini
after the iti-marker. The Cambridge manuscript follows the same conventions,
but with two differences: the iti-marker is reduced to a mātra (or ‘dependent’)
short vowel -i and in place of the repetition of the whole compound in analysed
form, only the first member is repeated after the marker -i, followed by the CBM.21
|| hotar -i | pāvaka | (Pp. | hotar iti | pāvaka | – Sp. hotaḥ pāvaka) ṚV 1.13.1
(Or.2366 [3v9])22
| ahar -i | svaYḥ | (Pp. | ahar iti | svaḥ | – Sp. ahaḥ svar)
ṚV 1.71.2 (Or.2366 [24r4])23
| punar -i || (Pp. | punar iti | – Sp. punaḥ)
ṚV 1.140.8 (Or.2366 [53r3])24
||
21 The ways the final r is marked in both Śākalya’s Padapāṭha and the Cambridge manuscript
clearly mirror those used for marking the pragṛhya vowels.
22 In Müller’s edition, the analysis of the word hotar (| hotar iti |) is omitted: no doubt this is an
oversight, since the analysis is regularly recorded in the Poona edition (Sontakke and Kashikar
1933–1951).
23 The symbol transcribed here with ‘Y’, which actually looks more like a small Latin letter ‘h’
turned upside down, is used in the Cambridge manuscript for marking the independent svarita
called jātya (‘genuine’) or nitya (‘invariable’).
24 Here the final r is converted into visarga because it occurs at the end of a hemistich.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 387
| vidharttar iti vi- | sacase | (Pp. | vidhartar iti vi-dhartaḥ | sacase | – Sp. vidhartaḥ
sacase) ṚV 2.1.3 (Or.2366 [70v2])
In addition to the cases shown above, in which the original final r is converted
into another sound in the Saṃhitāpāṭha, in the Cambridge manuscript (but not
in the Śākalya Padapāṭha) the scribe has also marked cases in which an original
final r appears unchanged in the Saṃhitāpāṭha, but is converted into a visarga in
the Padapāṭha in accordance with the rules of permitted finals. This happens
when the final r occurs in front of a voiced phoneme, which can be the initial
sound either of the following word or of the second member of a compound. Ap-
parently, when the combination occurs between words, a Grantha syllable ra be-
tween daṇḍas is used as a marker, whereas when it occurs between the two mem-
bers of a compound the marker is represented by a ligature combining the final r
of the first member with the initial syllable of the second member. Admittedly,
however, these cases seem to be only occasionally marked.25
| bhrātaḥ | ra | agastya | (Pp. | bhrātaḥ | agastya | – Sp. bhrātar agastya)
ṚV 1.170.3 (Or.2366 [64r4])
ahaḥ-vidaḥ | rvi || (Pp. | ahaḥ-vidaḥ | – Sp. aharvidaḥ) ṚV 1.2.2 (Or.2366 [1r6])
||
25 For example, the following cases are not marked: Sp. doṣāvastar dhiyā = Or.2366 | doṣā-
vastaḥ | dhiyā | [1r3] (ṚV 1.1.7); Sp. punar garbhatvam = Or.2366 | punaḥ | garbha-tvam | [2r5]
(ṚV 1.6.4); Sp. punar dāt = Or.2366 | punaḥ | dāt | [6v6] (ṚV 1.24.1); Sp. punar eyuṣīṇām =
Or.2366 | punaḥ | ā-īyuṣīṇām | [46r7] (ṚV 1.124.4); Sp. punar asmabhyaṃ = Or.2366 | punaḥ |
asmabhyaṃ | [69r7] (ṚV 1.189.3).
388 | Marco Franceschini
3 Second section
With the exception of the last cases illustrated above, the previous section dealt
with devices of textual analysis which are found in both the northern written
transmission of Śākalya’s Padapāṭha and the Cambridge manuscript in Grantha
script, although their graphical representation is often different in the two tradi-
tions. In this section, several additional devices of textual analysis will be pre-
sented which are found only in the Cambridge manuscript and, as such, have no
counterpart in the northern manuscripts of the text. These devices are used to
indicate some euphonic modifications and other alterations of the text which
take place in the Saṃhitāpāṭha of the Ṛgveda, and which are left unnoticed in
Śākalya’s Padapāṭha.
3.1 Exceptional combination of a pragṛhya vowel
In the previous section it has been shown that the pragṛhya vowels are marked in
the Cambridge manuscript with the Grantha independent vowel i or with the par-
ticle iti. However, in the Saṃhitāpāṭha there are few cases in which a pragṛhya
vowel is exceptionally combined with the initial vowel of the following word
(Whitney 1889, 48, § 138g). These cases are marked in the Cambridge Grantha
manuscript: the final pragṛhya vowel is firstly regularly marked with a full Gran-
tha vowel i or the particle iti; then an additional marker is added between daṇḍas,
consisting of a ligature showing the combination of the syllable ending with the
pragṛhya vowel with the initial vowel of the following word.
| vedī i | dya | asyām || (Pp. | vedī iti | asyām | – Sp. vedy asyāṃ) ṚV 2.3.4 (Or.2366 [71v4])
3.2 Hiatus markers
In general, hiatus is strongly contrasted by the euphony of classical Sanskrit. To
avoid hiatus, the rules of sandhi prescribe that a final and an initial vowel coming
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 389
together are combined into one vowel, or one of the two is turned into a semi-
vowel, or the latter of the two is elided (abhinihita sandhi).26 In contrast, hiatuses
were abundantly admitted in the earlier language of the Veda, as the evidence of
the metre shows, although they were largely suppressed by the later application
of the classical rules of sandhi.27 Nonetheless, a good number of them survive in
the Saṃhitāpāṭha of the Ṛgveda: in the Cambridge manuscript, they are marked
with the Grantha syllable vya enclosed between daṇḍas, placed in the break be-
tween the two vowels.
| devāsaḥ | vya | asridhaḥ | (Pp. | devāsaḥ | asridhaḥ | – Sp. devāso asridha) ṚV 1.3.9
(Or.2366 [1v3])
| manīṣā | vya | agniḥ | (Pp. | manīṣā | agniḥ | – Sp. manīṣā agniḥ) ṚV 1.70.1 (Or.2366
[23v9])
3.3 The anunāsika sign and nasalisation markers
In the Cambridge manuscript, the anunāsika is represented by an ‘L’-shaped sign
with the horizontal stroke longer than the vertical one.28 It is employed to indicate
a nasalised vowel, as in the representation of the particle ū̆ shown above (| ūṁ i
|). The sign for anunāsika is also used in the manuscript as a marker indicating
the results of the combination (in the Saṃhitāpāṭha) of a final n preceded by a
||
26 See Whitney 1889, 39 (§ 113), 42–48 (§§ 125–138); Macdonell 1910, 63–67 (§ 69–73).
27 See Whitney 1889, 39 (§ 113), 42 (§ 125c), 45 (§ 129e), 46 (§ 133abc), 47 (§ 135c); Arnold 1905, 5
(§ 14) and passim.
28 In the present article, the anunāsika is represented by the letter ṁ, to distinguish it from the
anusvāra (ṃ).
390 | Marco Franceschini
long vowel:29 a final ān before an initial vowel is marked with a simple anunāsika
between daṇḍas, indicating the resulting āṁ;30 final īn, ūn, ṝn before voiced
sounds are marked with an anunāsika and a Grantha syllable made of r and the
initial voiced sound of the following word, indicating the resulting īṁr, ūṁr, ṝṁr;
a final ṝn before an unvoiced sound is marked with an anunāsika and a visarga
between daṇḍas, indicating the resulting ṝṁḥ.31
| su-bhagān | ṁ | ariḥ | (Pp. | su-bhagān | ariḥ | – Sp. subhagāṁ arir)
ṚV 1.4.6 (Or.2366 [1v7])
| iṣu-dhīn | ṁra | asakta | (Pp. | iṣu-dhīn | asakta | – Sp. iṣudhīṁr asakta)
ṚV 1.33.3 (Or.2366 [10r10])
||
29 See Whitney 1889, 70 (§ 209); Macdonell 1910, 68–69 (§ 77b).
30 As noted by Winternitz (1902, 222–223), the same marker is used for the same function in
manuscript No. 176 in the Whish collection (No. 165 in Winternitz’s catalogue), which, predicta-
bly, transmits the Padapāṭha text of the Ṛgveda. Incidentally, this is the only mention found so
far in scholarly literature of one of the markers used in the Cambridge manuscript.
31 There is only one occurrence of this marker in the manuscript, namely | nṝn | ṁḥ | pātram |
[44r1] (Pp. | nṝn | pātram | – Sp. nṝṁḥ pātraṃ, ṚV 1.121.1). Unfortunately, the passage cannot be
shown in the present article because the quality of the relevant picture is too poor for reproduc-
tion.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 391
| paridhīn-iva | ṁri | (Pp. | paridhīn-iva | – Sp. paridhīṁr iva) ṚV 1.52.5 (Or.2366
[17v7–8])32
| rtūn | ṁra | anu || (Pp. | rtūn | anu | – Sp. ṛtūṁr anu) ṚV 1.15.5 (Or.2366 [4r11])
| dasyūn | ṁryya | yonau || (Pp. | dasyūn | yonau | – Sp. dasyūṁr yonāv) ṚV 1.63.4
(Or.2366 [22r3–4])
In the Ṛgveda, a small number of cases are found in which a final ā̆ is nasalised
to avoid the hiatus or contraction with a following initial vowel.33 In the Cam-
bridge manuscript, these nasalisations are marked with an anunāsika between
daṇḍas.
| śāśadānā | ṁ | eṣi | (Pp. | śāśadānā | eṣi | – Sp. śāśadānāṁ eṣi) ṚV 1.123.10 (Or.2366
[46r1])
||
32 In the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha, the particle iva is regularly combined in a compound with the pre-
ceding word, and, thus, separated from it by an intervening avagraha.
33 See Macdonell 1910, 59–60 (§ 66.2).
392 | Marco Franceschini
3.4 Prolonged and shortened vowels markers
In the Saṃhitāpāṭha of the Ṛgveda, the final vowel of a word, that of the former
member of a compound, and the vowel of the syllable of reduplication are pro-
longed in a good number of cases, the prolongations being mostly for prosodic
reasons.34 In Śākalya’s Padapāṭha, all these words are recorded with their regular
short vowel, and the prolongations are not indicated in any way. On the contrary,
in the Cambridge manuscript these prolongations are regularly marked: the
lengthening of a short a is marked with a mātra (or ‘dependent’) long vowel -ā,
and that of a short vowel other than a is marked by repeating the whole relevant
syllable with its vowel lengthened. All the markers are placed between daṇḍas
after the relevant word or compound.
|| vidma | -ā | (Pp. | vidma | – Sp. vidmā) ṚV 1.10.10 (Or.2366 [3r7])
| aśva-vatyā | -ā | (Pp. | aśva-vatyā | – Sp. °āśvāvatye°) ṚV 1.30.17 (Or.2366 [8v9])
||
34 See Whitney 1889, 84–85 (§§ 247–248); Macdonell 1910, 62–63 (§ 68). The topic is extensively
discussed by Arnold (1905, xi–xiii, 6, 108–148), according to whom most of these final vowels
were originally long and had been shortened in later times, in obeisance to the rules set by clas-
sical Sanskrit grammarians. However, the primitive quantity must often be restored for metrical
reasons. This being the case, what we call ‘prolongation’ is in fact ‘restoration’ of the original
quantity, which is often necessary to match the requirements of the metre. The fact that the Pa-
dapāṭha usually gives short vowels in place of the original long ones ‘is only evidence of the
pronunciation of the word at the time when this commentary was composed’ (Arnold 1905, 6).
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 393
| hṛdaya-vidhaḥ | -ā | (Pp. | hṛdaya-vidhaḥ | – Sp. hṛdayāvidhaś) ṚV 1.24.8 (Or.2366
[6v10])
| vavṛdhe | -ā | (Pp. | vavṛdhe | – Sp. vāvṛdha īṃ) ṚV 1.167.8 (Or.2366 [63r8])
| kṛdhi | dhī | (Pp. | kṛdhi | – Sp. kṛdhī) ṚV 1.10.11 (Or.2366 [3r8])
| carṣaṇi-dhṛtaḥ | ṇī | (Pp. | carṣaṇi-dhṛtaḥ | – Sp. carṣaṇīdhṛto) ṚV 1.3.7
(Or.2366 [1v2])
| mithu | thū | (Pp. | mithu | – Sp. mithū)
ṚV 1.162.20 (Or.2366 [59r9])
394 | Marco Franceschini
In a few cases, the opposite alteration occurs, i.e. the final long ā of a devatā-dvandva
is shortened in the Saṃhitāpāṭha. In the Cambridge manuscript, this shortening is
marked by repeating the final syllable of the compound with a short a between
daṇḍas.35
| indrāvaruṇā | ṇa | (Pp. | indrāvaruṇā | – Sp. indrāvaruṇa) ṚV 1.17.3 (Or.2366 [4v10])
|| indrāvaruṇā | ṇa | (Pp. | indrāvaruṇā | – Sp. indrāvaruṇa) ṚV 1.17.7 (Or.2366 [5r1])
3.5 Final s markers
As a rule, a final s before voiceless velar and bilabial plosives k(h) and p(h) is turned
into visarga. However, in a number of cases the s is retained or converted into a
cerebral sibilant ṣ (Whitney 1889, 58, §§ 170–171). These cases are passed under si-
lence in Śākalya’s Padapāṭha; in the Cambridge manuscript, however, they are
marked with a Grantha ligature joining the retained sibilant with the following ini-
tial plosive.36
||
35 In addition to the two examples shown here, other cases are found in ṚV 1.15.6b ([4r11][4v1]),
ṚV 1.17.8 ([5r1]) and ṚV 1.17.9 ([5r1], with the mark ṇa erroneously placed after the word following
the compound). In all these cases, Arnold suggests reading índra váruṇa (as two separated voc-
atives, each bearing its own accent) in place of the devatā-dvandva índrāvaruṇa, ‘on the analogy
of varuna mitra in i 122 7a’ (Arnold 1905, 137, § 174 ii); see also Insler 1998.
36 In compounds, a final s before k(h) and p(h) is regularly retained in the Veda (Whitney 1889,
58, § 171) and, consequently, it is not marked in the Cambridge manuscript. No special signs for
jihvāmūlīya and upadhmānīya are found in the Cambridge manuscript.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 395
| patnī-vataḥ | kṛdhi | skṛ || (Pp. | patnī-vataḥ | kṛdhi | – Sp. patnīvatas kṛdhi)
ṚV 1.14.7 (Or.2366 [4r6])
| brahmaṇaḥ | pate | spa || (Pp. | brahmaṇaḥ | pate | – Sp. brahmaṇas pate)
ṚV 1.18.1 (Or.2366 [5r3])
| śavasaḥ | pate | spa || (Pp. | śavasaḥ | pate | – Sp. śavasas pate) ṚV 1.11.2
(Or.2366 [3r10])
| catuḥ-pade | ṣpa | (Pp. | catuḥ-pade | – Sp. catuṣpade) ṚV 1.114.1
(Or.2366 [40r3])
| dhīḥ | pīpāya | ṣpa | (Pp. | dhīḥ | pīpāya | – Sp. dhīṣ pīpāya) ṚV 2.2.9
(Or.2366 [71r9])
396 | Marco Franceschini
3.6 Sp. ścandra (vs Pp. candra) marker
In the Saṃhitāpāṭha of the Ṛgveda, the adjective candra (‘bright, brilliant’) oc-
curs in a number of cases in its old form ścandra, especially where it is the second
member of a compound.37 In the Padapāṭha, the word is invariably recorded as
candra: in the Cambridge manuscripts, however, the form ścandra of the Saṃhi-
tāpāṭha is indicated with a Grantha syllable śca enclosed by daṇḍas placed after
candra-.
| puru-candraḥ | śca || (Pp. | puru-candraḥ | – Sp. puruścandraḥ) ṚV 1.27.11
(Or.2366 [8r3])
| sva-candram | śca || (Pp. | sva-candram | – Sp. svaścandram) ṚV 1.52.9
(Or.2366 [17v10])
3.7 Retroflexion markers
An original dental nasal n or sibilant s, recorded as such in the Padapāṭha, is of-
ten changed to its corresponding retroflex (ṇ and ṣ respectively) in the Saṃhitā-
pāṭha, due to the rule of euphonic combination. These alterations are indicated
in the Cambridge manuscript by placing the syllable with the altered (i.e. retro-
flexed) consonant(s) between daṇḍas, after the relevant word or compound.
However, the original vowel of the syllable is occasionally replaced with a short
vowel a.
||
37 See Macdonell 1910, 74 (§ 81.2c); Macdonell 1916, 37 (§ 50a n. 5).
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 397
| suteṣu | naḥ | ṇa | (Pp. | suteṣu | naḥ | – Sp. suteṣu ṇo) ṚV 1.10.5 (Or.2366 [3r5])
| vṛṣa-pāneṣu | ṇa | (Pp. | vṛṣa-pāneṣu | – Sp. vṛṣapāṇeṣu) ṚV 1.51.12 (Or.2366
[17r10])
| pra | nonumaḥ | ṇo | (Pp. | pra | nonumaḥ | – Sp. pra ṇonumo) ṚV 1.11.2 (Or.2366
[3r10])
| su-pranītiḥ | ṇa | (Pp. | su-pranītiḥ | – Sp. su praṇītiś) ṚV 1.73.1 (Or.2366 [24v9])
|| ni | sasāda | ṣa | (Pp. | ni | sasāda | – Sp. ni ṣasāda) ṚV 1.25.10
(Or.2366 [7r9])
398 | Marco Franceschini
| ūṁ i | su | ṣu | (Pp. | ūṁ iti | su | – Sp. ū ṣu) ṚV 1.27.4 (Or.2366 [7v10])
| puru-stutaḥ | ṣṭu || (Pp. | puru-stutaḥ | – Sp. puruṣṭutaḥ) ṚV 1.11.4
(Or.2366 [3v1])
| su-stutim | ṣṭu || (Pp. | su-stutim | – Sp. suṣṭutim) ṚV 1.7.7 (Or.2366 [2v1])
| su-stutiḥ | ṣṭa | (Pp. | su-stutiḥ | – Sp. suṣṭutir) ṚV 1.17.9 (Or.2366 [5r2])
| aprati-skutaḥ | ṣka || (Pp. | aprati-skutaḥ | – Sp. apratiṣkutaḥ)
ṚV 1.7.6 (Or.2366 [2v1])
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 399
3.8 Multiple markers
To conclude, it is worth noting that in the Cambridge manuscript there are cases
in which multiple alterations affecting the same word or compound are also
marked. In some of these cases, two different alterations are pointed out by one
single mark. For example, in the first picture below, the syllable | rṇi | between
daṇḍas marks both the conversion of the visarga into r (niḥ > nir) and the change
of the dental nasal to the corresponding retroflex (nijā > ṇijā). Similarly, in the
second picture, the syllable | rṣa | indicates both the conversion of the visarga into
r (dhūḥ > dhūr) and the change of the dental sibilant to the corresponding retro-
flex (sadam > ṣadam). In other cases, however, two or more markers are ap-
pended to one single word or compound, each indicating a different alteration.
For example, in the third picture below, the symbol transcribed with a capitol ‘Y’
marks a jātya accent, and the Grantha syllables ṣa and ṇyā mark the change of
the original dental sibilant and nasal (s and n) to their correspondent retroflex
sounds (savanyā > ṣavaṇyā).
| niḥ-nijā | rṇi | (Pp. | niḥ-nijā | – Sp. nirṇijā) ṚV 1.162.2 (Or.2366 [58v5])
| dhūḥ-sadam | rṣa || (Pp. | dhūḥ-sadam | – Sp. dhūrṣadam) ṚV 2.2.1 (Or.2366 [71r3])
| adhi-savanyā Y | ṣa ṇyā | (Pp. | adhi-savanyā | – Sp. ādhiṣavaṇyā) ṚV 1.28.2
(Or.2366 [8r5])
400 | Marco Franceschini
4 Conclusions
In the previous pages, all the markers found in the Cambridge manuscript have
been presented.38 To conclude, some final observations will be given, aiming to
answer the following five questions: (1) What is the function of the system of ad-
ditional markers found in the Cambridge manuscript? (2) Are these markers com-
monly used in Grantha manuscripts transmitting the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha or does
the Cambridge manuscript represent a unicum in this sense? (3) Are these markers
found only in the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha or they are used in the Padapāṭhas of other
śākhās as well? (4) Are they unique to manuscripts written in Grantha or do they
have a counterpart in Padapāṭhas written in other South Indian scripts? (5) When
did these markers come into use?
(1) With regard to their purpose, it seems clear that these markers function as
a ‘code’ to provide the reciter with the information needed to convert the Pa-
dapāṭha into the Saṃhitāpāṭha. Furthermore, it seems natural to suppose that
these markers, in an extremely compact fashion, encode the rules laid down in
the Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya concerning the conversion of the Padapāṭha into the
Saṃhitāpāṭha. However, this conjecture needs further investigation. The as-
sumption that historically the Padapāṭha precedes the Saṃhitāpāṭha and that the
former is the basis on which the latter is formed goes back to Max Müller and has
been adopted by several scholars since, but also rejected by others.39 Similarly,
the role played by the Prātiśākhyas in the process of constructing the
||
38 With the exception of those relating to the Vedic accent, as pointed out in the Introduction.
Moreover, for all the attention paid in the search, chances are that a few infrequent markers may
have escaped notice.
39 According to Max Müller, the arrangement of the text in the Padapāṭha ‘bildet die prakṛti,
die Norm, welcher die Sanhitā, d.h. der verbundene Text des Veda, folgt. Die Sanhitā ist dem-
nach, fur Grammatische Zwecke, als Vikāra des Padapāṭha (der Prakṛti) zu fassen’ (1856, xxxii;
here Müller is commenting upon Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya II.1, saṃhitā padaprakṛtiḥ). More recently,
the same opinion has been maintained by Bronkhorst (1982, 185 and passim), who went so far
as to postulate that ‘the Padapāṭha was originally the written version of the Ṛgveda’ (Bronkhorst
1982, 185). In his view, it ‘was written down from its beginning’ and, consequently, it is ‘not un-
likely that the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda is the oldest surviving written book of India’ (Bronkhorst
1982, 184, 186). Bronkhorst reiterated his opinion twenty years later, although with some caution
(2002, 806–808). On the other hand, the assumption that the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha precedes the
Saṃhitāpāṭha is rejected by Scharfe, who argues that it ‘has long been laid to rest’ (2009, 103),
probably alluding to the arguments he had adduced in Scharfe 2002, 10–11. On a possible influ-
ence of the scripts on the origins of the Padapāṭha arrangement of the Vedic texts, see Houben
and Rath 2012, 30–31.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 401
Saṃhitāpāṭha from the Padapāṭha is debated. Several scholars hold that provid-
ing the rules for converting the former into the latter is actually the primary pur-
pose served by the Prātiśākhyas.40 However, this view has recently been chal-
lenged by Scharfe (2009, 97–107), who contends that ‘no Prātiśākhya states it as
its purpose to reconstruct the Saṃhitā-pāṭha’ (2009, 106).41 As important and in-
teresting as this debate may be, it takes us beyond the scope of the present article.
Turning back to the Cambridge manuscript, it seems clear that its additional
markers constitute an aid for converting the Padapāṭha into the Saṃhitāpāṭha.
Whether these markers encode the rules of the Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya or those of
some other (local?) treatise is not clear at present, and deserves further investiga-
tion.
(2) and (3) The markers found in the Cambridge manuscript seem to be com-
monly used in the Grantha manuscripts of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha. Furthermore,
similar markers are also used in Grantha manuscripts transmitting other Pa-
dapāṭhas, particularly that of the Taittirīyasaṃhitā. In fact, it seems that the use
of a system of additional markers is a regular feature in the Grantha manuscripts
transmitting these two Vedic texts in Padapāṭha form: at least, this is the result
of a survey of the manuscripts belonging to the Cambridge University Library
(UL) and the Institut Français de Pondichéry (IFP), and of the examination of
Winternitz’s catalogue of the Whish collection (1902). Systems of markers of the
||
40 This view was expressed by Whitney, according to whom 'the Prātiśākhyas [...] take for
granted, upon the whole, the existence of their śākhās in the analysed condition of the pada-
text, and proceed to construct the saṃhitā from it’ (1868, 82); later, it was also expressed by Max
Müller, who maintained that the Prātiśākhyas ‘start from the Pada text, take it, as it were, for
granted, and devote their rules to the explanation of those changes which that text undergoes in
being changed into the Saṃhitā text’ (1891, xlii). The same opinion has been reiterated, in a
slightly different fashion, by Winternitz, who holds that the Prātiśākhyas ‘contain the rules by
the aid of which one can form the Saṃhitā-Pāṭha from the Pada-Pāṭha’ (1927, 283), by Gonda,
who maintains that the Prātiśākhyas ‘were composed for the purpose of exhibiting – in oral in-
struction – all the changes necessary for constituting the saṃhitā text on the basis of the pa-
dapāṭha’ (1975, 17), and by Bronkhorst, according to whom ‘the desire to construe the
Saṃhitāpāṭha on the basis of the Padapāṭha also underlies the Ṛgveda-Prātiśākhya’ (1982, 185).
41 According to Scharfe, ‘the concerns of these texts [i.e. the Prātiśākhyas] are the qualities of
the combined and separated words, i.e. as words appear in the Saṃhitāpāṭha and Padapāṭha –
not the directed conversion of the Padapāṭha into the Saṃhitāpāṭha’ (2009, 99). On this argu-
ment, see also Scharfe 2002, 241–243.
402 | Marco Franceschini
sort described in the present article are used in all the manuscripts in these col-
lections that transmit the Padapāṭhas of the Ṛgvedasaṃhitā (five manuscripts) 42
and of the Taittirīyasaṃhitā (fourteen manuscripts).43 It should be noted, how-
ever, that both the number and the graphical shape of the markers can vary con-
siderably from one manuscript to another. For example, four distinct signs for
anunāsika and as many as eight distinct CBMs have been found in the manu-
scripts. Moreover, it happens that different markers have the same function in
different manuscripts, that the same marker serves different purposes in different
manuscripts, and even that different signs have the same function in the same
manuscript. For example, two or even three distinct CBMs are used together in
the same manuscript, even if it was presumably written by one and the same
scribe.44 At a first perusal, it seems that the preference for one particular marker
among several serving the same function is more a matter of personal choice on
the part of the scribe than a characteristic connected with the text transmitted in
the manuscript. In other words, different signs and different markers are used to
convey the same information in manuscripts belonging to the same śākhā, and
this also holds true with regard to the Vedic accent marks, which are not dealt
with here, but which will be examined in a forthcoming article by the present
author. Once again, however, this point needs further investigation.
(4) It is perhaps tempting to surmise that this system of additional markers,
apparently so common in Grantha manuscripts, may also be found in Padapāṭhas
written in other South Indian scripts, such as Telugu, Kannada and, primarily,
Malayalam. At present, though, it has been possible to examine only two manu-
scripts in the Tigaḷāri script,45 transmitting portions of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha. A
||
42 Two manuscripts belonging to the IFP collection (RE 45685 and RE 45710), two manuscripts
belonging to the Whish collection (Nos 176 and 177, corresponding to Nos 165 and 166 in Winter-
nitz’s catalogue; see Winternitz 1902, 222–224), and the manuscript described in the present ar-
ticle (UL collection, Or.2366). With regard to the two manuscripts in the Whish collection, the
presence of a system of markers similar to the one described in the present article can be evinced
from the records in Winternitz’s catalogue: in the former manuscript an anunāsika between
daṇḍas is used for marking the results of the combination (in the Saṃhitāpāṭha) of a final n pre-
ceded by a long vowel and followed by a voiced sound (cfr. Section 3.3 above, and especially
note 30); in the latter, the syllable vya enclosed between daṇḍas is used for marking a hiatus
arising from the non-application of the abhinihita-sandhi (cfr. Section 3.2 above).
43 Of these manuscripts, four belong to the UL collection (Or.2356, Or.2357, Or.2362, Or.2369)
and ten to the IFP collection (RE 20305, RE 30516, RE 38367, RE 38376, RE 39651, RE 40269, RE
46070, RE 49434, RE 50342, RE 50372).
44 Two different CBMs are used in RE 50342, RE 50372, RE 20305, RE 46070; three different signs
in Or.2369.
45 Both manuscripts (RE 43176 and RE 43211) belong to the IFP collection.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 403
cursory examination of these manuscripts shows that they mainly follow the
marking system of the ‘orthodox’ northern manuscript tradition in Devanāgarī:
they use the anārṣa marker iti in accordance with it, and none of the markers
found in the Grantha manuscripts seem to be employed in them. However, in con-
trast with the northern tradition, no CBM is used in either of them, and a special
marker is used to mark the galitas, which differs both from the circle between
daṇḍas used in the northern manuscripts and the independent o used in the
Grantha manuscripts.
(5) The available data is too meagre to speculate about the time when the
system of additional markers observed in the Padapāṭhas written in the Grantha
script entered into use. All that we know at present is evinced from the manu-
scripts themselves. One of the manuscripts listed above (i.e. Or.2369) bears a date
corresponding to 1828 CE. On the other hand, we are led to assign some manu-
scripts of the IFP collection46 tentatively to the 17th or the first half of the 18th cen-
tury, on the basis of certain palaeographic features. Accordingly, all that can be
said at present is that the system of additional markers was probably in use by
the 17th or 18th century. However, we cannot expect to shed much more light on
this point if we base our research merely on the data from manuscripts, even more
so considering that manuscripts from South India dating from earlier than the 17th
century are extremely rare. Rather, references to the use of these additional mark-
ers in secondary and commentarial literature (also in vernaculars) would be of
great help in establishing the period when they came into use. In this respect,
suggestions from colleagues working on the transmission of the Vedic texts in
South India will be particularly valuable and most welcome.
References
Aithal, K. Parameswara (1993), Veda-lakṣaṇa. Vedic Ancillary Literature: A Descriptive Biblio-
graphy (First edition: Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1991), Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1–20.
Arnold, Edward Vernon (1905), Vedic Metre in its Historical Development, Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press.
Bronkhorst, Johannes (1981), ‘The Orthoepic Diaskeuasis of the Ṛgveda and the Date of Pāṇini’,
in Indo-Iranian Journal, 23: 83–95.
Bronkhorst, Johannes (1982), ‘Some Observations on the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda’, in Indo-
Iranian Journal, 24: 181–189.
Bronkhorst, Johannes (2002), ‘Literacy and Rationality’, in Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asia-
tiques, 56(1): 797–831.
||
46 They are RE 38367, RE 38376, RE 39651, RE 40269, RE 45710.
404 | Marco Franceschini
Falk, Harry (2001), ‘The Galitas in the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha: On the Origins of the Saṃhitāpāṭha
and the Padapāṭha’, in Axel Michaels (ed.), The Pandit. Traditional Scholarship in India,
New Delhi: Manohar, 181–202.
Gonda, Jan (1975), Vedic Literature. A History of Indian Literature, Volume I, Fasc. 1, Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz.
Grünendahl, Reinhold (2001), South Indian Scripts in Sanskrit Manuscripts and Prints, Wiesba-
den: Harrassowitz.
Houben, Jan E.M., and Saraju Rath (2012), ‘Manuscript Culture and its Impact in ‘India’: Con-
tours and Parameters’, in Saraju Rath (ed.), Aspects of Manuscript Culture in South India,
Leiden: Brill, 1–53.
Insler, Stanley (1998), ‘mitrā́váruṇā or mitrā́ váruṇā’, in Jay Jasanoff, H. Craig Melchert and Lisi
Olivier (eds), Mír Curad: Studies in Honor of Calvert Watkins, Innsbruck: Institut für
Sprachwissenschaft der Universität Innsbruck, 285–290.
Jha, Vashishta Narayan (1975), ‘Iti-karaṇa in the Ṛgveda-Padapāṭha’, in Bulletin of the Deccan
College Research Institute, 35: 49–54.
Jha, Vashishta Narayan (1976), ‘Stages in the Composition of the Ṛgveda-padapāṭha’, in Bulle-
tin of the Deccan College Research Institute, 35: 47–50.
Kashikar, Chintamani Ganesh (1947), ‘Repetition in the Ṛgveda-padapāṭha’, in Annals of the
Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 28: 301–305.
Kashikar, Chintamani Ganesh (1951), ‘The Problem of the Gaḷantas in the Ṛgveda-Padapāṭha’,
in Proceedings of All-India Oriental Conference (Thirteenth Session: Nagpur University,
October 1946, Part 2), 39–46.
Levy, John, and Frits Staal (1969), The Four Vedas. The Oral Tradition of Hymns, Chants, Sacrifi-
cial and Magical Formulas. Introduction and Notes by Professor J.F. Staal. Recordings by
John Levy and J.F. Staal. ASCH Mankind Series, Album No. AHM 4126 (Ethnic Folkways Rec-
ords FE 4126), 1–20.
Macdonell, Arthur Anthony (1910), Vedic Grammar, Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner.
Macdonell, Arthur Anthony (1916), A Vedic Grammar for Students, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Müller, Friedrich Max (ed.) (1856), Rig-Veda oder die Heiligen Lieder der Brahmanen. Mit einer
Einleitung, Text und Übersetzung des Prātiśākhya oder der ältesten Phonetik und Gram-
matik enthaltend. Erster Theil, Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus.
Müller, Friedrich Max (ed.) (1877), The Hymns of the Rig-Veda in the Samhita and Pada Texts.
Reprinted from the editio princeps. Second edition, with the two texts on parallel pages.
Two volumes, London: Trübner and Co.
Müller, Friedrich Max (trans.) (1891), Vedic Hymns. Part I, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Oliphant, Samuel Grant (1912), ‘The Vedic Dual: Part VI, The Elliptic Dual dvandva’, in Journal of
the American Oriental Society, 32: 33–57.
Pandey, Raj Bali (1952), Indian Palaeography. Part I, Banaras: Motilal Banarsi Das.
Rastogi, Moti Lal (1970), ‘Itikaraṇa in the Ṛk-padapāṭha’, in Sri Venkateswara University Orien-
tal Journal, 13: 1–10.
Scharfe, Hartmut (2002), Education in Ancient India, Leiden: E.J. Brill.
Scharfe, Hartmut (2009), ‘A New Perspective on Pāṇini’, in Indologica Taurinensia, 35: 3–272.
Shastri, Mangal Deva (ed.) (1922–1937), The Ṛg-vedaprātiśākhya with the Commentary of
Uvaṭa. Edited from Original Manuscripts, with Introduction, Critical and Additional Notes,
English Translation of the Text and Several Appendices. Three volumes, London: Oxford
University Press.
On Some Markers Used in a Grantha Manuscript of the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha | 405
Sontakke, N.S., and C.G. Kashikar (eds) (1933–1951), Ṛgveda-Saṃhitā with the Commentary of
Śāyaṇācārya. Five volumes, Poona: Vaidika Saṃśodhana Maṇḍala.
Whitney, William Dwight (1868), ‘The Taittirīya-Prātiśākhya, with its Commentary, the
Tribhāṣyaratna: Text, Translations and Notes’, in Journal of the American Oriental Society,
9 (1868–1871): 1–469.
Whitney, William Dwight (1889), A Sanskrit Grammar. Including both the Classical Language
and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana. Second (revised and extended) edition.
(First edition: 1879), Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel.
Winternitz, Moriz (1902), A Catalogue of South Indian Sanskrit Manuscripts (Especially those of
the Whish Collection) Belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland,
London: Royal Asiatic Society.
Winternitz, Moriz (1927), A History of Indian Literature. Volume I. Translated from the original
German by Mrs. S. Ketkar and revised by the author, Calcutta: University of Calcutta.
Witzel, Michael (1989), ‘Tracing the Vedic Dialects’, in Colette Caillat (ed.), Dialectes dans les
littératures indo-aryennes. Actes du Colloque International organisé par l’UA 1058 […]
Paris, 16–18 septembre 1986, Paris: Collège de France, Institut de Civilisation Indienne,
97–265.
Witzel, Michael (1997), ‘The Development of the Vedic Canon and its Schools: The Social and
Political Milieu’, in Michael Witzel (ed.), Inside the Texts, Beyond the Texts: New Ap-
proaches to the Study of the Vedas. Proceedings of the International Vedic workshop, Har-
vard University, June 1989. Harvard Oriental Series, Opera Minora 2, Cambridge (Mass.):
Harvard University Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies, 257–345.
|
Textual Criticism
Francesco Sferra
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra: A Critical
Edition of the Leaves Contained in Cambridge
University Library Or.158.1
Abstract: The core of the paper consists of the editio princeps of a long fragment of
the Sanskrit text of the Vajrāmṛtatantra, one of the earliest Buddhist Yoginītantras,
preserved in a manuscript of the Cambridge University Library (MS Or.158.1). The
introduction contains information on the text and on its translation and commen-
taries, as well a description of the manuscript used, a description of the linguistic
and stylistic features of the work, and a detailed synopsis of its contents. When nec-
essary, references to the unpublished commentary by Śrībhānu are given in the
notes of the critical apparatus.
1 Introductory remarks
1.1 The Vajrāmṛta
The Vajrāmṛtamahātantra (aka Vajrāmṛtatantra, or simply Vajrāmṛta) is one of
the main and earliest Buddhist Yoginītantras, probably datable to between the
end of the 9th and the beginning of the 10th century. This text, translated into Ti-
betan by Gyi jo zla ba’i ’od zer (10th to 11th cent.), has apparently survived in only
two Sanskrit manuscripts: 1) a complete manuscript of the work that was seen by
Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana at the Źwa-lu monastery (Central Tibet) in 1934, and 2) a
fragment kept in the Cambridge University Library, which was identified by Ha-
runaga Isaacson in 1997 in the manuscript labelled ‘Or.158’.
||
I read sections 1, 8, and 10 of the Vajrāmṛtatantra during two seminars held in Cambridge in
2014 (January and June). I owe my sincerest thanks to my friend Vincenzo Vergiani, who kindly
invited me there and organized these reading sessions, and to all those who attended and pro-
vided useful suggestions and insights, in particular (in alphabetical order): Daniele Cuneo, Elisa
Ganser, Camillo Formigatti, Marco Franceschini, Malhar Kulkarni, Péter-Dániel Szántó, and Vin-
cent Tournier. I also thank Florinda De Simini, Harunaga Isaacson, Péter-Dániel Szántó, and
Ryugen Tanemura, who have read this paper and suggested several improvements. Kristen De
Joseph has kindly revised the English.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-014, © 2017 F. Sferra, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
410 | Francesco Sferra
Unfortunately, the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra does not appear among Sāṅkṛt-
yāyana’s photographic negatives of Sanskrit manuscripts and, to the best of my
knowledge, there are no records of the original manuscript he briefly described1
in any of the published catalogues of Sanskrit manuscripts. The leaves belonging
to this important text that are kept in Cambridge enable us to study approxi-
mately one half of the work in its original language.2 Or.158 is in fact not com-
plete, although at first look the numbers of the leaves appear to be in the right
sequence, and the manuscript ends with a colophon consisting of a metrical line
and the date. For more details on the codicological features of this manuscript,
see § 2 below.
The sole chapters that are entirely extant are the ninth, tenth, and eleventh,
while chapters 2 to 3 are missing. The remaining chapters are only partially pre-
served: only one-third of the first chapter has survived, along with the second
half of the fourth chapter. However, in the latter case, we can restore some of the
missing stanzas with the help of quotations found in later works, so that the text
that is actually lost only amounts to the first third of the chapter. Of a total of 21
stanzas, only two verses and one pāda from the fifth chapter are extant; the sixth
chapter lacks the five initial stanzas. About one half of the text of the seventh
chapter survives, including three stanzas that are available through quotations,
while the eighth chapter has lost the first four stanzas.
The Vajrāmṛta must certainly have enjoyed some popularity, although it was
less influential than other Yoginītantras, such as, primarily, the Hevajratantra,
which was likely produced later. Of special importance must have been the fourth
chapter, entitled Homavidhinirdeśa, considering that Bhūvācārya, the author of
the still-unpublished Saṃvarodayā nāma Maṇḍalopāyikā (early 11th cent.?), refers
to this work as one of the authoritative sources for the practice of the homa ritual,3
and that several verses from its fourth nirdeśa are quoted in the Śuklaku-
rukullāsādhana (= Sādhanamālā No. 180).4
The earliest quotations from the Vajrāmṛta can be found in works of the 10th
century.5 The Pradīpoddyotana — the famous commentary on the Guhyasamāja-
||
1 Cf. Sāṅkṛtyāyana 1935, 30, No. X.3.32: ‘Vajrāmṛtatantra [script:] vartula [leaves:] 8 complete’.
2 The entire text consists of c. 260 stanzas (anuṣṭubh) divided into 11 chapters; note that some
verses contain six pādas and a few, apparently, five (see e.g. 9.6).
3 In the bāhyādhyātmahomavidhiḥ, the eleventh chapter of this work, he writes: vajrāmṛtādim
āśritya bāhyahomaṃ samācaret (st. 600cd, fol. 43r4), that is: ‘[The practitioner] should perform
the external sacrifice on the basis of the Vajrāmṛta and other [sources]’.
4 Cf. Sādhanamālā, pp. 368–370. Stanzas 13–21, 23–24 of chapter 4 are quoted with some differ-
ent readings and introduced with the word apare.
5 Further references to the Vajrāmṛtatantra in ancient lists are discussed in Szántó 2012, 37, 39.
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 411
tantra, composed by the tantric Candrakīrti — is perhaps the earliest source to
quote the Vajrāmṛta, and contains the following two citations: 1) one from the
first chapter: amṛtaṃ śukram ity uktaṃ tatprasūtaṃ jagattrayam || (st. 6ef) (Dhīḥ
49: 130), which is also quoted in the Catuṣpīṭhapañjikā of Kalyāṇavarman (first
half of the 10th cent.),6 and in Muniśrībhadra’s Yogimanoharā, attributed simply
to a ‘tantra’ (p. 41); and 2) a further one from the third chapter: svāhākāras tu
māmakyāḥ sarvasiddhipradāyiketi7 vajrāmṛte vacanāt (ed. Chakravarti p. 149).8
Stanza 7.15 is cited at least twice: by Ratnākaraśānti (11th cent.) in his Guṇavatī
(ed. p. 18), together with stanzas 13 to 14 of the same chapter, and, with only a
small change (i.e. devi for devo in pāda a), by Rāmapāla (11th cent.) in the Seka-
nirdeśapañjikā (ad st. 22, ed. p. 185).
The Tibetan translations of three Sanskrit commentaries on this tantra sur-
vive in the bsTan ’gyur. These commentaries are the short Vajrāmṛtapañjikā (rDo
rje bdud rtsi’i dka’ ’grel) by Vimalabhadra (Dri med bzaṅ po) (Ōta. 2521/Tōh. 1649),
the *Vajrāmṛtatantraṭīkā (rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud kyi bśad pa) by *Guṇabhadra
(Yon tan bzaṅ po) (Ōta. 2522/Tōh. 1650), and the Vajrāmṛtamahātantrarājaṭīkā
Amṛtadhārā (rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud kyi rgyal po chen po’i rgya cher ’grel) by
Śrībhānu (Ōta. 2523/Tōh. 1651).9 The first and third commentaries are also extant
in the original Sanskrit, but remain unpublished. The Vajrāmṛtapañjikā is pre-
served in a manuscript that was kept at Źwa-lu at least until the 1990s,10 whereas
||
6 Cf. fol. 33r, introduced with the words tathā coktam.
7 Read pradāyaka iti ?
8 This line corresponds to st. 3.20ab: swā hā yi ge mñam par ldan || dṅos grub thams cad rab
sbyin rnams || (cf. D fol. 20r4), which could be retranslated as *svāhākārasamāyuktāḥ sarvasidd-
hipradāyakāḥ, with a clear difference in the reading of pāda a. This reading is in agreement with
the Tibetan version of Vimalabhadra’s pañjikā: svā hā’i yi ge mñam ldan pa (cf. D fol. 10r3), and
with the Tibetan translation of *Guṇabhadra’s commentary, where pāda a is rendered and ex-
plained by the following words: svā hā’i yi ge rnam par ldan || źes pa ni || mtha’ ma ni yi ge svā hā
daṅ ldan pa’o || (cf. D fol. 34v4-5). As to be expected, the Tibetan translation of the Pradīpoddyo-
tana is instead closer to Candrakīrti’s reading of the quotation (yi ge svā hā mā ma kī’i || dṅos
grub thams cad rab ster ba’o ||, cit. in Ōmi 2013, 149 [18]).
9 Note that in the Ōta. and Tōh. catalogues, the name of this master is wrongly given as Bhago.
10 ‘Dge ’dun chos ’phel, Works (1990), vol. 1, p. 18 lists an Indian manuscript at Zha lu, although
he gives the author as Vimalaprabha’ (Martin 2014, s.v. *Vimalabhadra [Dri med bzang po]). This
manuscript is likely the one that was seen and briefly described by R. Sāṅkṛtyāyana in July 1936
(1937: 45, Nos XXXV.7.303: ‘Vajrāṃrtatantrapaṃjikā [author:] Vimalabhadra [leaves:] 7 [lines:]
7 complete’). Of this work, Sāṅkṛtyāyana also transcribes the initial stanza (one śārdūlavikrīḍita)
and the two last verses (one puṣpitāgrā and one anuṣṭubh) with the colophon (see footnote 3).
These lines are reproduced here with slight changes (the main differences are pointed out in
notes a and b):
Beginning — yo vidhvastasamastavastuvimalajñānodayānākulaḥ
412 | Francesco Sferra
a palm-leaf manuscript (34 fols) containing the longer Amṛtadhārā is still pre-
served in the Nor bu gliṅ kha.11 As far as we know at present, the commentary by
*Guṇabhadra is only available in Tibetan.
Fortunately, a photographic reproduction of the manuscript containing the
Amṛtadhārā — which, among the three commentaries, seems to be the only one
quoted elsewhere12 — is also kept in Beijing, in the library of the China Tibetology
Research Centre (henceforth: CTRC) in box 50, text No. 2.13 In 2014 I was allowed
to transcribe it entirely within a project of cooperation that was initiated a few
years ago between the CTRC and my institution, the University of Naples “L’Ori-
entale”. A critical edition of this work will be published in the series Sanskrit Texts
from the Tibetan Autonomous Region. For issues related to the doctrines and the
practices described in the Vajrāmṛtatantra I refer the reader to the introduction
to this forthcoming book. Suffice it to say that Jishō Ōmi, the only scholar who
has published specific studies on the Vajrāmṛtatantra and its commentaries so
far (cf. Ōmi 2013, 2014), has shown, on the basis of some quotations from the work
and its Tibetan translation, that the system of practices described in the text
closely resembles the teachings of the Guhyasamājatantra, whereas at a theoret-
ical level it is close to the Mahāmāyātantra and the Yogācāra.
||
prajñopāyamahākṛpāsamarasāda eko dvayorb dyotate |
māmakyādikaṭākṣaṣaṭpadagaṇair ādṛṣṭavaktrāmbujas
taṃ natvā paramaṃ sukhaṃ jinamayaṃ vajrāmṛtaṃ likhyate ||
End — iti likhitam anantatantragarbhaṃ
paramasukhādvayabuddhisiddhihetoḥ |
guṇiṣu vimalabhadranāmna etad
yadi ruciraṃ priyam astu naḥ kṣamantām ||
anuṣṭupchandasā caitad gaṇyamānaṃ catuḥśatam |
ślokaiḥ katipayair yuktaṃ vajrāmṛtanibandhanam ||
Colophon — śrīvajrāmṛtapañjikā samāptā || kṛtir iyam ācāryavimalabhadrapādānām |
likhāpiteyaṃ pustikā paṇḍitajinaśrīmitreṇa ||
a
°mahākṛpā° em. supported by the Tibetan trans. (D fol. 1r2: thugs rje chen po) ] °matā kṛpā
Sāṅkṛtyāyana
b
dvayor em. (Isaacson) ] dvayo° Sāṅkṛtyāyana
11 Sandhak, p. 29 (cf. also Luo 1985, 48).
12 Passages of Śrībhānu’s commentary have been embedded in the Sampuṭatantra 7.4 (cf.
Szántó 2016, 414–415).
13 Sandhak, p. 29 (cf. also Luo 1985, 48).
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 413
1.2. UL Or.158
An online description of the manuscript Or.158, along with high-quality colour repro-
ductions of its leaves, is available on the website of the University of Cambridge Dig-
ital Library (https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00158-00001/6), to which I refer
the reader for further details. The following information is to be considered an inte-
gration of what is already available there.
Firstly, we observe that Or.158 consists of 12 palm leaves from two different
texts, both fragmentary: one containing parts of the Vajrāmṛta (Or.158.1) and the
other one containing parts of the Buddhakapāla (Or.158.2), another important
Yoginītantra, so far published only partially (cf. Luo 2010). Leaves of the two
works have been mingled according to an apparently correct sequence of folio
numbers:14 parts of the Vajrāmṛta survive in fols 1v, 6, 8 and 10 to 12,15 whereas
fragments of the Buddhakapāla are found in fols 2 to 5, 7 and 9.16 Due to reasons
that we cannot ascertain, at a certain point in the tradition, someone wrongly
combined the leaves of the two texts, mistaking them for parts of the same
work/manuscript. This mistake was possible due to a substantial homogeneity of
the two sources: the ductus of the script is identical, as are the quality and shape
of the leaves comprising the Vajrāmṛta and the Buddhakapāla. Moreover, each
leaf contains six lines, one string hole, two writing areas of which the left one is
smaller than the right one, and on average 64 to 65 akṣaras per line. One hypoth-
esis concerning the formation of Or.158 could thus be that its two sections were
part of two originally separated manuscripts, but were produced by the same
scribe or at least in the same scriptorium.17
||
14 Folio numbers appear on both the left and right margins of each verso (figure numerals are
on the left, letter numerals are on the right), but seem to belong to different hands. Cf. e.g. leaves
3, 8, and 9, where the difference in the ductus is significant; the number 6 to the right is even
written in Arabic numerals, perhaps in pencil, a bit higher than usual, clearly because the num-
ber was added when the margin was already damaged; the numbers in the left margin look older
and may be the original ones.
15 In particular: chapters 1 (partial), 4 (partial), 5 (partial), 6 (partial), 7 (partial), 8 (partial) and
9 to 11 (complete).
16 These leaves include parts of chapters 1 to 3 (cf. also Luo 2010, XLVIII).
17 See also Szántó’s contribution in this volume.
414 | Francesco Sferra
Fig. 1: Or.158, fol. 1r. © Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University
Library.
Another possibility, and a highly probable one, is that Or.158 is what remains of
an original multiple-text manuscript (MTM), with independent foliation for each
work. Besides the Vajrāmṛta and the Buddhakapāla, this manuscript would also
contain at least a third work, namely the Vajrāralimahātantrarāja. There is in fact
no doubt that, already at an early stage, this manuscript transmitted the three
texts together. Proof is given by the short list of contents added by a different
hand to the top left side of fol. 1r. There we read: (siddham sign) vajrāmṛtatantra
|| vajrāraṇitantra18 || buddhakapālatantra || (see the image above).19
MTMs with independent foliation for each block are frequent and it is not at
all sure that the sequence of works we find on fol. 1r (1. Vajrāmṛta; 2. Vajrārali,
which likely included also the Rigyārali (aka Rigyaralli);20 3. Buddhakapāla) re-
flects the original sequence at the time of the production of the manuscript. Sec-
tions of MTMs were temporarily used as independent works, for studying, copy-
ing, etc., and we can suppose that the different sections/blocks could easily have
been misplaced after their use. According to Or.158 fol. 1r, the Vajrāmṛta appears
to be the first text in the list; at the same time, this text has a dated colophon,
which one would rather expect to find attached to the last work of the manuscript.
The possibility that, before the list was compiled, the Vajrāmṛta could have been
the final work in the manuscript indeed cannot be ruled out. However, it should
||
18 Vajrāraṇitantra (sic for Vajrāralimahātantrarāja) (rDo rje ā ra li źes bya ba’i rgyud kyi rgyal
po chen po), Tōh. 426, sDe dge bKa’ ’gyur, vol. ṄA, fols 171r2–176r2 (tr. by Kāyasthāpa Gayadhara
and Śākya ye śes).
19 On the right of the same recto folio, we find some mantras that were likely written by the
same hand (it is possible that the last two lines, which cover the whole length of the folio, were
instead written by a third hand).
20 See Szántó’s contribution in this volume.
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 415
be observed that independent, dated colophons for each work in a MTM are a
common feature,21 so it is also possible that the list of folio 1r is absolutely reliable.
Unfortunately, no leaves of the Vajrāralitantra have yet been found in the Cam-
bridge University Library, but it is worth noticing that in another manuscript of the
same collection of Sanskrit manuscripts, i.e. Add.1680, we find one leaf (item 12) of
the Rigyāralitantrarāja (Tōh. 427), a work which is connected with the Vajrārali-
mahātantrarāja (support and ductus are the same as Or.15822), and that two more
folios of the Buddhakapāla from the same manuscript, now labelled as Or.158.2,
are kept in another manuscript of the Cambridge University Library, namely
Add.1680.13 (see Luo 2010, XLVIII).23
The scribe does not give any information about himself or the place where he
worked, although we can hypothesise that the manuscript was produced in Nepal
because the script has the typical characteristics of the manuscripts produced there
between the 12th and 15th century, such as the hook-shaped tops of the akṣaras, the
vowel e marked as a waved śirorekhā, etc. As has been briefly observed before, the
copyist reports the date on which the Vajrāmṛta was completed, which, according
to the verification made by Luo Hong, corresponds to Saturday, 22nd September
1162 CE:24
vajrāmṛtamahātatvaṃ buddhabodhiprasādhakam
i(O)ti || o || samvat ā 80 2 aśvini śuklatrayodaśyāṃ || śaniścaradine ||
1.3 Stylistic features of the Vajrāmṛta text
Judging from the portion of the text that is currently available in Sanskrit, the lan-
guage of the Vajrāmṛta, as far as morphology and syntax are concerned, falls
squarely into that of many tantras. Typical forms of classical Sanskrit go hand in
hand with Middle Indic forms, in particular with the language of the so-called Bud-
dhist Hybrid Sanskrit and of several non-Buddhist early tantric texts. We observe,
for instance, several cases of the optative in -e (BHSG § 29.12) in the third person
||
21 The practice of writing dated colophons for each of the sections of multiple-text manuscripts
is not rare in Nepal, as is shown in De Simini 2016, 257–258, n. 61.
22 A critical edition, diplomatic transcript, and English translation of Add.1680.12 is published
by P.-D. Szántó in his contribution to this volume.
23 That is, folio 13, which contains the end of chapter 4 and the beginning of chapter 5, and fol.
22, which contains chapters 8 (end), 9 (complete), 10 (beginning).
24 Cf. Luo 2010, XLVIII: ‘[I]ts copying was completed sometime on a Saturday (śaniścaradine [=
śanivāra], the thirteenth day of the light fortnight in the month of aśvini [= āśvina] in 1162 CE
(282+880)’, and n. 47. Cf. also Sanderson 2009, 315.
416 | Francesco Sferra
singular: visarjaye instead of visarjayed (4.35c), vinaśye instead of vinaśyet (6.19a),
kampe instead of kampen (11.2a), bhakṣaye instead of bhakṣayed (11.9c); and one
case of the optative in -yā (BHSG § 29.42): dadyā instead of dadyād (6.13c).25 There
are several cases of the vocative feminine in -ī (BHSG § 10.41): māmakī for māmaki
(8.13b, 10.18b, 11.6b, 11.8b, 11.17d), devī for devi (11.16d, 11.19c);26 and one case of
the agentive genitive (cf. also BHSG § 20.17), namely me for mayā (1.7d), even
though the latter also occurs in classical Sanskrit.
It is worth noting the use of variant spellings of the same word, such as vetāla
(10.1b, 10.15c, 10.18c) and vetāḍa (8.5c), although this is not a peculiarity of this
text; the occasional adoption of the neuter instead of the masculine, such as in the
case of the word bali (4.22ab); and the employment of the personal name Amṛta-
kuṇḍali, as if belonging to the i-stems, instead of the more regular Amṛtakuṇḍalin
(chapter 9).27 We also register the irregular accusatives mātṛṃ for mātaraṃ, and
duhitam for duhitāraṃ (6.13cd).28
In one case (11.11ab) we find a nominative instead of a genitive: vajrodakaṃ
purīṣan tu ātmavidyā tu bhakṣayet instead of vajrodakaṃ purīṣaṃ tu ātmavidyāyā
bhakṣayet, which would be metrically incorrect. The commentary by Śrībhānu clar-
ifies the right interpretation: svavidyāyāḥ vajrodakaṃ vairocanaṃ ca […] bhakṣayet
(fol. 33v3). In two cases we find unexpected verbal tenses or moods: the optative for
a past in 7.1d; the imperfect for a present (or optative/future) in 10.15d.
Furthermore, we observe the use of morphological irregularities, such as the
loss of case endings etc., in order to fit the metre. A few examples are: vajrāmṛta
namāmy aham for vajrāmṛtaṃ namāmy aham (7.2–4, 6), cāṇḍāli ḍombikā for
cāṇḍālī ḍombikā (8.7b); śrīheruka namāmy aham for śrīherukaṃ namāmy aham
(8.9b); dvaupada niyojayet for dvaupadaṃ niyojayet (8.10d); para{ma}ṃ samādhi-
sam{ā}panno for para{ma}samādhisam{ā}panno (11.2c); and puna pṛcchati for
||
25 Cf. also Kiss 2015, 79.
26 The instrumental māmakyā, apparently with the quite unusual value of vocative, probably
metri causa, occurs in 3.15b (the Tibetan here has mā ma kī [D fol. 20r2], but Śrībhānu’s commen-
tary confirms the reading māmakyā: māmakyeti sambodhane [fol. 16v7]) and in 11.13a (see the
text below).
27 It should be noted, however, that Amṛtakuṇḍali instead of Amṛtakuṇḍalin is actually quite
common in Buddhist tantric sources; cf. e.g. a verse from the [Guhyasamāja]vyākhyātantra cit.
in Pradīpoddyotana, chapter 1 (guhyapradeśe tiṣṭhati amṛtakuṇḍalis tathāgataḥ ||, ed. p. 151) and
the following words in Kumāracandra’s Pañjikā ad Kṛṣṇayamāritantra 4.10: amṛtakuṇḍalis tu ka-
laśe uttareṇa sthāpyaḥ (ed. p. 91).
28 The form duhitam occurs for instance in Brahmayāmala 61.24c (putram vā duhitam vāpi), fol. 246v5
[= fol. 247v according to the numbers in the right margin].
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 417
punar pṛcchati (11.2d).29 Another instance could be amṛtaṃ sādhanopāyaṃ for
amṛtasādhanopāyaṃ or even amṛtasya sādhanopāyaṃ (1.2c), both unmetrical; in
this case, however, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that the com-
pound sādhanopāyaṃ is used in apposition to amṛtaṃ.
The adoption of words that are peculiar to Buddhist Sanskrit could also be ex-
plained as an attempt to respect the metre, in particular °devata° (BHSD: 270) in-
stead of °devatā° (4.26d) and anopamam (BHSD: 37) instead of anupamam (7.5b),
as well as — at least in one case — the adoption of the singular ablative in -ā, which
is again a peculiarity of Buddhist Sanskrit (cf. BHSG § 8.46): in stanza 9.9bc, where
we read amṛtā amṛtam utthitam | amṛtā amṛtayogena, the omission of the d in the
word amṛtād was likely meant to render the following initial a silent. However, we
should observe that the ablative in -ā also occurs in stanzas 8.10–11, where there
are no metrical problems. Again, very likely in order to respect the metre, in stanza
4.22a we find herukā° instead of heruka° and in stanza 7.3b the kokilā° instead of
kokila°.
It is very likely that in a few cases — for instance in st. 8.6d (śrīherukarūpam
udvahet) and st. 9.7a (hasante kilikilāyante) — the vowels a and i were intended
to be silent or to be read quickly, a practice which is sometimes admitted, for in-
stance by Ratnākaraśānti, who, while commenting upon Khasamatantra 5.1,
points out that a quick pronunciation (drutoccāraṇa) of the word abhāveṃ allows
the mātras to be reduced to four (abhāveṃ iti drutoccāraṇāc caturmātraḥ) (ed. p.
250). I have marked these cases with a breve (˘). In stanza 10.5b, we find an i that
has to be considered long in pronunciation, and which I have conventionally ren-
dered with ì.
Metrical irregularities remain, for instance, in stt. 1.10d, 4.27a, 4.31cd, 6.16b,
7.6a, 10.3c, 10.4, 10.5f, 10.11b, 10.15cd, 11.12b, 11.14d, 11.17a, 11.17c, and 11.18c.
Among the stylistic features that are visible in the portion of the text available
in Sanskrit, we observe the use of yadicchet (or yad icchet) with the meaning of
yadīcchet30 and the frequent use of tu as pādapūraṇa or mainly with the value of
connective rather than that of oppositional particle (cf. e.g. 1.3c, 1.4a, 4.13d, 4.14bc,
6.6c, 11.11c), a feature that in any case is relatively common in Sanskrit and not ex-
clusive to this text.
||
29 Note that puna is a Middle Indic form, common for instance in Pāli.
30 Cf. 4.35a, 6.12b, 6.14a, 11.20d. This use is quite frequent in tantric texts (cf. e.g. Catuṣpīṭhatantra
3.3.7d and Brahmayāmala 3.226b). See also Kiss 2015, 209, n. 226.
418 | Francesco Sferra
1.4 Synopsis of the work31
According to a pattern that is common to many tantras, the text consists of a dia-
logue between a questioner and a/the Buddha or Bhagavān (in this work called Va-
jrin, Vajrāmṛta, and Mahāsukha), who imparts the teaching. Following a well-es-
tablished scheme, which here is probably modelled after the Śaiva tantras, in this
text the questioner is identified with the female consort of the Bhagavān instead of
one of the Bodhisattvas, who are usually the recipients of the tantric teachings.
After a prose preamble that strictly resembles the vijahārapāda of the
Guhyasamājatantra, as well as the Kṛṣṇayamāritantra and the Hevajratantra, the
first chapter (Guhyamaṇḍalakaraṇābhinayanirdeśa) begins, in the fashion of the
‘explanatory tantras’ (vyākhyātantra), by stating that the actual teachings have al-
ready been imparted (2ab); the Goddess (devī) Māmakī then asks for insights on the
means to achieve (sādhana) the supreme Nectar of the Vajra (vajrāmṛta), which is
defined as ‘the knowledge concealed in all tantras’ (5a). This Nectar, corresponding
to the ‘semen’ from which the three worlds arise, is said to be quickly achieved by
means of amorous enjoyment, pleasure, sexual union, songs, music, dance, etc.
(6). The practitioner is immediately freed from the chain of transmigration after
having known the supreme Nectar of the meditation on the (devatā)yoga (8); this
‘great knowledge’ should not be revealed to the non-initiated (9a). The Nectar of
the Vajra is produced by the unions of Vajra and Lotus. As the text instructs, the
practitioner should kiss the Lotus, whereas Māmakī should kiss the Vajra (10).
Māmakī then asks about the arrangement of the deities in the maṇḍala, as well as
the way in which the maṇḍala should be worshipped, the nature of this worship,
and the means of its realization (11–12). The answer of the Bhagavān starts with st.
14 and occupies the rest of the chapter. He states that, in this tantra, the maṇḍala is
taught in order to realize the body, speech, and mind of Vajrāmṛta; in other words,
the aim of teaching the maṇḍala is the attainment of the liberation from transmi-
gration (14). Then follows a description of the maṇḍala (15, 18cd), along with a short
description of Vajrāmṛta, which is hidden in the pericarp of the eight-petalled lotus
and is endowed with three faces and six arms (16–18ab). Afterwards, the text de-
scribes the door-guardians (dvārapāla) (19) and the eight Wisdoms (vidyā)
(Saumyā, Saumyavadanā, Candrī, Śaśinī, Śaśimaṇḍalā, Śaśilekhyā, Manojñā, Ma-
nohlādanakarī), which are located in the eight leaves of the lotus (20–22ab). The
master, who is here identified with Vajrāmṛtamahāsukha, should accomplish, i.e.
||
31 I prepared this synopsis on the basis of both the Tibetan translation of the Vajrāmṛtatantra
and the Sanskrit commentary by Śrībhānu. Words that are drawn from the commentary or, in a
few cases, that are supplied by me to help the reader have been put between parentheses.
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 419
empower, the maṇḍala, that is the wheel of the goddesses, by means of music,
dance and sexual enjoyment (23). The practitioner should worship the secret
maṇḍala through the semen that is produced during sexual union with the yoginīs
(Mother, Wife, Daughter, etc.) (24). Each female partner is connected to a different
fruit (25–26ab). The practitioner should use his tongue to extract the semen that has
fallen into the secret lotus of the yoginīs (26cd). The practitioner reaches perfection
quickly, i.e. in this very life (27). During the practice of the maṇḍala, the five ambro-
sias (pañcāmṛta) (human flesh, blood, etc.) should be given to the disciple every
day (most likely according to the procedures described in the last chapter of the
tantra) (29). The practitioner is then able to perform all ritual actions, starting with
subduing (vaśya). The chapter ends with the chapter rubric preceded by a metrical
line that occurs at the end of all nirdeśas and represents a kind of “imprimatur”
formula: ‘This was said by the Bhagavān, the Vajra-holder, the Great Pleasure of
the Nectar of the Vajra’ (30).
The second chapter, called Tattvayogajñānanirdeśa, starts by describing the
amorous play between Māmakī, who is satisfied with the teaching she has just re-
ceived (1ab), and the Vajra-holder, who, full of passion, strongly embraces her,
kisses her, penetrates her, makes love to her, arouses passion in her by means of
gentle words, squeezes her breasts, etc. (1cd–5). Being satisfied in his turn, he is
ready to give Māmakī whatever she desires (6–7ab). Stanza 7cd introduces the sec-
ond question of Māmakī: she now wants to know how it is possible that the true
nature of the Bhagavān, which is a transformation of the Bodhicitta, and which,
being extremely subtle, is undecaying, ‘plays’, that is to say is active, in the world
(8–9). The answer of the Bhagavān starts at stanza 10cd. He says that the
knowledge that is connected with the manifestation and explanation of the
(devatā)yoga is extremely subtle, secret, indestructible, etc.; it is devoid of any per-
manent object (anitya) (i.e. it shows that any permanent object is non-existent); it
is without beginning, non-arisen, etc. (11–12). Beyond the reach of common beings’
understanding, this knowledge can be attained by means of the path of the
(devatā)yoga, which is of two kinds, external and internal (13). The external yoga
consists in the realization of the form, colour, and shape of the deity by means of
the utpattikrama (14ab). The entire universe, including all the moving and unmov-
ing entities that are in the three spheres of existence, is pervaded by one single na-
ture, for everything is nothing but consciousness (sarvaṃ vijñānam eva) (14cd–
15ab). Since the aggregate consciousness is totally based on itself, obfuscated peo-
ple (like naiyāyikas who believe in the existence of the external world, made of dis-
crete entities) do not attain awakening (15cd–16ab). Multiplicity of dharmas is not
logically tenable. The water of the rivers is no more distinguishable when it enters
the ocean; the dharmas are not distinguishable with respect to their unitary, true
420 | Francesco Sferra
nature (16cd–18). This nature can be obtained only through the direct teaching of
the master, who explains the way it is present within the body (19). The Vajra-
holder resides in the space that is in the middle of the Lotus, which is briefly de-
scribed (20). The semen flows in the form of Nectar, being devoid of vowels and
consonants, as well as of bindu and nāda (21). This is the substratum of all the ele-
ments (semen, bones, marrow, etc.), which pervades (the entire body) above and
below (22ac). Stanzas 22d–26ab explain the way the Nectar is a pervader (vyāpaka)
also by means of actions (seeing, hearing, etc.). Although the supreme, true nature
(i.e. consciousness) has no form, it becomes endowed with many forms, assumes a
gender, and becomes manifold in the same way that a jewel assumes different col-
ours in accordance with the colours of the various objects that are nearby (26cd–
28ab). Regarding this reality, there is no use for ordinary practices based on the
muttering of mantras, breath control, fasting, etc. (28cd–29ab). After having wor-
shipped the Lotus, the practitioner should eat the Nectar (29cd). In this way he re-
alizes the true nature, the great pleasure of the Vajrāmṛta (30ab). The text goes on
by referring to the channels (nāḍī) that have to be worshipped by the practitioner.
The channel called Madāvahā is located in the pericarp of the lotus (30cd). It is the
main channel in the middle of a group of 32 (31ab). The other nine channels, known
here as Wisdoms (vidyā), have to be worshipped in their respective loci (i.e. in the
nine doors of the body) (31cd–32ab). This supreme secret, which is called ‘yoga’, is
not known by the Tathāgatas, such as Viśva (= Amoghasiddhi) and Vairocana (that
is to say, they neither know nor have taught it) (32cd–34ab). It is due to the enjoy-
ment of intense bliss that this yoga has been taught here by Vajrāmṛta to Māmakī
after he had seen her secret lotus (i.e. after he had understood that she was the right
receptacle of the Vajrāmṛta teaching) (34cd–35).
Chapter 3 (Mantrotpattinirdeśa) starts with a further question from Māmakī.
Delighted and adorned with bracelets (1), she gratifies and praises the Great Being
with a song (2–3). With this song, the practitioner attains the awakening of the Bud-
dha (4). After solving her previous doubts (5–6), now Māmakī wishes to know the
origin of the mudrās (samayamudrā and so on) and the mantras of the māṇḍaleyas
(7–8). The answer begins in stanza 9, where the Bhagavān states that the mudrās
are of three kinds, based on body, speech, and mind (from which they arise or from
which they are effected). Stanza 10 briefly lists and describes the three kinds of
mudrā: karamudrā is connected with the body; vāṅmudrā, with the projection of
the mantras, etc.; cihnamudrā (which includes vajramudrā, ghaṇṭāmudrā, etc.) is
related to the mind. The practitioner should worship the auspicious deities’ lotuses,
which are connected with (the vajra, i.e.) the source of all pleasures; he should also
perform all ritual actions (the drawing of the maṇḍala, the homa ritual, etc.) by
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 421
means of the union of Vajra and Padma (11–12). In the same way that the wish-ful-
filling tree (kalpavṛkṣa) is the source from which various desired fruits arise, so the
channel called Madāvahā is the source of the deities, whose nature is the great
pleasure, and of all mantras, the nature of which is the Bodhicitta (13–14). The fol-
lowing stanzas describe the extraction of the mantras: oṃ haḥ vajrāmṛta svāhā, oṃ
vajrāmṛtamahāsukhāya svāhā, oṃ ghī svāhā (15–17); the eight mantras of the aus-
picious deities: oṃ aṃ haḥ svāhā, oṃ uṃ haḥ svāhā, etc. (18); the mantras of the
door-guardians: oṃ ṛ svāhā, oṃ ṝ svāhā, etc.; and the four mantras of Puṣpā,
Dhūpā, etc., i.e. oṃ ṛ ṝ svāhā, oṃ ḷ ḹ svāhā, etc. (19–21). The practitioner should wor-
ship the secret maṇḍala with all worship rituals (i.e. both external and private) (22).
Chapter 4 (Homavidhinirdeśa) describes the homa ritual and the procedures of
several magical rites (appeasement [śāntika], reinvigoration [pauṣṭika], etc.) as well
as the mantras and mudrās connected with their execution. No question is asked
by Māmakī, so the Bhagavān teaches all this without interruption from the previous
section (1–3ab). The maṇḍalācārya (i.e. the homācārya, the master who celebrates
the homa liturgy) should first identify himself with Vajrasattva; adorned with all
embellishments and in the ālīḍha posture, he should then perform the Victory of
the Three Worlds (trailokyavijaya) (i.e. he should identify himself with the Kro-
dharāja deity) and eventually cleanse the ground (bhūmisaṃśodhana) (3cd–5): the
practitioner should drive away the obstacles (vighnotsāraṇa), pay homage to the
guru, and attract the Deity of the Earth (pṛthivīdevatā) (6). Stanzas 7–12 describe the
vāhanamantra, the projection of the mantric syllables into the cakras of the body,
the throwing of flowers and other rituals that are necessary for the purification of
the ground. The following verses give the shapes and measurements of the kuṇḍas
that are needed for the performance of various rituals: appeasement (13–14), rein-
vigoration (15), hostile purposes (abhicāruka) (16), subjugation (vaśya), and attrac-
tion (ākarṣaṇa) (17). The mantra-user should begin the appeasement ritual while
facing north; the reinvigoration ritual should always be performed while facing
east, and the hostile purposes ritual while facing south; attraction, destruction
(uccāṭana) and the other rituals always require facing west (18–19ab). The text
briefly mentions the colours (19cd) and the kind of offerings connected with the
rituals described above (20–21). All offerings must be given with the herukamudrā,
and whatever the yogin desires is always attained (22). The practitioner should per-
form the appeasement ritual in autumn, the reinvigoration ritual in winter, the hos-
tile purposes ritual in summer (23); appeasement should be done in the evening,
reinvigoration at dawn, hostile purposes at noon or at midnight (24). Stanzas 25 to
39 provide several details about the homa ritual (the realization of one’s deity by
means of the syllable hūṃ, the meditation on this deity, the invocation of Agni, the
offering of the sacred water, etc.) (25–28) and the mantras that have to be recited
422 | Francesco Sferra
during its performance, i.e. the mantra of the flower (29), the mantra of the lamp
(30), the mantra of the incense (31), the mantra of the perfume (32), and also the
mantra for the dismissal of the deity (36–37).
Chapter 5 (Karmaprasaranirdeśa) prescribes the way to produce the collyrium
that is used for ritual purposes. The Bhagavān continues his teaching from the pre-
vious section. The collyrium is produced using human fat, lampblack, a skull, the
head of an owl, human blood, etc. (1–3). It is used, together with a mantra that has
to be recited ten thousand times, in order to neutralize demons, to destroy enemies,
etc. (4–6). The mantra is given in stanza 7 (hrīṃ hrīṃ hūṃ hūṃ aṃ aḥ a hā hāṃ
svāhā). Afterwards, the text briefly describes the iconographical representation of
Māmakī (8–9), the mantra that has to be recited after having filled the matrix of the
woman with saffron (oṃ ā i ū ṛ ḷ ai au aḥ amṛte phaṭ hụṃ haḥ svāhā), the way its
extraction has to be performed, etc. (10–11), as well as other rituals, such as the
production of a tilaka, the intoxication of the enemies, and the recitation of the
yamāntakamantra (oṃ hrīḥ ṣṭrīḥ vikṛtānana sarvaśatrūn vināśaya stambhaya
māraya hūṃ hūṃ phaṭ) (12–15). The chapter ends with the description of the proce-
dures for subduing the husband and thus making the wife happy (16–17ab), and
the description of the ritual for killing the enemies (17cd–21).
In chapter 6, the Vajrahūṃkārasādhananirdeśa, the Bhagavān explains in brief
the sādhana of Vajrahūṃkāra, as well as the procedures for drawing the maṇḍalas
of Vajrāmṛta, Heruka, and so on (1). The shape and the measures of the va-
jrahūṃkāramaṇḍala are given in st. 2. Vajrahūṃkāra, who has three faces and six
arms, has to be placed in the centre of this maṇḍala, surrounded by a halo of trem-
bling lights (3), embellished with ornaments, and encircled by four mudrās
(Kelikilā, Vajrāstrā, Vajragarvā, Sparśavajrā) (4). The text continues with a list,
sometimes accompanied by iconographical descriptions, of the objects and the de-
ities that have to be drawn in the maṇḍala; the latter include Umā, the Vidyās
(Puṣpā, Dhūpā, etc.), the door-guardians, and the eight Bodhisattvas (Maitreya,
Mañjuśrī, etc.) (5–10). By making oblations to deities (bali), by making offerings of
food to living beings (balya), and by drinking liquors and juices, on the eighth and
fourteenth days of the black fortnight, the practitioner should throw (an animal)
made of powdered grains into the maṇḍala and offer it ritually (11). After having
performed the oblation in the middle (of the maṇḍala), if the practitioner desires
the supreme perfection, i.e. if he wishes to realize Vajrahūṃkāra, he should recite
the mantra of one single syllable (i.e. the sound hūṃ) (12). Subsequently, he should
worship the master; and for this purpose he should offer himself to him, as well as
his kingdom, mother, sister, wife, and daughter (13). (After this worship) the man-
tra-user who desires the realization of one’s self as one’s own deity should assume
the tantric pledges (samaya) of the disciples (14). The maṇḍala of Vajrasattva,
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 423
which is connected with (the teachings of) the Vajrāmṛta(tantra), is endowed with
the five ambrosias (pañcāmṛta), and implies the destruction of all the bad destinies
(15). The realization of the glorious Vajrahūṃkāra is a transformation of the Bodhi-
citta (16). The practitioner should have playful and variegated sexual intercourse
with his Wisdom (namely with a young girl of low caste who, in her turn, has the
nature of the Goddess) (17ab). With his tongue, he should kiss her Lotus and extract
the semen from it with his fingers (17cd–18). After having extracted (the semen), he
should not dispel the energy or the fruit (of pleasure, which is the source of strength
and health). He shall realize the Buddhahood, namely the ambrosia, which con-
sists in the semen (and corresponds to the apratiṣṭhitanirvāṇa) (19–20ab).
Chapter 7 (Geyanṛtyābhiṣekatattvāvabodhanirdeśa) starts with a praise of Va-
jrāmṛta sung by Māmakī, who is still involved in the love play with him, while join-
ing her hollowed palms in reverence (1–8). This song contains a description of Va-
jrāmṛta, who is defined as a hero encircled by other heroes, who is joined by the
group of Mudrās (2); he emits a sound similar to that of kokilas and bees, he is good-
looking, and he experiences the pleasure of love (3); he is omniscient and friendly
towards all beings (4); his body hair is bristled; and he makes love to the 24 Great
Wisdoms (Tārā, Vitārā, etc.) in all three spheres of existence (5–6). The praise ends
with two Apabhraṃśa stanzas, which read: ‘You, dark like a petal of a blue water-
lily, are the Tathāgata, the Vajra-holder. Oh Pleasure of Sexual Delight, love me! By
means of that you accomplish [your] duty in the three worlds (7). You are empty,
pure, the supreme stage, the unchanging Vajra, beginningless. The living being —
either moving or unmoving — who meditates on you, how can he be born again in
the saṃsāra?’ (8). The characteristics of the dance and its movements (gatipracāra)
are described in stanzas 9 to 11. After the dance, Māmakī should kiss the Vajra,
while the Bhagavān should kiss the Lotus. The female partner shows her secret
parts and the worship begins (12). The meditation of the Nectar is described in stan-
zas 13 to 15. When the Wisdom remains motionless, the practitioner should begin
the concentration on the Nectar (i.e., he should meditate on Madāvahā, which con-
tains milk and is flowing after having unified all the other channels [nāḍī]). The
practitioner meditates on the supreme reality, that is the Nectar in the form of bindu
(i.e. the syllable ha) (13). In the middle of the sky, similar to the moon, there is the
true nature of emptiness, which corresponds to Vajrasattva, the “Unsounded” Re-
ality, and which is indestructible, subtle, etc. (14). Located inside the navel, in the
hidden space of the pericarp, it flows in the form of semen, residing in the middle
between the bhaga and the liṅga (15). (With reference to the five skandhas) it is
called the vital breath of living beings, the aggregate vijñāna; it is the Buddha, the
Vajra-holder; (Brahmavādins, Vaiṣṇavas and Śaivas call it respectively) Brahman,
Viṣṇu, and Maheśvara (16). (With reference to the world of common experience) it
424 | Francesco Sferra
is the earth, the water, the fire, etc., everything that belongs to the three spheres of
existence. It is the object on which the Bhagavān himself continuously meditates.
In addition, he declares himself to have arisen from this reality (tattva) (in form of
Vajrāmṛta) together with Māmakī (17). (The other deities) Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and so
on, as well as the Bodhisattvas and the Tathāgatas, also (meditate on) this powerful
reality, which consists of jñeyas (i.e. the bhūmis, pāramitās, etc.) and jñāna (i.e. a
knowledge free from conceptualization and from the two [advaya], that is subject
and object) (in order to realize their own nature, to reach the state of Vajrāmṛta, or
to impart his teaching) (18). Believers of other traditions (Śaivas, Kālavādins,
Puruṣavādins, Sāṃkhyas, Vaiṣṇavas, Haritantrayogins, Gaṇakas, etc.) conceive this
deity in different ways, that is according to specific aspects, as the Autogenous
(svayambhu), as Time (kāla), as the Creator (kartṛ), etc. (19–22). This teaching must not
be transmitted to wicked people, to those who do not observe the tantric pledges, to the
nihilists, etc. It can be imparted only to one who is devoted to the master, who is well-
disciplined, who has been initiated (guhyamaṇḍalapraviṣṭa, lit. ‘who has entered the
secret maṇḍala’), etc. (23–24). To such a disciple, the master can impart the initiation
that is performed by means of sexual union with the mudrā (25).
Chapter 8 (Śrīherukotpattinirdeśa) contains the description of how to visualise
Śrīheruka. Māmakī now asks why the Bhagavān assumes a wrathful aspect (1). The
text does not provide any direct answer to this question. The Bhagavān starts by
displaying his wrathful aspect: he is surrounded by a garland of flames, fierce,
dreadful, a cause of fear; he has eight arms, four faces, and is embellished with a
garland of skulls; he bears skulls and a khatvāṅga, is shaved, is endowed with a
Vajra and a garland made of intestines, is fierce, and is encircled by his eight Wis-
doms (vidyā); he dwells in the great cemeteries, roars while reciting mantras and
the sound pheṭ, and plays with groups of demons, vetālas, and beings that abide in
burning grounds (4–5). The great Vajra-holder should summon the Glorious form
of Heruka, who is devouring the Devas together with Indra, Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and
Śiva (6). Then the text lists the eight Wisdoms: Sotkaṭā, Vikaṭā, Cāṇḍālī, Ḍombikā,
Piṅgalā, Kulinī, Ugrā, and Dāruṇī (7), expounds the words that the practitioner has
to mutter when he is pushed by these Wisdoms: ‘I honour the glorious Heruka who,
endowed with fangs, is extremely terrific, who is adorned with a garland [made] of
intestines, who is devouring the great meat [i.e. human flesh]’ (8–9ab), and de-
scribes the extraction of the mantra of Heruka: oṃ jvala jvala hūṃ phaṭ bhyo svāhā
(10–12). The chapter ends with a reference to the advantages that derive from the
recitation of this mantra (13–14).
Chapter 9 (Śrī-amṛtakuṇḍali-utpattinirdeśa) begins with the visualisation of
Amṛtakuṇḍalin: he has three faces and six arms, is fierce and appears black like the
newly split antimony (1); he is surrounded by a garland of flames, he is cruel, and
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 425
he is endowed with reddish-brown eyes; he is crushing the Great Obstacle(s) under
his feet; his fist is raised, holding a hatchet (2); with his left hands he holds a club,
a vajra and a noose. His forefinger is threatening all evil beings. The practitioner
should visualize a sword in his hand (3); afterwards, he should visualize the eight
Wisdoms along with the door-guardians; eventually he should project the eight
Wisdoms into the petals (4). The text continues with the list of the eight Wisdoms
(Amṛtā, Amṛtavajrā, Amṛtā, Amṛtalocanā, Aprameyā, Surūpā, Vāruṇā, and Su-
khasādhanī) and their description (5–7a). The last verses explain the extraction of
the mantra oṃ amṛtakuṇḍali mā maṃ svāhā (7b–8) and mention the advantages
that derive from the meditation on Amṛtakuṇḍalin (stt. 10–11).
Chapter 10 (Vetālasādhananirdeśa) teaches how to resuscitate a vetāla. The prac-
titioner should perform this ritual on the eighth day in the dark half of any month or
on the fourteenth day of a lunar fortnight, in a field or a place in which (for a distance
of five krośas) there is but one landmark, or alternatively in a place where four roads
meet, where there is an isolated tree, in a cemetery, on a river bank or on a mountain
(1–2). The text lists the characteristics that should be possessed by the corpse (3–4)
and the ritual actions that the practitioner should perform on it (5–6ab); then it briefly
describes the maṇḍala that is required for this ritual, the Wisdoms (Sotkaṭā, Vikaṭā,
etc.) (6cd–7), and the door-guardians (Gokarṇa, Hastikarṇa, Sumukhya, and Durmu-
kha) that have to be drawn outside the maṇḍala (8–10). The following stanzas pre-
scribe the way the maṇḍala should be worshipped (11–13). While the practitioner is
reciting the great mantra of the glorious Heruka, the vetāla will emerge, emitting a
deep sound and pronouncing a cry, filled with anger (14). At that point the mantra-
user should not be afraid and should remember the glorious heruka(mantra) (15ab).
The vetāla, once arisen, asks the practitioner to indicate his task: ‘Oh Great Hero,
what is the action (to be performed)? Give me the command!’ (15cd–16ab). The vetāla
will help him attain whatever he desires: a sword, a collyrium (for invisibility), the
capacity of moving in the sky, etc. (16cd–18ab). The chapter ends by declaring that
this ritual is the main sādhana for the accomplishment of the body, the speech, and
the mind (of the deities); it confers happiness on the practitioners (18cd–19ab).
The core of chapter 11 (Pañcāmṛtasādhanopāyanirdeśa) describes the fruits de-
riving from the ritual eating of semen, menstrual blood, human flesh, urine, and ex-
crements, i.e. the five ambrosias mentioned at the beginning of the text (cf. 1.29). The
Bhagavān is silent, absorbed in the supreme samādhi (1–2). Māmakī asks the means
to attain the Subtle Vajra (sūkṣmavajra) (i.e., the unbeaten heart of Vajrāmṛta) that
resides in the heart of all beings (3). The Bhagavān laughs and starts to teach (4). The
practitioner should always (i.e. every day) enjoy the ‘true reality’ (tattva), that is the
Nectar in form of semen (produced by the union of the male and female organs),
which is connected with the five ambrosias (5). First of all, the practitioner should eat
426 | Francesco Sferra
the semen, which is the accomplisher (i.e. the purifier) of knowledge and knowable
(6). Subsequently, he should accomplish the ‘great blood’ (= human blood) in order
to bring to perfection body, speech, and mind. As a rule, this (menstrual ?) blood
should be taken from a young girl, or from a woman belonging to one of the tradi-
tional varṇas (7). The one who enjoys human blood accomplishes all duties. He
should eat the ‘great flesh’ (= human flesh), after having taken it in a cemetery from
the corpse of one who has died violently (e.g. one who was killed in a war or executed
by impalement or hanging). Eating these substances involves an increase of life and
health; it confers pleasure as well as the awakening of the Buddhas (8–10). Then the
practitioner should consume the urine and excrements of his own partner (ātma-
vidyā) (11ab). Details about the production of the pills needed for this ritual and about
this ritual itself are given in stanzas 11cd–15: the practitioner should prepare a subtle
powder with the substances mentioned above, and he should ‘meditate’ (i.e. mix
them) with human blood (11cd). This rite, which also includes the drinking of urine,
should be done thrice every day: at down, in the evening and at noon (12). The body
of the practitioner who practices this ritual every day will become free from sickness
and old age (13), handsome, etc. (14). The practitioner is at the same time a yogin and
the Omniscient One, endowed with the qualities of Vajrasattva, free from attachment
and aversion, and free from covetousness and envy. For him, the means of realization
(sādhana), which involves the great pleasure of Vajrāmṛta, becomes perfect (15). The
last verses of the text extol the Vajrāmṛtatantra (16–24). The entire Vajrayāna comes
forth from it (16). This teaching has not been transmitted to others (not only common
Buddhist practitioners, but not even those who have entered the bhūmis, i.e. the Bo-
dhisattvas) (17). This is the supreme, delightful secret that resides in every being (i.e.
this is the Bodhicitta that resides in form of pleasure in the matrix of the excellent
women) (18). The Vajrāmṛtatantra is called Jewel of the Vajras (vajracūḍāmaṇi). The
yogin should keep it well hidden; he should not even be confident in his ancestors
(i.e. the Buddhas) and sons (i.e. the Bodhisattvas) (who have not ‘entered the pledge’
[samayāpraviṣṭa]) (19). The true teaching (tattva) of this tantra should be bestowed
on one who desires the supreme awakening (bodhi)/perfection (dṅos grub), one (by
whom the mantra is kept) extremely secret, on a hero, one who is devoted to his mas-
ter, one who firmly observes the vows (20). The practitioner should realize this Va-
jrāmṛtatantra which is at the same time easy to be realized and extremely difficult to
be attained. It is mild, it is a collection of the essence (of Buddha’s qualities) and of
knowledge (21). The practitioner who is initiated in the great Vajrāmṛtatantra is wor-
shipped by Buddhas, by Bodhisattvas, and by everyone in this world (22). After hav-
ing paid homage to him three times, they say to him: ‘You are the Lord, the means of
saving all beings from transmigration’ (23). The great Vajrāmṛtatantra is a receptacle
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 427
(i.e. a great treasure). Therefore, the Vajra-holder (i.e. the heart of the Vajrāmṛta) in
its subtle form has been fixed in the space of the Bhaga (24).
1.5 About this edition
As regards orthography and sandhi, this edition has to be considered ‘conservative’,
as the peculiarities of the manuscript have usually been retained, including the alter-
nation in the use of ś and s for the same word, such as e.g. āsana and āśana. The
layout takes the metrical division of lines into account; verse numbers are inserted
between parentheses; hiatuses are marked with hyphens; Apabhraṃśa verses are in
italic. The chapter titles, which have been drawn from Śrībhānu’s commentary and
verified against the Tibetan translation, are inserted between square brackets. Stan-
zas quoted from the indirect tradition have been included, for the sake of complete-
ness, within double brackets (cf. chapters 3 to 4, 7).
Although many doubts remain, for instance in stt. 4.27 and 10.13, and about some
words of the verses in Apabhraṃśa (7.7–8), where we find terms paralleled in the lan-
guage of the Paümacariu by Kavirāja Svayambhūdeva, cruces are used only in the
most unsolvable cases.
1.6 Symbols and abbreviations
(O) string hole
<...> contain additions
. illegible part of an akṣara
.. illegible akṣara
(...) enclose numbers not present in the MS
[...] enclose pagination and titles
[[…]] enclose verses quoted from other sources, not present in Or.158.1
{...} enclose words, akṣaras or daṇḍas that should likely be omitted
] separates the accepted reading, emendations or conjectures from other readings
♦ separates the commentary on different lemmas within the same compound or
series of words that are graphically connected
♰…♰ cruces desperationis
siddham sign
✥ ornamental sign resembling a flower (perhaps a crossed-vajra)
ac
ante correctionem
MS Or.158.1
pc
post correctionem
T Tibetan
428 | Francesco Sferra
2 Text
[1v1] namaḥ śrīvajrasatvāya ||
[Chapter 1 – Guhyamaṇḍalakaraṇābhinayanirdeśa]
evam mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavā(O)n sarvatathāgatakāyavākci-
ttahṛdayavajrāmṛtaguhyapadmeṣu vijahāra ||
krīḍate bhagavān vajrī māmakyā sahitaḥ32 pure |
pṛccha[1v2]te tatra sā devī rahasye tivyavasthitā33 || (1)
uktaṃ deva tvayā pūrvaṃ tantraṃ vajrāmṛ(O)tam paraṃ |
amṛtaṃ sādhanopāyaṃ kathayasva mahāsukha || (2)
ity āha bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ34 |
acintyam avyayaṃ sūkṣmam amo[1v3]ghañ ca nirindriyaṃ |
paraṃ śāntaṃ viśuddhaṃ tu vajrāmṛtam udāhṛtaṃ ||35 (3)
tatas tu (O) bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtasamādhibhiḥ36 |
māmakyā rāgayuktena rahasyaṃ prakaṭīkṛtaṃ ||37 (4)
gopitaṃ sarvatantreṣu jñānaṃ vajrāmṛtaṃ paraṃ |
ta[1v4]d ahaṃ kathayiṣyāmi gāḍhāliṃganacumbanaiḥ <|>| (5)
||
32 sahitaḥ em. ] sahite MS
33 The Tibetan canonical translation (gsaṅ chen źes bya cher gnas pa’i) and the commentary by
*Guṇabhadra (cf. D, fol. 21r3–4: gsaṅ chen źes bya ba źes pa ni | bde ba chen po gñis su med pa’i so
so raṅ rig pa’i ye śes so || de la cher gnas pa źes te bde ba myoṅ ba’i bdag ñid ces pa’o ||) confirm the
odd reading rahasye ’tivyavasthitā only in part (in fact źes bya cher seem to reflect a reading like ity
ati° rather than ’tivyava°). Note that the commentary by Śrībhānu suggests a reading starting with
rahasye tu (rahasye tv ity anyabodhisa[2r9]ttvādidevatāpagate sthitā satī | tuśabdaḥ satyarthe [corr.
satyārthe ?], fol. 2r8–9), which however could be a secondary attempt (not necessarily of the com-
mentator but perhaps of a previous copyist of the mūla text) to obtain a smoother text. One possible
emendation, a kind of compromise that respects the evidence of Or.158.1, of Śrībhānu’s commen-
tary, and of the Tibetan translation (of the mūla text and of *Guṇabhadra’s commentary) could be
rahasye tv ity atisthitā (the word atisthitā is in any case quite unusual, and one would expect at least
the explanation of the upasarga ati in the commentaries); other possibilities are, for instance, ra-
hasye tv ity avasthitā or rahasye tu vyavasthitā. A further possibility is to keep the text as it is (ra-
hasye ti vyavasthitā) and to interpret ti as iti, or to divide the text differently (rahasyeti vyavasthitā)
and interpret rahasyā as an adjective. Another possibility could be to interpret rahasye <’>ti as ārṣa
formulation for atirahasye.
34 mahāsukhaḥ | MSpc (cf. also below, 1.11b, 4.38d, 6.20d, 8.15d, 11.24b) ] mahāsukha | MSac
35 || MSpc ] | MSac
36 vajrāmṛtasamādhibhiḥ MS ] Śrībhānu’s comm. suggests the reading vajrāmṛtasamādhinā
(kim āhety āha — vajrāmṛtasamādhinetyādi | […] vajrāmṛtasamādhinā kartṛbhūtena he-
tubhūtena vā yad rahasyaṃ tattvaṃ tat prakaṭīkṛtam |, fol. 3r2, 4)
37 || MSpc ] | MSac
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 429
ratikrīḍāsamāyogair gī(O)tavādyāvikurvaṇaiḥ38 |
sidhyate acirād evaṃ39 tantraṃ vajrāmṛtam paraṃ |
amṛtaṃ śukram ity uktaṃ tatprasūtaṃ40 jagattrayaṃ41 || (6)
tasyāhaṃ sādhanam42 [1v5] vakṣye tvatpriyārthaṃ43 varānane |44
kathayāmi samāsena tat me nigaditaṃ śṛ(O)ṇu45 <|>| (7)
sarvasatvahitārthāya yogayogāmṛtaṃ46 varaṃ47 |
yaṃ jñātvā mucyate kṣipraṃ yogī saṃsārabandhanāt <|>| (8)
aprakāśyaṃ mahājñānaṃ siddhi[1v6]trailokyasādhanaṃ48 |
kāyavākcittasiddhyarthaṃ49 sādhakānāṃ sukhāvahaṃ <|>| (9)
vajrapadma(O)samāyogair vajrāmṛtasamudbhavaṃ |
cumbayed bhagapadmaṃ tu vajraṃ cumbayet māmakī || (10)
ity āha bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ |
tadā50 tu[fols 2–5 missing] [...]
[...]
||
38 Read °vādya° ?
39 The commentary by Śrībhānu suggests a reading sevyate acirād devi: […] sevyate | ebhiḥ
kāraṇaiḥ niṣpa[3v3]dyate | pratibhāsagocaro bhaved ity arthaḥ | acirād iti cumbanādyanantaram
| devīti sambodhane | kiṃ sevyata ity āha — tantram ityādi | (fol. 3v2–3). Although the reading
evaṃ is confirmed by the Tibetan translation (de ltar), the locution acirād eva (sometimes in
connection with the verb sidhyati) is frequent in Sanskrit literature. One could conjecture that
the original reading acirād eva was subsequently misinterpreted as acirā deva (acirā and acirād
are possible alternatives in this register of the Sanskrit language) and then as acirā(d) devi/devī,
which is found in Śrībhānu’s pratīkas.
40 tatprasūtaṃ em. (cf. above, introduction p. 413) ] tatprasūta° MS
41 jagattrayaṃ em. (cf. above, introduction p. 413) ] jagatrayaṃ MS (note, however, that this
reading is attested in primary sources, although rarely [cf. e.g. ad Śāradātilakatantra 17.118, ed.
p. 703], and could perhaps be retained)
42 sādhanam em. ] sādhanam ato MS
43 tvatpriyārthaṃ em. (see next note) ] tvatpriyārthe MS
44 Cf. the parallels in Svacchandatantra 5.2ab (ed. vol. 3, p. 2): samāsāt kathayiṣyāmi tvatpriyār-
thaṃ varānane, in the Niśvāsakārikā (transcript, pp. 361, 366, 582): tad ahaṃ saṃpravakṣyāmi
tvatpriyārthaṃ varānane, and in Vīṇāśikhatantra 339ab (ed. p. 83): eṣa ekākṣaraḥ proktas tvat-
priyārthaṃ varānane.
45 śṛṇu MSpc ] śṛṇuḥ MSac
46 yogayogāmṛtaṃ MS and Śrībhānu’s comm. (yogeti devatāyogaḥ | tasminn api yogo bhāvanā
tadartham amṛ[4r2]taṃ sāram |, fol. 4r1-2) ] *yogavajrāmṛtaṃ T (sbyor ba’i rdo rje bdud rtsi) ]
47 varaṃ MS ] param is the reading supported by Śrībhānu’s comm.
48 siddhi° MS ] siddhaṃ is the reading supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (siddham iti prakṛtisi-
ddham, fol. 4r3)
49 °arthaṃ em. ] °artha° MS
50 tadā MS ] tatas Śrībhānu’s comm.
430 | Francesco Sferra
[Chapter 2 – Tattvayogajñānanirdeśa]
[…]
[Chapter 3 – Mantrotpattinirdeśa]
[…]
[[svāhākāras tu māmakyāḥ sarvasiddhipradāyikaḥ | (20ab)]]51
[…]
[Chapter 4 – Homavidhinirdeśa]
[…]
[[52tatas tu vilikhen mantrī53 homakuṇḍaṃ54 pramāṇataḥ |
śāntikaṃ vartulaṃ kāryaṃ hastamātraṃ tu sūtrayet || 13 ||
ardhahastaṃ khaned bhūmau śvetaraṅgaṃ tu dāpayet |
pārśvayos tu samālikhya cakrākāraṃ samantataḥ || 14 ||
pauṣṭikaṃ tu dvihastakam ekahastaṃ tataḥ khanet |
caturasraṃ samaṃtena lekhyaṃ ca pītagairikaiḥ55 || 15 ||
abhicārukaṃ56 trikoṇaṃ tu viṃśatyaṅgulavistaram |
khanitvā viṃśatyardhaṃ ca jvālāmālākulaṃ likhet || 16 ||
ardhacandraṃ samālekhyaṃ vaśyākarṣaṇayos tathā |
homakuṇḍaṃ samuddiṣṭaṃ diśābhāgaṃ57 vinirdiśet || 17 ||
uttarābhimukho bhūtvā mantrī śāntikam ārabhet |
pauṣṭikaṃ tu sadā pūrve abhicāraṃ tu dakṣi]][6r1]ṇe | (18)
||
51 On this line see above, note 8 and Ōmi 2013, 150–149 [17–18].
52 Stanzas 13–21, 23–24 are quoted with some different readings in Sādhanamālā 180, pp. 368–
370, introd. with the word apare. The same quote continues with the following stanzas, as if they
belonged to the same source: na hi homakarmaṇaḥ saṅkhyāṃ ye caiva vadanti ca | ta ācāryā
mahāśāntā buddhaśāsanasaṃmatāḥ || rāgacetasas tv anye ca dveṣiṇaḥ paradūṣakāḥ | garvitā
mohayuktās te varjitā buddhaśāsane ||.
53 mantrī em. based on T (sṅags pas) ] mantraṃ Sādhanamālā
54 °kuṇḍaṃ em. ] °kuṇḍa° MS
55 °gairikaiḥ em. on the basis of Śrībhānu’s comm. ] °gaurikaiḥ Sādhanamālā
56 abhicārukaṃ em. on the basis of Śrībhānu’s comm. ] abhicārakaṃ Sādhanamālā
57 diśābhāgaṃ em. on the basis of Śrībhānu’s comm. (karmārthaṃ digvibhāgaṃ nirdeṣṭum āha
— di[19v4]śābhāgam ityādi | diśābhāgaḥ suprasiddhaḥ ||, fol. 19v3-4) ] diśo bhāgaṃ Sādhanamālā
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 431
paścime vaśyam evoktaṃ ākarṣăṇoccāṭanan tathā58 |
ăbhicārukaṃ sadā59 (O) kṛṣṇaṃ pañcaraṃgeṇa60 vaśyayoḥ | (19)
tilataṇḍulakṣīreṇa61 ghṛtena madhunā saha |
pañcāmṛtaniyuktena62 śāntike pauṣṭike63 juhet64 | (20)
samidhāni [6r2] ca sarvāṇi kṣīravṛkṣasugandhayoḥ |
bhakṣyan nānāvidhaṃ65 dadyāt baliṃ vā sarva(O)bhautikaṃ66 | (21)
dātavyaṃ herukāmudrair baliṃ yat kiṃcit sādhakaiḥ |
sidhyate67 yogino nityaṃ yat kiñcit mana-īpsitaṃ68 | (22)
śāntikaṃ śaratkāle tu69 [6r3] hemante pauṣṭikan tathā |
grīṣme <’>bhicārukarmāṇi70 kuryāt sarvāṇi sādhakaḥ71 | (O) (23)
pradoṣe śāntikaṃ proktaṃ pratyūṣe pauṣṭikan tathā |
madhyāhne arddharātre vā prakuryād abhicārukaṃ {sadā}72 | (24)
hūṃkāreṇa tu niṣpādya kuṇḍama[6r4]dhye svadevatāṃ <|>
vaktraṃ prasāritaṃ73 dhyātvā āhutiṃ tatra dāpayet | (25)
lakṣyaṃ74 tu ā(O)hutiṃ dadyāt pratyakṣam agratam75 bhavet |
prathămam āvāhayed agniṃ76 sarvadevatapūjitaṃ |
||
58 paścime vaśyam evoktaṃ ākarṣaṇoccāṭanan tathā MS T ] paścime tu sadā proktaṃ
ākarṣoccāṭanādikam Sādhanamālā
59 sadā Sādhanamālā T ] tadā MS
60 °raṃgeṇa em. ] °raṃgena MS Sādhanamālā
61 °taṇḍulakṣīreṇa Sādhanamālā ] °taṇḍulākṣīreṇa MS
62 pañcāmṛtaniyuktena MS ] pañcāmṛtena yuktena Sādhanamālā
63 śāntike pauṣṭike em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (etāni samidhāni śāntike pauṣṭike ju-
huyāt, fol. 19v9) ] śāntikaṃ pauṣṭikaṃ MS Sādhanamālā
64 juhet MS T ] matam Sādhanamālā
65 bhakṣyan nānāvidhaṃ MS ] bhakṣyaṃ nānāvidhiṃ Sādhanamālā; bhakṣair nānāvidhair
Śrībhānu’s comm.
66 sarvabhautikaṃ MS Śrībhānu’s comm. ] sārvabhautikam Sādhanamālā
67 sidhyate em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (tena kiṃ bhavatīty āha — sidhyata ityādi |
evaṃ kṛte yogino manasepsitaṃ sidhyate sampadyate ||, fol. 20r5) ] sidhyante MS
68 mana-īpsitaṃ MS ] manasepsitaṃ Śrībhānu’s comm. (perhaps better)
69 The letters tkāle t are partly damaged (cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: śaratkāle ’śvinakārttikau, fol.
26r6).
70 ’bhicāru° MS ] ’bhicāra° Sādhanamālā
71 sādhakaḥ Sādhanamālā ] sādhakaiḥ MS
72 abhicārukaṃ sadā MS (contra metrum, but sadā is represented in T) ] abhicārakam Sādha-
namālā
73 prasāritaṃ em. ] praśāritaṃ MS
74 lakṣyaṃ MS ] lakṣaṃ Śrībhānu’s comm. (equally possible)
75 agratam (T: mdun du) sic for agrato ?
76 agniṃ em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] agni MS
432 | Francesco Sferra
divyamālākulaṃ raudraṃ buddhabodhiprasādhakaṃ | (26)
oṃ77 [6r5]
ehy78 ehi tvayāvaśyāgnau pratyakṣaṃ siddhidāyakaṃ |
trailokyapūjitaṃ raudraṃ bra(O)hmāviṣṇunamaskṛtaṃ |
gṛhītvā tv79 idam arghañ ca pādyaṃ {ca} dravyaṃ80 savajriṇaṃ | (27)
oṃ hūṃ hūṃ phaṭ phaṭ svāhā ||
arghan tu prathamaṃ dadyāt paścā[6r6]t puṣpan nivedayet || (28)
oṃ
divyapuṣpaṃ suraktañ ca {|} divyagandhasuśobhanaṃ |
pra(O)tīccha adya me puṣpa asmin saṃnihito bhava81 |
puṣpamantraḥ || (29)
oṃ
dīpanaṃ jvalanaṃ82 dīptaṃ durgatīnāṃ bhayāpahaṃ |
divyacakṣukarāṃ83 dhanyāṃ [6v1] dīpam asmai pratīcchati |
dīpamantraḥ || (30)
oṃ
candanañ ca sakarpūraṃ dīpasaugandhikaṃ84 (O) śubhaṃ |
sāṃnidhyakaraṇaṃ85 dhūpam86 asmai pratīcchatu | sannihito bhava87 |
dhūpamantraḥ || (31)
oṃ
nānādivyasugandhañ ca nānākarpūra{vi}bhūṣitaṃ |
nā[6v2]nāhūṃkārasaṃbhūtaṃ idaṃ gandhaṃ88 pratīcchatu || (32)
ādau pūjāvidhānan tu agnīkṛta(O)suniścayaṃ |
paścād uccārayed vidyāṃ jāpya mantrasvadevatāṃ | (33)
geyanṛtyopahāreṇa krīḍayantam anekadhā |
gaṇaṃ89 santoṣayet pūjā vi[6v3]dyāṃ90 sādhakam eva ca | (34)
||
77 oṃ conj. supported by T and Śrībhānu’s comm. ] damaged in MS
78 ehy damaged in MS
79 tv em. ] tu MS
80 dravyaṃ ] *savyaṃ T (g.yon)
81 saṃnihito bhava em. ] sa vihito bhava MS
82 jvalanaṃ em. ] jvālanaṃ MS
83 divya° em. ] divyaṃ MS
84 °saugandhikaṃ em. ] °saugandhika° MS (contra metrum)
85 sāṃnidhya° em. ] sānidhya° MS
86 dhūpam MSpc ] bhūpam MSac
87 bhava em. ] bhavaḥ MS
88 gandhaṃ em. ] gandha MS
89 gaṇaṃ em. ] gaṇa MS
90 vidyāṃ em. ] vidyā MS
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 433
yadicchet siddhim ātmānaṃ kāyavākcittasādhanaṃ |91
pūjya vi(O)sarjaye devaṃ agniṃ vajradharaṃ guruṃ | (35)
oṃ
agnaye92 sādhitaṃ karmaṃ sarvasatvasukhāvahaṃ |
kāyavākcittasiddhyarthaṃ93 devatānāṃ tu pālanaṃ | (36)
ga[6v4]ccha94 āgneya {su}saumyena śāntiṃ kuru mahīdhara95 |
sādhakānān tu sarveṣāṃ sthā(O)varāṇāñ ca jaṅgamaṃ |
mama puṇyaphalaṃ bhotu mantrasiddhiprado bhavet || (37)
a ā | i ī | u ū ṛ ṛ ̄ ḷ ḷ ̄ | e ai o au | aṃ aḥ | hūṃ [6v5] haḥ svāhā ||
ity āha bhagavān96 vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ | (38)
sarvatathāga(O)takāyavākcittavajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ ||
vajrāmṛtamahātantre homavidhinirdeśo nāma caturthaḥ || o ||
[Chapter 5 – Karmaprasaranirdeśa]
uktaṃ homa[6v6]vidhānañ97 ca aṃjanaṃ kathayāmi98 te |
mahāmedena varttañ99 ca kapāle gṛhna (O) kajjalaṃ |<|> (1)
ulūkasya śiraṃ100 dagdhvā101 mahāraktena bhāvayet |
niśāyān tu supiṣṭitvā102 sūkṣmacūrṇṇāni kārayet |<|> (2)
gṛdhrapādān103 atipūrya [fol. 7 missing] [...]
||
91 The same line occurs below: 6.14ab.
92 agnaye Śrībhānu’s comm. (sarvakarmasā[21r6]mānyavisarjanamantram āha — oṃ agnaye
sādhitaṃ karma sarvasattvasukhāvaham ityādi |, fol. 21r5–6) ] agneya MS
93 °siddhya° em. ] °sidhya° MSpc; °sādhya° MSac
94 The akṣara ga is damaged.
95 mahīdhara em. ] mahīdharā MS
96 bhagavān em. (see also below, chapters 6, 8, 10–11) ] bhagavan MS
97 homa° supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (adhunā karmaprasaram upakṣipann āha — uktaṃ
homavidhānam ityādi, fol. 28r7) ] unclear (damaged) in the MS
98 kathayāmi em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (te tava kathayāmi, fol. 28r7) ] kathayiṣyāmi
MS (contra metrum)
99 Sic for varttiṃ ?
100 Sic for śiro (śiraḥ) ? See below, next note.
101 dagdhvā em. supported by T (bsregs nas) and Śrībhānu’s comm. (ata ulūkaśiro mastakaṃ
dagdhvā mahāraktena bhāvayitvā […], fol. 21r9) ] dagdhā MS
102 supiṣṭitvā em. supported by T (btags nas) ] supirthitvā MS
103 gṛdhrapādān em. supported by T (bya rgod rje ṅar) and Śrībhānu’s comm. ] gradhrapādran
MS
434 | Francesco Sferra
[Chapter 6 – Vajrahūṃkārasādhananirdeśa]
[...]
<catu> [8r1]rbāhuṃ samālekhyaṃ dvayor104 bāhoḥ105 kucagrahaṃ |
vidyās tu106 trimukhā sarve dvāra(O)pālās107 tathāṃkuśaḥ <|>| (6)
puṣpadhūpaṃ tathā dīpaṃ gandhañ cāpi108 samālikhet |
lāśyā mālyaṃ tathā gītaṃ nṛtyaṃ caiva tu ṣaḍbhujaṃ <|>| (7)
vaṃśe109 caiva [8r2] samālekhyaṃ sarvavīṇā makundayoḥ |
murăja vādyaṃ tathā sarve samālekhyaṃ (O) tu maṇḍale || (8)
vajrāmṛtamahātantre sthāpayed bhadrakalpikān110 |
dvibhujam ekavaktran tu bhadrakalpikam eva ca <|>| (9)
agrataḥ111 sādhakaṃ likhet112 [8r3] sarvālaṃkārabhūṣitaṃ |
akṣasūtraṃ113 tathā vajraṃ ghaṇṭāñ cāpi samālikhet (O) <|>| (10)
balibalyopahāreṇa madyapānarasotsavaiḥ114 <|>
kṛṣṇāṣṭamyāṃ caturdaśyāṃ pātayec cūrṇi115 maṇḍale <|>| (11)
caruṃ kṛtvā116 tu madhye tu yadicchet siddhi[8r4]m uttamāṃ |
sādhayed vajrahūṃkāraṃ mantram117 ekākṣaraṃ vibhuṃ <|>| (12)
ācārye pūjayet pa(O)ścād ātmānaṃ rājyam eva ca |
mātṛṃ dadyā bhaginyāṃ118 tu bhāryāṃ119 duhitam eva ca <|>| (13)
yadicchet siddhim ātmānaṃ kāyavākcittasādhanaṃ |120
sādha[8r5]nīyaṃ121 sadā mantrī trailokyoddharaṇaṃ sadā || (14)
||
104 dvayor conj. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] dvitīye MS
105 bāhoḥ em. ] bāho MS
106 vidyās tu corr. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] vidyābhis MS
107 dvārapālās em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] dvārapālas MS
108 cāpi em. ] capi MS
109 vaṃśe is partly damaged and not clearly readable.
110 bhadrakalpikān corr. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] bhadraṃ kalpitaṃ MS
111 agrataḥ em. ] agrata MS
112 likhet conj. ] l.ikhy. MS
113 akṣasūtraṃ em. ] akṣasūtra MS
114 madyapāna° MS ] madyamāṃsa° is the reading suggested by Śrībhānu’s comm.
115 pātayec cūrṇi (or pātaye cūrṇi) conj. (cf. T: rdul tshon gdab) ] pātaye MS (contra metrum)
116 caruṃ kṛtvā conj. (cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: hūṃkāreṇa paśuṃ piṣṭakamayaṃ cchāgalaṃ ma-
hiṣaṃ puruṣaṃ vā pātayitvā [24r2] caruṃ kuryāt |, fol. 24r1-2) ] carutvā MS
117 mantram em. (cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: mantram ekākṣaram iti hūṃkāraṃ japet, fol. 24r2) ]
mantra MS
118 bhaginyāṃ MSpc ] bhaginyā MSac
119 bhāryāṃ em. ] bhāryā MS
120 The same line occurs above: 4.35ab.
121 °nīyaṃ MSpc ] °nīya MSac
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 435
maṇḍalaṃ vajrasatvasya vajrāmṛta(O)vinirgataṃ |
pañcāmṛtasamāyuktaṃ sarvadurgatināśanaṃ <|>| (15)
vajrācchaṭasamāyogaiḥ122 śrīvajrahūṃkārasādhanaṃ |
kathitaṃ yogayo[8r6]gināṃ123 bodhicittavikurvaṇaṃ <|>| (16)
kurvīta maṇḍale krīḍāṃ124 vidyayā125 cāpy aneka(O)dhā |
bhagamadhye {tu} samāsvādya vīro yo mantrasaṃsthitaḥ126 <|>| (17)
vaktreṇa cumbayet padmam amṛtaṃ śukram eva ca |
na tatra-m-uddharet sthāne ka[8v1]rasyāṅgulinaiva ca127 <|>| (18)
uddharitvā vinaśye tu na vīryan na ca vai phalaṃ |
uddhari(O)tvā mahāvidyā128 cumbayitvā tu vajriṇaṃ <|>| (19)
sidhyate tasya buddhatvam129 amṛtaṃ śukrarūpiṇaṃ ||
ity āha bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsu[8v2]khaḥ || (20)
sarvatathāgatakāyavākcittavajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ | vajrāmṛ(O)tamahātantre
vajrahūṃkārasādhananirdeśo nāma ṣaṣṭhaḥ || ||
[Chapter 7 – Geyanṛtyābhiṣekatattvāvabodhanirdeśa]
tatas tu māmakī devī ratikrīḍāvyavasthitā |
kṛtāṃjalina[8v3]maskārair idaṃ gītam udāharet <|>| (1)
asitābjavapur vīraṃ vīrair anyaiḥ130 pari(O)vṛtaṃ |
mudrāgaṇasamāyuktaṃ vajrāmṛta namāmy aham131 <|>| (2)
śaradgagaṇasaṃprāptaṃ132 kokilābhṛṅganāditaṃ <|>
||
122 °samāyogaiḥ em. ] °sāmāyogaiḥ MS
123 °yogināṃ em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] °yoginyāṃ MS (sic for °yoginīnāṃ ? cf. T:
rnal ’byor pa daṅ rnal ’byor ma’i || byaṅ sems rnam par sprul par gsuṅs ||, D 23r5-6)
124 krīḍāṃ em. ] krīḍā MS
125 vidyayā em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (krīḍām iti suratakrīḍām | vidyā prāg uktā
caṇḍālādikanyā devatīrūpā tayā sahānekadhā nānāvidhāṃ suratakrīḍāṃ sampādayet sādhayed
iti bhāvaḥ ||, fol. 24v1) ] vidyāyā MS
126 vīro yo mantrasaṃsthitaḥ conj. (cf. T: gaṅ dag dpa’ bo sṅags la gnas ||, and Śrībhānu’s
comm.: vīro hakārātmakavajrāmṛtaṃ tatsthānavaktreṇa jihvayā sparśarāgāsvādanādikaṃ
kṛtvā […], fol. 24v2) ] vīrāveyai mantrasaṃsthitā MS
127 karasyāṅgulinaiva ca conj. ] karābhyām aṅgulim eva ca MS (contra metrum)
128 Note that according to Śrībhānu this compound has to be interpreted as a vocative:
mahāvidyeti sambodhane | (fol. 24v4).
129 buddhatvam em. ] buddhatvaṃm MS
130 vīrair anyair conj. ] vīramanyair MS
131 namāmy aham conj. (see below stt. 3–4, 6) ] namāmye MS
132 śarad° em. ] śaraṃ MS; cf. T: ston gyi nam mkha’ daṅ ’dra ba
436 | Francesco Sferra
subhagaṃ suratārūḍhaṃ133 vajrāmṛ[8v4]ta namāmy ahaṃ || (3)
♰sarvaṃ sarvā anārūpaṃ♰ sarvajñaṃ sarvasauhṛdaṃ |
samyagindriya(O)mārgeṇa vajrāmṛta namāmy aham || (4)
traidhātuka-m-aśeṣasya vajrāmṛtam anopamaṃ134 |
caturviṃśanmahāvidyā135 atirāgeṇa rāgayet <||> [8v5] (5)
samapulakitāṃgo136 hi {sarvabuddhakṛtālayet |
sarvasiddhikaraḥ śrīmān}137 (O) vajrāmṛta namāmy aham <|>| (6)
dala nīluppara138 sāman ♰traä♰ tuhuṃ tathāgatu vajju139 <|>
mahuṃ140 aṇurāaï suratasuha141 jjeṃ142 tihuäṇe143 sāhasi [8v6] kajju || (7)144
suṇṇa nirañjaṇa paramapadi145 tuhuṃ akkharu vajja aṇāï <|>
jjo ♰pacche (O) etti♰ sacarācara146 ♰gaeti♰ tuhuṃ kaü saṃsāra hojāï || (8)147
anena gīyamānena vajranṛtyavikurvaṇaiḥ |
bhāratī sāndhakī148 caiva lu149 [fol. 9 missing] [...] (9)
[…]
[[150tiṣṭhate niścalaṃ vidyā amṛtaṃ dhyānam ārabhet |
dhyāyate paramaṃ tattvam amṛtaṃ bindurūpiṇam || (13)
khamadhye śaśisaṃkāśaṃ śūnyatattvam udāhṛtam |
||
133 suratārūḍhaṃ em. ] suratārūṭaṃ MS
134 anopamaṃ em. based on T (dpe med) and Śrībhānu’s comm. (cf. BHSD p. 37) ] anomayaṃ
MS
135 °viṃśan° em. ] °viṃśat° MS
136 °pulakitāṃgo em. ] °pulukitāṃge MS
137 The two pādas 6bc are not translated into Tibetan and are not commented on by Śrībhānu.
138 The syllable da is post correctionem; the ante correctionem reading is unclear.
139 vajju em. ] vajja MS
140 mahuṃ em. ] muhuṃ MS
141 °suha em. ] °subha MS
142 jjeṃ em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (jem iti yena mamānurāgeṇa hetunā, fol. 25v2) ] jjo
MS
143 tihuäṇe MSpc ] tuhuäṇe MSac
144 Chāyā: dalaṃ nīlotpalasya śyāmaḥ […] tvaṃ tathāgato vajrī | mām anurāgaya suratasukha
yena tribhuvane sādhayasi kāryam ||
145 °padi em. ] °pati MS
146 sacarācara em. ] sacarāera MS
147 Chāyā: śūnyaṃ nirañjanaṃ paramapadaṃ tvam akṣaraṃ vajram anādi | yaḥ sacārācaraḥ
[…] tvāṃ kathaṃ saṃsāre jāyate ||
148 The letter k is not perfectly readable.
149 The syllable lu is hardly readable.
150 Stanzas 13 to 15 are quoted by Ratnākaraśānti in the Guṇavatī, ed. p. 18 (ad Mahāmāyātantra
1.21). Cf. also Ōmi 2013: 140 [27] and above, introduction, p. 413.
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 437
akṣayam avyayaṃ sūkṣmaṃ vajrasattvam anāhatam || (14)
nābhimadhye sthito devaḥ karṇikāgūḍhagocare |
sravate śukrarūpeṇa bhagaliṅgāntare sthitaḥ || (15)]]
[…]
[Chapter 8 – Śrīherukotpattinirdeśa]
[...] [10r1]vṛtaṃ <|>| (4)
mahāśmaśānanilayaṃ mantrapheṭkāranāditaṃ151 |
bhūtavetāḍasaṃ(O)ghaiś ca krīḍamānaṃ śmaśānakaiḥ <|>| (5)
tatas tu sendrakān devān brahmāviṣṇumaheśvarān |
bhakṣamāṇaṃ152 mahāvajrī śrīherukӑrū[10r2]pam udvahet <|>| (6)
sotkaṭā prathamā vidyā vikăṭā cāṇḍāli ḍombikā | (O)
piṅgalā kulinī ugrā dāruṇī cāṣṭamī smṛtā153 <|>| (7)
japyamānam idaṃ mantraṃ nṛtyamānā tu gāpayet |
daṃṣṭrotkaṭamahābhī[10r3]maṃ154 antraśragdāmabhūṣitaṃ <|>| (8)
bhakṣamānaṃ mahāmānsaṃ śrīheruka namāmy155 a(O)haṃ |156
jāpyamantraṃ157 pravakṣyāmi sādhakānāṃ hitāya vai <|>| (9)
tṛtīyā ca tṛtīyan tu saptamī ca caturthake |
saptamā ca tṛtīyan tu [10r4] dvau158 dvaupada niyojayet <|>| (10)
sakalaṃ tatvasaṃyuktaṃ phaṭkāreṇa vibhūṣi(O)taṃ |
ṣaṣṭhā159 caturthakoddhṛtya saptamādyena āsanaṃ <|>| (11)
trayodaśasamākrāntam {antra} svāhāntaṃ mantram uddharet |
ādau vairoca[10r5]naṃ dadyāt mūlamantraṃ tu heruke <|>| (12)
asyaiva mantrarājasya māhātmyaṃ śṛ(O)ṇu māmakī |
sakṛjjaptena mantreṇa trailokyan nāśayet kṣaṇāt <|>| (13)
traidhātukam aśeṣan tu bhakṣayed aviśaṅkitaḥ |
sarvakā[10r6]maṃdadā hy eṣā śrīherukasamo bhavet || (14)
ity āha bhagavān vajrī vajrā(O)mṛtamahāsukhaḥ | (15)
||
151 °nāditaṃ MS (cf. Kālikākulapañcaśatikā 1.5d) ] em. °nādinaṃ ?
152 bhakṣamāṇaṃ em. ] bhakṣāmānaṃ MS
153 smṛtā em. ] smṛtāḥ MS
154 daṃṣṭro° em. ] daṃṣtro° MS
155 namāmy MSpc ] ramāmy MSac
156 Verses 8cd–9ab are quoted in Sādhanamālā 239 (Mahāmāyāsādhana), ed. vol. 2, p. 462.
157 jāpya° MS ] jāpa° is the reading supported by Śrībhānu’s comm.
158 dvau em. ] dvo MS
159 ṣaṣṭhā em. ] ṣaṣṭhyā MS
438 | Francesco Sferra
sarvatathāgatakāyavākcittavajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ | vajrāmṛtamahātantre
śrīherukotpatti[10v1]nirdeśo nāmāṣṭamaḥ || o ||
[Chapter 9 – Śrī-amṛtakuṇḍali-utpattinirdeśa]
athātaḥ sampravakṣyāmi rūpam amṛtaku(O)ṇḍalī160 |
trimukhaṃ ṣaḍbhujaṃ raudraṃ kṛṣṇabhinnāñjanaprabhaṃ <|>| (1)
jvālāmālākulaṃ caṇḍaṃ piṅgălākṣiṃ piṅgaloj<j>valaṃ <|>
mahāvighnasamā[10v2]krāntaṃ paraśūdyatapāṇinaṃ161 <|>| (2)
muṣalaṃ vajrapāśañ ca vāmahastena da(O)rjinī162 |
tarjayaṃ sarvaduṣṭānāṃ pāṇau khaḍgan tu bhāvayet <|>| (3)
vidyāṣṭakasamāyuktaṃ dvārapālasamanvitaṃ |
bhāvayed guhyapadmaṃ [10v3] tu vidyā163 cāṣṭau dale nyaset <|>| (4)
amṛtā ӑmṛtavajrā ca amṛtā ӑ(O)mṛtalocanā |
ӑprameyā ca surūpā ca vāruṇā sukhasādhanī <|>| (5)
trimukhā ṣaḍbhujā sarve diśāsu vidiśāsu ca |
paṃkajo[10v4]dyatapāṇinā
nṛtyamānā ca te devyo viśvarūpadharapradāḥ164 <|>| (6)
hasante (O) kilĭkilāyante mantrarājam anusmaret165 |
punar vairocanan dadyāt tat padaṃ paripūrayet <|>| (7)
prathamā tu dvitīyaṃ tu śūnyam ā[10v5]śanasaṃyutaṃ |
śūnyaṃ śūnyam166 samākrāntaṃ167 mantraṃ168 svāhāntayojitaṃ <|>| (8)
atyanta(O)suratāyogaiḥ amṛtā ӑmṛtam utthitaṃ |
||
160 According to Śrībhānu’s commentary, this line runs more smoothly as follows: athānyaṃ
sampravakṣyāmi rūpam amṛtakuṇḍaleḥ (cf. fol. 30v3). The form amṛtakuṇḍaleḥ for amṛtakuṇḍali-
naḥ is attested in for instance Abhayākaragupta’s Vajrāvalī (Kalaśādhivāsanavidhi). For the
reading athānyaṃ, cf. also st. 10.1a.
161 paraśū° em. supp. by T and by Śrībhānu’s comm. (dakṣiṇe paraśukhaḍgavajram | vāme
tarjjanikāmuṣalapāśaṃ ca |, fol. 30v6) ] paruśo° MS (usually paruṣa, ‘arrow’, is not part of
Amṛtakuṇḍalin’s iconography, cf. Lokesh Chandra 2000, 325–328)
162 darjinī sic for tarjanī
163 vidyā sic for vidyāś ?
164 °pradāḥ em. ] °pradā MS
165 anusmaret MS ] read samuddharet ? Cf. T: dbyuṅ bar bya
166 śūnyaṃ śūnyam is also the reading supported by the commentarial literature (cf. Śrībhānu’s
ṭīkā, fol. 31r9; Vimalabhadra’s comm. D, fol. 15r2-3; *Guṇabhadra’s comm. D, fol. 50v1-2). In the
canonical translation we read steṅ pas steṅ nas (D) / ston pas steṅ nas (P), which could reflect a
reading like śūnyopari. However, it is likely that steṅ (ston in P) is a transmissional error for stoṅ.
167 samākrantaṃ em. ] ākrantaṃ MS
168 mantraṃ em. ] mantra MS
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 439
amṛtā ӑmṛtayogena sādhayed ӑmṛtakuṇḍaliṃ <|>| (9)
sidhyante169 acirāt tasya170 sa[10v6]rvārthāḥ171 sarvasiddhibhiḥ |
naro vā yadi vā nārī smarate {a}mṛtakuṇḍa(O)liṃ <|>| (10)
tasya hastatale sarvaṃ trailokyaṃ sacarācaraṃ |
dhyāyate nityakāle172 tu vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ173 <|>| (11)
sarvatathāgatakāyavākcitta[11r1]vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ | vajrāmṛtamahātantre
śrī-amṛtakuṇḍali-u(O)tpattinirdeśo nāma navamaḥ || o ||
[Chapter 10 – Vetālasādhananirdeśa]
athānyaṃ saṃpravakṣyāmi mahāvetālasādhanaṃ |
kṛṣṇāṣṭamyāṃ caturdaśyāṃ ekaliṃge catu[11r2]ṣpathe174 <|>| (1)
ekavṛkṣe śmaśāne vā nadītīre ca parvate |
sādhayet sarvakāryā(O)ṇi vetālotthāpanan175 tathā <|>| (2)
sarvalakṣaṇasaṃpūrṇṇā udbandhanamṛtā tu yā |
mātaṃgī ḍombikā176 śvapākī ca nirvraṇā177 cāruśobhanā178 [11r3] | (3)
dvātṛṃśaṃ179 ca saumyā pañcaviṃśatyābdā prasūtā |
vāleṣu gṛhyate mṛtakā stri(O)yā (4)
snāpayet divyatoyena mantrauṣadhi{sa}salìlakaiḥ |
svetacandanakarpūraiḥ kuryāt tasya vilepanaṃ |
pūjayet puṣpadhūpaiś ca vi[11r4]citrāṇi baliṃ180 dāpayet181 | (5)
mahātailenābhyajyā182 sarṣapair mukha tāḍayet | (O)
maṇḍalam ālikhyet tatra śrīherukasya sādhakaḥ | (6)
arddhacandraṃ183 kapālākhyam āpūrya dhanuṣākṛtiṃ |
||
169 sidhyante em. ] sidhyate MS
170 tasya MS (partly damaged) ] *tena T (de yis)
171 sarvārthāḥ em. ] sarvārthā MS
172 nityakāle em. (T: dus rtag par ni) ] nṛtyakāle MS
173 °sukhaḥ em. ] °sukha MS
174 catuṣpathe conj. (T: lam mdo) ] .. .. ṣpathe MS (only the hook of the two broken akṣaras is
visible)
175 vetālo° em. ] vettālo° MS
176 ḍombikā em. ] ḍombīkā MS
177 nirvraṇā em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. (nirvraṇety akṣatā |, fol. 32r1) ] nirvaṇā MS
178 The upper part of °nā is not clearly readable; the reading °nī is also possible.
179 The akṣara dvā is partly damaged.
180 Read vicitrair bali ?
181 Cf. Hevajratantra 1.10.26a.
182 Corr. to mahātailena abhyajya ?
183 arddha° em. ] ārddha° MS
440 | Francesco Sferra
aṣṭavidyāsamāyuktaṃ kapālai[11r5]r upaśobhitaṃ | (7)
asravā tu kapālāni sarvāḥ184 khaṭvāṅgadhāriṇyaḥ185 |
trimukhā (O) raudrarūpās tu ṣaḍbhujāḥ186 khaḍgapāṇayaḥ | (8)
bāhyato maṇḍalasyāsya dvārapālān prakalpayet |
gokarṇṇo187 hastikarṇṇaś ca sumukhyo [11r6] durmukhas tathā | (9)
pāśāṃkuśadharā raudrā vikaṭotkaṭabhīṣaṇāḥ |
dvibhujā (O) ekavaktrās tu puṣpapūjā samālikhet | (10)
vidyā sā tu vicitrāṇi maṇḍalapūja samālikhet |
tatas tu sādhako vīro188 herukarū[11v1]pam udvahet | (11)
mahāśaṃkhair alaṃkṛtya kapālamālaśekharaṃ |
ḍamărukaṃ vāha(O)yet tatra nṛtyamānaḥ189 puraṃ viśet | (12)
mantraiḥ ♰samudvahehas♰ tu phaṭkāraṃ190 tatra jāpayet191 |
pūjayet maṇḍalaṃ divyaṃ192 mahāraktena prokṣayet193 | [11v2] (13)
śrīherukamahāmantraṃ japamānas tu sādhakaḥ |
krodhāviṣṭan tu garjantaṃ194 ve(O)tāḍo195 rāvam uccaret196 | (14)
{tasya} na bhetavyaṃ tadā mantrī śrīherukam anusmaret <|>
utthitatas tu vetālaḥ197 sādhakam idam abravīt | (15)
kiṃ karmaṃ [11v3] tu mahāvīra dehi {me} ājñāñ ca vajriṇaḥ |
khaḍgam añjana pātālaṃ kheca(O)ratvaṃ jigīṣiṇaṃ198 | (16)199
yad icchet sādhakasyāpi tat karmañ ca prasādhayet |
tatas tu sādhako brūyāt yasya yat manasepsitaṃ200 | (17)
||
184 sarvāḥ em. ] sarve MS
185 °dhāriṇyaḥ em. ] °dhāriṇā MS
186 ṣaḍbhujāḥ em. ] ṣaḍbhujā MS
187 gokarṇṇo em. ] gokarṇṇaṃ MS
188 vīro em. ] vīra MS
189 nṛtyamānaḥ em. ] nṛtyamāno MS
190 Read pheṭkāraṃ ? Cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: praviśya tatra caturdikṣu pheṭkāraṃ dadyāt, fol. 32v1.
191 jāpayet (or dāpayet) em. (Isaacson) ] ṭāpayet MS
192 divyaṃ em. ] divya MS
193 The letter t is partly broken.
194 Read garjanto ?
195 vetāḍo em. ] vetāḍa MS
196 uccaret em. supported by T (sgrogs byed) and Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā (japamāneti sarṣapais
tāḍyamāno vetālo rāvam uccaret, fol. 32v1) ] uddharet MS
197 vetālaḥ em. ] vetālaṃ MS
198 jigīṣiṇaṃ em. ] jīgīṣiṇaṃ MS (the anusvāra is almost unreadable and could have been rubbed out)
199 Note that pāda 16d occurs several times in the Brahmayāmala (e.g. 11.76b, 74.188b).
200 manasepsitaṃ em. (cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: tato brūyād iti sādhakena manasepsitaṃ vak-
tavyam, fol. 32v3) ] manepsitaṃ MS
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 441
prasādha[11v4]yet <tat> sarvan tu mūlapadmā201 tu māmakī |
vetālasādhanaṃ mukhyaṃ vajrāmṛtavini(O)rgataṃ | (18)
kāyavākcittasiddhyarthaṃ202 sādhakānāṃ sukhāvahaṃ ||
ity āha bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ <|> (19)
sarvatathāgatakāyavā[11v5]kcittavajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ <|> vajrāmṛtamahātantre
vetālasādhano nāma (O) nirdeśo daśamaḥ || o ||
[Chapter 11 – Pañcāmṛtasādhanopāyanirdeśa]
tatas tu bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ |
vajrapadmasamāyogais tūṣṇībhūtvā vyavasthitaḥ <|>| (1)
no[11v6]śvasen203 na ca kaṃpe na nirīkṣen na ca bhāṣate |
paraṃ204 samādhisam{ā}panno205 mā(O)makī puna pṛcchati <|>| (2)
bhagavan206 sūkṣmavajraṃ207 tu sarvasatvahṛdi sthitam208 |
kathaṃ kena prakāreṇa tat tatvam upalabhyate <|>| (3)
tatas tu bhagavā[12r1]n209 vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ |
hasamāna210 idaṃ vākyaṃ netram udghāṭya cābravī(O)t || (4)
pūrvaṃ tu211 kathitaṃ tatvam amṛtaṃ śukrarūpiṇaṃ |
svādayet sadā nityaṃ pañcāmṛtasamanvitaṃ <|>| (5)
ekaikasya tu māhātmyaṃ dravyāṇāṃ212 [12r2] śṛṇu māmakī |
prathamaṃ prāśayec chukraṃ jñānajñeyaprasādhakaṃ213 <|>| (6)
||
201 mūlapadmā is not clearly visible.
202 °siddhy° em. (cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: devatānāṃ kāyavākcittasiddhyartham, fol. 32v4) ]
°sādhy° MS
203 nośvasen em. ] nośvaseṃ MS (the syllable no is partly broken)
204 paraṃ em. (see next note) ] paramaṃ MS
205 Note that the hypermetrical reading °samāpanno is confirmed by Śrībhānu’s comm.:
asādhāraṇatvāt paraḥ samādhis taṃ samāpanno [33r1] viṣayīkṛtavān |, fols 32v9-33r1.
206 bhagavan em. supported by Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā (bhagavann iti sambodha[33r2]ne, fol. 33r1–2) ]
bhagavān MS
207 sūkṣma° em. ] śūkṣma° MS
208 sthitam em. ] sthitaḥ MS
209 bhagavān em. ] bhagan MS
210 hasamāna em. ] hasamānam MS
211 pūrvaṃ tu MS ] Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā supports the reading pūrvaṃ te (pūrvam iti prathamanirdeśe
| te tava mayā kathitam, fol. 33r4)
212 dravyāṇāṃ em. ] dravyāṇā MS (the edge of the folio is broken and it is possible that the
anusvāra was originally present above the syllable ṇā)
213 jñānajñeya° em. (see st. 10b below) ] jñānajñeyaṃ MS ♦ prasādhakaṃ em. ] prāsādhakaṃ
MS (contra metrum)
442 | Francesco Sferra
kāyavākci(O)ttasiddhyarthaṃ214 mahāraktaṃ prasādhayet |
kanyāyās215 tu sadā gṛhyaṃ216 yasya tasya priyāpi vā <|>| (7)
sarvakāryakaro hy eṣa mahāraktaṃ tu māma[12r3]kī |
haṭhamṛtyuvanaṃ217 prāpya mahāmāṃsan218 tu āharet || (8)
śūlam udbaddhakaṃ vāpi (O) raṇe vā yas tu ghātitaḥ |
bhakṣaye dṛḍhagāṃbhīra219 āyurārogyavarddhanaṃ <|>| (9)
kāmadaṃ saukhyadaṃ caiva buddhabodhiprasādhakaṃ |
vajrasattva[12r4]m220 ivāyuṣyaṃ sarvakāmaphalapradaṃ <|>| (10)
vajrodakaṃ purīṣan tu ātmavidyā tu bhakṣa(O)yet |
sūkṣmacūrṇṇan {tu} tataḥ kṛtvā mahāraktena bhāvayet || (11)
pratyuṣe tu sadā kāryaṃ pradoṣe madhyāhne tathaiva ca221 |
triṣkālaṃ bhakṣaye[12r5]d222 yogī pibed vajrodakan tataḥ <|>| (12)
dine dine tu māmakyā sādhayed yas tu sādhakaḥ | (O)
nirvyādhī223 tu bhavet kāyaṃ jarārogavināśanaṃ <|>| (13)
saubhāgyaṃ suvapustejo224 rājadvāre jayāvahaṃ225 |
sarvakāmandadā hy eṣā226 pravarata[12r6]tvan227 tu prāpyate228 <|>| (14)
sa yogī sa ca sarvajño229 vajrasatvaguṇair yutaḥ230 |
rāgadveṣa(O)vinirmukto lobha-īrṣyā ca varjitaṃ231 |
sidhyate sādhanan tasya vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaṃ <|>| (15)
||
214 °siddhyarthaṃ em. ] °sidhyarthaṃ MS
215 kanyāyās em. ] kanyāyā MS
216 gṛhyaṃ em. ] gṛhya MS
217 °vanaṃ em. supported by Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā (haṭhena balena mṛtyuprāptānāṃ vanaṃ [33r9]
śmaśānaṃ, fol. 33r8-9) ] °dhanaṃ MS
218 mahāmāṃsan em. ] mahāmāṃnsan MS
219 °gāṃbhīra em. ] °gāṃbhīraṃ MS
220 vajrasattvam conj. based on T (rdo rje sems dpa’) ] vajras. .. m MS
221 The akṣara ca is partly broken.
222 bhakṣayed Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā ] bhakṣ. .. d MS
223 Read nirvyādhi ?
224 °tejo em. ] °tejāṃ MS
225 Cf. Vāgbhaṭa’s Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgrahaḥ, Uttarasthānam, 40.65b.
226 °dadā hy eṣā em. (cf. st. 8.14c) ] °dad. .. .hy eṣāṃ MS
227 The akṣara va is partly broken. Note that the hypermetrical reading pravaratatvan (vs pra-
varatvan) is apparently supported by T (mchog rab de ñid thob pa yin).
228 The akṣara pya is partly broken.
229 sarvajño em. ] sarvajña MS
230 yutaḥ em. ] yutaṃ MS
231 Read lobha-īrṣyāvivarjitaḥ ?
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 443
idaṃ vajrāmṛtaṃ tantraṃ bahvarthaṃ232 gūḍhavikramaṃ | [12v1]
nikhilaṃ vajrayānasya233 ato234 devī vinirgataṃ <|>| (16)
kathitaṃ tatvan tu sadbhāvaṃ ati(O)rāgeṇa rāgitaṃ |
na mayā kasyacid ākhyātaṃ sthūlapadmaṃ tu māmakī <|>| (17)
idaṃ rahasyaṃ235 paramaṃ ramyaṃ sarvātmani {sadā}236 sthitaṃ |
bodhi[12v2]satvena na237 vijñātaṃ arūpyaṃ śūnyam akṣaraṃ <|>| (18)
etat tantraṃ238 mahāvidye vajracūḍā(O)maṇiḥ239 smṛtaṃ |
guptan tu240 dhārayed devī pitāputrair na viśvaset <|>| (19)
atyantagupte vīre ca gurubhakte dṛḍhavrate |
deyaṃ241 tasya idaṃ ta[12v3]tvaṃ yadicched242 bodhim uttamaṃ <|>| (20)
idaṃ vajrāmṛtaṃ tantraṃ sukhasādhyaṃ243 sudurlabhaṃ | (O)
sādhayet subhage saumyaṃ sārajñānasamuccayaṃ <|>| (21)
vajrāmṛtamahātantre yo ’bhiṣiktas244 tu sādhakaḥ |
buddhāś ca bodhisattvāś ca taṃ vai245 [12v4] sarvo ’bhivandati <|>| (22)
namaskṛtvā tu triskālam ācāryaṃ246 subhagottamaṃ |
tvam eva (O) sarvasatvānāṃ saṃsāroddharaṇaṃ prabhuḥ <|>| (23)
idam avod bhagavān vajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ |
{sarvatathāgatakāyavākcittava[12v5]jrī247 vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ |}248
||
232 bahvarthaṃ em. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] bahvāttaṃ MS (the reading of the akṣaras
ātta is in any case uncertain)
233 The akṣara va is partly broken
234 ato corr. supported by Śrībhānu’s comm. ] atra MS
235 rahasyaṃ em. (bhavipulā) ] rahasya° MS (navipulā)
236 sadā is not rendered in T and is not commented in Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā.
237 bodhisattvena na vijñātaṃ MS (contra metrum) ] bodhisattvair avijñātaṃ is the reading sug-
gested by Śrībhānu’s comm.
238 etat tantraṃ Śrībhānu ] eṣa tatva MS; read etat tattvaṃ ? *atha tattvaṃ T (de na de ñid)
239 °maṇiḥ em. (cf. Śrībhānu’s comm.: vajrās tathāgatāḥ | teṣāṃ cūḍāmaṇiḥ | ratnabhūtatvād
vajracūḍāmaṇir iti smṛtam |, fol. 34r5) ] °maṇi MS
240 guptan tu MS ] suguptaṃ Śrībhānu
241 The akṣara yaṃ is partly broken.
242 Cf. above, n. 30.
243 sukhasādhyaṃ em. ] sukhasādhya MS
244 yo ’bhiṣiktas em. supported by Śrībhānu’s ṭīkā (yo vajrāmṛtatantrābhiṣekavidhinābhiṣiktaḥ
sarvācārya[34v3]tāṃ gataḥ, fol. 34v3–4) ] yoṣiktas MS (contra metrum)
245 taṃ vai conj. (cf. T: de la kun gyis phyag byed de) ] t. .. MS
246 ācāryaṃ em. ] ācārya MS
247 °vajrī em. ] °va.. MS
248 Note that in accord with the previous parallels (cf. the final rubrics of chapters 4, 6, 8–10),
the commentary by Śrībhānu, and the Tibetan translation, this line should be shifted after st. 24,
before the last sentence of the text.
444 | Francesco Sferra
vajrāmṛtamahātantraṃ nikṣepaṃ kathitaṃ priye (O) |
sūkṣmarūpaṃ tato vajri bhagākāśe249 vyavasthitaṃ <|>| (24)
<sarvatathāgatakāyavākcittavajrī vajrāmṛtamahāsukhaḥ |> vajrāmṛtamahātantre
pañcāmṛtasādhanopāyo nāma nirdeśa250 ekādaśa[12v6]maḥ251 samāptaḥ252 || ✥ ||
References
Primary Sources in Sanskrit and Prakrit
Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgraha by Vāgbhaṭa
Śrīmad Vṛddhavāgbhaṭaviracitaḥ Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgrahaḥ, ed. by Anaṃta Dāmodara Āṭhavale,
Śa. He. Gurjara at the Āyurvidyā Mudraṇālaya, Poona, 1980.
Kālikākulapañcaśatikā
Online e-text edited by Mark S.G. Dyczkowski (https://www.scribd.com/docu-
ment/87023764/devipancasatikaVELTHIUS).
Khasamatantraṭīkā by Ratnākaraśānti
‘khasamatantrasya ācāryaratnākaraśāntiviracitā khasamā-nāmaṭīkā’, ed. by Jagannātha
Upādhyāya, Saṅkāya Patrikā, Śramaṇavidyā Vol. I, Sampurnanand Sanskrit Vishvavidya-
laya, Varanasi 1983, 225–254.
Guṇavatī (Mahāmāyātantraṭīkā) by Ratnākaraśānti
Mahāmāyātantra with Guṇavatī by Ratnākaraśānti, ed. by Samdhong Rinpoche and Vrajaval-
labh Dwivedi, Rare Buddhist Text Series 10, CIHTS, Sarnath, Varanasi 1992.
Catuṣpīṭhapañjikā by Kalyāṇavarman
National Archives of Kathmandu, MS 3–360 / vi. bauddhatantra 23 = Nepal-German Manu-
script Preservation Project, reel No. B 30/37.
Niśvāsakārikā
French Institute of Pondicherry, Transcript No. 17A.
Paümacariu by Kavirāja Svayambhūdeva
Paumacariu of Kavirāja Svayambhūdeva (A pre-tenth century Jainistic Rāma epic in Apa-
bhraṁśa), ed. by Harivallabha Cunilala Bhayani, 3 vols, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Singhi Jain
Series, 34–36, Bombay 1953–1960.
Pradīpoddyotana (a.k.a. Ṣaṭkoṭivyākhyā) by Candrakīrti
Guhyasamājapradīpodyotanaṭīkā Ṣaṭkoṭivyākhyā, ed. by Chintaharan Chakravarti, Tibetan
Sanskrit Work Series 25, Kashi Prasad Jayaswal Research Institute, Patna 1984.
||
249 vajri bhagākāśe em. based on Śrībhānu’s comm. (na kevalaṃ tantraṃ samarpitam api tu
hṛdayam api samarpitam ity āha — sūkṣmam ityādi | nāḍīśuṣirāṇurūpatvā[34v5]t sūkṣmam | va-
jrīti vajrāmṛtahṛdayam | bhagākāśe yad vyavasthitaṃ tad hṛdayasaṃsthitam iti bhāvaḥ |, fol.
34v4–5) ] vajrī bhagākāre MS
250 nirdeśa em. ] nirdeśaṃ MS
251 ekādaśamaḥ em. ] tantraikādaśamaṃ MS
252 samāptaḥ em. ] samāptam MS
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 445
‘Guhyasamājapradīpodyotanaṭīkā Ṣaṭkoṭivyākhyā of Ācārya Candrakīrti, Chapters I–II’,
name of editor(s) not stated, Dhīḥ 48 (2009): 119–156.
‘Guhyasamājapradīpodyotanaṭīkā Ṣaṭkoṭivyākhyā of Ācārya Candrakīrti, Chapters III–VI’,
name of editor(s) not stated, Dhīḥ 49 (2010): 105–136.
See also sGron ma gsal bar byed pa źes bya ba’i rgya cher bśad pa.
Brahmayāmalatantra
National Archives of Kathmandu, MS 3-370 = Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Pro-
ject, reel No. A42/6.
See also Kiss 2015.
Yogimanoharā Pañcakramaṭippaṇī by Muniśrībhadra
The Pañcakramaṭippaṇī of Muniśrībhadra. Introduction and Romanized Sanskrit Text, ed. by
Jiang Zhongxin and Tomabechi Tōru, Schweizer Asiatische Studien/Etudes asiatiques
suisses: Monographie 23, Peter Lang, Bern etc. 1996.
Vajrāmṛtamahātantra
MS Cambridge University Library, MS Or.158.1.
Vajrāmṛtamahātantrarājaṭīkā Amṛtadhārā by Śrībhānu
China Tibetology Research Centre, MS 50/8/0385, No. 2.
Vajrāvalī by Abhayākaragupta
Vajrāvalī of Abhayākaragupta, 2 vols, ed. by Masahide Mori, Buddhica Britannica series con-
tinua 11, London 2009.
Vīṇāśikhatantra
The Vīṇāśikhatantra. A Śaiva Tantra of the Left Current, edited with an introduction and a
translation by Teun Goudriaan, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1985.
Śāradātilakatantra by Lakṣmaṇa Deśikendra
Śāradā-Tilaka Tantram. Text with Introduction, edited by Arthur Avalon, Āgamānusandhāna
Samiti, the Sanskrit Press, Calcutta 1933.
Saṃpuṭodbhavatantra
‘The Saṃpuṭa-tantra: Sanskrit and Tibetan Versions of Chapter Two’. In: The Buddhist Forum
Volume VI, ed. by Tadeusz Skorupski, The Institute of Buddhist Studies, Tring, UK 2001,
223–269.
Saṃvarodayā nāma Maṇḍalopāyikā by Bhūvācārya
Tokyo University Library, MS 450 (Old 296).
Sādhanamālā
Sādhanamālā, ed. by Benoytosh Bhattacharya, 2 vols, Gaekwad’s Oriental Series 26, 41, Ori-
ental Institute, Baroda 1925, 1928.
Sekanirdeśapañjikā by Rāmapāla
The Sekanirdeśa of Maitreyanātha (Advayavajra) with the Sekanirdeśapañjikā of Rāmapāla.
Critical Edition of the Sanskrit and Tibetan Texts with English Translation and Reproductions
of the MSS. With Contributions by Klaus-Dieter Mathes and Marco Passavanti, ed. by Ha-
runaga Isaacson and Francesco Sferra, Manuscripta Buddhica Series 2, Università di Napoli
“L’Orientale” / Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg, Serie Orientale Roma 107, Napoli
2014.
Svacchandatantra
Svacchanda Tantram With Commentary by Kshemarāja, ed. by Madhusūdan Kaul Shāstrī, 7
vols, Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies 31, 38, 44, 48, 51, 53, 56, Bombay 1921–1935.
446 | Francesco Sferra
Hevajratantra
The Hevajra Tantra. A Critical Study, Part I, Introduction and Translation; Part II, Sanskrit and
Tibetan Texts, ed. by David L. Snellgrove, London Oriental Series 6, Oxford University Press,
London 1959.
Primary sources in Tibetan
dGe ’dun chos ’phel gyi gsuṅ rtsom, 3 vols, Bod ljoṅs Bod yig dPe rñiṅ dPe skrun khaṅ, Gaṅs can
Rig mdzod series, Nos. 10–12, Lhasa 1990–1994.
sGron ma gsal bar byed pa źes bya ba’i rgya cher bśad pa (Pradīpoddyotanaṭīkā) by Candrakīrti
Trans. by Śraddhākaravarman, Rin chen bzaṅ po, Śrījñānākara and ’Gos lhas btsas; revised
by Nag po and ’Gos Lhas btsas, Ōta. 2650, P [Peking], bsTan ’gyur, rGyud ’grel, vol. SA, fols
1v1–233r7; Tōh. 1785, D [sDe dge], bsTan ’gyur, rGyud ’grel, vol. HA, fols 1v1–201v2.
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud (Vajrāmṛtatantra)
T Trans. by Gyi jo zla ba’i ’od zer, Ōta. 74, P, bKa’ ’gyur, rGyud, vol. CA, fols 17r3–28r8; Tōh. 435,
D, bKa’ ’gyur, rGyud, vol. CA, fols 16v5–27r6.
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i dka’ ’grel (Vajrāmṛtapañjikā) by Dri med bzaṅ po (Vimalabhadra)
Revised by Rin chen grub, Ōta. 2521, P, bsTan ’gyur, rGyud ’grel, vol. YA, fols 1r1–20r4; Tōh.
1649, D, bsTan ’gyur, vol. RA, fols 1v1–15v6.
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud kyi bśad pa (*Vajrāmṛtatantraṭīkā) by Yon tan bzaṅ po (*Guṇabhadra)
Trans. by Smṛtijñāna, Ōta. 2522, P, bsTan ’gyur, rGyud ’grel, vol. YA, fols. 20r4–61v2; Tōh.
1650, D, bsTan ’gyur, vol. RA, fols 15v6–53v2.
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud kyi rgyal po chen po’i rgya cher ’grel pa (Vajrāmṛtamahātantrarājaṭīkā)
by Śrībhānu
Trans. by Tārapāla and Chiṅs Yon tan ’bar, revised by Śīlaguhyavajra and Klog (Glog in D)
skya Śes rab brtsegs, Ōta. 2523, P, bsTan ’gyur, rGyud ’grel, vol. YA, fols 61v2–119v1; Tōh.
1651, D, bsTan ’gyur, vol. RA, fols 53v2–104r7.
Secondary sources
De Simini, Florinda (2016), ‘Śivadharma Manuscripts from Nepal and the Making of a Śaiva Cor-
pus’, in Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke (eds), One-Volume Libraries: Composite and
Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 9), Berlin: De Gruyter, 233–286.
Also available online as an open-access publication at the following link:
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/476788.
Dhīḥ. Durlabha bauddha grantha śodha patrikā (different English titles have been printed in the
course of the years).
Kiss, Csaba (2015), The Brahmayāmalatantra or Picumata, Vol. II. The Religious Observances and
Sexual Rituals of the Tantric Practitioner: Chapters 3, 21, and 45, Collection Indologie
130/Early Tantra Series 3, Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry/Universität Ham-
burg/École française d’Extrême-Orient.
Lokesh Chandra (2000), Dictionary of Buddhist Iconography, vol. 2, New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan.
A Fragment of the Vajrāmṛtamahātantra | 447
Luo Hong (2010), The Buddhakapālatantra. Chapters 9 to 14. Critically Edited and Translated by
Luo Hong with a Preface by Harunaga Isaacson and Alexis Sanderson, China Tibetology Re-
search Center / Asien-Afrika-Institut (University of Hamburg), Beijing: China Tibetology Pub-
lishing House.
Luo Zhao 罗炤 (1985), Budala gong suocang beiyejing mulu 布达拉宫所藏贝叶经目录 [Catalogue
of Manuscripts Preserved at Potala Palace], unpublished manuscript.
Martin, Dan (2014), Tibskrit Philology. A Bio-bibliographical Resource Work, compiled by Dan Mar-
tin, edited by Alexander Cherniak, available online (http://tibeto-logic.blog-
spot.it/2014/04/released-tibskrit-2014.html).
Ōmi Jishō (2013), ‘On the Vajrāmṛta-tantra’, The Mikkyo Bunka (Journal of Esoteric Buddhism) vol.
230, March 2013: 160–111 [7–56].
Ōmi Jishō (2014), ‘The Position of the Vajrāmṛta-tantra and Its Character in Late Indian Esoteric
Buddhism: An Analysis of Related Texts and Interpretations of the Three Commentaries’, in
Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies (Indogaku Bukkyogaku Kenkyu) 62.2: 963–959 [102–
106].
Petech, Luciano (1984), Mediaeval History of Nepal (c. 750–1482). Second, thoroughly revised edi-
tion (Serie Orientale Roma 54), Rome: IsMEO [SOR 10.3, Rome 19581].
Sandhak 桑德 (no date), Zhongguo Zangxue yanjiu zhongxin shoucang de fanwen beiyejing
(suowei jiaojuan) mulu 中国藏学研究中心收藏的梵文贝叶经(缩微胶卷)目录, Kruṅ go’i
bod kyi śes rig źib ’jug lte gnas su ñar ba’i ta la’i lo ma’i bstan bcos (spyin śog ’dril ma’i par)
kyi dkar chag mdor gsal bźugs so [Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscript (Microfilms) Pre-
served at the China Tibetology Research Center], Unpublished manuscript.
Sāṅkṛtyāyana, Rāhula (1935), ‘Sanskrit Palm-Leaf MSS. in Tibet’, in Journal of the Bihar and Orissa
Research Society, 21.1: 21–43.
Sāṅkṛtyāyana, Rāhula (1937), ‘Second Search of Sanskrit Palm-Leaf MSS. in Tibet’, in Journal of
the Bihar and Orissa Research Society, 23.1: 1–57.
Sanderson, Alexis (2009), ‘The Śaiva Age — The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism During the Early
Medieval Period’, in Shingo Einoo (ed.), Genesis and Development of Tantrism (Institute of
Oriental Culture Special Series 23), Tokyo, 41–349.
Sferra, Francesco, and Camillo Formigatti (2014), ‘Vajrāmṛtatantra (MS Or.158.1)’
(https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00158-00001/6).
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2012), Selected Chapters from the Catuṣpīṭhatantra. Pt. 1: Introductory study
with the annotated translation of selected chapters; Pt. 2: Appendix volume with critical edi-
tions of selected chapters accompanied by Bhavabhaṭṭa’s commentary and a bibliography,
Balliol College, Oxford, unpublished thesis.
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2016), ‘Before a Critical Edition of the Sampuṭa’, in ZAS, 45: 397–422.
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2017), ‘Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitan-
tra’, in Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo and Camillo Formigatti (eds), Indic Manuscript Cul-
tures through the Ages: Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations (Studies in Manu-
script Cultures 14), Berlin: De Gruyter, see below, 487–504.
448 | Francesco Sferra
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2012), Selected Chapters from the Catuṣpīṭhatantra. Pt. 1: Introductory study
with the annotated translation of selected chapters; Pt. 2: Appendix volume with critical edi-
tions of selected chapters accompanied by Bhavabhaṭṭa’s commentary and a bibliography,
Balliol College, Oxford, unpublished thesis.
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2016), ‘Before a Critical Edition of the Sampuṭa’, in ZAS, 45: 397–422.
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2017), ‘Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitan-
tra’, in Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo and Camillo Formigatti (eds), Indic Manuscript Cul-
tures through the Ages: Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations (Studies in Manu-
script Cultures 14), Berlin: De Gruyter, see below, 487–504.
Gergely Hidas
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist
Apotropaic Scripture
Abstract: One of the dhāraṇī scriptures incorporated into the Sanskrit Pañcarakṣā
collection is commonly referred to as Mahāśītavatī. On the basis of several palm-
leaf manuscripts this article presents a new critical edition along with the first com-
plete Western translation and shows that this widely used name reflects a seem-
ingly later stage in the transmission. An early title is likely to have been Mahā-
Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī or Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī.
1 Previous research
A description of this scripture appeared in Mitra 1882, 164–165 with a brief sum-
mary of contents based on a modern Pañcarakṣā manuscript. A romanised edition
using five paper manuscripts was published in Iwamoto 1937, 1–9.1 The first careful
study was given in Skilling 1992, 141–142 who noticed that there is a discrepancy
between the Sanskrit and Tibetan Pañcarakṣā collections and listed and described
the Mahāśītavatī and the Mahāśītavana as two different texts. A summary following
a Newari redaction was provided in Lewis 2000, 150–151, a Devanāgarī transcript
based on notes of various Vajrācāryas was published in Śākya 2004, 123–126, and
short sections were translated in Davidson 2014a, 15, 18, 32.
||
This research was funded by a grant from the European Union, co-financed by the European So-
cial Fund (Támop 4.2.1/B-09/1/KMR-2010-0003). Many thanks to Dr Péter-Dániel Szántó and
Gergely Orosz for an examination of the Tibetan translation, Dr Gábor Kósa for an analysis of the
Chinese one, Professor Diwakar Acharya for advice on manuscripts and Professor Peter Skilling
for reading a final draft. A paper titled ‘A New Look at the Mahāśītavatī’ was given at the Buddhist
Manu-script Culture Workshop in Cambridge on 13 April 2013, and I am grateful for some com-
ments from the participants.
1 Four of these are Pañcarakṣā mss. and the fifth one is a modern Mahāśītavatī ms. The earliest
one, used as the main piece in the edition, dates from the 16th century. Note that beside a list of
the manuscripts the edition is presented without an introduction.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-015, © 2017 G. Hidas, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
450 | Gergely Hidas
2 Sources
2.1 Sanskrit
The earliest Sanskrit witness of the Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī (MDDS) comes
from Central Asia as a single manuscript folio.2 The other surviving textual tradi-
tions3 have been transmitted almost exclusively4 in Pañcarakṣā manuscripts of
which more than three hundred survive. A few of these originate from Eastern India
from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries5 and the majority from Nepal from the
eleventh6 to the twentieth centuries.7
2.2 Tibetan
The Tibetan translation, be con chen po zhes bya ba’i gzungs (Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī), by
Jinamitra, Dānaśīla and Ye shes sde dates from around 800 CE. It is listed under no.
373 in the Lhan kar ma catalogue compiled around the same time,8 and it has been
included in various Kangyurs.9 As Skilling 1992, 138–144 noted, the MDDS is not
among the gzungs chen po lnga la (Pañcamahādhāraṇī) ‘The Five Great Dhāraṇīs’
(probably an alternative name for the Pañcarakṣā) in the Tibetan tradition.10 The
||
2 Guan 2012. Described as written in ‘Upright Gupta’ script without a reference to the material,
date or location. On the basis of the photographic reproductions this appears to be a paper folio
possibly dating from the second half of the first millennium. This fragment preserves parts cor-
responding to sections [6] and [7] in the present edition.
3 It seems that a single ‘original’ text is difficult to trace.
4 There are a few independent mss, too. See, for example, Tsukamoto et al. 1989, 90–91.
5 For a detailed study of Eastern Indian Pañcarakṣā mss. see Kim 2010.
6 Note that a Pañcarakṣā ms. dated NS 19 (899 CE) is listed in Wright 1877, 324. Thanks to Dr
Camillo Formigatti it has been clarified that this manuscript is actually the one catalogued as
Add.1688 in Bendall 1883, 175 (see siglum L in this edition). Wright must have read 19 for 14 in
the colophon and taken this as Nepal Samvat instead of a Pāla regnal year.
7 The majority of these mss. are listed in Tsukamoto et al. 1989, 62–64, the Nepalese German
Manuscript Preservation Project database and Mevissen 1989, 366–372. See also Kim 2010.
8 See Herrmann-Pfandt 2008. The 9th-century 'Phang thang ma catalogue lists the MDDS un-
der no. 355 (Halkias 2004, 80 and Kawagoe 2005, 20). Both catalogues include this scripture in a
section titled ‘Miscellaneous dhāraṇī, long and short’ (gzungs che phra sna tshogs).
9 E.g. Peking 308=583, Derge 606=958, Narthang 568. The later Mongolian translation, titled
Qutuγ-tu yeke beriy-e neretü tarni, is listed in the Mongolian Kangyur under nos 313 and 599
10 See Herrmann-Pfandt 2008 and Harrison 1996. Cf. also the collections of these five texts cat-
alogued under IOL TIB J 397 and 399 in Dalton and van Schaik 2006.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 451
scripture incorporated in place of the MDDS in this collection is the bsil ba’i tshal chen
mo (Mahāśītavana) but it has no surviving Sanskrit or Chinese equivalent.11
2.3 Chinese
The Chinese translation was done in 984 CE by Fatian (Dharmadeva), an Indian
monk who arrived in China in 973 and died in 1001.12 It is catalogued under T. 1392
as Dahan lin sheng nanna tuoluoni jing (Āryamahāśītavanadaṇḍadhāraṇīsūtra).13
2.4 Citations, references and commentaries
The spell-section of the MDDS is included in various dhāraṇī collections.14 The
Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī lists Śītavana, Mahāśītavana, Daṇḍadhara and Mahā-
daṇḍadhara in a longer enumeration,15 and the first parivarta of the Mañjuśri-
yamūlakalpa refers to the Daṇḍadhāraṇī in an inventory of spells.16 As for exegetical
works, a commentary on the MDDS survives in Tibetan attributed to Karmavajra
(Las kyi rdo rje) from the early 11th century.17
||
11 E.g. Peking 180, Derge 562, Narthang 495. Lhan kar ma 332, 'Phang thang ma 319. For a ca.
10th-century Dunhuang manuscript see IOL TIB J 397/1 and 397/3 in Dalton and van Schaik 2006.
Skilling 1992, 141 notes that this scripture shares features both with the Āṭānāṭika-sūtra (see
Sander 2007) and the Āṭānāṭiya-sutta (DN.III.9).
12 See e.g. Orzech 2011, 440, 448. The introductory sentence of the Chinese translation states that
he comes from Nālandā, Magadha, and belongs to the ‘Three Commentaries School.’
13 Nanjio 1883, 185 lists this text as Mahāśītavanārya-daṇḍa-dhāraṇī-sūtra. The Korean Buddhist
Canon gives the Sanskrit title as Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī(sūtra) under no. 1104 (Lancaster 1979, 379).
14 See, for example, manuscripts Add.1326, 1476, 1550 and Or.1811, 1812 kept in the Cambridge
University Library. On the formation of the Dhāraṇīsaṃgraha genre see Davidson 2014b.
15 Śītavanāya svāhā mahāśītavanāya svāhā daṇḍadharāya svāhā mahādaṇḍadharāya svāhā
(Takubo 1972, 37.17–18. Cf. Skilling 1992, 144 and Hidas 2003, 272). Note the variant reading,
śitavanāya svāhā mahāśītavanāya svāhā daṇḍadhāraṇīye svāhā mahādaṇḍadharaṇīye svāhā,
listed in Oldenburg’s 1899 edition.
16 1.12. anekāś ca dhāraṇyaḥ samādhiniṣpandaparibhāvitamānasodbhavā duṣṭasattvanigra-
hadaṇḍamāyādayitāḥ tadyathā vajrānalapramohanī dhāraṇī meruśikharakūṭāgāradhāriṇī
ratnaśikharakūṭāgāradharaniṃdharā sukūṭā bahukūṭā puṣpakūṭā daṇḍadhāriṇī nigrahadhāraṇī
ākarṣaṇadhāriṇī...
17 This commentary is listed in the Tengyur as rig sngags kyi rgyal mo chen mo bsil ba’i tshal gyi
mdo’i 'bum ‘grel zhes bya ba (Mahāśitavana [Peking: Mahāśītavatī]-vidyārājñī-sūtra-
śatasahasra-ṭīkā) under Derge 2693 or Peking 3517.
452 | Gergely Hidas
2.5 Auxiliary texts
There are few texts that appear to be auxiliary works of the MDDS. A Mahāśīta-
vatīsādhana-nāma-dhāraṇī and a Śītavatī-stuti survive in Sanskrit, and a number
of Mahāśītavatī-sādhanas are extant in Tibetan.18
3 Title
The title of this text shows considerable fluidity.19 Both in religious traditions and
scholarship this scripture has been widely known as Mahāśītavatī, perhaps to be
translated as ‘The Great Cool One.’20 It was first noticed by Skilling 1992, 142 that
it bears a different name in the Tibetan Tripiṭaka: Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī, probably
to be interpreted as ‘The Great Rod Dhāraṇī,’21 and it is not grouped together with
the other Pañcarakṣā scriptures. As it was remarked in Hidas 2003, 264 the title
of this text shows variations in Sanskrit sources with names including a
Mahāśītavatī-daṇḍa-dhāraṇī, and a Mahāśītavatī-vidyārājñī-daṇḍa-dhāraṇī,22
||
18 See Tsukamoto et al. 1989, 91–92 and Derge 3255, 3381, 3589 or Peking 4078, 4202, 4411 respectively.
19 As Nattier 2003, 26, 28 notes, ‘[o]f all elements of Buddhist sūtra literature in India, only the
opening formulas of homage are more fluid than titles. (…) As to the titles themselves, Buddhist
sūtras (especially those texts that would come to be identified as “Mahāyānist”) appear to have
circulated in India under a variety of names.’ In the colophons of the mss. used in this edition
the following titles appear: ārya-mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī-śītavatī, ārya-mahāśītavatī-nāma-mahā-
vidyārājñī-mahānuśaṃsā-rakṣāsūtra, ārya-mahāśītavatī-nāma-mahāvidyārājñī, ārya-mah-
āśītavatī-mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī-vidyārājñī, daṇḍadhāraṇī-ārya-mahāśītavatī, ārya-śītavatī-nāma-
mahāvidyārājñī-rakṣāsūtra and ārya-mahādāṇḍadhāraṇī-ārya-mahāśītavatī.
20 The morphology of Mahāśītavatī poses problems: this word appears to refer to the incanta-
tion related to the Mahāśītavana burning ground (‘The Great Śītavana Spell’) and perhaps comes
from a similarly awkward Mahāśītavanī form. It is not unlikely that this scripture was also called
Mahāśītavana, ‘The Great Cool Forest’, at a certain phase before deification and then it gradually
changed to the feminine Mahāśītavatī. Note the approximate words in the dhāraṇī of the
Jāṅgulīmahāvidyā in the Sādhanamālā: śīte śītavattāle hale halale tuṇḍe tutuṇḍe taṇḍite
(Bhattacharya 1925–1928, 250).
21 The word daṇḍa ‘stick, rod’ is widely used for legal authority providing justice and retribu-
tion, and it seems that this is primarily what this dhāraṇī offers against malevolent forces. Note
simultaneously a line in the Mahābhārata describing the Śītavana forest: punāti darśanād eva
daṇḍenaikaṃ narādhipa translated as ‘which alone purifies in one blow if one merely looks at it’
by van Buitenen 1975, 380.
22 Tsukamoto et al. 1989, 91–92. Further variant titles are given as Mahāśītavatī-nāma-vidyā-
dhāraṇī, Mahāśītavatī-mahāvidyārājñī/Śītavatī-nāma-vidyārājñī and Mahāśītavatīdaṇḍa-
dhāraṇī-caturthamantra-dhāraṇī.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 453
and it was proposed that the original title of this scripture may have been
Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī, which later on changed to Mahāśītavatī.23 In the present edi-
tion this proposal appears to have been confirmed, with the addition that there
seems to have been a transitional phase when these two titles were used together,
and in several cases it looks that the text itself is called Śītavatī and the dhāraṇī
Daṇḍadhāraṇī.24 It should also be noted that the Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī mentions
Daṇḍadhara and Mahādaṇḍadhara ‘The (Great) Rod Bearer’ at one place, which
reflects further fluidity.25 The questions how much exactly all these titles are in-
terconnected and how the completely different text of the Mahāśītavana (surviv-
ing only in Tibetan) replaced the Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī in the Tibetan collection of
The Five Great Dhāraṇīs remain to be answered.
4 Contents
[0] Obeisance26
[1] Setting (nidāna): the Lord and Rāhula in Rājagṛha: Rāhula is disturbed by var-
ious beings in the Śītavana burning ground
[2] Rāhula visits the Lord
[3] Rāhula informs the Lord about being disturbed
[4] The Lord teaches Rāhula the Great Daṇḍa-dhāraṇī Spell
[5] The first part of the dhāraṇī
[6] The second part of the dhāraṇī
[7] Instructions for use and benefits
[8] Further instructions for use and benefits
[9] Conclusion
[10] Colophon
||
23 Davidson 2014a, 15 suggests that this is an alternative title.
24 As Skilling 1992, 142 observes, Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī is the name of the dhāraṇī in the Tibetan
translation.
25 See n. 15.
26 Skilling 1992, 142 notes that the MDDS is the only Pañcarakṣā text composed entirely in
prose.
454 | Gergely Hidas
5 Contexts and date
The MDDS is an apotropaic, magical-ritualistic scripture of dhāraṇī literature.
Skilling 1992, 143 classifies this text under the Śrāvakayāna adding that it has
been used by practitioners of the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, too. Some manu-
script colophons in the present edition indeed refer to the Mahāyāna,27 while an-
other one has tantric allusions.28 It is worth noting that the MDDS reveals affilia-
tions with Brahmanism, for example, with regard to the presence of deities such
as Indra, Yama, Varuṇa, Kubera, Daṇḍāgni and Brahmā. This text may also be
linked to classical Brahmanical sources: the Śītavana is mentioned as a famous
tīrtha in the Āraṇyakaparvan of the Mahābhārata,29 and the Vāmanapurāṇa lists
this place among the seven blessed forests of Kurukṣetra30 along with a brief de-
scription quite similar to that of the Āraṇyakaparvan.31
As far as dating is concerned, the terminus ante quem for the emergence of
this scripture is 800 CE when the Tibetan translation was done. References to the
Daṇḍadhāraṇī and Śītavana32 in the Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī33and the Mañjuśri-
yamūlakalpa34 cannot be traced to an earlier date than this. Nevertheless, the
||
27 The earliest of these colophons is from the 11th century. The reference to the manuscript donor
as pravaramahāyānayāyin ‘follower of the excellent Mahāyāna’ is found in mss. I, J, L, O and R.
28 See the colophon of the 11th-century ms. N.
29 3.81.48–49. tataḥ śītavanaṃ gacchen niyato niyatāśanaḥ / tīrthaṃ tatra mahārāja mahad an-
yatra durlabham / punāti darśanād eva daṇḍenaikaṃ narādhipa / keśān abhyukṣya vai tasmin
pūto bhavati bhārata ‘Thereupon he should go, restrained and of meager diet, to the Śītavana
Ford: there is sanctity there unobtainable elsewhere, which alone purifies in one blow if one
merely looks at it; by sprinkling one’s hair one becomes pure.’ (translation in van Buitenen 1975,
380)
30 13.3–5. śṛṇu sapta vanānīha kurukṣetrasya madhyataḥ / yeṣāṃ nāmāni puṇyāni sarvapāpa-
harāṇi ca // kāmyakaṃ ca vanaṃ puṇyaṃ tathāditivanaṃ mahat / vyāsasya ca vanaṃ puṇyaṃ
phalakīvanam eva ca // tatra sūryavanasthānaṃ tathā madhuvanaṃ mahat / puṇyaṃ śītavanaṃ
nāma sarvakalmaṣanāśanam.
31 14.44–45.tataḥ śītavanaṃ gacchen niyato niyatāśanaḥ // tīrthaṃ tatra mahāviprā mahad an-
yatra durlabham / punāti darśanād eva daṇḍakaṃ (daṇḍenaikaṃ?) ca dvijottamāḥ.
32 See n. 15 and 16.
33 None of the Chinese versions of the Mahāmāyūrī (T. 982, 984–988) dating from the 4th century
onwards contain the references present in Takubo’s edition. I am grateful to Dr Gábor Kósa for
checking these sources. The 6th-century Bower Manuscript does not contain these references ei-
ther (Hoernle 1893–1912, 222–225, 236–237). For a recent study of the Mahāmāyūrī see Overbey
2016.
34 On the date of the Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa see Sanderson 2009, 129 and on available sources
Delhey 2012. Note that the Chinese translation of its complete text (T. 1191) dates from the late
10th century.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 455
MDDS shares a number of features with those scriptures of dhāraṇī literature that
in all probability go back to the first half of the first millennium, and thus it is
likely to belong to this period too.35 At some point in time the MDDS became per-
sonified and the goddess representing this tradition has been known as
Mahāśītavatī up to the present. When deification happened, it looks that the
names Mahādaṇḍadhara or Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī did not come to be used.
6 Practice
While in section [8] recitation as a general practice is mentioned, according to the
instructions in section [7], one should recite this spell into a knotted thread and
wear it on the forearm or around the neck, and offerings should also be made for
further protection.36 The practice of using knotted threads is widespread in tantric
Buddhism,37 and this tradition appears to share features with the paritta rituals
of the Theravāda too.38 As far as the range of protection provided by the MDDS is
||
35 Such as the Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī. The presence of Vajrapāṇi and the Four Great Kings as
main characters is likely to reveal an early formation. Cf. also the first-century *Manasvi-
nāgarāja-sūtra in the Bajaur collection (Strauch 2014). The MDDS appears to be considerably
earlier than, for example, the Mahāpratisarāmahāvidyārājñī which emerged latest in the 6th cen-
tury (Hidas 2012, 21).
36 For protective threads in various dhāraṇī texts see Skilling 1992, 166–167, 1994, 85 and Hidas
2012, 33–34. For enchanted and knotted cords in the Kriyāsaṃgrahapañjikā see Tanemura 2004,
276. See also Duquenne 1988, 343, Copp 2014, 79–87 and Davidson 2014b, 146 for such knotted
incantation cords in Chinese Buddhism.
37 Cf. Amoghapāśakalparāja 22b: ekaviṃśatisūtrakagranthayaḥ karttavyaḥ śire bandhitavyaṃ
yathā manasi varttayamānan tathā indrajālan darśayati; Sādhanamālā Nos 93, 94, 110: anena
mantreṇa paṭāñcalaṃ saptābhimantritaṃ kṛtvā granthiṃ baddhvā vindhyāyām api gacchan na
kenāpy avalīyate; No. 141: deśāntaragamane tu anena mantreṇātmīyottarīyāñcalaṃ gṛhītvā
yathāvad granthiṃ kṛtvā gacchet caurādibhir na muṣyate, Ācāryakriyāsamuccaya: tad anu
kumārīkartitasūtram śiṣyaśarīrapramāṇaṃ triguṇitam amṛtakuṇḍalimantreṇa trigranthīkṛtaṃ
teṣāṃ savyabāhau strīṇāṃ vāve; Vajrāvalī: tad anu raktasūtraṃ śiṣyaśarīrapramāṇaṃ
triguṇīkṛtaṃ hūṃ-jaṃ tena kuṇḍalinā ca saptajaptaṃ trigranthīkṛtaṃ ṣaḍgranthīkṛtam vā teṣāṃ
savyabāhau vāmapāṇau vā tantrāntaroktaiḥ oṃ buddhamaitrī rakṣa rakṣa sarvān svāhā iti
paṭhan svayaṃ baddhvā samyaksaṃrakṣyotsāhayet; Siddhaikavīratantra: uttarīyāñcale gran-
thiṃ kṛtvā mantram abhismarato mārge caurādīn stambhayati; Sarvavajrodaya: vajrarakṣābhi-
japtaṃ tataḥ samayaṃ nirbadhnīyād vāmapāṇau tu sūtrakaṃ granthibhiḥ samupetaṃ vai tribhiḥ
svayam eva tu.
38 On paritta see de Silva 1981. It is not certain how early such practices go back to in South
Asian religious traditions (quite likely as early as the Atharvaveda), but the use of enchanted and
456 | Gergely Hidas
concerned, in sections [7] and [8] there are stock-lists with the following items
against which safeguard is granted: humans, non-humans, Vetālas, poison,
weapons, sickness, spells, mantras, fire, water, sorrow, obstacles, discords,
kings, thieves and dangers in the wilderness. On the basis of section [7] it appears
that special protection is given against Grahas, spells and magical bonds.
7 A critical edition of selected Eastern Indian and
Nepalese manuscripts
7.1 Sigla
A: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from ca. 19th century. Kept in a private col-
lection in New Delhi. Reproduced in Lokesh Chandra 1981. Paper, modern
Nepālākṣara script. The MDDS is the fifth text (fols 123v–126v) in the collection.
For a detailed description see Hidas 2012, 76–77.
B: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from 1810 CE. Kept in a private collection
in New Delhi. Reproduced in Lokesh Chandra 1981. Paper, modern Nepālākṣara
script. The MDDS is the fourth text (fols 177v–182v) in the collection. For a de-
tailed description see Hidas 2012, 77.
G: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from the 12th century. Ms. No. 1447, Hodg-
son 8 (R), kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Palm leaf, hook-topped
Nepālākṣara script (Bhujimol). The MDDS is the fourth text (fols 123v–126v) in the
collection. For a detailed description see Hidas 2012, 81.39
||
knotted cords is present in various Brahmanical texts as well. See, for example, the Śaiva Kri-
yākālaguṇottara in Slouber (forthcoming) and the entries pavitrāropaṇa and pāśasūtra in
Goodall and Rastelli 2013.
39 As an addition to the previous description in Hidas 2012, note that at the end of the manu-
script bundle there is a palm-leaf folio, most probably a later supplement, with an incomplete
colophon written in a different hand with bigger akṣaras in four lines and numbered 132 on the
right margin (note that all previous folios are numbered on the left side and have six lines written
in earlier characters): ye dharmmā... || deyadharmmo yaṃ pravalamahāyānayāyino para-
madhārmmikaḥ śākyabhikṣuśrīratnakasya yad atra puṇyaṃ bhavatv ācāryyopādhyāya-
mātāpitṛpūrvvaṃgamaṃ kṛtvā sakalasatvarāśī nuttarajñānaphala prāpnotu || rājādhirājapa-
rameśvaraparamabhattārakaśrī2pratāpamalladevasya...
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 457
I: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from 1205 CE. Ms. Add.1644, kept in the
Cambridge University Library.40 Palm-leaf, hook-topped Nepālākṣara script (Bhu-
jimol). The MDDS is the fourth text (fols 87v–89v) in the collection. For a detailed
description see Hidas 2012, 82–83.
J: An Eastern Indian Pañcarakṣā manuscript from the second half of the 11th cen-
tury. Ms. Or.3346, kept in the British Library. Palm-leaf, Eastern Indian script. The
MDDS is the third text (fols 46v–48r) in the collection. For a detailed description
see Hidas 2012, 83–84.
K: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from the 12th–13th century. Ms. Add.1662,
kept in the Cambridge University Library. Palm-leaf, hook-topped Nepālākṣara
script (Bhujimol). The MDDS is the fourth text (fols 125v–128v) in the collection.
For a detailed description see Hidas 2012, 84.
L: An Eastern Indian Pañcarakṣā manuscript from the mid-11th century. Ms. Add.
1688, kept in the Cambridge University Library.41 Palm-leaf, Eastern Indian script.
The MDDS is the fourth text (fols 64v–67r) in the collection. For a detailed de-
scription see Hidas 2012, 84–85. For a thorough iconographical study see Kim
2010, 270–279. For a recent description see Weissenborn 2012, 303–304 and note
that both this work and Kim 2010, 269 read the donor’s name as Uddākā. See also
Kim 2013.
N: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from 1063 CE. Nepalese German Manu-
script Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) B 30/45, kept in the National Archives, Kath-
mandu. Palm-leaf, early Nepālākṣara script. The MDDS is the fifth text (fols 148v–
151v) in the collection. For a detailed description see Hidas 2012, 86.
O: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from 1247 CE. Nepalese German Manu-
script Cataloguing Project (NGMCP) G 1/1, kept in the National Archives, Kath-
mandu. Palm-leaf, hook-topped Nepālākṣara script (Bhujimol). The MDDS is the
third text (fols 88v–91v) in the collection. For a detailed description see Hidas
2012, 87.
||
40 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01644/1.
41 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01688/1.
458 | Gergely Hidas
P: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from ca. the first half of the 12th century.42
Kept in the National Archives, Kathmandu, catalogued as number 4–1076. Pho-
tographed on 6 September, 1984, preserved on microfilm reel A 936/14, and im-
precisely listed as ‘Āryamahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī’ by the Nepal-German Manuscript
Preservation Project (NGMPP).43 41 palm leaves measuring 54 5 centimetres,
with two stringholes and three, four or five lines on a folio. Hook-topped
Nepālākṣara script (Bhujimol). Clear, balanced, bold handwriting. Incomplete:
the beginning of the MDDS is not preserved.44 The margins of most leaves are
damaged and broken off in various degrees. No marginal or interlinear correc-
tions. Foliation: three different sets of numbering, one with numerals under the
left string-hole (this appears to be the newest) and two inconsistently written
ones with letters or numerals on the left (this is probably the oldest) and right
(this is probably the second oldest) margins on the verso. The MDDS is the third
text (fols 72r–73v)45 in the collection. Donor’s name inserted in the text: Mamuka.
No colophon survives.
Q: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from 1117 CE.46 Reproduced in Lokesh Chan-
dra 2010,47 where it is reported to have been kept in Tibet but the present location
is not specified. 76 palm leaves with six lines on a folio, except for the end of certain
sections with three, four or five lines. The manuscript appears to have once been
illuminated. Nepālākṣara script. Clear and balanced handwriting. Complete: all fo-
lios of the MDDS are preserved without marginal or interlinear corrections. There
are few corrections elsewhere and occasional notes in Tibetan script. Foliation: let-
ter numerals on the left margin on verso side. The MDDS is the fifth text (fols 74v–
76v) in the collection.48 Colophon at the end of the manuscript.49
||
42 Many thanks to Professor Diwakar Acharya for his help with establishing a date for this man-
uscript.
43 This identification was apparently done on the basis of the sub-colophon on an unnumbered
folio misplaced at the very end of the bundle: āryamahāmāyūryā (?) vidyārājñī samāptā.
44 Note that from among the other Pañcarakṣā texts in this manuscript the folios containing the
Mahāmantrānusāriṇī are lost.
45 As mentioned before, the folio with the beginning of the MDDS is lost.
46 Note that the preface dates this manuscript to the early 9th century.
47 Note that there is an incomplete illuminated Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā manuscript re-
produced on pages 121–144 without being listed in the table of contents.
48 Note that the table of contents lists this text as the fourth one.
49 Many thanks to Professor Diwakar Acharya for his help with deciphering parts of this hardly
legible colophon: ye dharmā… || o || rāgādi... (a verse)… samvat 237 (written in letter numerals)
kārttikaśuklapañcamyām.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 459
R: A Nepalese Pañcarakṣā manuscript from 1234 CE, in the reign of King Abhaya-
malla.50 In private possession in Kathmandu. Photographed on 1 November, 1984
and reproduced on microfilm reels E 1714/22 and 1715/1 by the Nepal-German Man-
uscript Preservation Project (NGMPP). 142 palm leaves measuring 38.4 5.5 centi-
metres, with five or three lines on a folio. Hook-topped Nepālākṣara script (Bhu-
jimol). Clear, balanced, bold handwriting. Complete, with folio 132 being a paper
supplement. No marginal or interlinear corrections. Foliation: two different sets of
numbering (one with numerals referring to the whole manuscript on the left mar-
gin, and one with numerals referring to the individual section on the right margin)
on the verso. The MDDS is the fourth text (fols 131v–134v) in the collection. Donor’s
name inserted in the text: Śrībala.51 Colophon at the end of the manuscript.52
S: Significant variants in Śākya 2004
W: Iwamoto 1937
Wvar: Significant variants in Iwamoto 1937
Tib.: Tibetan translation in the Derge or Stog Palace Kangyur
Chin.: Chinese translation in the Taisho Tripiṭaka
7.2 Manuscript affinities
Nine out of the twelve manuscripts used in this edition were included in Hidas
2012 and their relation to each other examined on the basis of variants in the text
of the Mahāpratisarā-Mahāvidyārājñī. This analysis had the following results:
||
50 On Abhayamalla (1216–1255 CE) see Petech 1984, 83–88.
51 Note the discrepancy between the name inserted in the main text (Śrībala) and the one writ-
ten in the copied colophon (Śrīdhara).
52 The colophon is written on a paper supplement folio: ye dharmā... || || deyaṃdharmo yaṃ
pravaramahāyāyina paramopāsakaḥ śrī-udayapāra-ācāryya-nāmnasya yat ada punya bhavatv
ācāryopādhyāyamātrāpītṛpūrvvagamaṃ kṛtvā sakarasatvarāsyar anurttarajñānapharaprāptaye
iti || o || samvat 354 kārttikakṛṣṇa-ekādasyāṃ ādityavāraḥ || rājādhirāja-parameśvara-para-
mabhaṭṭāraka-raghuvaṃsāvatāra(ka-adhopaṭṭa-(read only by the NGMPP card)śrīśrī-abhaya-
malladevasya vijayarājye riṣitam (read: likhitam) iti || o || śrī-maṃṣaradeva-kārita-śrī-sīhadeva-
mahācāryya-bhikṣu-śrīdharasenasya likhitam itiḥ || || yathā dṛṣṭaṃ tathā likhita leṣako (read:
lekhako) nāsti dokhaṃ (read: doṣaṃ) yadi surddhaṃm aśurddhaṃ vā sodhanīyaṃ gunīskare
(read: guṇākaraiḥ?) || o || śubham astu labhavantu savvadāḥ || o ||
460 | Gergely Hidas
mss. GILN, JK and AB may be grouped together, while ms. O stands somewhere
between the first two groups being slightly closer to the former one.53
Here it has been investigated whether this grouping applies to the textual
traditions of the MDDS too and how the three newly used mss. can be positioned
in relation to these groups. A statistical analysis54 of the significant variants of the
MDDS in the twelve mss. has largely confirmed the groupings in the previous
study with the following differences: ms. I belongs to the JK group here, while
mss. AB and O do not stand apart but are also linked to this group. Among the
three newly used mss. P and R belong to the first group, while Q to the second,
with mss. BQ, (L)NR and GP showing closer affinities. Thus, there are two distinct
manuscript groups with regard to the text of the MDDS: GLNPR and ABIJKOQ. As
in the case of the Mahāpratisarā, these two groups reflect only approximate af-
finities because of the highly contaminated transmission.
7.3 Editorial policy
Comparing the variants belonging to the two manuscript groups established
above, it appears that it is the GLNPR group which reflects a probably earlier and
less inflated textual tradition. Therefore readings from this group have been pre-
ferred in most cases unless context, structure or grammar were against such
choices. As for the subgroups GP and (L)NR, the latter often appears to reveal
possibly more archaic strata; however, because of the enormous contamination
it has not been straightforward to follow this group in numerous cases. Thus,
some of the editorial decisions had to be necessarily subjective without a great
amount of certainty; nevertheless, the apparatus always provides a database of
other textual traditions preserved in the selected manuscripts for comparison.
||
53 Hidas 2012, 88–89.
54 Occurrences from highest to lowest numbers: BQ 29, GP 16, NR 16, GLNPR 15, LNR 14,
ABIJKOQ 10, AIJKO 6, LN 6, ABIJKO 5, BQR 5, GLN 5, ABIJKQ 4, GL 4, GLP 4, GN 4, IK 4, LR 4, AB
3, ABG 3, AIJK 3, AJK 3, GNP 3, GNR 3, GLNP 3, GLNR 3, GQ 3, IJK 3, NP 3, PQ 3, ABIKOQ 2, ABQ
2, AIJKOQ 2, AIKO 2, AJKO 2, BGLNPQR 2, BGPQR 2, BL 2, GNPR 2, GLNPQR 2, IJKO 2, IKO 2, IO 2,
JKO 2, JNR 2, LP 2.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 461
7.4 Silent standardizations
– Geminations after r have been standardized
– Degeminations before a semivowel have been standardized
– Sibilants have been given in their standard form
– Variations between ṇ/n and r/l have been standardized
– Final anusvāras before vowels or at the end of sentences have been changed to m
– Homorganic nasals have been changed to anusvāras when needed
– Variations between sandhi and open sandhi have not been indicated
– The lack of avagrahas has not been indicated
– Variations between i/ī and u/ū have not been indicated
– Daṇḍas have been added or ignored without indication
– Cha and ccha are usually undistinguishable and have been given in their standard form
– Differences between numbered repetition (e.g. curu 2) or double forms (e.g. curu curu) have
not been indicated and double forms have been kept in the main text
7.5 Symbols and abbreviations
Σ all manuscripts except those listed separately
corr. correction
em. emendation
conj. conjecture
om. omission
ac
ante correctionem
pc
post correctionem
[1] section number given by the editor
(...) lacuna
Tib. text reflected in the Tibetan translation
Chin. text reflected in the Chinese translation
AJHITOKASYA donor’s name inserted in the text by the scribe
462 | Gergely Hidas
7.6 The textual traditions transmitted in the selected
manuscripts
[0] [siddham] namaḥ sarvabuddhabodhisattvebhyaḥ55 |56
[1] evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin samaye bhagavān rājagṛhe viharati sma57 | śīta-
vane mahāśmaśāne58 iṅghikāyatana59pratyuddeśe60 | tatrāyuṣmān61 rāhulo ‘tīva62
viheṭhyate devagrahair nāgagrahair63 yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnara-
grahair64 garuḍagrahair65 mahoragagrahair66 manuṣyagrahair67 amanuṣyagra-
haiḥ68 pretagrahair69 bhūtagrahaiḥ70 piśācagrahaiḥ kumbhāṇḍagrahair71
||
55 [siddham] namaḥ sarvabuddhabodhisattvebhyaḥ] GKTib; [siddham] oṃ namo bhagavatyai
āryamahāśītavatyai AB, [siddham] namo bhagavatyai āryamahāśītavatyai IOQR, om. JChin,
namo buddhāya L, [siddham] namo buddhāya N, namo bhagavatyai āryamahāśītavatīyai R,
namo bhagavatyai āryamahāśītavatyai W
56 A123v, B177v, G123v, I87v, J46v, K125v, L64v, N148v, O88v, Q74v, R131v.
57 viharati sma] Σ; viharati sma | gṛdhrakūṭe parvate | tena khalu punaḥ samayenāyuṣmān
rāhulo rājagṛhe viharati L
58 mahāśmaśāne] ΣJpc; mahātā mahāśmaśāne Jac (open sandhi)
59 iṅghikāyatana°] Σ; iṅghikāyatane LS, iṅgikāyatana° N
60 °pratyuddeśe] Σ; °pratyudeśe IJ
61 tatrāyuṣmān] Σ; tatra khalv āyuṣmān L
62 rāhulo ‘tīva] Σ; rāhulam atīva B, rāhulo (…) L, rāhulo ‘vatīva O. L65r.
63 nāgagrahair] Σ; (…) L, om. R. asuragrahair nāgagrahair Tib
64 yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair] corr.Tib; asuragrahai rākṣasagrahair ma-
horagagrahair marutagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair A, asuragrahair yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kin-
naragrahair marutagrahair BQ, yakṣagrahai rākṣagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair marutagrahaiḥ G,
yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahair marutagrahair asuragrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair IJKW, (…) rākṣasagra-
hair gandharvagrahair asuragrahair garuḍagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair L, yakṣagrahaiḥ rākṣasagra-
haiḥ kinnaragrahair NR, yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair marutagrahair asura-
grahair O, asuragrahai yakṣagrahair mahoragagrahair marutagrahai kinnaragrahair S
65 garuḍagrahair] BGINR; garuḍagrahair gandharvagrahair AJKOQW, om. LChin, ma-
horagagrahair Tib
66 mahoragagrahair] Σ; om. S, gandharvagrahair Tib. G124r.
67 manuṣyagrahair] ΣTib; om. R
68 amanuṣyagrahaiḥ] Σ; om. NOacR, na manuṣyagrahaṃ Opc, marutagrahair Tib
69 pretagrahair] ΣTib; om. GS
70 bhūtagrahaiḥ] ΣTib; om. AGS
71 kumbhāṇḍagrahair] ΣTib; kumbhāṇḍagrahaiḥ | B, kumbhāṇḍaiḥ G
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 463
dvīpibhiḥ kākair ulūkaiḥ72 kīṭaiḥ73 sarīsṛpaiṛ anyaiś ca manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ satt-
vaiḥ74 |
[2] athāyuṣmān rāhulo75 yena bhagavāṃs76 tenopasaṃkrānta77 upasaṃkramya
bhagavataḥ pādau śirasābhivanditvā78 bhagavantaṃ79 tri80pradakṣiṇīkṛtya bha-
gavataḥ purato rudann81 aśrūṇi pravartayati sma |
||
72 ulūkaiḥ] Σ; ulūkair rulūkaiḥ O, ullakaiḥ R
73 kīṭaiḥ] Σ; om. B
74 manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ sattvaiḥ] AGIJKW; sattvair manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ B, manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ
sarvair iti L, manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ sarvair hārītibhiḥ N, manuṣyāmanuṣyā sattvaiḥ O,
manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ sarvasattvaiḥ Q, manuṣyāmanuṣyai sarvair ītibhiḥ R, om. Chin. B178r.
75 athāyuṣmān rāhulo] Σ; āyuṣmāṃś ca rāhulo G, atha khalv āyuṣmān rāhulo O, athāyuṣmān
rāhulaḥ Q
76 bhagavāṃs] Σ; bhagavās A, bhagavān R
77 °krānta] Σ; °krāntaḥ JKO, °krāntar N
78 śirasābhivanditvā] LNR; śirasā vanditvā Σ, śirābhivanditvā G
79 bhagavantaṃ] Σ; bhagavatta R
80 triḥ°] Σ; triṣ° J, tri° QW, om. R. N149r.
81 purato rudann] Σ; purataḥ sthitaḥ prāñjalir bhagavantaṃ namasyamānaḥ prarudann L, pu-
rato rudan R, purato rudanta Wva
464 | Gergely Hidas
[3] atha82 bhagavān83 jānann eva84 rāhulam āmantrayate85 sma | kiṃ tvaṃ86 rāhula87
mama purataḥ88 sthitvā aśrūṇi89 pravartayasi90 | evam ukte91 āyuṣmān rāhulo92 bha-
gavantam etad avocat | ihāhaṃ bhagavan93 rājagṛhe94 viharāmi95 | śītavane mahā-
śmaśāne96 iṅghikāyatana97pratyuddeśe | so ‘haṃ bhagavaṃs98 tatra viheṭhye99
devagrahair nāgagrahair100 yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair101
||
82 atha] Σ; atha khalu BGQL
83 bhagavān] Σ; bhagavan K
84 jānann eva] Σ; om. GTibChin
85 J47r.
86 tvaṃ] Σ; tva A, nu tvaṃ BQ, tu tvaṃ OWvar
87 rāhula] Σ; rāhulo LNR. O89r.
88 purataḥ] Σ; pura R. A124r. There is a longer gap between two double daṇḍas at the beginning
of A124r and kiṃ tva rāhula mama purataḥ is repeated.
89 aśrūṇi] Σ; cāśrūṇi BQ, prarudann aśrūṇi L, tyaśrūṇi R
90 pravartayasi] Σ; pravartayati O, pravartayati sma R
91 ukte] Σ; ukto A
92 rāhulo] Σ; rāhulaḥ B
93 bhagavan] Σ; bhagavān R
94 Q75r, R132r.
95 viharāmi] Σ; viharāmaḥ I, viharāmai R
96 K126r.
97 iṅghikāyatana°] Σ; iṅghikāyatane LR
98 bhagavaṃs] Σ; bhagavan GN, (…) R
99 viheṭhye] AIJacKOQW; viheṭhyate BWvar, viheṭhyāmi GLN, vihe_thye Jpc, (…) R, vihethate S
100 nāgagrahair] Σ; nāgagrahair asuragrahair B, asuragrahair nāgagrahair Tib
101 yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair] conj.Tib; yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahair maruta-
grahair asuragrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair AJKW, yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahair kinnaragrahair maru-
tagrahair B, marutagrahair asuragrahair rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair G, yakṣagrahai rākṣasa-
grahair marutagrahair asuragrahaiḥ I, suparṇagrahair yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahair gandharva-
grahair asuragrahaiḥ garuḍagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair L, yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahair marutagra-
haiḥ kinnaragrahair N, yakṣagrahair marutagrahair asuragrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair
O, (…)grahaiḥ P, marutagrahair asuragrahair yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahaiḥ kinnaragrahair Q,
yakṣagrahaiḥ rākṣasagrahaiḥ marutagrahaiḥ (…) R, yakṣagrahai rākṣasagrahai marutagrahai
garuḍagrahair kinnaragrahair S. The text of ms. P begins here. P72r.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 465
garuḍagrahair102 mahoragagrahair manuṣyagrahair103 amanuṣyagrahaiḥ104 preta-
grahair bhūtagrahaiḥ105 piśācagrahaiḥ106 kumbhāṇḍagrahair107 dvīpibhiḥ kākair
ulūkaiḥ108 kīṭaiḥ109 sarīsṛpair110 anyaiś ca manuṣyāmanuṣyaiḥ sattvair iti111 |
[4] atha khalu112 bhagavān113 āyuṣmantaṃ rāhulam āmantrayate sma | udgṛhṇa
tvaṃ114 rāhula115 imāṃ mahādaṇḍa116dhāraṇīṃ117 vidyām118 | catasṛṇāṃ parṣadāṃ119
rakṣāvaraṇaguptaye120 bhikṣūṇāṃ bhikṣuṇīnām upāsakānām121 upāsikānāṃ ca122
dīrgharātram123 arthāya124 hitāya sukhāya125 bhaviṣyati126 |
||
102 garuḍagrahair] BGP; garuḍagrahair gandharvagrahair AIJKOQW, om. LNRSChin, gandhar-
vagrahair Tib
103 B178v.
104 amanuṣyagrahaiḥ] Σ; om. NR, marutagrahair Tib
105 bhūtagrahaiḥ] ΣTib; om. ABGS
106 piśācagrahaiḥ] ΣTib; piśācagrahaiḥ | bhūtagrahaiḥ G. L65v.
107 kumbhāṇḍagrahair] ΣTib; kumbhāṇḍagrahaiḥ | GQ, kumbhāṇḍaiḥ P, om. R. G124v.
108 ulūkaiḥ] Σ; ullūkaiḥ R
109 kīṭaiḥ] Σ; kiṭaiḥ J, kiṭai R
110 sarīsṛpair] ΣRpc; sarī marutagrahair asuragrahaiḥ kinnaragrahai sṛpaiḥ Rac
111 sattvair iti] GJOPSWvar; sattvaiḥ AKW, sarvasattvair iti BQ, (…) I, sarvair iti L, sarvair ītibhiḥ
N, sarvair itibhiḥ R, om. Chin
112 khalu] Σ; om. BP. I88r.
113 bhagavān] Σ; bhagavānn Q
114 udgṛhṇa tvaṃ] Σ; tena hi rāhula udgṛhṇīṣva L, udgṛhṇa tvaṃ ānanda Wvar
115 rāhula] Σ; om. L
116 mahādaṇḍa°] LNR; mahāśītavatīṃ Σ, śītavatī° S, mahāśītavatī° W
117 °dhāraṇīṃ] LNpc; °nāma dhāraṇīṃ ABGKOQW, °nāma dhāraṇī° IJPS, °dhāriṇīṃ NacR.
118 vidyām] GIKLNOPRW; vidyā AS, mahāvidyām BQ, °vidyārājñīm J, vidyārājñī Wvar
119 parṣadāṃ] Σ; pariṣadāṃ IJKW, parṣadā Wvar
120 rakṣāvaraṇaguptaye] Σ; rakṣāvaraṇaye P
121 upāsakānām] Σ; upāsikānām R
122 upāsikānāṃ ca] Σ; upāsikīnāṃ ca P, upāsikānāṃ Q, upāsakānāṃ ca R
123 dīrgharātram] GLNPRSWvarTibChin; sarvasattvānāṃ ca dīrgharātram AIJKOW, sarva-
sattvānāṃ dīrgharātram B. N149v, O89v
124 arthāya] Σ; om. P
125 sukhāya] GLNPTibChin; sukhāya yogakṣemāya ABIJKOQW, sukhāya loka R, sukhāya yo-
gasambhārāya kṣemāya S. A124v
126 bhaviṣyati] Σ; ca bhaviṣyati GP, bhaviṣyati devamanuṣyāṇāṃ ceti L, viṣyati R
466 | Gergely Hidas
[5] tadyathā | aṅgā | vaṅgā127 | bhaṅgā128 | varaṅgā | saṃsārataraṅgā129 | sāsadaṅgā130
| bhaṅgā131 | jesurā132 | ekatarā133 | ara vīrā134 | tara vīrā135 | kara vīrā | kara kara vīrā136
| indrā137 | indrakisarā138 | haṃsā139 | haṃsakisarā140 | picimalā141 | mahākiccā142 | vi-
heṭhikā143 | kālucchikā144 | aṅgodarā145 | jayā | jayālikā146 | velā | elā | cintāli147 | cili
cili148 | hili hili149 | sumati150 | vasumati | culu naṭṭe151 | culu culu naṭṭe152 | culu nāḍi153
||
127 vaṅgā] Σ; om. Q
128 bhaṅgā] GLN; kaliṅgā bhaṅgā ABIJKOWvar, om. P, kaliṅgā raṅgā Q, bhaṅgā kaliṅgā bhaṅgā
R, kaliṅgā bhaṅgā 2 S, kaliṅgā W
129 saṃsārataraṅgā] Σ; saṃsārā taraṅgā N
130 sāsadaṅgā] Σ; sāmavādasā N
131 sāsadaṅgā | bhaṅgā] ABJNOQRSWvar; māmaṅgā G, sāsadaṅgā | bhagā IKW, sāmavedasā |
bhaṅgā L, sāsadaṅgā P
132 jesurā] BLNP; asurā AIJKOQW, jāsurā G, yesurā R, asuravīrā Wvar
133 ekatarā] GNP; ekataraṅgā AIJKOW, ekacarā BQ, (…) L, ekavīrā R
134 ara vīrā] BGNOPQR; asuravīrā AIJKW, (…) L, suravīrataraṅgā Wvar
135 tara vīrā] GLP; tara vīrā | tara tara vīrā AIJKNOW, tara vīrā | viheṭhikā | tara tara vīrā BQR
136 kara kara vīrā] Σ; kara kaira vīrā P, om. Q, kara kara vīrā | kuru vīrā | kuru kuru vīrā | curu
vīrā | curu curu vīrā | culu vīrā | culu culu vīrā | hili vīrā | hili hili vīrā | sihīlikā | mahāsihīlikā L
137 indrā] Σ; om. J
138 indrakisarā] Σ; indrakisorā G, indraggikisarā L, indrakīsarā N, indrakisarāḥ P. B179r, R132v.
139 haṃsā] Σ; haṅgā P
140 haṃsakisarā] Σ; haṃsakisorā G, haṃsaggikisarā L, haṃsakīsarā N, haṅgākisarā P
141 picimalā] AGIKLN; piśācikā | cilimālā BQ, picimalā | lomā J, picimālā OPW, cirimārā R, pi-
cisarā S, picimālā | loma Wvar
142 mahākiccā] Σ; mahāviccā G
143 viheṭhikā] Σ; heṭhavikā (…) viheṭhikā kaṭācchikā L, viheṭhī Wvar. K126v.
144 kālucchikā] Σ; kālacchikā N, tālucchikā P
145 aṅgodarā] Σ; aṅgodarā amocarā yamodarā L
146 jayā jayālikā] Σ; jayā jayākilā G, jarā jarālikā S, jayālikā W
147 velā elā cintāli] AJKLOS; parā vittāli B, palā vittāli G, velā elā cittāli IN, palā vitāli P, velā
cintāli QW, para cirtāli R
148 cili cili] KILOW; citi citi A, cili BQR, vali cihili G, vali vi JP, cici N, cali cicili Wvar
149 hili hili] AIKLNOW; hili kili BQ, kisi G, hili cili 2 hili 2 kili 2 J, hili hasihi P, hili cili R, hili hili
kili hili Wvar
150 sumati] Σ; sumadhi GP, samavati N
151 culu naṭṭe] AGIKOQW; culu naṭṭe 2 B, culu naṭe JNR, (…) L, culu naṭe | culu naṭe | culu naṭe P
152 culu 2 naṭṭe] BLQRS; culu 2 naṭṭe | culu culu culu A, culla naṭṭe culu culu naṭṭe G, culu 2
naṭṭe culu 2 culu naṭṭe IK, culu 2 naṭe culu 2 culu naṭe J, culu 2 naṭe NP, culu 2 naṭṭe culu naṭṭe
O, culu culu culu naṭṭe W, om. Wvar
153 culu nāḍi] Σ; culla nāḍi G, culu nāti P, cullu nāḍi R
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 467
| kunāḍi154 | hārīṭaki155 | kārīṭaki156 | gauri157 | gandhāri158 | caṇḍāli159 | mātaṅgi160 |
dharaṇi dhāraṇi161 | uṣṭrapālike162 | kaca kārike163 | cala nāṭike164 | kākalike165 | lala-
mati166 | rakṣamati167 | varākule168 | manmate utpale169 | kara vīre170 | tara vīre171 | tara
||
154 kunāḍi] Σ; kulati P, om. S, kuru nāḍi Wvar
155 hārīṭaki] N; hārīṭakī 2 AJ, hārīṭaki tarīhuki B, harīṭaki G, hārīṭaki hārīṭaki IKOW, hārīṭāki L,
harīṭakī 2 hārīṭuki P, hāriṭaṅki tarīṭaṅki Q, hāriṇuki R
156 kārīṭaki] BGQ; kārīṭaki kārīṭaki | karīṭaki karīṭaki AIKW, kārīṭaki karīṭaki karīṭaki J, karīṭāki
kāriṭāki L, om. NP, kārīṭaki kārīṭaki karīṭaki O, tariṭuki 2 R
157 gauri] IJKLNOW; gaurī ABPQR, mauri G
158 gandhāri] IJKNOQW; gandhārī ABR, gāndhāri GL, gāndhārī P
159 caṇḍāli] GLNPS; caṇḍāli vetāli Σ
160 mātaṅgi] GNP; mātaṅgi | varcasi ABIJKQW, (…) L, varcasi | mātaṅgi O, mātaṅgīr cavasi R
161 dharaṇi dhāraṇi] GP; dharaṇi dhāraṇi | taraṇi tāraṇi AIJKOW, dharaṇi dhāraṇi |
prajñāmānike | taraṇi tāraṇi BQ, (…) L, dharaṇi dhāraṇi 2 N, dharaṇi dhāraṇi | prajñāmālīke |
taraṇi tāraṇi R
162 uṣṭrapālike] GLN; duṣṭamālike ABIJ, uṣṭramālike KQW, (…) O, uṣṭramāli | ke P, uṣṭamālike
R, draṣṭamālike SWvar, duṣṭa Wvar
163 kaca kārike] GL; kaca kācike | kaca kācike A, kaca kācike 2 B, kaca kācike IP, kaca kācike |
kaca cive J, kaca kācike | kaca kācive KQW, kaca kācike | kaca kācike 2 O, kaca kācike | kara
kālike R, kaca kārike | kaca kācive N, kaca kācice S, kaca kācike Wvar
164 cala nāṭike] AJKW; kara nāḍike BQR, bala nāśike G, cala nāṭike kaca kācive I, bala nāṭi L,
vala nāḍi N, om. OWvar, balā nāsike P, cala nādike S. G125r.
165 kākalike] Σ; kākilike G, kālike P
166 lalamati] Σ; balamati L
167 rakṣamati] BGPQRS; lakṣamati AIKOW, om. J, kulākula L, nakṣamati N
168 varākule] GN; varāhakule ABKOQRSW, om. IL, varāhakulo° J, balākule P
169 manmate utpale] P; matpale utpale AOW, utpale | bālākuli | pālākuli | manmate | unmatte
B, satpate utpale G, matpale utpate I, °tpale utpale J, matpate | utpale K, anyate utpale L, man-
yate utpale N, utpale | dhārākuli | pārākuli | manmatte | unmatte Q, utpale | dhārākuli | manmatte
| utpatte R, manamate S
170 kara vīre] GLNP; kara vīre | kara kara vīre Σ
171 tara vīre] Σ; om. G, tara vī R. P72v.
468 | Gergely Hidas
tara vīre | kuru vīre172 | kuru kuru vīre173 | curu vīre174 | curu curu vīre175 | mahāvīre176 |
iramati177 | varamati178 | rakṣamati179 | sarvārthasādhani | paramārthasādhani |
apratihate180 | indro rājā | yamo rājā181 | varuṇo rājā182 | kubero rājā183 | manasvī184 rājā
| vāsukī rājā185 | daṇḍāgnī rājā186 | brahmā187 sahasrādhipatī188 rājā189 | buddho bha-
gavān dharmasvāmī rājā190 | anuttaro191 lokānukampakaḥ192 | mama193 sarva-
sattvānāṃ ca rakṣāṃ194 kurvantu195 | paritrāṇaṃ196 parigrahaṃ paripālanaṃ
śāntiṃ197 svastyayanaṃ daṇḍaparihāraṃ śastraparihāraṃ viṣadūṣaṇaṃ
viṣanāśanaṃ198 sīmābandhaṃ199 dharaṇībandhaṃ ca kurvantu200 | jīvatu201
varṣaśataṃ paśyatu202 śaradāṃ śatam |203
||
172 kuru vīre] Σ; om. GI
173 A125r.
174 curu vīre] Σ; om. GN, (…) L
175 curu curu vīre] Σ; culu culu vīre A, curu curu vīre curu vīre curu curu vīre G, (…) L. B179v.
176 mahāvīre] Σ; om. R
177 iramati] Σ; (…) L, garamati N, irimati P, indramati R, iramati talamati Wvar
178 varamati] GIJKORW; viramati AWvar, varamati taramati BR, (…) L, caramati N, om. P, vara-
mati talamati Q
179 rakṣamati] Σ; (…) L, rakṣamati lakṣamati Q
180 apratihate] Σ; om. R. N150r.
181 yamo rājā] Σ; om. GS, somo rājā N, somo rājā yamo rājā Tib
182 J47v, O90r, Q75v, R133r.
183 kubero rājā] Σ; kubero rājā | kumbhāṇḍo rājā BQWvar, (…) L, vāyu rājā kubero rājā Tib
184 manasvī] Σ; manasī I. om. Tib
185 vāsukī rājā] GNR; vāsukī rājā | daṇḍakī rājā AIJKOW, vāsuki rājā | yamadagni rājā | daṇḍakī
rājā B, vāsuki rājā | yamadagni rājā L, vāsukī rājñī | yamadagnī rājā P, vāsuki rājā | yamadagnī
rājā | daṇḍakī rājā Q
186 daṇḍāgnī rājā] NRTib; daṇḍāgnī rājā | dhṛtarāṣṭro rājā | virūḍhako rājā | virūpākṣo rājā
AJKW, daṇḍāgni rājā | dhṛtarāṣṭro rājā | virūḍhako rājā | virūpākṣo rājā B, daṇḍo ‘gnirājā G,
daṇḍāgnī rājā | yamadagnī rājā | dhṛtarāṣṭro rājā | virūḍhako rājā | virūpākṣo rājā IO, daṇḍāgni
rājā | daṇḍakārī rājā | jayo rājā | vijayo rājā | jayantā rājā | vijayantā rājā | dhṛtarāṣṭro rājā |
virūḍhako rājā | virūpākṣo rājā | kubero rājā L, om. P, dhṛtarāṣṭro rājā | virūḍhako rājā | virūpākṣo
rājā Q, daṇḍāgnī rājā | dhṛtarāṣṭro rājā | virūḍhako rājā | virūpākṣo rājā | vaiśramaṇo rājā Wvar.
I88v, L66r.
187 brahmā] Σ; buddho N
188 sahasrādhipatī] IKNOPQRW; sahāṃpatī A, sahāpati BG, sahasrādhipati JL, sahāṃpati S
189 rājā] Σ; om. S
190 rājā] Σ; om. G
191 anuttaro] Σ; anuttaro dharmarājā L
192 °kampakaḥ] AGIKOPQW; °kampako BL, °kampaka JNRS, °kampaka evam ājñāpayati Wvar.
K127r.
193 mama] ABGIOW; AJHITOKASYA J, ŚĀKYABHIKṢUŚRĪSOMABHADRASYA (note that this name is half-
erased) K, UḌḌĀKĀYĀḤ L, rakṣa rakṣa mama saparivārasya N, MAMUKASYA P, mama saparivārasya
Q, rakṣa 2 māṃ ŚRĪBALASYA R, mama sagaṇaparivārasya Wvar
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 469
[6] tadyathā204 | balavati205 | varamati206 | talamati207 | lakṣamati208 | rakṣamati209 |
huru huru210 | phuru phuru211 | cara cara212 | khara khara213 | khuru khuru | mati mati214
| bhūmicaṇḍe215 | kālikeṭi216 | akisalā | pīne217 | sāmalate218 | hūle sthūle |
sthūlaśikhare219 | jaya sthūle | jaya naṭṭe220 | cala nāsi221 | culu nāsi222 | vāgbandhani223
||
194 rakṣāṃ] Σ; om. N, śarīraṃ rakṣāṃ Q
195 kurvantu] AIJKOQSWvar; kuṃrvatu B, kuru GP, karotu LW, om. N, karo jīvatu varṣaśataṃ
paśyatu sattavarṣa R
196 paritrāṇaṃ] AGNRWTib; guptiṃ paritrāṇaṃ BIJKLOQSWvar, om. P
197 śāntiṃ] Σ; śānti° B
198 viṣadūṣaṇaṃ viṣanāśanaṃ] Σ; viṣanāśanaṃ W
199 B180r.
200 kurvantu] Σ; karotu R
201 jīvatu] BGIKNOQRWvar; jīvantu AJLPW
202 paśyatu] BGIKNOR; paśyantu AJLQW, paśya P
203 Tib. omits this sentence.
204 tadyathā] GLNPR; tadyathā | ilā | milā | utpalā ABIJOQW, tadyathā | ili | milā | utpalā K
205 balavati] L; iramati Σ, bala balavati N, balamati R
206 varamati] GLOP; viramati AIJKW, valamati | kurumati B, caramati NR, varamati | valamati |
kurumati Q
207 talamati] GLNPR; halamati ABIJKOW, halamati | talamati | kṣaṇamati BQ, halamati | tala-
mati | kṣalamati Wvar
208 lakṣamati] Σ; om. S
209 rakṣamati] N; rakṣamati | kuru kuru mati AJKW, rakṣamati | arumati | ārumati | kuru kuru
mati B, arumati 2 G, rakṣamati | kuru mati 2 IO, om. L, ālumati 2 P, rakṣamati | arumati | arumati
| ārumati | kuru kuru mati Q, rakṣamati | huru mati R, rakṣamati | huru huru mati Wva
210 huru huru] GIJKOPRW; huru huru mati A, huru mati | huru 2 BLNQ, hulu 2 mati S
211 phuru phuru] Σ; puru puru GJ, om. IS
212 cara cara] AIJKPRW; dhara 2 BQ, vara 2 G, cara cara śatrūn LN, curu 2 OWvar
213 khara khara] Σ; om. GLPWvar, khaḍga R
214 mati mati] Σ; khurumati GP, mati LS
215 bhūmicaṇḍe] Σ; bhūmicaṇḍi GPQ, bhūmicaṇḍike I
216 kālikeṭi] LNR; kālike ABGJOPQW, kākalike I, kālile K
217 akisalā | 469ine] NR; abhisaṃlāpite ABIJKQW, akiśalā pīte G, akisalā pīna L, sukimalāpīte
O, akisaṃlā pīte P. A125v.
218 sāmalate] Σ; śārmalake G, sāmanate NR, sālamate P, somarate Wvar
219 °śikhare] Σ; °śikhale A, °śire BGP, °khare Wvar
220 jaya sthūle | jaya naṭṭe] P; jaya sthūle | jayavate | vala naṭṭe AJKRW, jaya naṭī B, jaya sthūle
| jala naṅge G, jaya sthūle | jayavate | vala naṭṭe | jaya naṭṭe I, jala nāṭi L, jaya sthūle | jala nāḍi
N, jaya sthūle | jayavate | vala naṭṭe | jala naṭṭe O, jaya sthūle | jaya naṭī Q, jayavate | vala nate |
jaya naṅge Wvar
221 cala nāsi] GLP; cala nāḍi AIJKO, tala nāṭī BQ, cara nāḍi NW, om. R. G125v
222 culu nāsi] GL; culu nāḍi culi nāḍi AJKO, culu 2 nāḍī BQ, culu nāḍi culu 2 nāḍi I, culu nāḍi
NR, culu culu nāsi P, culu nāḍi culu nāḍi W
223 vāgbandhani] Σ; vāgbandhanī B, vāsaṃdhari G
470 | Gergely Hidas
| virohaṇi224 | solohite225 | aṇḍare | paṇḍare | karāle226 | kinnare227 | keyūre | ketumati228
| bhūtaṃgame229 | bhūtamati230 | dhanye231 | maṅgalye232 | mahābalalohitamūle233 |
acalacaṇḍe234 | dhuraṃdharā235 | jayālike236 | jayā237 | gorohaṇi238 | curu curu239 |
rundha rundha | dhuru dhuru240 | khuru khuru241 | khurumati242 | bandhumati243 |
dhuraṃdhare244 | dhare dhare245 | vidhare vimati246 | viṣkambhaṇi247 | nāśani
||
224 virohaṇi] Σ; virohiṇi GLOWvar, rohiṇi S
225 solohite] NQR; sālohite AJKW, molohite B, molohire G, gorohaṇi sālohite I, golohite LP, go-
rohiṇi O
226 karāle] Σ; karālike B, karālā R. N150v
227 kinnare] AGJKLNRW; nale | dūre B, vidūre P, kinnare vidūre IOQ, kinnare | vittarake Wvar
228 ketumati] ΣJpc; saketumati Jac
229 bhūtaṃgame] Σ; om. Wvar
230 bhūtamati] Σ; bhūtapatiṃ B, bhūtamati bhūtapati L, bhūtapati P. R133v
231 dhanye] Σ; dhanya° AWvar
232 maṅgalye] GNPRTib; maṅgalye| hiraṇye | hiraṇyagarbhe A, maṅgalye | hiraṇyagarbhe
BIOQW, hiraṇyagarbhe J, maṅgale | hiraṇyagarbhe K, maṅgalye mahāmaṅgalye L. B180v. Cf.
Mahāmāyūrī: maṅgale maṅgalye, hiraṇye hiraṇyagarbhe, ratne ratnagarbhe and maṅgale sa-
mantabhadre hiraṇyagarbhe, sarvārthasādhani
233 mahābalalohitamūle] LNR; mahābale | avalokitamūle AIJKOW, mahābale | mahābalābale |
kitamūle B, mahābale mahābalāvalokite G, mahābale | mahābalalohitamūle P, mahābale |
mahābalāvalokitamūle Q. O90v, P73r
234 acalacaṇḍe] AIJKOPW; abalacaṇḍe B, acaladaṇḍe GQ, culu culu culu naṭṭe L, aculuṇḍe N,
acaluṇḍe R, acalacandre S
235 dhuraṃdharā] AIJKNOQWvar; burāṃdharā B, dharaṃdharā dharā G, dharāṃdharā L,
dhuraṃdhare PW, dharaṃdharā R
236 jayālike] Σ; jayā jayālike AI, parājayalike B, pārājayālike Q
237 jayā] Σ; jaya BQ, om. I, jayabandhani L
238 gorohaṇi] IJKLNRWvar; gorohiṇi AGPQW, golohiṇi B, godohiṇi O
239 curu curu] LNR; culu culu | phuru phuru AJ, culu culu | huru huru BQ, curu curu | phuru
phuru GIKOPW
240 dhuru dhuru] GP; phara 2 AJKOWvar, hara 2 BQ, pare 2 I, phuru 2 | muru 2 L, phuru 2 NR,
phala 2 S, om. W
241 khuru khuru] KOP; khara 2 khuru 2 A, khara 2 BL, khuru G, khare 2 I, khara J, guru 2 | khuru
NR, sphuru 2 Q, khala 2 | khulu 2 S, om. W, khulu 2 Wvar
242 khurumati] Σ; khurumati svāhā B, (…) L, sphurumati Q, om. W
243 bandhumati] Σ; om. BW, (…) mati svāhā L, mandhumati svāhā Q
244 dhuraṃdhare] ABGJPQWvar; dharadhare | dhara 2 I, dharaṃdhare KO, dhuruṃdharu L,
dhuruṃdharu 2 NR, om. SW
245 dhare dhare] Σ; dhara 2 G, dharu dhare dhare L, dhure 2 S, vare 2 Wvar
246 vidhare vimati] Σ; vidhuṇu dhimati G, vidhare 2 vimati 2 L, vidhare vidhare vidhamati P,
vidhare vidhare W
247 viṣkambhaṇi] Σ; viskambhiṇi NP, viṣkambhani | bhāvani vibhāvani O
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 471
vināśani248 | bandhani | mokṣaṇi249 | mocani250 | mohani251 | bhāvani252 | śodhani253 |
saṃśodhani254 viśodhani255 | saṃkhiraṇi256 | saṃchindani257 | sādhu turumāṇe258 |
hara hara bandhumati | hiri hiri | khiri khiri259 | kharali260 | huru huru261 | piṅgale262 |
namo ‘stu263 buddhānāṃ264 bhagavatāṃ265 svāhā266 |
||
248 vināśani] Σ; om. P. K127v.
249 mokṣaṇi] GLNR; mokṣaṇi vimokṣaṇi Σ
250 mocani] LP; mocani vimocani ABIJKOW, vimocani GNR, om. QWvar
251 mohani] GLNPR; mohani vimohani ABIKOQW, om. J
252 bhāvani] LNR; bhāvani vibhāvani ABIJKQW, om. GOP
253 śodhani] LNPR; sodhani śodhani A, sādhani | śodhani BGIJKQWvar, śodhani viśodhani OS,
śodhani 2 W
254 saṃśodhani] Σ; om. AWvar
255 viśodhani] Σ; om. RSWvar
256 saṃkhiraṇi] RW; saṃkhiraṇi saṃkiraṇi AKOS, saṃkiraṇi sākikiraṇi B, saṃsīraṇi saṃkīraṇi
G, saṃkhiraṇi saṃkiriṇi I, saṃkhiriṇi saṃkiriṇi J, sakhīraṇi saṃkīraṇi L, saṃkhīraṇī rakīraṇī N,
sakhīrati P, saṃkiraṇi | samīdani | sākikiraṇi Q
257 saṃchindani] Σ; saṃchinnani G, saṃchindini I, saṃchāraṇi saṃchindani L, saṃchāraṇi
saṃchīdani N, saṃchadanī R
258 sādhu turumāṇe] N; sādhūttaramāṇe | tara taramāṇe AGIK, sādhūntaramāṇe | tara tara-
māṇe B, sādhutaramāṇe J, sādhataramāṇe | tara tara māṇe | hara māṇe | hara hara māṇe L,
sādhu turamāṇe | turu 2 māṇe O, sādhu turumāṇe tara taramāṇe P, sādhūttaramāṇe | taramāṇe
Q, sādhu turu māṃ 2 rakṣa 2 R, sādhu turamāṇe W, sādhutaramāṇe | tara taramāṇe Wvar. I89r.
259 khiri khiri] Σ; miri 2 BQ, (…) L
260 kharali] Σ; om. BGPQWvar
261 huru huru] Σ; phuru phuru P, hurulu R, kuru 2 S
262 piṅgale] BGLNPQR; khuru khuru | piṅgale AIJOW, khuru piṅgale K
263 namo ‘stu] Σ; namo R
264 buddhānāṃ] Σ; buddhānā A, buddhāya P. A126r
265 bhagavatāṃ] Σ; bhagavatāṃnāṃ G, namo ‘stu bhagavatāṃ P
266 Q76r
472 | Gergely Hidas
[7] asyāṃ267 khalu268 rāhula269 mahādaṇḍadhāraṇyāṃ270 vidyāyām271 antaśo ‘ṣṭot-
taraśatapadānāṃ272 sūtraṃ273 granthiṃ274 baddhāyāṃ275 hastena276
dhāryamāṇāyāṃ277 kaṇṭhena278 dhāryamāṇāyāṃ279 samantād280 yojanaśatasya281
rakṣā kṛtā bhaviṣyati282 | gandhair283 vā puṣpair vā284 mudrābhir vā naiva
manuṣyo285 vāmanuṣyo286 vābhibhaviṣyati287 | na viṣaṃ na śastraṃ288 na rogo289 na
jvaro290 na prajvaro291 na vidyāmantro292 na vetāḍaḥ293 | na vyādhau294 nāgnau295
||
267 asyāṃ] Σ; asyā GPQR, asyāḥ L
268 khalu] GLNPR; khalu puna ABIJKOQ, khalu punaḥ S, khalu punā W
269 rāhula] Σ; rāhulo LNR
270 mahādaṇḍadhāraṇyāṃ] corr.Tib; mahāśītavatī° Σ, mahāśītavatīnāma° B,
daṇḍadhāraṇyāṃ L, mahādhāraṇyāṃ N, mahādaṇḍadhāraṇyā R. B181r.
271 °vidyāyām] Σ; °vidyāyā AR, °vidyā G
272 antaśo ‘ṣṭottaraśatapadānāṃ] NR; daśottaraśataṃpadāyāṃ A, daśottarapadaśatāyāṃ
BJKOPQW, daśottarapadaśatānāṃ G, daśottaramantrapadāyāṃ I, daśottaraśatapadāyāṃ KWvar,
antaśo ‘ṣṭottarapadaśatānāṃ L
273 sūtraṃ] LR; sūtre Σ, sūtra N
274 granthiṃ] Σ; grantha N, granthi° R
275 baddhāyāṃ] GLNPQR; baddhvā ABIJKOW, baddhā S
276 hastena] Σ; haste BQS
277 dhāryamāṇāyāṃ] Σ; dhāryamāṇāyā K
278 kaṇṭhena] AIKNOPRW; kaṇṭhe BQS, om. G, kaṇṭhe vā J, kāyena dhāryamāṇāyāṃ kaṇṭhena L
279 dhāryamānāyāṃ] Σ; dhāryamānāyā A, om. G
280 samantād] Σ; samantādad J
281 yojanaśatasya] Σ; yojanaśataṃsahasrasyāṃ B, yojanaśataṃ tasya O, yojanaśatasahasrasya
Q, yojanadaśasya Tib
282 kṛtā bhaviṣyati] Σ; tā bhaviviṣyati R. In the Tibetan translation rakṣā kṛtā bhaviṣyati comes
after mudrābhir. G66v, L66v.
283 gandhair] Σ; daṇḍair Tib
284 puṣpair vā] Σ; (…) L, puṣpair vā | dhūpair vā OWvar. N151r.
285 manuṣyo] Σ; manuṣyā ABQWvar
286 vāmanuṣyo] GIJKLOPW; vā ‘manuṣyā A, om. BQS, ‘manuṣyo N, amanuṣyo R
287 vābhibhaviṣyati] Σ; vā ‘bhibhaviṣyati AP, vā bhaviṣyati GL, vābhibhaviṣyanti Q. G126r.
288 na viṣaṃ na śastraṃ] ABIJKLNPRS; na viṣaṃ na śastraṃ na garaṃ GOWvar, na viṣaṃ na
śastraṃ na marā Q, na śastraṃ na viṣaṃ WTib
289 rogo] Σ; rogaṃ Wvar
290 na jvaro] Σ; om. J, na jvaraṃ Wvar
291 na prajvaro] Σ; om. R
292 na vidyāmantro] LRW; na vidyā na mantro Σ, na vidyā P, (…) N
293 vetāḍaḥ] AIJKOW; vetāḍā BGPQR, vetāḍā na vyālā LTib, (…) N, vyāpādaḥ Wvar
294 vyādhau] BGLQR; vyādhinā AIJKOW, (…) N, vyādhayo P, vyādher S
295 nāgnau] BGPQR; nāgninā AIJKOW, na graho nāgnau L, (…)gnau N, nāgni S. R134r.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 473
na296 viṣodakena297 kālaṃ kariṣyati | vidyāmantra298prayogānāṃ ca299 sarveṣāṃ
sādhuprayuktānāṃ300 ca301 bandhanī | parabandhānāṃ302 ca pramocanī303 | sarva-
roga304śoka305vighna306vināśanakarī | kali307kaluṣa308praśamanakarī | sarvagrahavi-
mocanakarī309 | yo graho na muñcet
saptadhāsya310 sphuṭen311 mūrdhā312 arjakasyeva313 mañjarī |314vajrapāṇiś cāsya
mahāyakṣasenāpatir315 vajreṇādīptena316 samprajvālitena317 ekajvālībhūtena
||
296 na] Σ; nāpi B. O91r.
297 viṣodakena] Σ; viṣadaṣodakena R, udakena Tib
298 vidyāmantra°] AIKLNORW; na vidyānāṃ vidyāmantra° B, vidyāmantraśo° J, na vidyāman-
tra° GPWvar, na vidyānāṃ vidyā_mantra° Q
299 ca] Σ; om. BOR
300 sādhuprayuktānāṃ] Σ; sādhusuprayuktānāṃ A, sādhuprayuktānāṃ ca B, sādhuprayuk-
tāṃ ca Q, sādhuprayuktā R. J48r.
301 ca] GP; cāsiddhānāṃ siddhakarī | siddhānāṃ ca saṃkṣobhaṇī | paraprayuktānāṃ ca AJKW,
vardhaṇī | siddhānāṃ siddhanakarī | siddhānāṃ ca saṃkṣobhaṇī | paraprayuktānāṃ ca B,
cāsiddhānāṃ ca siddhakarī | siddhānāṃ ca saṃkṣobhaṇī | paraprayuktānāṃ ca I, cāsiddhānāṃ
siddha | paraprayuktānāṃ L, om. NR, ca siddhānāṃ siddhakarī | siddhānāṃ ca saṃkṣobhaṇī |
paraprayuktānāṃ ca O, vardhaṇī siddhānāṃ siddhaṃkarī | siddhānāṃ ca saṃkṣobhaṇī | para-
prayuktānāṃ ca Q, cāsiddhānāṃ siddhakaraṃ | siddhānāṃ ca saṃkṣobhaṇam | parayuktānāṃ S
302 parabandhānāṃ] LNR; parabandhanānāṃ ABIKOQW, parabalānā G, parabandhanīnāṃ
JWvar, parabalānāṃ P
303 pramocanī] Σ; mocanī BLQ, mokṣaṇī GP. Chin omits vidyāmantraprayogānāṃ ca sarveṣāṃ
sādhuprayuktānāṃ ca bandhanī | parabandhānāṃ ca pramocanī
304 °roga°] Σ; om. R
305 °śoka°] Σ; °śokaśoka° G, (…) N
306 °vighna°] BGLPQRTib; °vighnavināyakānāṃ AIJKOW, (…) N
307 kali°] GLNR; °kalikalaha° Σ, kalaha° Tib
308 °kaluṣa°] Σ; om. P. K128r.
309 °praśamanakarī | sarvagrahavimocanakarī] AJKOR; °praśamanakarī | sarvagrahavimocanī
BQ, °praśamanakarmasarvagrahavimocanakarī GP, °pramardanakarī sarvagrahavimocanakarī
I, °praśamanakarī | sarvagrahavināśanī L, °praśamanakarī | sarvagrahapramocanakarī N,
°praśamanakarī | sakalagrahavimocanakarī S, °praśamanakarī W. B181v, P73v.
310 saptadhāsya] Σ; saptadhā G
311 sphuṭen] Σ; sphuṭon GNR
312 mūrdhā] Σ; mūrdhnām L, mūrdhnā R
313 arjakasyeva] Σ; arjakaseva J
314 Note the metrical line here.
315 mahāyakṣasenāpatir] Σ; senāpatir G, yakṣasenāpatir P
316 A126v
317 samprajvālitena] GLNPR; jvālitena prajvālitena samprajvālitena ABIJKOQS, prajvālitena W,
prajvālitena samprajvālitena TibWvar
474 | Gergely Hidas
dhyāyitvā318 mūrdhānaṃ319 sphoṭayet320 | catvāraś ca321 mahārājāno322 ‘yomayena323
cakreṇa324 kṣuradhārā325prahāreṇa326 vināśayeyuḥ327 | tasmād328 yakṣalokāc329 cya-
vanaṃ330 bhavet331 | aḍakavatyāṃ rājadhānyāṃ332 na labhate vāsam |
[8] asyāṃ333 khalu334 rāhula335 mahādaṇḍadhāraṇyāṃ vidyāyāṃ336 sakṛt337parivar-
titāyāṃ338 rājacaurodakāgni339viṣaśastrāṭavī340kāntāraparvatadurga341madhyaga-
taḥ342 sarvabhayebhyaḥ pratimucyate343 | iyaṃ khalu344
||
318 dhyāyitvā] LNR; tāvad vyāyed yāvan AJTibWvar, avadhyāyatā yāvan B, avadhyāyatā G,
tāvad vyāyed yātan I, tāvad vyāyādayed yāvan K, tāvad vyāyed yāvat O, avadhyāyan P, avadh-
yāyatāṃ yāvan Q, tāvad vyāyacched yāvan W
319 mūrdhānaṃ] Σ; mūrdhnānaṃ L, mūrdhānaṃ ca N, mūrdhnāṃ ca R
320 sphoṭayet] AGIJKOW; sphālayet BQ, sphoṭaya L, sphoṭayati P, sphoṭaye N, sphoḥṭaye R
321 ca] Σ; cāsya BQ
322 mahārājāno] Σ; mahārājāna N, mahārājānaḥ R
323 ‘yomayena] Σ; ‘yomukhena P
324 cakreṇa] BLNRTib; cakreṇa mūrdhānaṃ sphoṭayeyuḥ AIKOW, cakreṇa mūrdhānaṃ
sphoṭayet GQ, cakreṇa mūrdhānaṃ sphoṭayetayuḥ J, cakreṇa mūrdhānaṃ sphoṭayanti P
325 kṣuradhārā] Σ; khuradhārā J, kṣuradhāreṇa Wvar
326 °prahāreṇa] BGKPRW; °prahāreṇa ca AIJLNOQ
327 vināśayeyuḥ] Σ; vināśayeyus GILW
328 tasmād] BNOR; tasmāc ca AGIJKPQW, sa yakṣas tasmāc ca L
329 yakṣalokāc] Σ; yakṣakulalokāc P
330 cyavanaṃ] Σ; cyāvanaṃ L, cyavavanaṃ O
331 bhavet] IKLNOPRWvar; bhave A, bhaved BGJQS, bhaveyuḥ W
332 rājadhānyāṃ] Σ; om. R
333 asyāṃ] Σ; asmāt AB, asyā GL, atha W
334 khalu] GLNR; khalu puna AIJOPQ, khalu punar B, khalu punaḥ SWvar, khalu punā KW
335 rāhula] Σ; om. B, rāhulo LN
336 mahādaṇḍadhāraṇyāṃ vidyāyāṃ] LNTib; mahāśītavatīṃ nāma dhāraṇyāṃ vidyāṃ A,
mahāśītavatīnāmadhāraṇyāṃ vidyāyāṃ BPQ, mahāśītavatīṃ nāma dhāraṇyāṃ vidyāyāṃ G,
mahāśītavatīmahāvidyāyāṃ IKW, mahāśītavatīmahāvidyārāyāṃ J, śītavatīmahāvidyāyāṃ O,
mahādaṇḍadhāraṇyā mahāvidyāyāṃ R, mahāśitavatināmamahāvidyāyāṃ Wvar
337 sakṛt°] Σ; om. AWvar, satkṛtya G
338 °parivartitāyāṃ] Σ; °parivartāyāṃ N, °parivārārtāyāṃ R
339 °āgni°] Σ; °āgnibhaya° O
340 °viṣaśastrāṭavī°] Σ; °vistrāṭavī° R °śastrāṭavī° Tib
341 °kāntāraparvatadurga°] NTib; °kāntācadurgeṣu ABQ, °kāntāra° GPW, °kāntāradurga°
IKOWvar, °kāntāradu° J, °kāntāraparvatadurgama° L, °kāntāraparvatadurgadurga° R, °kāntāca-
durga° S. B182r, I89v, N151v.
342 °madhyagataḥ] Σ; °madhyagata G, °madhyataḥ N, °madhyegatasya S
343 pratimucyate] Σ; parimucyate PSW. O91v.
344 khalu] GLNPR; khalu punar Σ. G126v.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 475
mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī345vidyā346 ekanavati347gaṅgānadīvālikā348samair buddhair349
bhāṣitā350 bhāṣyate bhāṣiṣyate351 ca siddhā352 paramasiddhā353 sarvadevanāga-
yakṣa354gandharvāsuragaruḍakinnaramahoragābhir355 vanditā356 sarva-
jana gaṇaparivṛtā | sarvabhayopadraveṣu mama sarvasattvānāṃ ca360 śivam
357 358 359
ārogyaṃ361 bhavatu362 |
||
345 mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī°] LNTib; mahāśītavatīnāma° ABOPQWvar, śītavatīnāma° G,
mahāśītavatī° IJKW, mahādāṇḍadhāraṇī° R, mahatī śītavatī° S
346 °vidyā] ABGLNPQRWTib; °mahāvidyā IJKOSWvar
347 ekanavati°] AGLNPQR; ekanavatī° B, ekanavatyāṃ IKOW, ekanavatinyā J. R134v.
348 °vālikā°] Σ; °vālukā° IORW
349 buddhair] GLNWvar; buddhair bhagavadbhir ΣTib, buddhair _ _ R
350 bhāṣitā] Σ; bhāṣi N
351 bhāṣyate bhāṣiṣyate] ABL; bhāṣyante bhāṣiṣyante GN, bhāṣiṣyante bhāṣyante I, bhāṣiṣyate
bhāṣyate JKOW, bhāṣante bhāṣiṣyante PQ, bhāṣyante bhāṣite ca R, bhāṣiṣyante bhāṣante S,
bhāṣiṣyate Wvar. L67r.
352 siddhā] ABIJKOPW; siddhāḥ GLNQR. om. Tib
353 paramasiddhā] corr.; paramasiddhā | parākramā A, paramasiddhā | siddhaparākramā
BIJKOW, paramasiddhāḥ siddhaparākramāḥ GP, paramasiddhāḥ LNRChin, paramasiddhāḥ sar-
vasiddhaparākramāḥ QS
354 °yakṣa°] Σ; om. Tib, °yakṣarākṣasa° Wvar.
355 °mahoragābhir] GL; °mahoragādibhir Σ, °mahoragābhi° P, °mahoragābhiḥ R. Tib omits
°asuragaruḍakinnaramahoragādibhir. Chin gives °gandharvāsuramarutamahoragābhir.
356 vanditā] Σ; vanditāḥ GN, vanditāṃ L, vanditvā P
357 sarvajana°] GLNPRTib; sarvajina° Σ
358 °parivṛtā] Σ; °parivṛtāḥ GLNQR. K128v.
359 mama] ABGIQW; AJHITOKASYA J, ca ŚĀKYABHIKṢUŚRĪSOMABHADRASYA K, māṃ UḌḌĀKĀYĀḤ L,
om. NR, mama saparivārasya O, MAMUKASYA P, ca mama S
360 sarvasattvānāṃ ca] Σ; sarvasattvānāṃ P, om. GLQ, sarvasattvānāṃ ca saparivārasya Wvar
361 śivam ārogyaṃ] em.; rakṣāṃ śivam ārogyaṃ abhayaṃ ca sarvadā sarvathā sarvataḥ
sarvāvasthāsu ABJ, maitrī śivārogyaṃ GP, rakṣā śivam ārogyaṃ abhayaṃ ca sarvadā sarvathā
sarvataḥ sarvāvasthāsu IK, śivam ārogyaṃ ca mama sarvasattvānāṃ ca NR, maitrīṃ rakṣāṃ
śivam ārogyaṃ abhayaṃ ca sarvadā sarvathā sarvataḥ sarvāvasthāsu Q, śivam ārogyaṃ sarva-
sattvānāṃ ca L, abhayaṃ ca sarvadā sarvathā sarvataḥ sarvāvasthāsu śivam ārogyarakṣā OWvar,
rakṣāṃ kuru śivam ārogyaṃ abhayaṃ ca sarvadā sarvathā sarvataḥ sarvāvasthāsu W, śivam
ārogyam abhayaṃ Tib. Q76v
362 bhavatu] GKOPSWvar; bhavantu ABIJLQW, svāhā N, om. R
476 | Gergely Hidas
[9] idam avocad bhagavān āttamanā363 āyuṣmān rāhulo364 bhagavato365 bhāṣitam366
abhyanandann367 iti |
[10] āryamahādaṇḍadhāraṇīśītavatī368 samāptā369 |
8 An annotated translation
[0] Veneration to all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.370
||
363 āttamanā] Σ; om. GPTib
364 rāhulo] GLNPR; rāhulaḥ sā ca sarvāvatī parṣat sadevamānuṣāsuragandharvaś ca loko
AJQW, rāhulaḥ sā ca sarvāvatī parṣat sadevamānuṣāsuragaruḍagandharvaś ca loko BO, rāhulaḥ
sā ca sarvāvatī parṣadā sadevamānuṣāsuragandharvaś ca loko I, rāhulaḥ sā ca sarvāvatī pariṣat
sadevamānuṣāsuragaruḍagandharvaś ca loko K
365 bhagavato] Σ; bhagavān° I, bhagavataḥ W
366 bhāṣitam] Σ; samyaksaṃbuddhabhāṣitam W
367 abhyanandann] Σ; abhyanandan B. B182v
368 āryamahādaṇḍadhāraṇīśītavatī] N;
āryamahāśītavatīnāmamahāvidyārājñīmahānuśaṃsārakṣāsūtraṃ AB,
āryamahāśītavatīnāmamahāvidyārājñī IJKOWvar,
āryamahāśītavatīnāmamahāvidyāmahānuśaṃsārakṣāsūtraṃ Q,
āryamahāśītavatīmahādaṇḍadhāraṇīvidyārājñī G, daṇḍadhāraṇīāryamahāśītavatī L,
āryaśītavatīnāmamahāvidyārājñīrakṣāsūtraṃ P, āryamahādāṇḍadhāraṇīāryamahāśītavatī R,
āryamahādaṇḍanāmadhāraṇī Tib, āryamahāśītavatīnāmavidyārājñī W
369 samāptā] BJKLNRW; samāpta A, samāptāḥ GIO, samāptam PQWvar, samāptaḥ Wvar
370 Note the variations of this opening formula. The Chinese translation does not include an
obeisance.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 477
[1] Thus have I heard. At one time the Lord was dwelling in Rājagṛha. In the Śīta-
vana great burning ground,371 in the Iṅghikāyatana quarter,372 there the venerable
Rāhula373 was excessively disturbed by Deva-Grahas,374 Nāga-Grahas, Yakṣa-Gra
has, Rākṣasa-Grahas, Kinnara-Grahas, Garuḍa-Grahas, Mahoraga-Grahas, human-
Grahas, non-human-Grahas, Preta-Grahas, Bhūta-Grahas, Piśāca-Grahas,
||
371 Note that the majority of the selected manuscripts transmit ambiguous information about
the dwelling place of the Lord and Rāhula. While it is not completely unlikely that both of them
were staying in the Śītavana cremation ground (in avadāna No. 92 of the Avadānaśataka and the
Jyotiṣkāvadāna, No. 19 of the Divyāvadāna, the Buddha visits the Śītavana but does not stay
there), it seems more probable that they were in two separate places and this is also supported
by tatra in section [3]. Thus this textual tradition may reflect peculiar syntax, and it has been
deliberately chosen to be included in the main text so as to problematize this passage. Most likely
to clarify this ambiguity there exists an expanded textual tradition as well, transmitted in ms. L
and the Tibetan translation and commentary: here it is stated that the Buddha was staying on
the Gṛdhrakūṭa (Tib. adds: with 1250 monks) and Rāhula in Rājagṛha proper. In the Chinese
translation the Lord is in Rājagṛha and Rāhula in the Śītavana. Note that Mitra 1882, 164 curi-
ously writes that the ‘Buddha was sojourning on the bank of a tank near a cremation ground at
Rājagṛha.’
372 While interpreted as a toponym, Iṅghikāyatana may somehow be related to indhana ‘fuel’
referring to a place where firewood is stored. Note that the Tibetan translation indeed reads ‘next
to the great firewood-pile-like place.’
373 Note that Rāhula is also a main character in the Mekhalā-dhāraṇī, and the nidāna is quite
similar to the one in the MDDS. He and the Lord stay there in separate places, which reinforces
the supposition that this must also be the case in the MDDS. See Tripathi 1981.
374 Graha can mean both ‘grasping/seizure/possession’ or, in a personified form, a
‘Grasper/Seizer.’ In our text it appears to be a personified reference (see section [7]) to a demonic
being attached to various categories of other beings. Such compounds are found elsewhere in
South Asian literature: there are references to yakkhagaha in Dhammapada and Vinaya com-
mentaries, the Mahāmāyūrī lists devagraha, nāgagraha, asuragraha, marutagraha, garuḍagraha,
gandharvagraha, kinnaragraha, mahoragagraha, yakṣagraha, rākṣasagraha, pretagraha,
piśācagraha, bhūtagraha, kumbhāṇḍagraha, pūtanagraha, kaṭapūtanagraha, skandagraha, un-
mādagraha, chāyāgraha, apasmāragraha and ostārakagraha with slight variations at three
places (Takubo 1972, 3, 27, 57), and the Asilomapratisara lists devagraha, nāgagraha, asuragraha,
mārutagraha, garuḍagraha, gandharvagraha, kinnaragraha, mahoragagraha, pretagraha, pūtan-
agraha, kumbhāṇḍagraha, klāṭa(read: kaṭa)pūtanagraha, piśācagraha, kākhordagraha, vaitāḍa
(read: vetāla)graha, śīrṣagraha, hṛdayagraha, udaragraha, vastigraha, skandhagraha, bahu(read:
bāhu)graha, uru(read: ūru)graha, jaṅghagraha, pādagraha, nakṣatragraha, uparigraha, ala-
kṣmīgraha and vidya(read: vidyā)graha (Waldschmidt and Sander 1980, 273). Mann 2012 dis-
cusses the often problematic characteristics of Grahas in detail from the Atharvaveda onwards
and refers to Āraṇyakaparvan 219 of the Mahābhārata where devagraha, pitṛgraha, siddhagraha,
rākṣasagraha, gandharvagraha, yakṣagraha and piśācagraha are mentioned and Slouber (forth-
coming) writes about skandagraha ‘Skanda’s seizers’ in the Kriyākālaguṇottara.
478 | Gergely Hidas
Kumbhāṇḍa-Grahas, tigers, crows, owls, insects, creeping animals and other hu-
man and non-human beings.
[2] Then the venerable Rāhula went to the Lord375 and having approached him
bowed his head down at his feet, circumambulated him three times and shed tears
in front of him weeping.
[3] Then the Lord, already knowing [the answer], addressed Rāhula, ‘Why are you
shedding tears, O Rāhula, standing in front of me?’ Addressed thus, the venerable
Rāhula spoke this to the Lord, ‘O Lord, I have been dwelling here, in Rājagṛha, in
the Śītavana great burning ground, in the Iṅghikāyatana quarter. I have been dis-
turbed there by Deva-Grahas, Nāga-Grahas, Yakṣa-Grahas, Rākṣasa-Grahas, Kin-
nara-Grahas, Garuḍa-Grahas, Mahoraga-Grahas, human-Grahas, non-human-Gra-
has, Preta-Grahas, Bhūta-Grahas, Piśāca-Grahas, Kumbhāṇḍa-Grahas, tigers,
crows, owls, insects, creeping animals and other human and non-human beings.’
[4] Then the Lord addressed the venerable Rāhula, ‘O Rāhula, learn this Great
Daṇḍa-dhāraṇī Spell. It shall be protection, shelter and safeguard for the fourfold
assembly, advantage, benefit and comfort376 for monks, nuns, laymen and lay-
women for a long time.
[5] Namely,377
aṅgā, vaṅgā, bhaṅgā, varaṅgā, saṃsārataraṅgā, sāsadaṅgā, bhaṅgā, jesurā, eka-
tarā, ara vīrā, tara vīrā, kara vīrā, kara kara vīrā, indrā, indrakisarā, haṃsā,
haṃsakisarā, picimalā, mahākiccā, viheṭhikā, kālucchikā, aṅgodarā, jayā, jayālikā,
velā, elā, cintāli, cili cili, hili hili, sumati, vasumati, culu naṭṭe, culu culu naṭṭe, culu
nāḍi, kunāḍi, hārīṭaki, kārīṭaki, gauri, gandhāri, caṇḍāli, mātaṅgi,378 dharaṇi
dhāraṇi, uṣṭrapālike, kaca kārike, cala nāṭike, kākalike, lalamati, rakṣamati,
varākule, manmate utpale, kara vīre, tara vīre, tara tara vīre, kuru vīre, kuru kuru vīre,
||
375 The Tibetan translation gives here again an expanded and unambiguous formulation about
the dwelling place of the Lord: ‘…went where the Lord stayed on the Gṛdhrakūṭa.’
376 Note the addition of yogakṣemāya in some mss. and the even longer expansion of this
phrase in the Vasudhārā-dhāraṇī: ... arthāya hitāya sukhāya kṣemāya subhikṣāya yo-
gasaṃbhārāya ... (Dhīḥ 2007, 133.9–10).
377 Both dhāraṇī sections have been left untranslated except for the concluding sentences be-
cause of the difficulties of interpreting the majority of words.
378 Skilling 1992, 155 lists a number of Buddhist texts including these four vocatives as a com-
mon string of words.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 479
curu vīre, curu curu vīre, mahāvīre, iramati, varamati, rakṣamati, sarvārthasādhani,
paramārthasādhani, apratihate. May King Indra, King Yama, King Varuṇa, King Ku-
bera, King Manasvin, King Vāsuki, King Daṇḍāgni,379 King Brahmā Sahasrādhipati,380
King Buddha, the Lord, the Master of the Doctrine, the Chief Compassionate One in
the World, provide protection for me and for all beings. May they bestow shielding,
fencing round, shelter, peace, good fortune, removal of punishment, defence from
weapons, counteracting of poison, destruction of poison, sealing the boundary, seal-
ing the ground. May I live for a hundred years, may I see a hundred autumns.381
[6] Namely,
balavati, varamati, talamati, lakṣamati, rakṣamati,382 huru huru, phuru phuru, cara
cara, khara khara, khuru khuru, mati mati, bhūmicaṇḍe, kālikeṭi, akisalā, pīte,
sāmalate, hūle sthūle, sthūlaśikhare, jaya sthūle, jaya naṭṭe, cala nāsi, culu nāsi,
vāgbandhani, virohaṇi, solohite, aṇḍare, paṇḍare, karāle, kinnare, keyūre, ketumati,
bhūtaṃgame, bhūtamati, dhanye, maṅgalye, mahābalalohitamūle, acalacaṇḍe,
dhuraṃdharā, jayālike, jayā, gorohaṇi, curu curu, rundha rundha, dhuru dhuru,
khuru khuru, khurumati, bandhumati, dhuraṃdhare, dhare dhare, vidhare vimati,
viṣkambhaṇi, nāśani vināśani, bandhani, mokṣaṇi, mocani, mohani, bhāvani, śo-
dhani, saṃśodhani viśodhani, saṃkhiraṇi, saṃchindani, sādhu turumāṇe, hara hara
bandhumati, hiri hiri, khiri khiri, kharali, huru huru, piṅgale. Veneration to the glori-
ous383 Buddhas svāhā.
||
379 Appears to be the name of a Lokapāla. Cf. Vimalaprabhā: oṃ yāḥ vajrakrodharāja
nīladaṇḍāgneyyāṃ diśi rakṣāṃ kuru kuru svāhā. The four/eight standard Lokapālas are
Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Virūpākṣa, Virūḍhaka and Vaiśravaṇa/Kubera; Indra, Yama, Varuṇa, Kubera,
Īśāna, Agni, Nairṛta and Vāyu.
380 Note the unusual Sahasrādhipati for Sahā(ṃ)pati. Note also the non-standard lengthening
of short ‘i’-stem nominative endings in this list. While Vāsukī, Agnī and Adhipatī are attested
forms in various Buddhist texts, the present case may also reflect a process of assimilation re-
sulting from the position of these words between Manasvī and Dharmasvāmī.
381 The Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī includes this sentence (a common phrase with slight variations
from Vedic literature onwards) more than forty times.
382 Note that some of these words appear in the section [5] as well.
383 Note bhagavatāṃ for bhagavatānāṃ.
480 | Gergely Hidas
[7] O Rāhula, if one [recites and] ties this Great Daṇḍa-dhāraṇī Spell of an alto-
gether384 hundred-and-eight padas385 into a knot386 on a thread and [it is] worn
around the forearm or the neck, protection will be established all around up to one
hundred yojanas.387 By [offering] fragrances, flowers or seals neither humans nor
non-humans will come near, [similarly to] poison, weapons, sickness, fever, high
fever, spells, mantras and Vetālas.388 One will not die from illness, fire, poison or
water.389 It causes all uses of properly employed spells and mantras to be blocked.390
It releases from bonds made by the enemy. It destroys all diseases, sorrow, and ob-
stacles.391 It eliminates discord and agitation. It liberates from all Grahas. If a Graha
does not release, his head will split into seven like the blossom of the Arjaka
plant.392 Vajrapāṇi,393 the great leader394 of the Yakṣas, will attentively395 break his
head with a blazing, burning and single-flamed vajra.396 The Four Great Kings will
||
384 Or: ‘at least’.
385 Note the variations between aṣṭottara° and daśottara° in the mss. Pada seems to refer to
short sections of the dhāraṇī itself (cf. mantra-pada). Note that the Uṣṇīṣavijayā-dhāraṇī is di-
vided into one hundred portions (Yuyama 1997, 732). The Tibetan translation gives daśot-
taraśatāyāṃ excluding pada. The Chinese translation says that the spell should be recited a hun-
dred and eight times.
386 It is not unlikely that granthi ‘knot’ carries a plural sense here.
387 A yojana is calculated to be a few miles, varying according to different sources. See Fleet
1906 and more recently and extensively Skilling 1998. Note that the Tibetan translation gives ten
yojanas instead of a hundred.
388 On Vetāla/Vetāḍa see Skilling 2007 and Dezső 2010.
389 For various lists of dangers and advantages in rakṣā texts see Strauch 2008, 40–47.
390 Note the expanded form of this sentence in some mss: ‘It causes all unaccomplished uses
of properly employed spells and mantras to be accomplished. It causes those accomplished to
be disturbed. It causes those [spells and mantras] used by the enemy to be blocked.’ Cf. Va-
jravidāraṇī: asiddhānāṃ siddhakaraṃ siddhānāṃ cāpi vināśanakaraṃ (Iwamoto 1937, 7).
391 Or: ‘Vighnas’ if ‘obstacles’ are considered here personified. Cf. the expanded ‘Vighnas and
Vināyakas’ in some mss.
392 Ocimum Gratissimum, a kind of basil.
393 On the complex history, development and transformations of the Lord of the Yakṣas, a great
protector, see e.g. Lamotte 1966 and Snellgrove 1987, 134–141.
394 Senāpati appears to have a more general meaning, ‘leader’ or ‘head,’ in this contex (and
elsewhere too in Buddhist literature), rather than the specific sense of ‘army general.’
395 Note the variant from ava √dhyai ‘disapproving, rebuking’.
396 The Tibetan translation adds ‘like the Arjaka’. The breaking or bursting of one’s head as a
punishment appears in several Buddhist and Brahmanical texts – in the former instances often
by the intervention of Vajrapāṇi. For a detailed study of this phenomenon see Witzel 1987. The
examples quoted there and further ones include various Pali sources (Āṭānāṭiyasutta DN.32: api
ssu naṃ mārisa amanussā sattadhā pi ssa muddhaṃ phāleyyuṃ; Ambaṭṭhasutta DN.3. and Cūḷa-
saccakasutta MN.35: tena kho pana samayena vajirapāṇī yakkho mahantaṃ ayokūṭaṃ (āyasaṃ
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 481
destroy him with an iron discus and the stroke of a razor-edge.397 He will fall from
that Yakṣa-world398 and not gain residence in the capital, Aḍakavatī.399
[8] O Rāhula, if this Great Daṇḍa-dhāraṇī Spell is recited [even] once, one is released
from kings, thieves, water, fire, poison, weapons and from all sorts of dangers in
forests, woods, mountains or impassable places. This Great Daṇḍa-dhāraṇī Spell
was, is and will be proclaimed by the Buddhas equalling the sand-particles of
ninety-one Gaṅgā rivers.400 It is effective and highly accomplished. It is praised by
||
vajiraṃ MN) ādāya ādittaṃ sampajjalitaṃ sajotibhūtaṃ ambaṭṭhassa māṇavassa (saccakassa
nigaṇṭhaputtassa MN) upari vehāsaṃ ṭhito hoti — sacāyaṃ ambaṭṭho māṇavo (saccako nigaṇṭha-
putto MN) bhagavatā yāvatatiyakaṃ sahadhammikaṃ pañhaṃ puṭṭho na byākarissati, etthe-
vassa sattadhā muddhaṃ phālessāmī” ti); the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka: saptadhāsya sphuṭen
mūrdhā arjakasyeva mañjarī | ya imaṃ mantra śrutvā vai atikramed dharmabhāṇakam;
Avadānaśataka: atha na paryeṣase, niyataṃ devasya saptadhā mūrdhānaṃ sphālayāmi;
Mahāmāyūrī: yas caimāṃ mahāvidyāṃ kaś cid atikramiṣyati saptadhāsya sphuṭen mūrdhā ar-
jakasyeva mañjarī and yaś cemām ānanda mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñīm atikramet tasya vajrapāṇiḥ
saptadhā mūrdhānam arjakasyeva mañjarīṃ sphoṭayiṣyati; Sādhanamālā: yaś cainam ahir daśet
tasya saptadhā sphuṭen mūrdhā arjakasyeva mañjarī; Vajrāvalī: yo nāpakrāmati tasyāham anena
prajvalitahūṃkāravajreṇa dīptapradīptena mahatā jñānavajreṇa mūrddhānaṃ śatadhā vi-
kirāmīti; Kriyāsaṃgraha: tasyāham anena prajvalitahūṃkāreṇa dīptapradīptena mahatā jñānav-
ajreṇa mūrdhānaṃ śatadhā vikarāmi and yo nāpakramet tasya vajrapāṇi jvalitaśatakiraṇava-
jreṇa mūrdhni śatadhā vikiret; Hevajratantra: yadi na varṣanti tadā mūrdhā sphuṭati
yathārjakasyeva mañjarī or various Upaniṣads; the Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha: balāt kāmaya-
mānasya niṣkāmāṃ kāṃ cid aṅganām | bhavataḥ śatadhā mūrdhā dagdhabuddheḥ sphuṭed iti
and Kathāsaritsāgara: jānan yadi na vadiṣyasi vidaliṣyati te śiraḥ śatadhā.
397 The razor edge is likely to be that of the iron discus (cf. the Tibetan translation). Note that
the Chinese translation interprets this section differently. It says that one should recite this spell
fully concentrated when demons come to cause trouble and do not leave. Then those demons
perceive the reciter as if he was Vajrapāṇi, the great Yakṣa leader, being a brightly blazing vajra.
The Four Great Heavenly Kings drive the demons away with iron wheels and sharp swords. The
demons’ heads split into seven and their bodies are torn into small pieces.
398 It is possible that this reference to a Graha as a Yakṣa comes from the association of posses-
sion with Yakṣas from Vedic times onwards (DeCaroli 2004, 25–26). The category of Yakṣa oth-
erwise appears to be rather fluid in dhāraṇī literature too: in the Mahāpratisarā-Mahāvidyārājñī,
for example, even gods and goddesses are referred to by this denomination at one place (Hidas
2012, 242–243.18–21).
399 For similar and further punishments for Yakṣas cf. Āṭānāṭiyasutta: na me so, mārisa, aman-
usso labheyya āḷakamandāya nāma rājadhāniyā vatthuṃ vā vāsaṃ vā. na me so, mārisa, aman-
usso labheyya yakkhānaṃ samitiṃ gantuṃ. api ssu naṃ, mārisa, amanussā anāvayham pi naṃ
kareyyuṃ avivayhaṃ. api ssu naṃ, mārisa, amanussā attāhi pi paripuṇṇāhi paribhāsāhi
paribhāseyyuṃ.
400 Note that the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra and the Vimalakīrtinirdeśasūtra, for example, give
various numbers of Gaṅgā rivers (usually up to eighty) with reference to their sand-particles.
482 | Gergely Hidas
all the Devas, Nāgas, Yakṣas, Gandharvas, Asuras, Garuḍas, Kinnaras and Mahora-
gas, and embraced by all assemblies of people. May there be welfare and freedom
from disease for me and for all beings in all dangers and troubles.’401
[9] Thus spoke the Lord. Transported with joy, the venerable Rāhula402 praised the
words spoken by the Lord.
[10] The noble Great Daṇḍa-dhāraṇī-śītavatī ends here.
References
Ācāryakriyāsamuccaya: see Moriguchi 1992.
Amoghapāśakalparāja: see Mikkyo-seiten-kenkyukai 1998–2011.
Avadānaśataka: see Vaidya 1958.
Bhattacharyya, Benoytosh (1925–1928), Sādhanamālā. Vols I–II. Baroda: Oriental Institute.
Bṛhatkathāślokasaṃgraha: see Mallinson 2005.
van Buitenen, Johannes A.B. (1975), The Mahābhārata. The Book of the Assembly Hall. The Book
of the Forest. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Copp, Paul (2014), The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese
Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Dalton, Jacob, andSam van Schaik (2006), Tibetan Tantric Manuscripts from Dunhuang. A De-
scriptive Catalogue of the Stein Collection at the British Library. Leiden: Brill.
Davidson, Ronald (2014a), ‘Studies in dhāraṇī literature II: Pragmatics of dhāraṇīs’, Bulletin of
the School of Oriental and African Studies, 77: 5–61.
Davidson, Ronald (2014b), ‘Studies in Dhāraṇī Literature III: Seeking the Parameters of a
Dhāraṇī-piṭaka, the Formation of the Dhāraṇīsaṃgrahas, and the Place of the Seven Bud-
dhas’, in R.K. Payne (ed.) Scripture:Canon::Text:Context. Essays Honoring Lewis Lancaster.
Berkeley: Institute of Buddhist Studies and BDK America, 119–180.
DeCaroli, Robert (2004), Haunting the Buddha. Indian Popular Religions and the Formation of
Buddhism. New York.
Delhey, Martin (2012), ‘The Textual Sources of the Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa (Mañjuśrīmūlakalpa),
With Special Reference to its Early Nepalese Witness NGMPP A39/4’, in Journal of the Ne-
pal Research Centre, 14: 55–75.
Dezső, Csaba (2010), ‘Encounters with Vetālas. Studies on Fabulous Creatures I’, in Acta Orien-
talia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 63: 391–426.
Divyāvadāna: see Vaidya 1959.
||
401 This sentence may be a later addition to the text. Cf. the other invocations placed at the end
of sections [5] and [6]. It may, however, also be possible that the MDDS actually ended with this
sentence and not the usual concluding formula at an earlier stage of textual development.
402 Note the logically inconsistent expansion of this formulaic ending with ‘the entire assembly
and the world with its Devas, humans, Asuras and Gandharvas’ in a number of mss.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 483
Duquenne, Robert (1988), ‘Ganapati Rituals in Chinese’, in Bulletin de l’École francaise d’Ex-
treme-Orient, 77: 321–354.
Dwivedi, Vrajavallabh, and S. Bahulkar (1994), Vimalaprabhāṭīkā of Kalkin Śrīpuṇḍarīka on
Śrīlaghukālacakratantrarāja by Śrīmañjuśrīyaśas. Vols 2–3. Sarnath. [Vol. 1. published by
Upadhyaya, Jagannātha in 1986].
Fleet, John F. (1906), ‘The Yojana and the Li’, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Brit-
ain and Ireland 38: 1011–1013.
Ganapati Sastri, T. (1920–1925), Āryamañjuśrīmūlakalpa. Trivandrum.
Goodall, Dominic, and Marion Rastelli (eds) (2013), Tāntrikābhidhānakośa. A Dictionary of Tech-
nical Terms from Hindu Tantric Literature. Vol. III. Vienna: Verlag der österreichischen Aka-
demie der Wissenschaften.
Guan, Di (2012), ‘Three Sanskrit Fragments Found in Arthur M. Sackler Museum’, in China Tibe-
tology, 19: 26–38. [A slightly revised version of this article, titled Three Sanskrit Fragments
Preserved in Arthur M. Sackler Museum of Peking University, appeared in the Annual Re-
port of The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University 17
(2014): 109–118]
Gupta, A. S. (1967), Vāmana-Purāṇa. Varanasi.
Halkias, Georgios (2004), ‘Tibetan Buddhism Registered: Imperial Archives from the Palace-
Temple of ’Phang-thang’, in The Eastern Buddhist, 36: 46–105.
Harrison, Paul (1996), ‘Preliminary Notes on a gZungs ’dus Manuscript from Tabo’, in Michael
Hahn, Jens-Uwe Hartmann and Roland Steiner (eds), Suhṛllekhāḥ. Festgabe für Helmut Ei-
mer. Swisttal-Odendorf: Indica et Tibetica Verlag, 49–68.
Herrmann-Pfandt, Adelheid (2008), Die lHan kar ma: ein früher Katalog der ins Tibetische über-
setzten buddhistischen Texte. Kritische Neuausgabe mit Einleitung und Materialien. Vi-
enna: Verlag der österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.
Hevajratantra: see Snellgrove 1959.
Hidas, Gergely (2003), ‘Preliminary Notes on the Mahāpratisarā Mahāvidyārājñī, a Buddhist
Protective Text from the Pañcarakṣā-collection’, in Berliner Indologische Studien, 15–17:
263–284.
Hidas, Gergely (2012), Mahāpratisarā-Mahāvidyārājñī. The Great Amulet, Great Queen of
Spells. Introduction, Critical Editions and Annotated Translation. Śata-piṭaka Series Vol.
636. New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture and Aditya Prakashan.
Hoernle, August F.R. (1893–1912), The Bower Manuscript. Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent
of Government Printing India.
Iwamoto, Yutaka (1937), Kleinere Dhāraṇī Texte. Mahāsītavatī. Beiträge zur Indologie, Heft 2.
Kyoto.
Kathāsaritsāgara: see Sastri 1977.
Kawagoe, Eishin (2005), dKar chag 'Phang thang ma. Sendai.
Kim, Jinah (2010), ‘A Book of Buddhist Goddesses: Illustrated Manuscripts of the Pañcarakṣā
Sūtra and their Ritual Use’, in Artibus Asiae, 70: 259–329.
Kim, Jinah (2013), Receptacle of the Sacred. Illustrated manuscripts and the Buddhist book cult
in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kinjawadekar, Ramachandrashastri (1929–36), The Mahābhāratam with the Bharata Bha-
wadeepa Commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha. Poona: Chitrashala Press.
Kriyāsaṃgraha: see Tanemura 2000.
Lamotte, Étienne (1966), ‘Vajrapāṇi en Inde’, in Mélanges de sinologie offerts à Monsieur Paul
Demiéville, Paris: 113–159.
484 | Gergely Hidas
Lancaster, Lewis R. (1979), The Korean Buddhist Canon: a descriptive catalogue, Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press.
Lewis, Todd T. (2000), Popular Buddhist Texts from Nepal, Albany: State University of New York
Press.
Lokesh Chandra (1981), Pañca-Rakṣā. Two Sanskrit Manuscripts from Nepal. New Delhi:
Sharada Rani.
Lokesh Chandra (2010), Sanskrit Manuscripts from Tibet. 1. Vimalaprabhā commentary on the
Kālacakra-tantra. 2. Pañcarakṣā. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan
Mahābhārata: see Kinjawadekar 1929–36.
Mahāmāyūrī: see Takubo 1972.
Mallinson, James (2005), The Emperor of the Sorcerers by Budhasvāmin. Vols 1–2. New York:
New York University Press and the JJC Foundation.
Mann, Richard D. (2012), The Rise of Mahāsena. The Transformation of Skanda-Kārttikeya in
North India from the Kuṣāṇa to Gupta Empires, Leiden: Brill.
Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa: see Ganapati Sastri 1920–25.
Mevissen, Gerd J. R. (1989), ‘Studies in Pañcarakṣā Manuscript Painting’, in Berliner Indolo-
gische Studien, 4–5: 339–374.
Mikkyo-seiten-kenkyukai (1986), ‘Vajradhātumahāmaṇḍalopāyikā-sarvavajrodaya by
Ānandagarbha’, in Taisho-daigaku sogo-bukkyo-kenkyujo kiyo, 8: 28–56.
Mikkyo-seiten-kenkyukai (1995), Siddhaikavīratantra. Taisho-daigaku sogo-bukkyo-kenkyujo
kiyo, 15: 366–349 and 16: 1–9.
Mikkyo-seiten-kenkyukai (1998–2011), Transcribed Sanskrit Text of the Amoghapāśakalparāja.
Parts I–VII. Taisho-daigaku sogo-bukkyo-kenkyusho nenpo 20–23, 26, 32, 33.
Mitra, Rajendralala (1882), The Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal. Calcutta: Asiatic Society
of Bengal.
Monier-Williams, Sir Monier (1899), A Sanskrit-English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Moriguchi, Mitsutoshi (1992), ‘Ācāryakriyāsamuccaya Kanjo(bon) Tekisuto to Wayaku (I–2): Rya-
kujutsukyo “Hosshikishidai” Kaigi’, in Chisan Gakuho, 41: 1–31.
Nanjio, Bunyiu (1883), A Catalogue of the Chinese Translation of the Buddhist Tripiṭaka. Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Nattier, Jan (2003), A Few Good Men: The Bodhisattva Path according to the Inquiry of Ugra.
Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.
Oldenburg, Sergei (1899), ‘Mahāmāyūrī Vidyārājñī. Otryvki Kasgarskich i sanskritskich
rukopisej iz sobranija N.F. Petrovskago II. Otryvki iz Pañcarakṣā’, in Zapiski vostocnago
otdeleniya imperatorskago russkago archeologiceskago obscestva, 11: 215–264.
Orzech, Charles D. (2011), ‘Translation of Tantras and Other Esoteric Buddhist Scriptures’, in
Charles D. Orzech et al. (eds), Esoteric Buddhism and the Tantras in East Asia. Leiden–
Boston: Brill, 439–450.
Overbey, Ryan R. (2016), ‘Vicissitudes of Text and Rite in the Great Peahen Queen of Spells’, in
David B. Gray and Ryan R. Overbey (eds), Tantric Traditions in Transmission and Transla-
tion. New York: Oxford University Press, 257–283.
Petech, Luciano (1984), Mediaeval History of Nepal (c. 750–1482). Second, thoroughly revised
edition. Rome: IsMEO.
Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra: see Vaidya 1960.
Sādhanamālā: see Bhattacharyya 1925–28.
Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī: A Buddhist Apotropaic Scripture | 485
Sakurai, Munenobu (1996), Indo Mikkyo Girei Kenkyu: Koki indo Mikkyo no Kanchoshidai.
Kyoto.
Śākya, Min Bahadur (2004), Pañcarakṣā Sūtra. Lalitpur.
Sander, Lore (2007), ‘Preliminary remarks on two versions of the Āṭānāṭīya (Āṭānāṭika)-Sūtra in
Sanskrit’, in Journal of the International College for Advanced Buddhist Studies, 11: 159–
196.
Sanderson, Alexis (2009), ‘The Śaiva Age – The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism During the Early
Medieval Period’, in S. Einoo (ed.), Genesis and Development of Tantrism. Tokyo: 41–349.
Sarvavajrodaya: see Mikkyo-seiten-kenkyukai 1986.
Sastri, J. L. (1977), Kathāsaritsāgara of Somadeva Bhaṭṭa. Delhi. [Reprint of the edition by Pt.
Durgaprasad and K. P. Parab, Bombay, 1889]
Siddhaikavīratantra: see Mikkyo-seiten-kenkyukai 1995.
de Silva, Lily (1981), ‘Paritta: A Historical and Religious Study of the Buddhist Ceremony for
Peace and Prosperity in Sri Lanka’, Colombo: National Museums of Sri Lanka.
Skilling, Peter (1992), ‘The Rakṣā Literature of the Śrāvakayāna’, in Journal of the Pali Text Soci-
ety, 16: 109–182.
Skilling, Peter (1994), Mahāsūtras: Great Discourses of the Buddha. Vol. I, Oxford: Pali Text So-
ciety.
Skilling, Peter (1998), ‘A Note on Dhammapada 60 and the Length of the Yojana’, in Journal of
the Pali Text Society, 24: 149–170.
Skilling, Peter (2007), ‘Zombies and Half-Zombies: Mahāsūtras and Other Protective Measures’,
in Journal of the Pali Text Society, 29 (Festschrift in honour of the 80th birthday of K.R. Nor-
man in 2005 and the 125th anniversary in 2006 of the founding of the Pali Text Society):
313–330.
Slouber, Michael (forthcoming), ‘Vulnerability and Protection in the Śaiva Tantras’, in Dominic
Goodall and Pierre-Sylvain Filliozat (eds), Mélanges tantriques à la mémoire d’N.R. Bhatt.
Pondicherry: Institut Français d'Indologie.
Snellgrove, David L. (1959), The Hevajra Tantra. A Critical Study, London: Oxford University
Press.
Snellgrove, David L. (1987), Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Suc-
cessors, London: Serindia Publications.
Strauch, Ingo (2008), The Bajaur collection: A new collection of Kharoṣṭhī manuscripts. A pre-
liminary catalogue and survey. Online version 1.1: 1–79.
Strauch, Ingo (2014), ‘The evolution of the Buddhist rakṣā genre in the light of new evidence
from Gandhāra: The *Manasvi-nāgarāja-sūtra from the Bajaur Collection of Kharoṣṭhī Man-
uscripts’, in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 77: 63–84.
Study Group on Buddhist Sanskrit Literature (2006), Vimalakīrtinirdeśa: A Sanskrit Edition
Based upon the Manuscript Newly Found at the Potala Palace. Tokyo: Taisho University
Press.
Takubo, Shuyo (1972), Ārya-Mahā-Māyūrī Vidyā-Rājñī. Tokyo: Sankibo.
Tanemura, Ryugen (2000), A Preliminary Edition of Chapters 1–6 of the Kriyāsaṃgrahapañjikā.
Unpublished.
Tanemura, Ryugen (2004), Kuladatta’s Kriyāsaṃgrahapañjikā. A Critical Edition and Annotated
Translation of Selected Sections. Groningen: Egbert Forsten.
Tripathi, Chandrabhal (1981), ‘Gilgit-Blätter der Mekhalā-dhāraṇī’, in Studien zur Indologie und
Iranistik, 7: 153–161.
Péter-Dániel Szántó
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit
fragment of the Rigyarallitantra
Abstract: This paper is centred on the first edition of a Sanskrit palm-leaf frag-
ment of the Rigyaralli (Add.1680.12), a slightly obscure, late Buddhist tantra. The
introductory study contains a description of the multiple-text manuscript the
fragment is transmitted in, an examination of testimonia, a brief overview of the
Tibetan translation of the tantra and some related literature, and a short note on
the pantheon. I argue that the text must date from the early 11th c. CE. Accompa-
nied by a tentative translation and some notes, the edition is given in two forms:
critical and diplomatic.
1 Cambridge fragments Or.158 and Add.1680.12/13
The fact that the fragments under scrutiny here, Or.158 of 12 folios and
Add.1680.12 plus 1680.13 of one folio each, originally formed part of the same
multiple-text manuscript, as well as the fact that the texts contained therein are
fragments of the Buddhakapālatantra, the Vajrāmṛtatantra, and the Rigyaral-
litantra, were first determined by Harunaga Isaacson in 1997.1
Manuscript Or.1582 was purchased by Bendall during his 1898–99 tour (see For-
migatti's contribution in this volume). The latter fragment of two folios has been
described by Bendall (1883, 171), but he could not identify the contents. About
Add.1680.12 Bendall stated that it is ‘a leaf of a work on Buddhist mudrās’. He dated
it to the 12th–13th century and gave two short transcriptions with one misprint or
misreading in the first and two in the second. The first of these transcripts is from
line 1 of the recto: aṅkuśamudreti | karadvayasya kaniṣkā[sic!]bhyām anyonyam
aṃkuśarūpaṃ; whereas the second is from the line 2 on the verso, a final rubric:
svare[sic!]ya[sic!]buddhākhyāna(?)paṭalaś caturthaḥ ||. Bendall added a short note
after this: ‘At the beginning of the next chapter occur the names of Çuddhodhana
||
1 Isaacson, personal communication, 2008. Luo 2010 has used the Buddhakapāla fragment for
his edition; a study of the Vajrāmṛta is currently under preparation by Francesco Sferra (see his
contribution to the present volume).
2 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00158-00001/1.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-016, © 2017 P.-D. Szántó, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
488 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
[sic!], Aralli, Rāhula, etc.’ About Add. 1680.13 he had nothing to say, except to con-
jecture a title ‘Niruttara Tantra’ and to describe it as ‘Non-Buddhistic’. The present
paper will focus on Add.1680.12.
The document, of which for the time being unfortunately we have only the
aforementioned fragments, was either created as a multiple-text manuscript, or
was treated as such shortly after its copying. Suggestive of this fact is that on fol.
1r, or one might say the title page, of Or.158, in the upper left corner we find — in
addition to some scribal exercises in Sanskrit and Newar — a short list rather sim-
ilar to the main scribal hand. This list, or one might say table of contents, runs as
follows: [siddham sign] vajrāmṛtatantra || vajrāraṇitantra || buddhakapālatantra
|| (Cf. Sanderson 2009, 315, who silently corrects vajrāraṇi- to vajrārali-). How-
ever, if we reunite Or.158 and Add.1680.12 and 1680.13, the contents seem to be
the Vajrāmṛtatantra, the Buddhakapālatantra, and one folio of the Rigyarallitan-
tra; in other words, the Vajrāralitantra is either missing (but then the Rigyaral-
litantra is not recorded) or confused with the Rigyarallitantra.
Since it starts on fol. 1v, the first item in the multiple-text manuscript is the
Vajrāmṛtatantra, but, curiously, this text also has a colophon at its end giving the
date of copying as [Nepāla]samvat 282, the 13th of the bright fortnight of āśvina,
day of Śan[a]iścara = Saturday, September 22, 1162 CE (See Luo ibid. n. 47, only
the year is given in Sanderson 2009, 315). Had the scribe intended to go on to copy
the other tantras into a multiple-text manuscript, he would have more likely
given the date of copying at the very end and not after the first item of the collec-
tion. However, there can be little doubt that the scribe of the other texts is the
very same or that there are at least two scribes writing in very similar ways, for
which the most likely scenario is that they were trained in the same scriptorium.
I therefore propose that either the original scribe or somebody working in the
same environment continued copying the other scriptures as a kind of after-
thought. Unfortunately, we do not have colophons for the other texts.
At first glance there seem to be good chances that the date for the copying of
the other scriptures must be somewhere in the more or less immediate range of
1162 CE. However, we cannot be entirely sure. For manuscripts in the Indo-Nepa-
lese world sometimes contain additions in the same hand as late as sixty years
after the first colophon. A case in point is a manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā now
kept at the Asia Society, New York. The first colophon dates to the 15th regnal year
of Vigrahapāla, the son of Nayapāla (i.e. Vigrahapāla III), whereas the second
colophon recording some renovation dates from the 8th regnal year of Gopāla IV.
Although the image I have at my disposal is not of a very high quality,3 I cannot
||
3 www.himalayanart.org, item no. 88677.
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 489
find any significant differences between the two scribal hands. We are therefore
dealing either with the same scribe at the very beginning and presumably very
end of his career, or with a hand from the same scriptorium.
Be that as it may, once we are ready to accept that all our fragments were part
of the same manuscript, we face another problem. The texts in this multiple-text
manuscript are individually numbered, but for the fragment containing the
Rigyarallitantra the surviving folio number on the margin is 13. It is quite impos-
sible that the content of the previous folios (up to fol. 13, which survives) was
exclusively the Rigyarallitantra. The Rigyarallitantra in the Sde dge edition of its
Tibetan translation numbers 68 lines. The single surviving folio accounts for
eleven lines of Sde dge text. It follows that only about six and a half to seven folios
of the kind we are presently dealing with are needed for the entire text. The best
candidate to make up for the missing space would be the Vajrārallitantra, which
is only slightly longer that the Rigyarallitantra (by two and two thirds of Sde dge
line, to be exact), and would therefore also need about seven folios in our palm-
leaf manuscript. Moreover, this would account for the ‘table of contents’ men-
tioned above. In this case, however, it seems that, although the Vajrāmṛtatantra
and the Buddhakapālatantra were numbered individually, the two ‘Arali’ tantras
were taken as one and copied as a continuous text.
2 Testimonia for the Rigyarallitantra
In surviving Sanskrit texts there is a single4 known attestation for the existence and
currency of the Rigyarallitantra. This is a referenced quotation in Raviśrījñāna’s
||
4 During the editorial process, I became aware of another, very important, testimony, the fourth
and the seventeenth chapters of Abhayākaragupta’s Āmnāyamañjarī (Tōh./D 1198): 1) D 53a: ri
gī a ra lli’i rgyud du gsungs pa | ri gī lha mo rol pa ni rdo rje ’dzin pa’o zhes so ||; 2) D 151b–152a: ri
gī a ra lli’i rgyud du | shar lus ’phags po dang lho ’dzam bu gling dang nub pa glang spyod dang
byang sgra mi snyan ni gnas te | gnas bzhir ni lha mo bzhi rnams dang ri rab kyi rtse mo la ri gī gnas
so zhes gsungs pa dang | […]. Very recently, the first seventeen chapters of this major work be-
came available in a splendid bilingual manuscript published facsimile: Institute of the Collection
and Preservation of Ancient Tibetan Texts of Sichuan Province (compilers), Dpal yang dag par
sbyor ba’i rgyud kyi rgyal po’i rgya cher ’grel pa by Pandita ’jigs med ’buying gnas sbas pa, Rare
and Ancient Tibetan Texts Collected in Tibetan Regions Series vol. 1, Sichuan Nationalities Pub-
lishing House & Guangming Daily Press. (I am grateful to Toru Tomabechi and Kazuo Kano for
alerting me to this fact as well as to the Codrington Library of All Souls College for promptly
purchasing a copy.) The passages read: 1) Ms 154r (p. 309) uktaṃ hi rigyarallitantre | rigī devī
arallir vajradhara iti |; 2) Ms 430v (p. 864) rigyarallitantre ca | pūrvavideho jambūdvīpam (em.,
490 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
commentary on the Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti, the Amṛtakaṇikā (ed. Lal 1994, 11). To
my knowledge, the dates of Raviśrījñāna have not been satisfactorily settled. He
must postdate the Vimalaprabhā, that is to say the mid-11th century, and he must
predate c. 1200 CE, since Vibhūticandra (for whose dates see Stearns 1996) wrote a
subcommentary, the Amṛtakaṇikoddyota, on the Amṛtakaṇikā. The testimony
amounts to one and a half verses, the initial three hemistichs of chapter 5. Since
this passage also survives in the present fragment, I will discuss the particulars be-
low.
The same passage and its continuation, amounting to a total of four verses,
are quoted in a long commentary on the Hevajratantra, the *Vajrapadasāra-
saṃgraha of *Yaśobhadra.5 There is an as yet unsubstantiated suspicion that this
text survives in Sanskrit. We do not know much about the author,6 but he must
post-date the Vimalaprabhā, which he quotes and refers to. He too therefore can-
not predate the mid-11th century.
||
jambūpam Ms) aparagodānīyam uttarakuruś ca pīṭhaṃ | catuṣpīṭhe caturdevyo merumūrdhni rigī
sthitety uktam |.
5 D 64b: de bzhin du dpal ā ra lli chen po’i rgyud du yang gsungs pa | rgyal po chen po zas gtsang
ni | | ā ra lli ru yang dag gsal | | sgyu ma chen mo ri gi d[e]r | | ’gro ba shes rab thabs bdag nyid | |
rdo rje sems dpa’ don kun grub | | mchog tu dga’ ba bde ba che | | lha mo sa ’tsho phyag rgya che |
| sgra gcan ’dzin bzang bde ba che | | sa ’tsho ma ni sgyu ’phrul che | | sgyu ma’i rang bzhin spros
pa las | | lhan cig skyes dga’ dga’ rab bshad | | rdo rje sgyu ma’i rnam ’phrul gyis | | slar yang bcom
ldan rdo rje can | | skyed pa por ni rab tu grags | | sgyu ma chen mo skyed mor ’gyur | | de nyid phyag
rgyar rab tu grags || zhes so ||. The quoted text is from the beginning of the fifth chapter (D 179b–
180a). Somewhat curiously, the title of the source text is given as *Mahārallitantra. This must be
a slip of the pen on the author’s part, or perhaps an error of the translators. *Yaśobhadra quotes
from the *Mahārallitantra at another point (D 60b), but the quoted text here is not from the
Rigyarallitantra, but the Vajrārallitantra (beginning of the eighth chapter, D 175a).
6 This is in spite of the fact that his colophon (D 146a–146b) is quite informative. Here the author
tells us that he was a Kashmiri monk living in Paṭṭikeraka (pa ṭṭi ke ra ka) at the *Kanakastūpa
(gser gyi mchod rten) monastery, and that he finished his commentary in the 18th regnal year of
one *Haribrahmadeva (’phrog byed tshangs pa’i lha), styled king of Vaṅga (bhaṃ ga). A ruler
bearing a very similar name, Harikāladeva, is mentioned in the so-called Maināmati copperplate
inscription dated Śaka year 1141 = 1220 CE (Bhattacharyya 1933). This document records a gift to
the Durgottārā vihārī, clearly a Buddhist institution, in the city of Paṭṭikerā. The matching topo-
nym (which can almost certainly be located in the vicinity of present Comilla in Bangladesh), the
possibility of a generally Buddhist environment, and the similarity in the royal names suggest
some sort of connection, but it is one that cannot be determined more precisely for the time be-
ing. Another candidate for this ruler may be Harivarmadeva (Sanderson 2009, 82); perhaps the
confusion in the Tibetan translation was due to an Eastern pronunciation: Harivarma > *Hari-
bormo > *Haribrommo > *Haribrahma > ’Phrog byed tshangs pa. I know of at least three Buddhist
manuscripts copied during his reign.
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 491
Another major commentary, this time on the Herukābhidhāna, which can be
suspected to have survived in Sanskrit (Krung bod dkar chag, p. 120, no. 134), but
is not yet accessible, is the *Tattvaviśadā of *Śāśvatavajra. This author mentions
the name of the text (together with the Vajrāralli) in a list of yoga- and yoginītan-
tras,7 and quotes it at least once.8 We cannot determine the identity of the author
for certain, but he too must postdate the emergence of the Kālacakra system, since
he shows awareness of this deity and at least one of the cult’s texts (cf. D 325b).
Among works that are now available only in Tibetan with no Sanskrit original
in sight, a referenced quotation9 can be found in the *Pīṭhādinirṇaya of *Śākya-
rakṣita. There might have been several authors by this name; here we are most
likely dealing with the disciple of Abhayākaragupta, therefore not a very early
author.
By far the longest quotation, roughly half of chapter three, is to be found in
the *Lūyipādābhisamayavṛtti of *Tathāgatavajra.10 While this is a very important
||
7 D 342a–342b: rgyud du ni shes rab dang thabs dag gis gzhung yang dag par spel ba rnams su ste
der rgyal bas gsal bar byed pa rnams ni ’dus pa phyi ma la sogs pa rnal ’byor gyi rgyud nyi shu rtsa
bzhi dang rnal ’byor ma’i rgyud rnams kyang ste dpal he ru ka mngon par ’byung ba dang | mngon par
brjod pa bla ma dang | nam mkha’ dang mnyam pa dang | kun spyod dang [|] rdo rje mkha’ ’gro dang
| ṛ gi a ri [!] lli dang [|] rdo rje a ra lli dang [|] dpal he ru ka mngon par brjod pa dang | rig pa rgya mtsho
dang | gsang ba rgya mtsho dang | ral pa gyen brdzes phyi ma dang [|] kha sbyor ’byung ba’i rgyud
rnams su rtogs par bya’o zhes pa sgra ji bzhin pa’o ||. The titles in this passage are: Samājottara,
Herukābhyudaya, Abhidhānottara, Khasama, [Yoginī]saṃcāra, Vajraḍāka, Ṛgiaralli, Vajrāralli,
Herukābhidhāna, *Vidyārṇava (?), *Guhyārṇava (?), *Ūrdhvajaṭottara (?), Saṃpuṭodbhava.
8 D 348a: ṛ gi a rallir yang | | mgo bo yang ni nyon mongs bdud | | thod pa nam mkha’ dag pa zhes
so |. The quoted text is from the surviving viśuddhi section in the fourth chapter (D 179b).
9 D (I) 320a and D (II) 133b: ri gi ā ra lli’i rgyud las kyang | shar gyi lus ’phags ’dzam bu gling | |
nub kyi ba lang spyod dang ni | | byang gi sgra mi snyan yang gnas | | gnas bzhir lha mo bzhi rnams
te | | ri rab rtse mor ri gi gnas || zhes gsungs so ||. The quoted text is from the beginning of the first
chapter (D 176a).
10 D 303a–303b: [...] ri gi a ra lli’i rgyud las de bzhin du yang | a ra llis zhus lha mo la | | ye shes
mchog kyang ji lta bu | | gang zhig rnam par shes tsam gyis | | sgrub pa po yis dngos grub thob | |
lha mo rigs kyis [!] yang dag gsungs | | ye shes chen po bde ba mchog | kun mkhyen ye shes las byung
ba | | bsrub bya srub byed las byung ba | | bsam pa thams cad yongs spangs te | | dbang po thams
cad des bkag nas | | skye ’gro med pa’i dben phyogs su | | gnyis pa thams cad dang bral ba’i | | mig
gnyis ma phye ma btsums par | | smin ma’i mtshams su sems gtad nas | | mun pa mi bzad tshul yang
ni | | sgrub pa po yis dang por mthong | | de nas g.yon pa’i rna ba ni | | dal bus dal bus g.yo bar byed
| | shes rab ma yi bde ba gang | | de bzhin phyag rgya chen po’i bde | | nyes pa’i rang bzhin mi phyag
rgya | | de yis shes pa’ang nyams pa yin | | de phyir ye shes phyag rgya bsgom | | bde ba chen po
bsgrub bya’i phyir | | ye shes chen po ’di kho na | | rang gi rig bya’i rang bzhin te | | gzhan la bstan
par mi nus pa | | gzhon nu ma yis bde myong bzhin | | sbyor ba ’di dang bcas pa yi | | sems can mgu
byed sems kyis su | | snying rjes sems can thams cad la | | sbyor ba ’di ni bde bar byed | | ’di la goms
pa’i sbyor ba yis | | mkha’ dang mnyam pa’i sems kyis su | | snying rje chen po’i rdzu ’phrul can | |
492 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
witness, the author does not bring us any closer to a solution as far as dating is
concerned, since he seems to be even later than Raviśrījñāna. At the end of the
work (D 307b–308a) he gives the same story as the one found in the introduction
of Raviśrījñāna’s Guṇabharaṇī (ed. Sferra 2000, 73–74). Here too the lineage
starts with Anupamarakṣita, but after Dharmākaraśānti it continues with one
*Kīrtideva (Grags pa’i lha) and one *Dharmodgata (Chos ’phags), *Tathāgatava-
jra’s teacher, instead of Guṇaratnākara and Raviśrījñāna. The author was there-
fore either one generation younger than Raviśrījñāna or his junior by a few years.
It would therefore seem that we cannot gather any evidence from testimonies
to date the Rigyarallitantra any earlier than the middle of the eleventh century.
The scripture was apparently only moderately popular, as it is mentioned only by
a handful of authors. All can be dated between c. 1050 and 1250 CE; in cases
where they can be localized, most seem to have been active in East India.
3 The Tibetan translation of the Rigyarallitantra
The Tibetan translation was prepared by a famous duo, *Gayādhara and [’Brog
mi] Shākya ye shes, whose activity is usually placed in the mid-11th century. When
compared to the Sanskrit fragment and the identified testimonia, it becomes clear
quite quickly that this was not their finest work. The translation is full of misun-
derstandings, omissions, and obscure renderings.
If the translation mirrors a Sanskrit original, and I do not see any reason to
doubt that, then the tantra consisted of five chapters.
The first chapter opens with the usual nidāna: evaṃ mayā śrutam ekasmin
samaye. The Lord, who is here Aralli, resides in the vulva (?) of the goddess, Rigī;
it is immediately pointed out that they form a non-dual entity. Somewhat unusu-
ally, the petitioner is Aralli; he first poses a set of questions related to the sacred
sites beginning with the pīṭhas and ending in the upaśmaśānas. The goddess re-
plies that the pīṭhas are the four continents (known from Abhidharma cosmogra-
||
rnal ’byor grub ’gyur the tshom med | | dang por mun pa byed pa mthong | | gnyis pa dkar po du ba
bzhin | | gsum pa srin bu me khyer mtshungs | | bzhi pa dza ba’i me tog ltar | | lnga pa sprin med
nam mkha’ ste | | bdag dang gzhan gyi tshor ba bral | | thams cad mkhyen pa’i rgyu de yang | | sprin
med nam mkha’i dpe dang ldan | | rgyun du goms pa’i sbyor ba yis | | rtse gcig sems dpa’ ’di ltar
byos | | rtag tu ye shes bdud rtsi yis | | btung bas bkres pa’i dgag bya med | | rga dang nad kyis gdung
ba med | | thabs kyi sbyor ba ’di yis ni | | rim gyis thams cad mkhyen par ’gyur || zhes so ||. The
quoted text is the middle section of the third chapter (D 178b).
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 493
phy); these are the abodes of four goddesses (those in the first circuit of the pan-
theon), with Rigī on top of Sumeru in the middle. She then proceeds to describe
the rest of the maṇḍala integrating the remaining sacred sites and giving some
iconographical information on the deities, who are all female. There are three cir-
cuits of attendants, corresponding to body, speech, and mind. Between the first
two, so the goddess teaches, one must install the hells.
The second chapter opens by picking up this matter. The answer of the god-
dess as to why one must install the hells is obscure: because all beings are burn-
ing or freezing in hells, and the yogin should visualize himself in the middle of
the word evaṃ and rescue them. A short visualization is taught whereby the yogin
emerges as the deity. The section closes with a spell, presumably the *mūlaman-
tra. The next passage teaches seven minor rituals, some of which are quite ob-
scure; the identifiable ones are those for rainmaking, paralyzing, and attracting.
The rest of the chapter teaches matters related to daily visualization and worship:
protecting oneself and the place of practice, self-empowerment, attracting the so-
called gnostic deities (with a mantra based on the second half of the famous
śatākṣara), installing mantras on the body, the seed-syllables of the deities, ini-
tiation by the deities, and further details related to the maṇḍala.
The third chapter teaches the secret gestures (brda, *chommā) which are usu-
ally to be employed by initiates for communication. Or at least that is what one
would expect, but in fact here the term seems to be employed as a means of iden-
tifying the already mentioned sacred sites in one’s body. The next passage de-
scribes a kind of meditation, which is to be performed in isolation. Success is her-
alded by a series of visionary signs; at the end the practitioner becomes the
omniscient deity. A short section after this identifies the first four syllables of the
nidāna with the four elements beginning with earth. The final passage explains
the name Rigī and the first few rather obscure words of the tantra. Here Rigī is
said to be the equivalent of ḍākinī.
The fourth chapter opens with two minor rituals: the first is to draw the blood
of an enemy who harms the Buddha, the Law, and the Community; the second is
to destroy the images of (rival) deities. The Sanskrit fragment is from the next
section, which seems to describe further details of daily visualization, a famous
mantra used on the cusp of the preliminary rites and visualization of the deity
proper, as well as two hand-gestures. The next section deals with viśuddhi, a
‘mystical correspondence’ of elements of the maṇḍala with Mahāyāna doctrinal
terms. This is followed by a second viśuddhi, where parts of one’s body are de-
scribed in terms of a stūpa.
The fifth and final chapter continues in a similar vein: here, protagonists of
the historical Buddha’s life are identified with various tantric deities and the four
494 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
blisses. This is followed by further ‘mystical correspondences’. Thereafter two
mantras are taught, these are called the heart-mantra and a ‘second’ auxiliary
heart-mantra. The next section describes a variety of samayas: here the term
seems to mean various kinds of meat, which are recommended for particular
rites. However, the text points out, one must not kill in order to obtain any of the
meats. The next section returns to the topic of the maṇḍala, this time the kind
made of coloured powders for initiation. Various details are taught, such as pre-
cious materials that are to be used, the number of vases, the ritual sequence lead-
ing up to building the edifice, the ritual of offering food along with a mantra, and
a protective ritual to take hold of the site. The tantra ends somewhat abruptly
here.
4 The Pantheon
The structure of the maṇḍala is fairly simple: a pair of chief deities with three
circuits of attendant goddesses. The central pair is formed by Rigī (also spelt
Rigi), a goddess, and Aralli (also Āralli, Arali, Ārali), a male deity. The former is
dark-blue (nīla) and holds a noose and a goad. Her legs are embracing the con-
sort; therefore they are depicted in a sexual embrace. The latter is black and has
six arms: with two he embraces the goddess, the others hold a vajra, a rattle-drum
(ḍamaru), a battle-axe (paraśu), and a skull-bowl with a head. He is trampling on
Bhairava. The first circuit of attendants, also called the circle of mind, is formed
by *Sisā (also: *Sisi, *Śiśi, Śaṣī, Śaśī), Kāminī (or *Kāmalatā), *Ahosukhā (also:
Ahosaukhyā), and *Saṃvarī. They hold a flaying-chopping knife (kartṛ) and a
skull-bowl (first described as a *yogapātra, then kapāla); they are naked, with
dishevelled hair, and standing in a dancing position. This set is clearly an inher-
itance from the Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara. The second circuit,
the circle of speech, is formed by Ghorā (or *Ghorī), Tīkṣṇā, Mahāmāyā, and Ut-
tuṅgā. The third circuit, the circle of body, is made up by Jambukā (or *Jambukī),
*Mahiṣī, *Hayagrīvā, and a goddess whose name cannot be reconstructed with
certainty, but must mean a she-elephant. As the names imply, they are most
likely zoocephalic, a feature of door-guardians in other systems. The icono-
graphic particulars are not given separately for the second and third circuits; it
may be assumed that they are similar to the first set.
The names of the two central deities, Rigī and Aralli, are surprising and ob-
scure. As far as I am aware, the earliest attestation of the word aralli is in the
Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara, where, if not transcribed phoneti-
cally, it is usually translated into Tibetan as mkha’ ’gro ma, i.e. the customary
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 495
rendering of ḍākinī;11 this is also how the text itself seems to define the word.12 As
for rigī, the earliest occurrence known to me is the Catuṣpīṭhatantra; there, two
commentators interpret the word as buddha(s) (Szántó 2012, I., 201–202). The rea-
sons behind the words’ becoming proper names and the deities’ gender exchange
are unclear.
5 Related literature
The related literature is quite small, consisting of merely two canonical works: a
scripture, the Vajrārallitantra (Tōh. 426), and a sādhana (Tōh. 1658), both availa-
ble only in Tibetan translation.
The Vajrārallitantra is most likely earlier than the Rigyarallitantra. Here the
male deity, more often called Heruka and only thrice Ārali, appears without a
consort, unless one tacitly assumes that Prajñāpāramitā, in whose vulva he is
said to reside in the nidāna, has this role. More importantly, there is no mention
of the system of Four Blisses, although it is possible that other echoes of the He-
vajratantra are present.
The sādhana is anonymous. It was translated by [Bu ston] Rin chen grub, ‘ac-
cording to an Indian manuscript’ (rgya dpe ji lta ba bzhin du), by which he pre-
sumably meant that he had only one witness available; the sādhana must there-
fore predate the first half of the 14th century. It is short and adds almost nothing
to our understanding of the text, except some clarifications concerning the ico-
nography and some variant translations of the goddesses’ names.
||
11 Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara, Ms 18r = D 163a (twice, mkha’ ’gro perhaps metri
causa), Ms 25r = D 168a.
12 Ms lacuna, D 186a: | mkha’ ’gro ma yang a ra li |
496 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
6 Edition
NB: no separate notes for sandhi and other customary standardizations.
-to herukodbhavaḥ | mantraś ca oṃ śūnyatājñānavajrasvabhāvātmako ’ham ||
aṅkuśamudreti |
karadvayasya kaniṣṭhikābhyām anyonyam aṅkuśarūpam |
madhyadvayāṅgulī vṛddhāṅguṣṭhena pīḍayet ||
pāśam api tarjanīdvayena ||
viśuddhiṃ kathayiṣyāmi |
dharmajñānaviśuddhena Vajrārallir13 mahāyaśāḥ |
dharmajñānasya kṣāntyā ca Rigī caiva prakīrtitā14 ||
caturāryasatyarūpeṇa Śaṣyādyāḥ prakīrtitāḥ |
caturbrahmavihāreṇa Ghorādyāḥ prakīrtitāḥ ||
saṃgrahavastucatuṣkeṇa Jambukyādyāḥ prakīrtitāḥ |
ṣaḍ gatyaḥ ṣaḍ15 bhujāḥ proktās trinetraṃ tribhavaṃ matam ||
Bhairavam ātmacittaṃ tu16 pātitaṃ17 pādamūlataḥ |
muditādi daśa bhūmyas tu pīṭhādyāḥ18 saṃprakīrtitāḥ ||
ṣaṭ pāramitāḥ ṣaṇmātraṃ kapālaṃ gaganamaṇḍalam |
evaṃmayāmadhyastham ātmānaṃ vicintayet ||
astavyastasamasta19rūpeṇa sarvatantre vyavasthitam |
avidyācchedanā kartṛ karuṇā madyaṃ kapālake ||
mantrajāpaṃ bhaveḍ ḍamarū hūṃ-pheṃ-aralli-nādataḥ |
||
13 vajrārallir] em., vajrāralli Ms
14 prakīrtitā] Ms p. corr. (secunda manu), prakṛttitā Ms a. corr.
15 ṣaḍ] em., ṣaḍa Ms
16 °cittaṃ tu] conj., °citta + Ms
17 pātitaṃ] em., pātintaṃ/pātinta Ms
18 pīṭhādyāḥ] em., pīṭhādyā Ms
19 °samasta°] conj., ° + + sta° Ms
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 497
paraśur20 dharmodayaṃ proktaṃ vajraṃ vajraṃ21 prakīrtitam22 ||
muṇḍaṃ ca kleśamārasya kṛṣṇaṃ vyomaviśuddhitaḥ |
aṅkuśaṃ Rigikiñjalkaviśuddhyā pāśaṃ mantramālāviśuddhitaḥ ||
samudāyaṃ caiva kāyaviśuddhyā |
paryaṅkaṃ23 pīṭhikā jñeyā Jambudvīpaṃ bhagaṃ matam |
trivalī varaṇḍakaṃ nityam udaraṃ bimbakaṃ bhavet ||
grīvaṃ grīvakam ity uktaṃ skandhaṃ ca skandhakaṃ tathā |
vedikā mastakaṃ jñeyaṃ mūrdhnā cchattrāvalī tathā ||
candrasūryaṃ24 dve netraṃ patākā mūrdhajaṃ bhavet |
buddhabimbaṃ tataḥ kāyaṃ nityaṃ pūjanti yoginaḥ ||
atthi sugatadhātuś ca adhiṣṭhānaṃ bhavet tataḥ ||
svarūpabuddhākhyānapaṭalaś caturthaḥ || ||
Śuddhodano mahārājā Aralliḥ25 saṃprakāśitaḥ26 |
Rigī tatra Mahāmāyā prajñopāyātmakaṃ jagat27 ||
Vajrasattvas tu Siddhārthaḥ paramānando mahāsukhaḥ |
Gopādevī mahāmudrā Rāhulabhadro28 mahāsukhaḥ ||
Gopaiva tu mahāmāyā māyāra + + pañcataḥ |
sahajānandas29 tu Siddhārtho30 vajramāyāvikurvaṇaiḥ ||
punas tu bhagavān Vajrī vajrījanakaḥ prakīrtitaḥ |
Mahāmāyā bhavej jananī saiva mudrā prakīrtitā ||
vṛddhāṅguṣṭhaṃ bhaved vajraṃ nābhir31 dharmodayaṃ matam |
Siddhārtha eva jyotiṣko mahāmāyāvikurvaṇaiḥ ||
svarūpeṇa jagad buddhaḥ Aralle śṛṇu madvacaḥ |
||
20 paraśur] conj., pāśaṃ Ms
21 vajraṃ] em., vajra Ms
22 prakīrtitam] conj., prakīrti + Ms
23 paryaṅkaṃ] em., paryaḥṅka Ms
24 °sūryaṃ] em., °sūrya Ms
25 aralliḥ] em., 'ralli Ms
26 saṃprakāśitaḥ] conj., saṃprakāśi + Ms
27 jagat] conj., yatuḥ Ms
28 °bhadro] em., °bhadra Ms
29 sahajānandas] Ms p. corr. (secunda manu), sahanandas Ms a. corr.
30 siddhārtho] em., siddhārtha Ms
31 nābhir] conj., nā + r Ms
498 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
karmabhuktivikalpena dehināṃ bādhate sadā ||
ānandas tu Śaśī proktā paramānandas tu Kāminī |
viramānandas tv Ahosaukhyā sahajānandas tu Saṃvarī32 ||
Ghorā cumbanaṃ proktaṃ Tīkṣṇāliṅganam eva tu |
stanamardanaṃ Mahāmāyā Uttuṅgā33dharacūṣaṇam34 ||
Jambukī ratika-
7 Tentative translation
[...] from the [...] the becoming of Heruka.35 The mantra is:36 Oṃ, I am identical to
the vajra-nature of the gnosis of emptiness.37
As for the goad-gesture: with the two interlocked little fingers of the two hands,
[form] a goad-shape; the two middle fingers should be pressed down by the
thumbs. As for the noose-gesture, [it is the same as above, except that one uses] the
two index fingers.38
I shall now teach the purification (viśuddhi):39 Vajrāralli, he of great fame, symbol-
izes the knowledge of phenomena [as empty]. Rigī is taught to symbolize the toler-
ance [that puts up] with the knowledge of phenomena [as empty].40 Śaṣī and the
other [three goddesses of the mind-circle] are taught to symbolize the Four Truths
of the Noble One[/s]. Ghorā and the other [three goddesses of the speech-circle] are
taught to symbolize the Four Abodes of Brahmā.41 Jambukī42 and the other [three
||
32 saṃvarī] conj., satvarī Ms
33 uttuṅgā°] em., uttūṅgā° Ms
34 °cūṣaṇam] Ms p. corr., °bhūṣaṇam Ms a. corr.
35 The Tibetan does not mirror this sentence helpfully; instead it says: ‘From the mudrā, the
deities arise.’
36 This introductory phrase is omitted in the Tibetan.
37 Naturally, this mantra is open for other interpretations.
38 The text amounting to this paragraph is entirely versified in the Tibetan, which adds the fol-
lowing, puzzling line at the end: ‘the vajra, the sword, and the great noose’ (alternatively: the
vajra-sword).
39 This introductory phrase is omitted in the Tibetan.
40 The Tibetan translation of this hemistich is non-sensical; the corruption possibly started with
an eye-skip.
41 The Tibetan has ‘the Four Self-confidences’ (vaiśāradya) instead.
42 The Tibetan has simply wa; wa mo or lce spyang ma would have been more helpful.
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 499
goddesses of the body-circle] are taught to symbolize the Four Means of Attracting
[converts to the Path]. The six arms [of Aralli] are taught to represent the Six Realms.
The triad of eyes43 is taught to symbolize the Three Worlds. Bhairava, lain under the
soles of [Aralli’s] feet is one's mind. [The sacred sites] beginning with the pīṭhas are
the Ten Levels beginning with the Joyful. The six [cremation ground] ornaments44
are the Six Perfections. The skull-bowl is the expanse of the sky.45 One should visu-
alize oneself in the middle of the [syllables] evaṃ mayā.46 All [this] is present [i.e.
taught] in all the tantras, [but done so] in a scattered manner.47 The chopping-flay-
ing knife [represents] cutting through Ignorance. The liquor in the skull-bowl [sym-
bolizes Great] Compassion.48 The rattle-drum [represents] the recitation of mantras,
by means of the sounds ‘hūṃ’, ‘pheṃ’, ‘aralli’.49 The battle-axe50 is taught to be the
Source of Dharmas; the vajra is taught to be vajra [i.e. the non-dual essence of all
things]. The head [in the skull-bowl held by Aralli] is that of the Māra of Taints. [The
colour of Aralli's body is] black51 in order to symbolize the void.52 The goad [held by
Rigī] symbolizes Rigī's filaments [i.e. her pudenda], [whereas] the noose symbolizes
the mantra-garland.53
||
43 Both the male and the female deity have three eyes, although judging by the context here it
is probably Aralli's eyes that are referred to.
44 More usually, these are called mudrās: five bone-ornaments and ash. The term mātra, quite
common in Śaiva texts of the Vidyāpīṭha class, is rare but not unattested.
45 The import of this sentence is obscure to me.
46 This sentence is also unclear. Being situated in the middle of evaṃ alone would make good
sense, as the two syllables are frequently understood to form a six-pointed star on account of
their shape, which often stands in the middle of a maṇḍala.
47 I have taken some liberty in interpreting this statement. The Tibetan rendering is quite ob-
scure.
48 The Tibetan omits ‘liquor’, taking the skull alone to mean compassion. The chopping-flaying
knife and the skull-bowl are the implements of the subsidiary goddesses, although the descrip-
tion does not specify that the bowl is filled.
49 The second half of this sentence is unclear. The Tibetan has something almost completely
different: ‘The sound Rigi-Aralli, the rattle-drum symbolizing the recitation of the mantras hūṃ
he’ or ‘the rattle-drum is the syllable hūṃ, because it symbolizes the recitation of that’. Both
seem non-sensical to me.
50 The Tibetan also attests battle-axe, as does the iconographical description of Aralli, hence I
had no hesitation in making the conjecture.
51 Instead, the Tibetan has ‘the skull’, which is also attested in Śāśvatavajra's testimony. I nev-
ertheless hesitate to make a conjecture here, as the meaning is not entirely inapposite.
52 Void here most likely stands for Emptiness.
53 Perhaps on account of a corruption the Tibetan does not have any reference to the mantra-
garland.
500 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
As for the totality (?) symbolizing the body:54 the crossed legs should be known to
[represent] the base; the private parts55 are taught to be the Jambu-continent; the
triple fold [over the navel]56 is always [to be seen as] the mound; the abdomen is the
image; the neck is taught to be the neck [of stūpa] and the shoulders the shoulder
[of the stūpa];57 the head should be known [to represent] the pavilion and the fore-
head the row of parasols; the two eyes are the Sun and the Moon; hair stands for
the banners. The body is therefore a reflection of the Buddha [and it is thus] that
yogins constantly worship [it]. The bones are the relics of the Sugata [deposited in
the stūpa] and it is thence that empowerment comes.58
The [end of the] fourth chapter explaining one's form [as] the Buddha.
The great king Śuddhodana is revealed as Aralli [and] Rigī in that context [i.e. the
historical Buddha's family] is [the queen] Mahāmāyā. The nature of the world59 is
[inseparable] Wisdom and Means. [The prince] Siddhārtha is Vajrasattva, Supreme
Bliss, and Great Pleasure60.61 Gopādevī is the Great Seal, Rāhulabhadra is Great
Pleasure. Gopā, again, is Great Illusion, [...].62 Siddhārtha, by means of the manifes-
tations of the vajra-illusion, is Innate Bliss. Again,63 the Lord, the Holder of the Va-
jra, is taught to be the begetter of the holder of the vajra,64 [whereas] Mahāmāyā is
||
54 Here I failed to make good sense of the Sanskrit; the Tibetan is equally obscure, including an
extra quarter-verse.
55 I take this to refer to private parts in general and not just the female (bhaga, rendered into
Tibetan with snying po).
56 This is unusual, as the triple fold, as far as I know, is a sign of beauty in women.
57 The last verse-quarter is omitted in the Tibetan, perhaps due to an eye-skip.
58 The Tibetan, not without good reason, gives the two lines in reverse.
59 This reading, which is here a conjecture, is attested by the Tibetan, by the Sanskrit testimony
of the Amṛtakaṇikā, by the Tibetan translation of that, and by Yaśobhadra's testimony.
60 There is nothing in the Tibetan to correspond to paramānando mahāsukhaḥ.
61 These are the six pādas quoted in the Amṛtakaṇikā (ed. p. 11). A manuscript not used by the
Sarnath editors is Cambridge University Library Add.1108, which reads (fol. 6r, l. 5-6): yathoktaṃ
| (!) śrīṛgyavalli(!)mahātantre śuddhodano mahārājā aralliḥ samprakāśitaḥ | ṛgis tatra mahāmāyā
prajñopāyātmakaṃ jagat || vajrasatvas tu siddhārthaḥ paramānando mahāsukha iti || (See
http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01108/13). As far as I can tell, this quotation is missing
in another important witness not used by the Sarnath editors, the so-called Vanaratna codex
(Royal Asiatic Society, London, Ms Hodgson 35).
62 The Tibetan would suggest *māyārūpaprapañcataḥ, ‘by means of the proliferation of forms
[due to] illusion’; perhaps this is a synonym of vajramāyāvikurvaṇaiḥ and mahāmāyāvikurvaṇaiḥ
below.
63 Instead, the Tibetan has ‘the son’ (*putras/sutas).
64 This idea is somewhat strange. Perhaps vajrī vajrī° is a dittography?
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 501
the mother; she is also taught to be the mudrā [i.e. the consort]. The thumb is the
vajra, the navel is taught to be the Source of Dharmas.65 Siddhārtha himself, by
means of the manifestations of the Great Illusion, is the luminaries.66
The world is innately enlightened – hear my word, oh Aralli67 – and it is only
through the dichotomy of deed and retribution that the incarnate are forever in
bondage.
Śaśī is taught to be Bliss, Kāminī is Supreme Bliss, Ahosaukhyā is the Bliss of Ces-
sation, Saṃvarī is Innate Bliss.68 Ghorā is taught to be kissing, Tīkṣṇā is the em-
brace, Mahāmāyā is fondling the breasts,69 Uttuṅgā is the sucking of the lower lip.
Jambukī is amorous quarrel, [...]
8 Appendix: diplomatic transcript of Add.1680.12
Although a diplomatic transcript is not entirely free of editorial decisions — one
must decide when to write ba for va and vice-versa, etc. — I give here the text with-
out corrections.
Conventions:
ø - string-space
ṁ - candrabindu-style anusvāra
<| |> - deletion
< > - addition
: - ‘alignment’ daṇḍa
[fol. 13r1]to herukodbhavaḥ | mantraś ca | oṁ śūnyatājñānavajrasvabhāvātmako
haṃ || ø aṃkuśamudreti | karadvayasya kaniṣṭhikābhyām anyonyam
aṃkuśarūpaṃ | madhyadvayāṃgulī vṛddhāṅguṣṭhena pīḍayet || pā[2]śam api
||
65 The order of ideas is unclear: why are suddenly two body-parts mentioned here?
66 Again, the meaning is obscure.
67 However, the Tibetan has the goddess Rigi addressed here.
68 The series of four blisses is from the Hevajratantra. Their order suggests that the compiler/s
of the tantra sided with what is called in Isaacson and Sferra 2014, ‘position B’, i.e. that held by
authors such as Kamalanātha and Kālacakra followers.
69 Tibetan has a corrupt rendering, ‘the begetting of illusion’.
502 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
tarjanīdvayena viśuddhiṃ kathayiṣyāmi | dharmajñānaviśuddhena ø vajrāralli
mahāyaśāḥ | dharmajñānasya kṣāntyā ca | rigī caiva pra<|kṛ|><kīr>70ttitā | ca-
turāryasatyarūpeṇa śaṣyādyāḥ prakī[3]rttitāḥ | caturbrahmavihāreṇa ghorādyāḥ
prakīrttitāḥ || saṃgrahava: ø stucatuṣkeṇa jambukādyāḥ prakīrttitāḥ | ṣaḍ gatyaḥ
| ṣaḍa bhujāḥ proktāḥ trinetraṃ tribhavaṃ mataṃ | bhairavam ātmacitta +71 [4]
pātinta72 pādamūlataḥ | muditādi daśa bhūmyas tu pīṭhādyā saṃprakīrtti ø tāḥ |
ṣaṭ pāramitā ṣaṭ mātraṃ | kapālaṃ gaganamaṇḍalaṃ || evaṃmayāmadhyasthaṃ
| ātmānaṃ vicintayet | astavyasta + +73[5]starūpeṇa sarvatantre vyavasthitaṃ |
avidyā74cchedanā karttṛ75 | karuṇā: ø madyaṃ kapālake | mantrajāpam bhaveḍ
ḍamarū hūṁheṁ76 arallinādataḥ | pāsaṃ dharmodayaṃ proktaṃ vajraṃ vajra
prakīrtti + + +77 [6] muṇḍañ ca kleśamārasya kṛṣṇaṃ vyomaviśuddhitaḥ |
aṃkuśaṃ rigi: ø kiṃjalkaviśuddhyā | pāsaṃ mantramālāviśuddhitaḥ | sam-
udāyaṃ caiva kāyaviśuddhyā | paryaḥṅka pīṭhikā jñeyā jambu78[f. 13v1]dvīpaṃ
bhagaṃ mataṃ trivalī varaṇḍakaṃ nityaṃ | udaraṃ bimbakaṃ bhavet | grīvaṃ
grī ø vakam ity uktaṃ | skandhañ ca skandhakaṃ tathā | vedikā mastakaṃ
jñeyaṃ | mūrdhnā cchatrāvalī tathā candrasūrya dve netraṃ patākā
mūrddhajaṃ bhave[2]t | buddhabimban tataḥ kāyaṃ nityaṃ pūjanti yoginaḥ79 ||
acchi80 sugatadhā ø tuś cā81dhiṣṭhānaṃ bhavet tataḥ || svarūpabuddhākhyāna-
paṭalaś caturthaḥ || || śuddhodano mahārājā ’ralli saṃprakāśi +82 [3]ḥ rigī tatra
mahāmāyā prajñopāyātmakaṃ83 yatuḥ | vajrasatvas tu siddhārtha ø ḥ |
paramānando mahāsukhaḥ | gopādevī mahāmudrā | rāhulabhadra mahāsukhaḥ
||
70 Correction in a second hand. The syllable kṛ (or kṣa?) is corrected to a ka with the -ī and the
repha on the next syllable added.
71 Torn, only the sūtra is visible.
72 Possibly an anusvāra is added in fainter ink.
73 Torn, perhaps an i is just visible.
74 A very small part of the va, and a large part of the dyā is damaged due to a wormhole/tear.
75 Or should we read kartṛ ̄ ?
76 Or should that be pheṃ?
77 Torn, the second t in rtti is also lost.
78 Torn at the end, but only a small part of yā and mbu are lost.
79 Torn, but only an insignificant part of yo and gi are lost.
80 Or should we read atthi?
81 The half-syllable śc is the result of a correction, the pre-correction reading cannot be deter-
mined.
82 Torn, a small part of saṃ, the middle part of pra, a part of ka, the lower part of śi is lost, as is
the next akṣara, only the hook-sūtra of which is visible.
83 The uppermost part of kaṃ is torn.
Minor Vajrayāna Texts IV. A Sanskrit fragment of the Rigyarallitantra | 503
| gopaiva tu mahāmāyā māyār+ + + [4]pañcataḥ | saha<jā>84nandas tu siddhārtha
vajramāyāvikurvaṇaiḥ | punas85 tu bha: ø gavān vajrī vajrī janakaḥ prakīrttitaḥ |
mahāmāyā bhavej jananī saiva mudrā prakīrttitā vṛddhāṃguṣṭhaṃ bhaved va-
jraṃ | nā + [5]r ddharmodayaṃ mataṃ | siddhārtha eva jyotisko
mahāmāyāvikurvvaṇaiḥ | sva ø rūpeṇa jagad buddhaḥ | aralle śṛṇu madvacaḥ
karmabhuktivikalpena dehināṃ bādhate sadā | ānandas tu śaśī proktā: [6]
paramānandas tu kāminī | viramānandas tv ahosaukhyā sahajānandas tu ø
sa86ndarī | ghorā cumbanaṃ proktaṃ | tīkṣṇāliṃganam eva tu | stanamardanaṃ
mahāmāyā | uttūṅgādharabhūṣaṇaṃ87 | jaṃbukī ratika-
References
Primary sources
Amṛtakaṇikā — by Raviśrījñāna. Banarsi Lal (ed.), Āryamañjuśrīnāmasaṁgīti with Amṛtakaṇikā-
ṭippaṇī by bhikṣu Raviśrījñāna and Amṛtakaṇikodyota-[sic!]nibandha of Vibhūticandra.
Bibliotheca Indo-Tibetica XXX. Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, 1994.
Amṛtakaṇikoddyota — by Vibhūticandra. See under Amṛtakaṇikā.
Guṇabharaṇī — by Raviśrījñāna. Francesco Sferra (ed.), The Ṣaḍaṅgayoga by Anupamarakṣita
with Raviśrījñāna’s Guṇabharaṇīnāmaṣaḍaṅgayogaṭippaṇī, text edition and annotated
translation. Serie Orientale Roma 85. Rome, 2000.
*Tattvaviśadā — by *Śāśvatavajra. Tōh./D 1410.
*Pīṭhādinirṇaya — by *Śākyarakṣita. (I) Tōh./D 1215 and (II) Tōh./D 1606, same text.
*Rigyarallisādhana — anonymous. Tōh. 1658.
*Lūyipādābhisamayavṛtti — by *Tathāgatavajra. Tōh./D 1510.
*Vajrapadasārasaṃgraha — by *Yaśobhadra. Tōh./D 1186.
Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara — Institut d’études indiennes, Ms. Sylvain Lévi 48;
Tōh./D 366.
Secondary sources
Bendall, Cecil (1883), Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library,
Cambridge. Verzeichnis der orientalischen Handschriften in Deutschland; Suppl.-Bd. 33 /
||
84 Correction/addition in a second hand. The syllable has a 4 added, which means that here the
corrector was counting lines from above.
85 The syllable na is perhaps underlined. Is this a correction?
86 A faint trace of an -u is visible under the sa, possibly a deletion.
87 Possibly corrected to -cūṣaṇaṃ.
504 | Péter-Dániel Szántó
Publications of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project 2, Stuttgart: Franz Stei-
ner Verlag, 1992 [reprint].
Bhattacharyya, Dinesh Chandra (1933), ‘The Maināmati Copper-Plate of Raṇavaṅkamalla
Harikāladeva’, in Indian Historical Quarterly, 9: 282–289.
Krung bod dkar chag — Krung go’i bod kyi shes rig zhib ’jug lte gnas su nyar ba’i ta la’i lo ma’i
bstan bcos (spyin shog ’dril ma’i par) kyi dkar chag mdor gsal. n.a.
Isaacson, Harunaga, and Francesco Sferra (2014), The Sekanirdeś a of Maitreyanā tha (Ad-
vayavajra) with the Sekanirdeś apañjikā of Rā mapā la. Critical Edition of the Sanskrit and
Tibetan Texts with English Translation and Reproductions of the MSS. Manuscripta Bud-
dhica 2. Asien-Afrika-Institut, Universität Hamburg and Università degli studi di Napoli
‘L’Orientale’, Napoli.
Luo Hong (2010), The Buddhakapālatantra Chapter 9 to 14 Critically Edited and Translated.
China Tibetology Research Center – Asien-Afrika-Institut (University of Hamburg).
Sanderson, Alexis (2009), ‘The Śaiva Age — The Rise and Dominance of Śaivism During the
Early Medieval Period’, in Shingo Einoo (ed.), Genesis and Development of Tantrism, To-
kyo: Institute of Oriental Culture Special Series, 23: 41–349.
Stearns, Cyrus (1996), ‘The Life and Tibetan Legacy of the Indian Mahāpaṇḍita Vibhūticandra’,
in Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 19.1: 127–171.
Szántó, Péter-Dániel (2012), ‘Selected Chapters from the Catuṣpīṭhatantra’, vols I–II., un-
published PhD dissertation, Oxford University.
Florinda De Simini
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the
Dharma of Śiva. Common Errors, Scribal
Interventions, and the Transmission of the
Śivadharma Corpus
Abstract: The tradition of the so-called Śivadharma corpus is still largely unex-
plored. Scholars have so far identified a large number of manuscripts, including
some very early specimens, but the relationships between them, as well as the
possibility of classifying these manuscripts into groups and families, still need to
be systematically assessed. However, recent critical studies of some texts of the
corpus have sparked interest in the topic of their transmission. On the basis of
two case studies selected from the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda, this article aims at presenting some of the advantages and limits of
applying the genealogical-reconstructive method to the study of the manuscripts
of the Śivadharma corpus.*
||
This is an improved and enlarged version of a paper presented in the panel ‘The Transmission of
Sanskrit Texts’, organized by Cristina Pecchia at the 16th World Sanskrit Conference (Bangkok,
June 28–July 2, 2015). I deeply thank her for inviting me to participate in the panel, as well as for
the suggestions she gave during the preparation of this article. I would also like to express my
gratitude to the editors of this volume, Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo, and Camillo Formi-
gatti, for giving me the opportunity to publish my paper in their book. Furthermore, I would like
to use this opportunity to thank Peter Bisschop, for reading chapter 12 of the Śivadharmaśāstra
with me in winter 2013, as well as my friends and colleagues at the University of Naples who
helped me organize the World Philologies seminars in the spring terms of 2015 and 2016, and
those who took active part in them, above all Antonio Manieri, Amneris Roselli, Serena Saccone,
and Francesco Sferra. Parts of the findings expounded in the following pages have been dis-
cussed with them during those meetings, which have generally inspired the writing of this es-
say. Moreover, I am very grateful to Francesco Sferra for the additional comments he was willing
to share with me before the submission of this article. Finally, I thank Kristen de Joseph for her
help in revising the English text.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-017, © 2017 F. De Simini, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
506 | Florinda De Simini
1 The Dharma of Śiva and the method of
Lachmann
The ongoing critical edition of the works of the ‘Śivadharma Corpus’, as well as the
reconstruction of their transmission history,1 have confronted scholars with the
study of a complex yet hitherto little-examined textual and manuscript tradition.
Amid the progress of the first, current projects on this topic, several factors have
emerged that highlight not only the relevance of this research to the history of early
and medieval Śaivism (not to mention the Indian religious landscape in general),
but also its contribution to our knowledge of the dynamics regulating the composi-
tion and transmission of texts, both locally and to geographically and culturally
distant areas. The study of the transmission of the Śivadharma corpus can thus of-
fer important methodological insights on how to select and apply the rules of tex-
tual criticism to the critical editing of texts that are transmitted and used in different
regional contexts — where they nourished the local cults of Śiva and the growth of
Śaiva institutions — and whose manuscripts have regularly served not just as car-
riers of texts, but also as supports of worship.2
For the transmission of the Śivadharma corpus is based on an imposing and
varied body of manuscripts, counting ca. 85 specimens (according to a rough esti-
mate), which were produced continuously from an early period — the earliest man-
uscript, N , being palaeographically dateable to the 9th century — until the 20th
century. Being particularly prominent in Nepal, this tradition is moreover strongly
translocal, as it is attested in several different regions, such as (mainly) Kashmir,
Bengal, and Tamil Nadu. This means that the texts were studied and transmitted
in areas of different languages and manuscript traditions. Such consideration is
not equally true of all the works, however, as the tradition presents a very clear-
cut bifurcation between the two earliest works, the Śivadharmaśāstra and the
Śivadharmottara — which were also studied and transmitted outside Nepal — and
||
1 For a brief introduction, I refer the reader to De Simini and Mirnig 2017 below. In-depth con-
siderations on specific aspects of the Śivadharma corpus, especially concerning the Śivadharma-
śāstra and the Śivadharmottara, are found in Bisschop 2014 and forth., De Simini 2016a and
2016b. The scholars who are active in this field recently discussed the initial results and prospec-
tive outcomes of their research during the ‘Śivadharma Workshop. Manuscripts, Editions, Per-
spectives’ (Leiden University, 26–30 September 2016).
2 I refer the reader to De Simini 2016a for considerations on the ritual uses of manuscripts of the
Śivadharma corpus (and, more generally, on the attestations of this practice in Sanskrit texts). De-
tails on the manuscript tradition of the Śivadharma corpus, with special reference to the Nepalese
materials, are given in De Simini 2016b, on which the following introductory lines are mostly based.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 507
the remaining six (seven if we also include those attested only in one manuscript),
which have so far been found, with rare exceptions, exclusively in Nepal and, at
least in the earliest phases of their transmission, only in multiple-text manuscripts
(henceforth MTM) transmitting the entire corpus. Such manuscripts were thus most
likely the contrivance of the communities inhabiting the Kathmandu Valley. A fur-
ther element that is emerging as a key factor in achieving a historical understand-
ing of the transmission of these works is the scope of their secondary tradition,
which finds expression in numerous quotations and reuses. From this point of
view, the Śivadharmottara in particular is proving to have enjoyed a high level of
popularity, as attested by the multiple reuses, with or without attribution, that have
been traced so far in the main areas where the text was transmitted.3 Moreover, the
composition of Śivadharma works also entailed the reuse of other works, as shown
by the many borrowings from the Niśvāsa that are evident in the Śivadhar-
masaṃgraha,4 or by the parallels between the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, the
Lalitavistara, and the Mahābhārata that are now emerging.5
Making sense of this vast array of primary sources, to which the preceding lines
have just provided a brief and partial introduction, is the challenge faced by those
who work on these texts, and who must necessarily do so with a philological ap-
proach. Such an approach, as firmly established by a long tradition of scholarship,
requires — among other things — that a systematic recensio help clarify inasmuch
as possible the genealogical links between the manuscripts, in order to select the
appropriate specimens in preparing an edition. This genealogical-reconstructive
technique, based on the method of identifying common ‘monogenetic’ errors —
namely, the non-original readings that cannot be produced independently by dif-
ferent scribes6 — is what is typically designated by the widely debated but still
rightly iconic expression ‘the method of Lachmann’.7 My use of this expression in
||
3 On the reuses of the Śivadharmottara, see De Simini 2016a, especially Appendix 2, containing
tables of parallels between the Śivadharmottara and the Atharvavedapariśiṣṭas, the Devīpurāṇa,
the Haracaritacintāmaṇi, and the Uttarakāmika.
4 See Kafle 2015.
5 On this topic, cf. below and De Simini and Mirnig 2017 in this volume.
6 The distinction between monogenetic and polygenetic errors — the latter of which are variants
that do not really account for the genealogical relationships of the manuscripts, and are there-
fore to be disregarded in a reconstructive study — can be credited to Pasquali; see Trovato 2014,
to which I refer the reader for a general introduction to genealogical textual criticism, with both
a historical and a descriptive approach, as well as further bibliography on related subjects.
7 On this, see Timpanaro 2003, which gives an account of the debate regarding what constitutes
this method, as well as the actual contribution of Karl Konrad Lachmann (1793–1851) and his
contemporaries to the method.
508 | Florinda De Simini
the title and throughout the article is not meant to suggest that this is the most suit-
able approach in our case, but only to evoke the necessity of making the recensio
phase the pillar of a philological study also in the case of the transmission of the
Śivadharma corpus. This is crucial with respect to critically editing the texts, not
least because it provides a fundamental tool for a more detailed reconstruction of
the history of the tradition.
In this essay, I will present two case studies, selected from different parts of the
Śivadharma corpus, in which the presence of macroscopic inconsistencies — the
‘separative’ and ‘conjunctive’ errors of the European tradition of textual criticism
— suggests the possibility of tracing families of manuscripts, and thus speculate on
their genealogical links and transmission history. In the first case (2), the study of
the last chapter of the Śivadharmaśāstra allows us to consider the parallels and dis-
crepancies characterizing the different regional traditions in which the text has
been transmitted, and to assess their contribution to the reconstruction of the work;
on the other hand, the analysis of the final part of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda (3)
enables us to shift the focus to the Himalayan region, and to the work of composi-
tion and preservation that surrounded the Śivadharma corpus in the intellectual
communities of medieval Nepal. At the same time, these two case studies will also
highlight the limits of applying the genealogical-reconstructive method to the
study of a textual tradition that, because of our still-limited knowledge of the ma-
terials, and because of certain features inherent to this and other South Asian man-
uscript traditions, escapes mechanical reasoning and unambiguous categoriza-
tion.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 509
2 Rudra’s descents to earth
The 12th and last adhyāya of the Śivadharmaśāstra is a miscellaneous chapter that
sets out the behavioral norms of Śaiva devotees and śivayogins.8 Since this is the
concluding chapter of the text, it also gives a brief account of the transmission of
the Śivadharma’s teachings, as well as exhortations concerning the preservation,
recitation, and worship of the manuscripts of the Śivadharmaśāstra. Moreover, this
chapter devotes ten stanzas to listing the so-called ‘five ogdoads’ (pañcāṣṭaka), five
groups of eight extramundane worlds (bhuvanas) that correspond to pilgrimage
sites on earth. Besides being relevant to the assessment of some doctrinal points
emerging from the Śivadharmaśāstra, chapter 12 also offers a strong case for exam-
ining the textual transmission of this work, for a study of its internal consistency
allows us to identify at least two relevant cases in which the sequence of the stanzas
is disrupted, and which a broader knowledge of the manuscript tradition enables
us to classify as monogenetic errors. Attempting to reconstruct the genesis of these
mistakes allows us not only to surmise what could most likely have been the arche-
typical stanza arrangement of chapter 12, but also to better appraise the position,
in the history of the textual transmission, of the later layers of the tradition — rep-
resented by the Kashmiri and South Indian manuscripts — compared to the bulk of
the early Nepalese materials.
From a reading of chapter 12 on the basis of Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts
ranging from the 11th and 12th century to more recent specimens, we can derive the
sequence of topics reported in the summary below. More specifically, this ar-
rangement is reflected (with small differences concerning a few missing or added
pādas) by N (dated to 1069 CE), N (dated to 1138–39 CE), N (dated to 1170 CE),
N (undated, 12th century), N (dated to 1201 CE), N (dated to 1396 CE), and N
(dated by the catalogue to 1928–29 CE, though this date is unverified and seems
unlikely, as the manuscript looks much earlier). These are also among the man-
uscripts that I used for the first collation of this chapter, which resulted in the
following sequence of topics:9
||
8 The manuscript tradition calls this ‘Chapter on the Primary and Secondary Branches of the
Devotion to Śiva’ (śivabhaktyādyaśākhopaśākhādhyāya): the first verse of the text refers to these
two ‘branches’, although nowhere in the chapter is it specified what they really consist of. Note
that a very similar title is given to chapter 28 of the Lalitavistara as transmitted in N , which
however deals with different topics (see De Simini and Mirnig 2017, 615).
9 See De Simini 2013, Appendix 1. Although I had checked most of the palm-leaf materials to
verify several dubious points, the only manuscripts that I consistently used in collating the
510 | Florinda De Simini
Stanza 1 Introduction
Stanzas 2–27 Miscellaneous rules of conduct for Śaiva devotees on the
topics of liṅga worship, specific food and drinks to avoid,
as well as rules of purity (such as rules on impure acts to
avoid, or correct behaviour during rituals)
Stanzas 28–40 Characteristics and conduct of the śivayogins. Aspects of
their asceticism
Stanzas 41–46 Main characteristics of dāna; different types of gifts
Stanzas 47–48 Rules for fasting
Stanzas 49–51 Definition of tīrthas as the ‘places of Rudra’s descents’;
merits of those who donate and finance construction
works at these sites
Stanzas 52–84 Miscellaneous section on dāna: definition of the
śivabhakta as the main recipient of gifts; praise of the do-
nation of food to the Śaiva devotees; merits of those who
give several everyday objects to the śivayogins, or offer ser-
vices to them (see this section at stanzas 66–84)
Stanzas 85–91 Powers of Rudra’s rosary
Stanzas 92–95 Merits of donating and/or offering services to the śivayo-
gins
Stanzas 96–103 Rules for the veneration and recitation of the Śivadharma.
Merits of those who listen to the teachings of the
Śivadharma and venerate its manuscripts
Stanzas 104–109 Concluding remarks: five typologies of people within the
Śaiva community. Merits of those who protect the gifts;
merits of those who teach, practice, and protect the
Dharma
Stanzas 110–19 The ‘five ogdoads’
Stanzas 120–121 Praises of those who donate and finance construction
works at the tīrthas; characteristics of the recipients
Stanzas 122–123 Concluding remarks: the exposition of the ‘fivefold
Śivadharma’ is declared to be over.
This is also the arrangement found in later Nepalese paper manuscripts, such as
N (dated to 1742–43 CE), N , and N (both undated), as well as in the edition by
||
whole chapter were N (then C45); N (then N/C57), which is a Nepalese paper manuscript; N
(then N/B12); and P (then T32), a Devanāgarī paper transcript of the IFP.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 511
Naraharinatha 1998, based on the most recent Nepalese tradition, and in the Ben-
gali paper manuscript B , dated to 1682–83 CE. When I first collated the manu-
scripts of chapter 12 of the Śivadharmaśāstra, I could not access the manuscripts
from the collection of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta in their entirety, but I can now
confirm that the text of chapter 12 is also transmitted in this order by N , whose
date can be traced to the 12th century on palaeographical grounds.10 The table of
contents given above is thus supported by a significant number of testimonia,
among which the majority of the Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts. However, on
closer inspection, this structure turns out to be only one of the possible variants in
which chapter 12 has been transmitted, one that is most likely secondary with re-
spect to the order that the stanzas must have had in their archetypical version. From
this point on, I will refer to the structure given above as ‘version A’ of chapter 12,
and append the siglum A to the stanza numbers that refer to this arrangement.
One of the main problematic points in this chapter is the position of the ten
stanzas containing the list of the ogdoads, which corresponds to 12.110–119A. Here
the stanzas follow a first set of concluding remarks (12.99–109A), and seem to intro-
duce the very final verses of the whole work, which ends at stanza 12.123A:11
||
10 For information on this manuscript, see Shastri 1928, 723–744.
11 The text of chapter 12 of the Śivadharmaśāsastra reproduced in this article is a transcript from
manuscript N . I chose this manuscript because I wanted to account for the state of the text in
the 12th century, since many of the early specimens transmitting version A are dateable from the
12th century onward, when this had apparently become the best-known arrangement of the top-
ics in chapter 12. Manuscript N , which is dated to 259 NS (1139 CE) on fol. 247r[L6], transmits this
chapter on fols. 34v[L4]–38r[L3]; high-quality pictures of this manuscript and a full catalogue rec-
ord are available on the website of the Cambridge Digital Library, at the following link:
https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01645/1 (last accessed: 10/10/2016). I have standard-
ized the text of my transcripts to reflect the orthography usually adopted in the edition of San-
skrit texts, thus for instance avoiding the use of homorganic nasals or that of double plosives
after -r-.
Śivadharmaśāstra 12.110–123A: (fols 37v[L3]–38r[L1]) bhastrāpadaṃ rudrakoṭir avimuktaṃ
mahālayam | gokarṇaṃ bhadrakarṇaṃ ca suvarṇākṣo ’tha dīptimān || 110A [L4] sthāṇvīśvaraś ca
vikhyātas triṣu lokeṣu viśrutaḥ | sthānāṣṭakam idaṃ jñeyaṃ rudrakṣetraṃ mahodayam |
bhastrāpadādisthāṇvantaṃ rudrasāyojyakāraṇam || 111A chagalaṇḍo duraṇḍaś ca mākoṭaṃ
maṇḍaleśvaram | kālañjaraṃ śaṃkukarṇaṃ sthaleśvaraḥ sthuleśvaraḥ || 112A pavitrāṣṭakam ity
etan mahāpuṇyābhivardhanam | mṛtāḥ pra[L5]yānti tatraiva śivasya paramaṃ padam || 113 A gayā
caiva kurukṣetra<ṃ> nakhalaṃ kanakhalaṃ tathā | (c.m.) vimaleśvaro ’ṭṭahāsaṃ mahendraṃ
bhīmam aṣṭakam || 114A etad guhyāṣṭakaṃ nāma sarvapāpavimocanam | gatvā tu puruṣaḥ śrīmān
prāpnoti śivamandiram || 115A śrīparvataṃ hariścandraṃ jalpam āmratikeśvaram | madhyamaṃ
ca mahākālaṃ kedāraṃ bhairavaṃ tahā || 116A etad guhyātiguhyaṃ ca aṣṭakaṃ parikīrtitam |
saṃtārya tu pitṛ ̄ n sa[L6]rvān śivaṃ yānti paraṃ padam || 117A amreśvara<ṃ> prabhāsaṃ ca
naimiśaṃ puṣkaraṃ tathā | āṣāḍhiḍiṇḍimuṇḍiś ca bhārabhūtiṃ bhavāntakam | nakulīśvaro <’>tha
512 | Florinda De Simini
Bhastrāpada, Rudrakoṭi, Avimukta, Mahālaya, Gokarṇa, and Bhadrakarṇa, as well as the
splendid Suvarnākṣa, (110A) / And that one known as Sthāṇvīśvara, famous in the three
worlds: this ogdoad of sites (sthānāṣṭaka) has to be known as the field of Rudra, conferring
great fortune. [The group] that begins with Bhastrāpada and ends with Sthāṇv[īśvara] causes
the [attainment of] identity with Rudra. (111A) / Furthermore, Chagalaṇḍa and Duraṇḍa,
Mākoṭa, Maṇḍaleśvara, Kālañjara, Śaṅkukarṇa, Sthaleśvara, Sthuleśvara: (112A) / This [has to
be known as] the pure ogdoad (pavitrāṣṭaka), where great merits are more and more increased.
Those who die right there go to the supreme seat of Śiva. (113A) / Moreover, the ogdoad [includ-
ing] Gayā, Kurukṣetra, Nakhala, as well as Kanakhala, Vimaleśvara, Aṭṭahāsa, Mahendra,
Bhīma: (114A) / This [has to be known] as the secret ogdoad (guhyāṣṭaka), [which] enables lib-
eration from all sins. Having gone [there], a fortunate person reaches the abode of Śiva. (115A)
/ Śrīparvata, Hariścandra, Jalpa, Āmratikeśvara, along with Madhyama, Mahākāla, Kedāra, as
well as Bhairava: (116A) / This is renowned as the extremely secret (guhyātiguhya) ogdoad.
Having saved all the ancestors, [those who die there] go to the supreme abode of Śiva. (117A) /
Amareśvara and Prabhāsa; Naimiśa, as well as Puṣkara; Āṣāḍhi and Diṇḍimuṇḍi; Bhārabhūti,
which annihilates transmigration, as well as the one known as Nakulīśvara, the great inner
[place]: (118A) / [This] inner ogdoad (pratyātmikāṣṭaka) [is] the field of Rudra connected with
the desire of good; all those who die there go to the supreme abode of Rudra. (119A) / The one
who makes these things — [such as] gifts, a dwelling place, a pit well, a park, a temple — in
the tīrthas will gain an undecaying fruit. (120A) / Patience, absence of envy, pity, truthfulness,
generosity, morality, asceticism, learning: this is indicated as the supreme eightfold feature of
the recipient. (121A) / Thus this fivefold Śivadharma has been expounded, for the sake of
Dharma, wealth, desire, and liberation, out of compassion towards all beings. (122A) / Every-
body in all situations sees auspicious things [that are] very difficult to attain, [but] everyone
obtains a positive destiny, and happiness will be there for everyone. (123A)
Mentions of aṣṭakas as groups of eight supramundane worlds (bhuvana) are very
frequent in tantric literature. Among these, the pañcāṣṭaka represents the lowest
level, its worlds corresponding to actual pilgrimage sites on earth; the lay devotee
who dies there will reach the corresponding eponymous paradise after death.12 Ac-
cording to Goodall, the pañcāṣṭaka is actually an earlier, not exclusively tantric fea-
ture.13 Among the evidence that he quotes in support of his hypothesis is that the
Sarvajñānottara distinguishes the nature of these five groups by stating, only for
the names of the pañcāṣṭaka, that they also correspond to tīrthas on earth; and that
||
vikhyātas tathā pratyātmiko mahān || 118A (c.m.) pratyātmikāṣṭakam [38rL1] kṣetraṃ rudrasya
hitakāmikam | tatra yānti mṛtāḥ sarve rudrasya paramaṃ padam || 119A dānāny āvasathaṃ kūpam
udyānaṃ devatālayam | tīrtheṣv etāni yaḥ kuryāt so ’kṣayaṃ phalam āpnuyāt || 120A kṣamāspṛhā
dayā satyaṃ dānaśīlaṃ tapaḥ śrutam | etad aṣṭāṅgam uddiṣṭaṃ paraṃ pātrasya lakṣaṇam || 121A
iti pañcaprakāro <’>yaṃ śivadharmaḥ prakīrtitaḥ | dharmārthakāma[L2]mokṣārthaṃ sarva-
bhūtānukampayā || 122A sarvataraṃ tu durgāṇi sarvo bhadrāṇi paśyati | sarvaḥ sugatim āpnoti
sarvasya ca bhavec chivaḥ || 123A.
12 See Goodall 2004, 314, n. 620, and Sanderson 2003, 403–404.
13 Goodall 2004, 315–316, n. 620.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 513
the non-tantric Śivadharmaśāstra, in the above-mentioned passage, does not link
these sites to bhuvanas, most likely because this account is archaic and predates
the notion of a correspondence between tīrthas and supramundane paradises.
Sanderson also observes that ‘there is nothing specifically Mantramārgic about the
list itself’, arguing that at least six of the sites of the pañcāṣṭaka are clearly Pāśu-
pata.14 On the basis of the evidence provided by the original Skandapurāṇa, a text
that is culturally and chronologically close to the Śivadharmaśāstra, and by other
textual sources, Bisschop has argued that possibly all of the sites mentioned in the
pañcāṣṭaka originally belonged to the Pāśupata tradition.15
A first textual problem arising from the passage quoted above is that the stan-
zas immediately following the text on the ogdoads are redundant with respect to
other stanzas in the same chapter: stanza 12.120A is almost identical with 12.51A,16
and stanza 12.121A is perfectly identical with 12.52A. Stanza 12.120A (≃ 12.51A) is
closely connected with the preceding list of holy sites, since it refers to the high
merits gained through the performance of dāna and the building of artifacts in the
tīrthas. The purpose of listing the characteristics of the proper recipients at 12.121A
could, at the same time, be related to the topic of dāna, which has just been brought
up. The same contents admittedly seem to blend much better into the general con-
text of the stanzas surrounding 12.52A, since there the verse was inserted within a
section illustrating the features of dāna and its components. At any rate, stanzas
12.110–121A do not appear to connect seamlessly with the following 12.122–23A, but
rather seem to break the continuity between the latter stanzas and those immedi-
ately preceding the passage on the ogdoads. Verse 12.122A, which opens with a con-
cluding iti (note that iti had already occurred with the same function at 12.99A), in-
troduces the proper end of the work, where the Śivadharma — which here
corresponds to the title of the work — is defined as pañcaprakāraḥ, ‘[endowed] with
five aspects’, and the devotees are assured that happiness is awaiting them. This
reference to a fivefold classification of the Śivadharma could be puzzling to a
reader, as there are no other mentions of this in the whole text. While in the
||
14 Sanderson 2003, 405 and n. 201. Here he identifies Āṣāḍhi, Diṇḍimuṇḍi, Bhārabhūti,
Lakulīśvara/Nakulīśvara, Amareśvara, and Prabhāsa as Pāśupata sites. The first four, used as
toponyms in the text, actually correspond to the proper names of the last four incarnations of
Śiva at Kārohaṇa (modern Kārvān, Gujarat), the alleged site of the Pāśupata revelation.
15 Bisschop 2006, 27–34. In his survey, Bisschop also highlights, among other things, that the
lists of the pañcāṣṭaka sites occurring in textual sources are arranged in different orders; more-
over, the original Skandapurāṇa does not present the pāñcaṣṭaka as a structured list, yet still
mentions the majority of these sites.
16 Śivadharmaśāstra 12.51A: (fol. 35r[LL2–3]) ārāmāvasathaṃ kūpa[L3]m udyānaṃ devatāgṛham |
tīrtheṣv etāni yaḥ kuryāt so ’kṣaya<ṃ> labhate phalam || 51.
514 | Florinda De Simini
Śivadharmottara the doctrine of the ‘five great sacrifices’ (mahāyajña) — a Śaiva
revision of those of the Brahmanical tradition — becomes a rather relevant doctrinal
point (see especially chapter 3 of the work),17 which could therefore justify a possi-
ble (though never expressly attested) attempt to include it in the definition of the
work itself,18 this categorization does not seem to have emerged yet in the Śivadhar-
maśāstra. There are only a few possible explanations why the Śivadharmaśāstra is
defined as ‘fivefold’ — if, that is, we rule out the possibility that the ‘five aspects’ in
12.122A consist of the four puruṣārthas and the ‘compassion towards all beings’ men-
tioned in the same stanza, which function respectively as the objectives and the
motivation that prompted the composition of the work. In stanza 12.40A the text lists
the five characteristics of asceticism (tapas), which, however important, do not
seem relevant to the definition of a text mainly addressed to lay practitioners.19 Two
more references to a fivefold classification occur in close proximity to the conclu-
sion of chapter 12A: one is precisely the list of five ogdoads, which in version A of
the chapter occurs closest to the definition of the Śivadharma as pañcaprakāraḥ,
while the other is the reference to the ‘five categories’ that, according to stanza
12.105Aff., reflect the main social roles in the spreading and practice of Dharma
within the community of bhaktas. These five categories include those who teach,
those who give advice, those who practice the Dharma, those who enable these ac-
tivities, and those who are in charge of their protection. This subdivision, centred
on the practice of dutiful behaviors, seems much more fitting as a reference for the
concluding definition of the Śivadharma as being divided into five categories, and
induces us to shift our attention to the verses immediately preceding the passage
on the ogdoads:20
||
17 The ‘five great sacrifices’ according to chapter 3 of the Śivadharmottara are: the karmayajña,
also known as karmayoga, corresponding to ritual; tapas, namely askesis; svādhyāya, here iden-
tified with the repetition of the śivamantra; dhyāna, the continuous meditation on Śiva; and,
finally, the jñānayajña/jñānayoga.
18 The Śivadharmottara defines the jñānayoga, one of the five great sacrifices, as
pañcaprakāraḥ (3.14), since it consists of five different activities, namely teaching, studying, ex-
plaining, listening, and meditating (adhyāpanam adhyayanaṃ vyākhyā śravaṇacintanam,
Śivadharmottara 3.14ab).
19 Śivadharmaśāstra 12.40A: (fol. 35v[L5]) brahmacaryaṃ japo maunaṃ kṣāntir āhāralāghavam |
ity etat tapaso rūpaṃ sughoraṃ pañcalakṣaṇam || 40; ‘Chastity, muttering prayers, silence, pa-
tience, continence as regards food: this is the fivefold aspect of asceticism, difficult to perform.
(40)’
20 Śivadharmaśāstra 12.103–109A: (fol. 37v[LL1–3]) yāvad asyopadeśena śivadharmaṃ samācaret |
tāvat tasyāpi tat puṇyam upadeṣṭaṃ na saṃśayaḥ || 103A upadeśaṃ vinā yasmād dharmo jñātuṃ
na śakyate | na ca kartum avijñāya tasmāt tulyaṃ phalaṃ tayoḥ || 104A upadeṣṭānumantā ca
ka[L2]rtā kārayitā ca yaḥ | kṛtānupālakaś caiva pañca tulyaphalāḥ smṛtāḥ || 105A kartur atyadhikaṃ
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 515
As long as one practices the Śivadharma in accordance with his teaching (scil. that of Can-
drātreya), so long is his merit also taught, there is no doubt [about it]. (103A) / Since the Dharma
cannot be known without teaching, nor [is it possible] for one who ignores [the Dharma] to do
[anything], for this reason these two (scil. the one who teaches Dharma and the one who acts
according to it) gain a similar fruit. (104A) / The teacher and the adviser, the agent and the one
who provokes the action, as well as the one who protects what has been done:21 according to
tradition, [these] five share a similar fruit. (105A) / [The one] who protects what has been done
[gets] a merit [that is] superior to [that] of the performer. Since a temple disappears quickly if
it is not protected, for this reason [one] has to protect [it] with every effort (106A) / And protec-
tion would [even] be superior to the gift of the objects taught above, [like] land, jewels, horses,
elephants, cattle, gold, and so on, [or even] clothes. (107A) / And [the one] who protects the gift
[will get] a merit superior to [that of] the donor, because what is left unprotected disappears
quickly. (108A) / For this reason, [one] should teach the Dharma and practice it oneself, should
cause [others] to practice [it], give advice, as well as protect what has been done by others.
(109A)
This section, due to its generic character and the exhortations to teach the Dharma
and protect the results of dharmic actions, could serve perfectly as the conclusion
of the entire text and, as such, could easily be connected with the last two stanzas,
12.122–23A. In stanza 12.99A the particle iti introduces the typical final statements
(12.99–102A) that state the title of the work, its approximate length, and the identity
of its mythical expounders.22 Related to this are the exhortations to teach and pro-
tect the Śivadharma, as already stated in stanzas 12.97–98A. It is at this point that
the Śivadharmaśāstra inserts the small group of stanzas translated above (12.103–
109A), dealing with the great merits conferred on one who protects somebody else’s
actions, a possible reference to the lay sponsors who are supposed to protect the
Śivadharma and promote its spreading. The transition from the preceding stanzas
||
puṇyaṃ tat kṛtaṃ yo ’nupālayet | yasmād āyatanaṃ kṣipraṃ nāśaṃ gacchaty apālitam | tasmāt
sarvaprayatnena kurvīta anupālanam || 106A bhūmiratnāśvanāgānāṃ gohiraṇyādivāsasām | bha-
vet pūrvopadiṣṭānāṃ dānāc chre[L3]yo ’nupālanam || 107A dātur atyadhikaṃ puṇyaṃ dattaṃ yaś
cānupālayet | apālitaṃ tu tad yasmāc chīghram eva praṇaśyati || 108A tasmād upadiśed dharmaṃ
svayaṃ cāpi samācaret | kārayed anumanyeta kṛtam anyaiś ca pālayet || 109A.
21 The first two padās of this stanza are very closely reminiscent of Bhagavadgītā 13.22: upadra-
ṣṭānumantā ca bhartā bhoktā maheśvaraḥ | paramātmeti cāpy ukto dehe ’smin puruṣaḥ paraḥ ||
22. In the Bhagavadgītā, this corresponds to the definition of the functions of the supreme puruṣa
within the material body, where the puruṣa is said to be ‘Supervisor and adviser, supporter, en-
joyer, great overlord, as well as supreme self’. Although the first pāda of stanza 105A is almost
identical with Bhagavadgītā 13.22a, and the construction of the pādas is similar overall, I don’t
believe it possible also to connect the two stanzas thematically, as the contexts appear to be very
different.
22 For a digression on the traditional accounts of the transmission of the Śivadharmaśāstra and
other works of the corpus, see De Simini 2016b, 263–268.
516 | Florinda De Simini
happens smoothly, mediated by the reference to Candrātreya, the alleged compiler
of the Śivadharmaśāstra, and to the duty of disseminating and protecting the text
whose composition has just been evoked. It thus seems possible, although admit-
tedly not compelling, to connect the pañcaprakāraḥ of 12.122A with this sketch of
the different functions in the practice of Dharma within the community that the
Śivadharmaśāstra is addressing, rather than to the following five ogdoads. The
whole group of stanzas, 12.110–21A, when read in the context of the preceding and
following verses, starts and ends quite abruptly, with no clear connection with
what precedes or follows. Given the miscellaneous nature of this chapter, the ab-
sence of straightforward links with the surrounding verses does not, in and of itself,
constitute evidence for the misplacement of a portion of the text. To this purpose,
it is more relevant to observe that some of the scribes who copied the manuscripts
transmitting version A of the chapter — for instance N , N , or N — marked the
starting point of the list of ogdoads with a symbol, or a pair of double daṇḍas, sep-
arating this passage from the rest of the chapter.23 This can be read as a hint that
somebody, at a certain point, felt that the pañcāṣṭaka passage did not fit in, at least
not with the preceding stanzas. Among the Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts, there
is one that even drops this passage completely, namely N , which omits not only
the list of aṣṭakas, but also the two redundant stanzas 12.120A and 121A (see fol.
48r[L1]). This manuscript is not dated, but a note found immediately after the end of
the Śivadharmaśāstra states that it was copied from an exemplar produced in 1194–
95 CE (315 NS).24 It is not entirely surprising that, with respect to the passage on the
ogdoads, this manuscript stands out as an exception among the Nepalese tradition,
for ongoing critical work on the texts shows that, in several cases, the readings
of N are in agreement with those attested in the later South Indian manuscripts.
In the study of the transmission of Śivadharma works, the passage on the ogdoads
falls into the category of those significant, though not yet systematically known,
inconsistencies whose study can help scholars bridge the two opposed sides of the
manuscript tradition, thus proving extremely important in the attempt at a genea-
logical reconstruction.
The southern tradition of the Śivadharma corpus is still little known, with sev-
eral specimens having been identified only very recently. Their total number has
||
23 See, for instance, N , fol. 40v[L4]ff.: the beginning of the list is marked by a pair of double
daṇḍas with an akṣara in between. This symbol occurs again at the very end of the Śivadharma-
śāstra, fol. 41r[L2]ff., marking the end of the chapter as well as the beginning and the end of a
short succession of praises to the deities. 12.121 is omitted; see also N , fol. 44v[L4], or N , fol.
40v[L6], which mark the starting point of the list with pairs of double daṇḍas.
24 See De Simini 2016b, 256, n. 57.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 517
grown to ca. 20 manuscripts transmitting either the Śivadharmaśāstra and the
Śivadharmottara together, or only one of the two, alone or together with texts that
are not included in the Nepalese corpus, or even just a chapter or a fragment from
these texts.25 As the first phase of locating and identifying the materials is still on-
going, our study must therefore necessarily be limited only to some representative
examples; in spite of this, the selected cases allow us to make important deductions
concerning the transmission of the text, which will have to be verified against those
manuscripts that prove significant in the history of the Śivadharma tradition. Of the
manuscripts to which I have access, I have selected two as case studies for the
southern tradition. One is G , a Grantha manuscript from the former van Manen
Collection of the Leiden University Library, dated to 1830 CE. The other is the Pon-
dicherry paper transcript P , deriving from a palm-leaf manuscript in Grantha
script preserved in the library of Sri Nataraja Gurukkal in Kilvelur (Tamil Nadu).
Occasionally, I will examine other paper transcripts with reference to specific
points.
L
If we compare the order of the stanzas in version A to the one attested in G40 and
P , to which I will refer as version D, two major differences emerge. One is that
stanzas 12.110–121A, just like in N , are not in fact located in the end of the chapter.
However, while N lacks these stanzas completely, the two South Indian manu-
scripts place them immediately after 12.50A. A second difference from the Nepalese
tradition lies in the addition and omission of stanzas, with the most substantial ad-
dition being located at the very end of the chapter (and of the work). These two
manuscripts, while inserting the passage on the ogdoads in the middle of the chap-
ter, also avoid the redundancies of stanzas 12.51–52A, which are completely omitted
here. The arrangement of chapter 12 according to the two manuscripts is summed
up in the following table, where additional stanzas are marked with a star, their
number corresponding to the actual position that these hold in each individual
manuscript:
||
25 An introduction to the non-Nepalese manuscripts of the Śivadharma can be found in De Si-
mini 2016b, Appendix II. The ongoing work of Marco Franceschini, presented at the ‘Śivadharma
Workshop. Manuscripts, Editions, Perspectives’ (Leiden) on September 30, 2016, as well as of
those scholars active at the Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO — Dominic Goodall, S. A. S. Sarma,
and R. Sathyanarayanan — continues to reveal new specimens.
518 | Florinda De Simini
12.1–5A 12.1–50A
12.6ab* 12.110–119A
12.6-8A 12.60ef*
12.10ab* 12.51–81A
12.9–19abA 12.86–99abA
12.20–22abA 12–57cdA
12.23cd* 12.105cd–106cdA
12.22cd–35abA 12.107
12.37cd* 12.108cd-109A
12.35cd–44A 12.122A
12.48cd-49ab* 12.115–132*
12.45–49A 12.123A
12.54cd-55* 12.134–137*
12.50A
12.110–121A
12.54–55A
12.53A
12.56–59abA
12.77ab*
12.59cd–60A
12.73abA
12.62cd–64abA
12.82ab*
12.65–72A
12.76A
12.74–75A
12.77–82A
12.84A
12.100cd–102ab*
12.83A
12.85–87A
12.89cd-97abA
12.115ab*
12.97cd-106cdA
12.107–109A
12.122A
12.129*–148ab*
12.123A
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 519
Even just a cursory glance suffices to show that P is the most aberrant of the two,
due to its larger number of additional stanzas and omissions. However, despite
these omissions, both manuscripts follow the order of the topics as found in version
A, with one substantial difference in the position of the ten stanzas on the ogdoads,
which in the southern manuscripts follow immediately after 12.50A. This position of
the ogdoad passage is not surprising once we recall that, in version A, stanzas
12.120–21A, concluding the ogdoad list, were identical or almost identical with
12.51–52A. Moreover, stanzas 12.49–50A, immediately after which the two southern
manuscripts insert the group of stanzas starting with 12.110A, contain a reference to
the sacred places of Rudra’s descents:26
A water flow visited by seers — knowers of all the treatises, intent on asceticism, whose senses
are subjugated — and by gods: this is called a tīrtha on Earth. (49) / [One] should define the
places of the descents of Rudra as sacred places. Identity with Rudra [is granted] to the people
who die in these fields of Śiva. (50)
As pointed out by Bisschop,27 the notion of the śiva° or rudrāvatāras originated in a
Pāśupata milieu and was not widely known in Indian religious literature, with the
exception of Pāśupata-influenced Purāṇas and the Pāśupata work Ātmasamarpaṇa
of Viśuddhamuni: these texts list 28 avatāras of Śiva occurring in different time pe-
riods, and ending with Nakulīśa/Lakulīśa, additionally giving for each of them the
names of the pupils who spread the Śaiva teachings imparted in those places. Ac-
cording to this view, the complete list of 28 avatāras is a later doctrinal evolution
than the story of the four incarnations of Śiva at Kārohaṇa, for all the sources at-
testing the complete list of avatāras are later than the original Skandapurāṇa.28 The
Śivadharmaśāstra lacks any lists of rudrāvatāras, but still shows knowledge of
them in these two stanzas, which might be a hint that the text reflects a phase in
||
26 Śivadharmaśāstra 12.49–50A: (fol. 35r[L2]) ṛṣibhiḥ sarvaśāstrajñais taponiṣṭhair jitendriyaiḥ [em.;
jitendriyaḥ Cod.] | devaiś ca sevitaṃ toyaṃ kṣitau tīrthaṃ tad ucyate || 49 rudrāvatārasthānāni
puṇyakṣetrāṇi nirdiśet | mṛtānāṃ teṣu rudratvaṃ śivakṣetreṣu dehinām || 50.
27 Bisschop 2006, 41–44, points to the following Purāṇic occurrences of lists of rudrāvatāras (p.
41): Vāyupurāṇa 23.127–130; Kūrmapurāṇa 1.51.5d; Liṅgapurāṇa 1.7.31c and 1.24.35cd–39ab;
Śivapurāṇa Śatarudrasaṃhitā 4.27– 30, and Vāyavīyasaṃhitā 2.9.2d.
28 The only exception is the Vāyupurāṇa, as an early version of this work was certainly known to
the redactors of the Skandapurāṇa (Bisschop 2006, 18), although the section on the avatāras in the
Vāyupurāṇa was apparently a later adjunct. The occurrence of the names of the four incarnations
of Śiva at Kārohaṇa as toponyms may be a hint that the Śivadharmaśāstra, like the original
Skandapurāṇa, ignored the later theology of the 28 avatāras, while it was aware of the more archaic
story of the spread of the Pāśupata teachings.
520 | Florinda De Simini
which this doctrine was still undeveloped. The only information that the text pro-
vides is that the ‘places of the descents of Rudra’ had become tīrthas, and that dying
there was considered very auspicious — just as it was in the case of the pañcāṣṭaka.
Therefore, placing the stanzas on the ogdoads after the mention of the
rudrāvatārasthānas, like the South Indian manuscripts do, would be perfectly suit-
able to the context. This, along with the repetition of 12.51A and 12.52A as 12.120–21A
in the Nepalese tradition, can be considered an indication that the most likely place
for the 10 stanzas on the pañcāṣṭaka to occur is exactly between 12.50A and 12.51A,
which is where the two southern manuscripts have them. This means that two late
manuscripts, one of which is a Devanāgarī paper transcript, preserve the text in
what seems to be a more pristine condition, at least as regards this specific point.
The corruption that had interfered with most of the Nepalese tradition from the 11th
century until modern times does not appear in these much later specimens, which
however have features that clearly distinguish them from all northern manuscripts,
such as the addition of the final stanzas, which mostly consist of invocations to
Śiva. Nevertheless, the southern tradition is very diversified: among the paper tran-
scripts of the Śivadharmaśāstra we find some that confirm this arrangement, like
P , a paper transcript copied from T , a manuscript in Telugu script now pre-
served in Adyar;29 and others that are rather aligned with version A, like P and
P , which are nonetheless endowed with characteristics that are specific to the
southern transmission.30
||
29 This manuscript starts the enumeration of the aṣṭakas at its stanza 12.52cd, soon after the men-
tion of the rudrāvatārasthānāni (12.51). The list concludes with a hemistich (12.64ab in P ) missing
both in the Nepalese manuscripts and in P , but available in G (see P , p. 144): puṇyāṣṭakam
idaṃ jñeyaṃ śivakṣetrasya lakṣaṇam. The last aṣṭaka is thus called a puṇyāṣṭaka. This addition may
depend on the corruption of verse 12.119aA (12.62c in P ), where the name pratyātmikāṣṭaka is
given as pratyaṣṭakam idaṃ. Like in G , this additional hemistich (puṇyāṣṭakam idaṃ …) is con-
nected with 12.51Aff., while 12.122A (iti pañcaprakāro ’yaṃ […]), at the end of the chapter, is preceded
by 12.109A (kārayed anumanyeta […]).
30 P , copied from the Grantha manuscript G , reproduces the list of aṣṭakas at the end of the
chapter, in the same position as version A. On the other hand, 12.119A is followed by other stanzas,
not all of which are available in the manuscripts transmitting version A (P , p. 153): pratyaṣṭakam
idaṃ kṣetraṃ rudrasyāpi ca kāmadam || 122 tatra yānti mṛtās sarve rudrasya paramaṃ padam |
(=12.119A) puṇyāṣṭakam idaṃ jñeyaṃ śivasāyujyakāraṇam || 123 tīrtheṣv eteṣu yaḥ kuryāc chrāddhaṃ
yajñaṃ tapo japaḥ | (=12.120cdA) snānaṃ dānaṃ vrataṃ karma sokṣayaṃ phalam āpnuyāt || 124
kṣamā spṛhā dayā satyaṃ dāna śīlaṃ tapaḥ śrutam | etad aṣṭāṅgam uddiṣṭaṃ paraṃ pātrasya
lakṣaṇam || 125 (=12.121A) dharmārthakāmamokṣārthaṃ sarvabhūtānukampayā | (=12.122cdA) kartā
kārayitā mantā prerakaś cānumodakaḥ || 126 iti pañcaprakāro ’yaṃ śivadharmaḥ prakīrtitaḥ ||
(=122abA). Note that the addition of hemistich 12.126cd, immediately before the definition of the
Śivadharma as pañcaprakāra, contributes to understanding the latter as a reference to the five func-
tions that had been described in the stanzas immediately preceding the passage on the ogdoads,
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 521
On the other hand, the Nepalese tradition too is not consistent in the transmis-
sion of chapter 12 of the Śivadharmaśāstra. The study of the earliest testimonia of the
Śivadharmaśāstra, still unavailable during the first collation of chapter 12, has per-
mitted significant advances in the understanding of this chapter’s transmission, and
thus of the work in general. One of these early manuscripts is N , a multiple-text
manuscript (MTM) that only transmits a limited number of works of the corpus; this
manuscript is not dated, but its script suggests the late 10th to early 11th century as the
most likely period for its production.31 A further crucial piece of evidence for the trans-
mission of the text is provided by N , dated to 1036 CE (156 NS),32 and thus the ear-
liest dated manuscript transmitting the Śivadharma corpus, though also in this case
in a slightly different version.33 N and N , although transmitting the same stanzas
as Version A, attest to a completely different arrangement of the verses of chapter 12,
both as regards the position of the passage on the ogdoads (where N and N are
much closer to the late southern transmission), and that of the numerous stanzas on
dāna in the same chapter. While these two manuscripts respect the stanza sequence
||
and which are now summed up in this hemistich. This is not the end of the chapter, as 12.127ab
(=122abA) is followed by the same benedictory verses that we find in G and P . This transcript
therefore shares one feature with all of the southern manuscripts, and another feature only with
some of them, namely G and P , that is the adjunct of the final hemistich on the puṇyāṣṭaka (note
that the variant reading attested in P also adds the information that this puṇyāṣṭaka is the cause
of the attainment of identity with Śiva), along with the corruption of pratyātmikāṣṭakam into
pratyaṣṭakam idaṃ (see 12.122c =12.119aA). Moreover, P reproduces the verse iti pañcaprakāro ’yaṃ
(=12.122A) twice, once after the list of aṣṭakas and once immediately before it, as 12.112ab. This hap-
pens also in P , copied from G , which, like P , can be associated with version A, from which it is
however separated by this and other variants in the arrangement of the stanzas. The list of ogdoads
in P ends as follows: pratyātmikāṣṭakam idaṃ kṣetraṃ rudrasya kāmikam | tatra yāti mṛtāḥ sarve
rudrasya paramaṃ padam || (=12.119A) puṇyāṣṭakam idaṃ jñeyaṃ śivakṣetrasya lakṣaṇam | dānāny
āvasathaṃ kūpam udyānaṃ devatālayam || tīrtheṣv eteṣu yaḥ kuryāt so ’kṣayaṃ phalam āpnuyāt |
(=12.120A) kṣāntiḥ spṛhā dayā satyaṃ dānaṃ śīlaṃ tapaḥ śrutam || etad aṣṭāṅgam uddiṣṭaṃ paraṃ
pātrasya lakṣaṇam | (=12.121A) iti pañcaprakāro ’yam śivadharmaḥ prakīrtitaḥ || (=12.122abA). This
transcript, therefore, does attest a correct reading for 12.119A, since it gives pratyātmikāṣṭakaṃ in-
stead of the pratyaṣṭakam idam attested in P and other manuscripts. In spite of this, it preserves
the verse puṇyāṣṭakam idam […], introducing an anomaly in the transmission of the names of the
pañcāṣṭaka. Like the manuscripts transmitting version A, P preserves the redundancy of 12.120–
121A.
31 On the peculiarity of this manuscript as regards the number of works it transmits and further
considerations on its earliness, see De Simini 2016b, 244ff. as well as below, § 3.
32 See De Simini and Mirnig 2017 for text and translation of the colophon; Petech 1984, 36, verifies
the date given in the final colophon as July 6, 1036.
33 The particular version of the Śivadharma corpus transmitted by this manuscript is the main
topic of De Simini and Mirnig 2017.
522 | Florinda De Simini
12.1–41A, they connect 12.41A directly to 12.58A; at this point the text proceeds uninter-
ruptedly until 12.74A, then goes back again to 12.42A. This means that in manuscripts
N and N , the passage on the ogdoads (vv. 12.110–121A) follows 12.50A and is fol-
lowed by 12.53–54A, just like in the South Indian manuscripts. The sequence 12.53–
57A is respected, with small omissions, but these stanzas are then followed by 12.75A-
109A, after which in both manuscripts the text ends with stanzas 12.122–23A.
As dry and little appealing this whole discussion of stanza arrangement may
sound, it helps in disclosing an important aspect of the transmission of the Śivadha-
rmaśāstra. Before reviewing the structure of chapter 12 according to N and N ,
we should observe that this arrangement is not only attested in these two earliest
specimens of the corpus but also, with a few minor differences, in a late-12th century
Nepalese manuscript, namely N , dated to 1187 CE (307 NS).34 Among the vast array
of Nepalese manuscripts attesting the Śivadharmaśāstra, these three are the only
ones in which the topics of chapter 12 are given in the order shown in the table below:
12.1–41A 12.1–41A 12.1–5A
12.58–63cdA 12.58–72A 12.5ef*
12.64–74A 12.74A 12.6cdA
12.42–44A 12.42–44A 12.7–41A
12.62* 12.61* 12.58–74A
12.45–50A 12.45–50A 12.42–43A
12.110–121A 12.110–121A 12.46abA
12.53–54A 12.53–57A 12.44A
12.56–57A 12.75A 12.62*
12.75–106abA 12.78–109A 12.45–50A
12.108cd–109A 12.122–123A 12.110–121A
12.122–123A 12.53–54A
12.56–57A
12.75–96cdA
12.106ab*
12.96ef–106cdA
12.107–109A
12.122–123A
||
34 On this manuscript and its dated colophon, see De Simini 2016b, 253–254. Please, note that in
this publication the manuscript was wrongly referred to as Or. B 125; thanks to Yuko Yokochi, I am
now aware of the proper shelf mark, which is reported below (see References).
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 523
Although N omits more stanzas, the sequence of the verses and of the topics
remains mostly the same as in manuscripts N and N . These three manuscripts
present the reader with a different version of chapter 12, to which I will refer as
version P. The variation in the arrangement of the stanzas, and at the same time
the consistency shown by the three manuscripts, is such that it cannot simply be
arbitrary, but is revealing of the existence of a direct genealogical link between
these manuscripts. Therefore, along with the position of the stanzas on the ogdo-
ads, the arrangement of the stanzas on dāna constitutes another significant sep-
arating error in the transmission of the Śivadharmaśāstra. Now, while the stanzas
on the ogdoads seem to be in good order after 12.50A, the structure of version P
breaks the inner coherence of the stanzas about gifting, especially because it in-
terrupts the sequence of donations addressed to the śivayogins in 12.66–84A. This
is evident if we compare the text of the stanzas corresponding to the points at
which the two versions differ: 35
Version A Version P Version A
[He] who would feed a Śaiva [He] who would feed with de- Having donated the required
devotee, the best among the votion a twice-born Śaiva dev- toothbrush to a śivayogin, in
twice-born, during the otee, during the śrāddhā ritu- Heaven he will be granted a
śrāddhā rituals and so on, als and so on, having saved beautiful town furnished with
having saved seven members seven members of his lineage, gorgeous women and enjoy-
of his lineage, is exalted in is exalted in the world of Ru- ments. (74A) / Having donated a
the world of Śiva. (57A) / At dra. (57A=74P) / Having do- yogapaṭṭa and the sacred
this point, what’s the use of nated a yogapaṭṭa and the sa- thread to the śivayogin, [he]
so much talking? Donate cred thread to the śivayogin, will obtain the fruit of the gift of
food to the Śaiva devotee! [he] obtains the fruit of the one hundred pairs of garments.
When the Śaiva devotee is gift of one hundred pairs of (75A) / Having donated to the
fed, in that case Śiva is actu- garments. (75A=75P) śivayogins a vessel for alms,
ally fed. (58A) well made, [consisting] of clay,
||
35 Śivadharmaśāstra 12.57–58A: (Fol. 35r[LL4–5]) śivabhaktaṃ dvijaśreṣṭhaṃ yaḥ śrāddhādiṣu bho-
jayet | kulasaptakam uddhṛtya śivalo<ke> ma[L5]hīyate || 57A bahunātra kim uktena śivabhaktaṃ tu
bhojayet | śivabhakto yadā bhuṅkte sākṣād bhuṅkte tadā śivaḥ || 58A.
Śivadharmaśāstra 12.57A; 75A = 74–75P: (N , fol. 47r[L5]) śivabhaktaṃ dvijaṃ bhaktyā yaḥ
śrāddhādiṣu bhojayet | kulasaptakam uddhṛtya rudraloke ma[L5]hīyate || 57A yogapaṭṭopavītāni
nivedya śivayogine | vastrayugmasahasrasya dattasya phalam āpnute || 75A.
Śivadharmaśāstra 12.74–76A: (Fol. 36v[LL4–5]) dantadhāvanam uddiṣṭaṃ nivedya śivayogine |
divyastrībhogasaṃyuktaṃ divi ramyaṃ puraṃ labhet || 74A yogapaṭṭopavītāni nivedya śivayogine |
vastrayugmasahasrasya dattasya phalam āpnuyāt || 75A mṛdvaṃśālābudārvādisukṛtaṃ bhaikṣabhāja-
nam | nivedya śivayogibhyaḥ sadā [L5] sattraphalaṃ labhet || 76A.
524 | Florinda De Simini
Version A Version P Version A
bamboo, bottle-gourd, wood,
and so on, [he] will always ob-
tain the fruit of a Soma sacri-
fice. (76A)
Both stanza 12.57A and stanza 12.75A are much better connected with their con-
texts — which are the importance of donating food to Śaiva devotees and the list
of objects to donate to śivayogins — in the arrangement given by version A. This
last section amounts to 19 contiguous stanzas in version A. The same is true if we
observe the position of stanza 12.58A, which according to version P should imme-
diately follow 12.41A:36
Version A Version P
What is both desired and excellent, and what What is both desired and excellent, and what
could be obtained in a proper manner, this is could be obtained in a proper manner, this is
exactly what has to be donated to a [person] exactly what has to be donated to a [person]
endowed with good qualities; thus is the endowed with good qualities; thus is the
[main] rule about gifting. (41A) / [When one] [main] rule about gifting. (41A) / At this point,
would give land measuring one thousand what’s the use of so much talking? Give food
nivartanas and so on, bestowing all kinds of to the Śaiva devotee! Because the Śaiva devo-
grains, furnished with water, this is called a tee eats, after eating he directly becomes
gift of land (bhūmidāna) (42A) Bhava. (42P=58A)
The arguments asserting the misplacement of stanzas 12.110–121A on the ogdoads
are admittedly more compelling than those concerning the position of the stanzas
on dāna. However, if we accept that the order of these verses in version P is in-
deed less consistent, as it seems to break the internal sequence of some groups of
stanzas, we come to the conclusion that version A preserves the stanzas on dāna
||
36 Śivadharmaśāstra 12.41–42A: (Fol. 35v[LL5–6]) yad yad iṣṭam visiṣṭaṃ ca nyā[L6]yaprāptaṃ ca
yad bhavet | tat tad guṇavate deyam ity etad dānalakṣaṇam || 41A nivartanasahasrādyāṃ sarva-
sasyaprarohinīm | dadyād bhūmiṃ jalopetāṃ bhūmidānaṃ tad ucyate || 42A.
Śivadharmaśāstra 12.41–42P: (N , Fol. 35v[LL5–6]) yad iṣṭam ca visiṣṭaṃ ca nyāyaprāptaṃ ca yad
bhavet | tat tad guṇavate deyam ity etad dānalakṣaṇam || 41A bahunātra kim uktena śivabhaktaṃ
prabhojayet | śivabhakto yato bhuṅkte bhuṅktvā sākṣād bhaved bhavaḥ || 42P.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 525
in a (seemingly) correct order, though not the stanzas on the ogdoads; version P,
on the contrary, transmits the stanzas on the ogdoads in what should have been
their pristine position, while introducing some illogical changes to the order of
the stanzas on dāna. Version D, for which we have so far identified only southern
specimens, is the version that seems to have preserved the most accurate stanza
sequence for chapter 12, as regards both the passage on the ogdoads (where it
complies with version P) and the order of the stanzas on dāna (corresponding to
the one given in version A). These deductions are drawn exclusively on the basis
of the previous considerations regarding these two separating errors, without
considering the further question of omissions and adjuncts that characterize ver-
sion D more distinctively than any other version of the chapter identified so far.
There is a further question that we need to address before drawing any con-
clusions, albeit provisional, on this point of the transmission of the text, namely
what role to assign to the two known Śāradā manuscripts. The Śāradā tradition
so far consists only of these specimens, which do not show significant internal
variation. In brief, their main characteristics with reference to chapter 12 is the
addition of stanzas, both in the middle and at the end of the chapter, which are
not available in other specimens — neither those from Nepal nor those from the
South — and can therefore be considered specific to the Śāradā tradition; barring
a few omissions, the two Śāradā manuscripts reproduce the same arrangement
as in the Nepalese manuscripts of version P, as illustrated by the table below:
Ś Ś
12.1* 12.1*
12.1–41A 12.1–41A
12.58–59abA 12.58-59ab
12.44cd* 12.44cd*
12.60–61A 12.60–61A
12.47*–50* 12.47*–50*
12.62–63cdA 12.62–63cdA
12.64–66abA 12.64–66abA
12.67cd–68A 12.67cd–68A
12.66cdA 12.66cdA
12.69–71A 12.69–72A
12.74A 12.74A
12.42–44abA 12.42–44A
12.63* 12.65*
12.45–50A 12.45–50A
12.110–114abA 12.110–114abA
12.74cd* 12.76cd*
526 | Florinda De Simini
Ś Ś
12.114cd–116A 12.114cdA
12.77ab* 12.117abA
12.117abA 12.115cdA-116abA
12.118–119A 12.79*
12.80*–81* 12.117abA
12.120–121A 12.118–119A
12.53–57A 12.82-83*
12.75–80abA 12.120–121A
12.82–83A 12.52–57A
12.96* 12.75–83A
12.84–90abA 12.98*
12.103cd–104* 12.84–90A
12.91abA 12.106*
12.105cd* 12.91abA
12.91cd–96abA 12.107cd*
12.96ef–98A 12.91cd–96abA
12.113–125* 12.96ef–98A
12.101–106abA 12.115-126*
12.106ef–108A 12.101–106cdA
12.134–137* 12.107–108A
12.135-137*
The stanzas on the ogdoads are characterized by the insertion of extra verses, in
which different tīrthas are also mentioned; verses that are shared with the other
versions are at times rephrased, a rephrasing that in certain cases is clearly the
result of corruption.37 These two manuscripts can therefore be associated with
||
37 Following is a diplomatic transcript of the relevant stanzas as transmitted in Ś . The variant
readings attested in Ś are noted in square brackets; additional verses that are not available in
versions A, P, and D are marked with a star following the daṇḍa: [L6] rudrāvatārasthānani
puṇyakṣetrāṇi nirdiśet | mṛtānāṃ teṣu rudratvaṃ śivakṣetreṣu dehi[L7]nāṃ | bhastrāpadaṃ ru-
drakoṭir avimuktaṃ mahāpadam [mahālayaṃ Ś ] | gokarṇaṃ rudrakarṇaṃ ca suvarṇākṣo tha
[°ākṣaś ca Ś ] dīptimān | [L8] sthāneśvaraṃ tu vikhyātaṃ triṣu lokeṣu viśrutam | sthāṇvaṣṭakam
idaṃ jñeyaṃ tatra kṣetraṃ mahodayaṃ | bhastrāpadādi[L9]sthāṇvādirudrakṣetrādikārakam [ru-
dradayojya° Ś ] | chāgalāṇḍaṃ durāṇḍaṃ ca sahā vā maṇḍaleśvaram | kālāñjaraṃ
śaṅku[L10]karṇaṃ sthāneśvaram iti smṛtam | pavitrāṣṭakam etat śrimahāpuṇyābhivardhanam |
mṛtāḥ prayānti tatraiva [L11] śivasya paramaṃ padam | gayā ca kurukṣetraṃ ca tathānyā nikhi-
lābhisuḥ | tatra kanakhalaṃ daivaṃ bhukti[L12]muktiphalaśucam [°pradam Ś ] | vimalaṃ
cāṭṭāhāsaṃ ca māhendraṃ bhī … [… bhī Ś ] māṣṭakam | etad guhyātiguyākhyam aṣṭakaṃ pari[L1]
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 527
version P, but the addition of a substantial number of new verses that are not
attested anywhere else induces us to consider this a Kashmiri variant of version
P, just like we had a southern variant of version A.
The misplacement of the passage on the ogdoads must have been an early
error, since it appears in the Nepalese tradition already in the 11th century: our
manuscript from the second half of the century, N , , attests to this interference,
while the manuscripts from the first half do not. This is not to suggest that the
mistake necessarily originated in this century, but only to give a time frame for
its attestations. We should also recall that the two manuscripts attesting version
P that are dated or datable up to the first half of the 11th century each transmit a
different variant of the corpus that won’t be attested in the later tradition. Thus,
both versions A and P are attested in the earlier manuscripts of the collection,
with N being the only post-12th century Nepalese manuscript attesting version
P. This version, while transmitting a seemingly correct arrangement of the stan-
zas on the ogdoads, also differ from version A as far as the order of the stanzas on
dāna is concerned; as observed above, the order of the stanzas on dāna in version
P appears to be illogical with regard to the organization of the contents, to the
point that one might argue that this particular arrangement had originated, in its
turn, as a misplacement. Regardless of the fact that the order of stanzas in the
section on dāna as given in version P is incorrect, this situation suggests that the
manuscripts transmitting the two versions could go back to two different models.
The Nepalese manuscripts that fall into these two groups behave rather consistent-
ly: those that transmit the stanzas on the ogdoads in the end of the chapter do not
attest to the misplacement of the stanzas on dāna, and vice versa, the three that
correctly preserve the stanzas on the ogdoads after the reference to the
rudrāvatārasthānas propose a different arrangement — or, better, a disarrange-
ment — of the stanzas on dāna in the same chapter. Such consistency in the trans-
mission of two extensive variant readings can only imply the existence of two
distinct models.
||
kīrttitam | udgatvā puruṣaḥ śrīmān prāpnoti śivamandiram | śrīparvataṃ hariścandraṃ
mahākālacanaṃ [°kālardhanaṃ Ś ] [L2] tathā | ādārukeśvaraṃ [āmrātakeśvaraṃ Ś ] caivaṃ ke-
darabhairavaṃ tathā | janmeśaṃ saptam eśaṃ [saptadaiśaṃ Ś ] ca sarvaduḥkhapuṇyāsaram |*
ati[L3]guhyāṣṭakaṃ vidyād etam mokṣapradāpakam | amareśaṃ prabhāsaṃ ca naimiṣaṃ
puṣkaraṃ tathā | aṣāḍhaṃ ḍiṇḍipiṇḍa[L4]khyaṃ bhārabhūtim [°bhūmim Ś ] ataḥ param | nakule-
śam athākhyātaṃ vidyāś cātrāṣṭakaṃ śivam | guhyāṣṭakam iti khyātaṃ rudra[L5]syāmitatejasaṃ |
tatra yānti mṛtās sarve rudrasya paramaṃ padam | sthānāny etāni yatnena vrajed yogī śiva[L6]vratī
|* itūmā sāsya te yena rudrāṇāṃ kṣetram uttamam |* yatra yatrāthavā deśe yena yena maheśvaraḥ
|* rūpeṇāste [L7] mahāpuṇyaṃ tat tat kṣetraṃ sumokṣadam |* dānāny āvasathaṃ kūpam udyānaṃ
devatāgṛham | tīrtheṣv etāni yaḥ ku[L8]ryād akṣayaṃ labhate phalam |.
528 | Florinda De Simini
If we accept that the correct order of the stanzas on the ogdoads is the one
reflected in versions P and D, while a more correct arrangement of the section on
dāna is reflected in versions A and D, it turns out that the latter, only represented
by southern specimens, is the only version to have preserved both sections in
what could be their proper position. We are therefore faced with a situation
where, with regard to the two variants in question, late Grantha and Telugu man-
uscripts transmit a version that could be closer to that of the archetype, prior to
the emergence of the two interferences that would have heavily affected the
transmission of chapter 12 since its early history. This consideration only applies
to the general structure of the contents, as a common pattern of omissions and
additions closely links the manuscripts transmitting version D to the regional
southern tradition. One possibility is that the Indian regional transmissions and
the Nepalese transmission separated early, before the first manuscript(s) reached
Nepal, thus certainly before the 9th century. The most significant evidence that so
far seems to suggest that the Nepalese and the Indian traditions must have devel-
oped independently after the first split is the flourishing of the corpus, of which
we find no trace outside Nepal, where it played by contrast a key role also in the
manuscript transmission. While it is possible that the stanza order of version D
may depend on an older hyper-archetype, given its commonalities with versions
A and P, only an accurate study of the variant readings in the text will enable
scholars to confirm and enrich this reconstruction, or on the contrary to draw a
completely different picture. At the same time, the hypothesis of a scribal conjec-
ture that restored the correct position of the stanzas on the ogdoads in manu-
scripts following version D might always remain unconfirmed; as I will try to ar-
gue with the next example, the ghost of contamination has haunted the
transmission of the Śivadharma corpus since early times, getting in the way of
modern philological studies.
3 Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda in the making
The ‘Conversation between Umā and Maheśvara’ (Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda) is
typically transmitted as the fourth work in the Nepalese MTMs of the Śivadharma
corpus. It is first attested in two early 11th-century specimens, N and N , and
since then transmitted uninterruptedly in palm-leaf and paper manuscripts of the
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 529
Śivadharma corpus up to modern times.38 Like the other works of the corpus, with
the exception of the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara, the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda appears to only be attested in Nepal. The study of its transmission
thus offers the opportunity to narrow our focus from the vast South Asian area,
with its diverse local traditions and scripts, to the Nepalese region. The case that
will be examined in the next pages suggests that the composition of the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda was still in progress during the first stages of its manuscript
transmission, thus providing a clue that this work may indeed have been com-
posed in Nepal; at the same time, scribes have not only facilitated the transmis-
sion of this text, but also seem to have modified it significantly, for reasons that
might have been connected to the contexts in which the text was used.
As I have already pointed out elsewhere,39 a relevant disruption in the trans-
mission of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda consists in how the Nepalese manuscripts
appear to have divided the work into an uneven number of chapters. As a matter
of fact, several manuscripts transmit the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as a work di-
vided into 22 chapters, the final chapter consisting of only 16 stanzas that usually
lack the explicit designation of ‘chapter 22’, being set off simply with final iti.
Such is the division of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda according to N (which how-
ever has significant lacunas in this point), N , N , N , N , N , N , and N ,
to which I will hereafter refer as ‘group V’. Note that all these manuscripts also
turn out to transmit version A of Śivadharmaśāstra chapter 12, although this in-
formation cannot be verified for N and N , which lack the Śivadharmaśāstra
entirely. In this group we should also include Naraharinatha 1998. Once we com-
pare the structure of the final portion of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as in group
V with the one attested in N , possibly the earliest manuscript to attest the cor-
pus and, thus, the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda itself, some major differences
||
38 The works of the Śivadharma corpus have also been used independently of the MTMs in
which they are transmitted, a practice that in later times resulted in some of these works being
transmitted as single-text manuscripts originating from the dismemberment of a former MTM
(see De Simini 2016b, 260ff.). The title list of the NGMPP enumerates only four paper manuscripts
with the title Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda that don’t seem to be part of a larger manuscript. These
are (listed by microfilm number): A 305–4, of only ten folios; E 723/14, of 33 folios; A 471–40, of
25 folios; and F 6–8, of eight folios. The catalogue information provided is too scarce to let us
conclude beyond doubt that this Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda was indeed the same work (or a frag-
ment of the same work) as in the Śivadharma corpus. As a matter of fact, Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda is a very generic title, which could rather denote a category or subgenre of texts, as
shown by its various attestations in the New Catalogous Catalogorum.
39 Some of the considerations contained in the following lines are alluded to in De Simini 2016b,
246, n. 34.
530 | Florinda De Simini
emerge. In the following lines, I will describe this comparison by using one man-
uscript as representative of the entire group V, namely N , a complete palm-leaf
manuscript dated to 1170 CE.40 The first relevant discrepancy emerging from a
comparison between N and N is that the latter, in which the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda is also positioned as the last work in the corpus, concludes the work
at chapter 20. The contents of chapter 20 in the two manuscripts are otherwise
consistent, barring a few concluding verses absent from N :
N : (fol. 191v[L3]) prakāsitāni sarvāṇi N : (fol. 185r[LL2–3]) prakāśitā • ni sarvāṇi
dharmāṇi vividhā • ni ca | eṣa te paramaṃ dharmāṇi vividhāni ca || yo <’>sau ca rati-
yoga<ṃ> mayā tatvam udāhṛtam || ○ || iti dharmātmā sa yāti paramāṃ gatiṃ | rudra •
mahābhāratasāntiparvaṇi dānadharmeṣu jñānāni puṇyāni bhāṣitāni purāṇi ca || arcitā
u[L4]māmahesvarasaṃvāde viṃsamo <’>dhyā- vācakā ye ca likhāpaya[L3]ti śraddhayā | sarve
yaḥ samāptaḥ || ✼ || samāptaṃ umāmahesva- {yā} yānti pāraṃ sthānaṃ yatra vāso [vā a.c.,
rasaṃvādaṃ (sic!) ||; ‘[…] and all the manifold vāso p.c.] niraṃjanaḥ || etan te paramaṃ
teachings have been disclosed. That supreme yogaṃ ma • yā tatvaṃ udāhṛtam || || umāma-
yoga has been illustrated by me to you ac- heśvarasamvāde viṃśatimo <’>dhyāyaḥ ||; ‘[…]
cording to truth. Thus ends the 20th chapter in and all the manifold teachings have been dis-
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, belonging to the closed. / And the one who finds pleasure in the
teachings on gifting in the Śāntiparvan of the Dharma, he heads to the supreme path. The
Mahābhārata. The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda is meritorious and ancient [fields of] Rudra’s
concluded.’ knowledge have been expounded: / The wor-
shipper and [those] who recite, [as well as the
one who] has [knowledge] copied with faith, all
go to the supreme seat, where the pure abode
is. / That supreme yoga has been illustrated by
me to you according to truth. / [Thus ends] the
20th chapter in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda’.
The general tenor of these verses, which declare that all the teachings have been
disclosed and, in the version given by manuscripts of group V, praise the role of
those who worship and disseminate the text, seems to comply perfectly with the
concluding remarks of the work. However, N is the only extant manuscript in
which chapter 20 actually concludes the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. A further pe-
culiarity of N is that the colophon of chapter 20 mentions the ‘teachings on gift-
ing’ of the Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan, which is a phrasing actually used to refer
to the so-called ‘Section on the Teachings on Gifting’ (Dānadharmaparvan), cor-
responding to chapters 1 to 166 in the critical edition of the Anuśāsanaparvan, the
13th division of the Mahābhārata. This attribution, which does not have parallels
||
40 On this manuscript, see De Simini 2016c.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 531
in any of the extant chapter rubrics of the work, therefore seems to reconnect the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda with the Mahābhārata, which does contain a section
that depicts a dialogue between Umā and Maheśvara exactly in the Anuśāsana-
parvan, in chapters 127 to 134 of the critical edition, that is still within the
dānadharma section. As Mirnig and I have argued in a further contribution to this
volume (see chapter 18, 587ff.), the composition of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda,
along with that of the Lalitavistara transmitted in N (containing substantial par-
allels with the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda), seems indeed to have taken inspiration
from the Anuśāsanaparvan. In particular, we have shown that chapter 20 of the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, parallel to chapter 25 of the Lalitavistara, contains a
parallel of about 14 verses to the so-called Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra, a text that is
transmitted in the South as a sub-portion of the Āśvamedhikaparvan of the
Mahābhārata (see De Simini and Mirnig 2017, p. 628). However, in NGMPP A 27/2,
the early Nepalese manuscript that preserves the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra dated
NS 169 (= 1049 CE), the title of the text is indeed given as the Dānadharma. This
would indeed comply with the attribution that we find in the final rubric of
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chapter 20 in N , which thus shows that the agents in-
volved in the transmission of the work were aware that part of this chapter de-
rived from a different work, and that the reference to the ‘teachings on Dharma’
is meant to indicate the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra rather than the modern sub-divi-
sion of the Anuśāsanaparvan.
The chapter rubrics of the manuscripts belonging to group V miss this con-
nection, while on the other hand they link the contents of chapter 21, which is
absent from N , to another work:
(N , fol. 187v[L3]) || || bhagavato gītapurāṇe dharmaguhya (sic!) gajendramokṣaṇam umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāde: • ekaviṃśatimo <’>dhyāyaḥ samāptaḥ || ||
[Thus ends] the freeing of the king of the elephants [expounded] in the secret of Dharma
(read: dharmaguhye), [which is] the Purāṇa of the hymns of the Lord; the 21st chapter in the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda is concluded.
While the first part of chapter 21 (stanzas 1 to 63) centres on the topic of musical
notes (svara), the last part (corresponding to stanzas 64 to 78) indeed recounts
the story of the liberation of the king of the elephants (gajendramokṣaṇa).41 This
||
41 According to this story, the king elephant, after leading his herd into a lake, gets his foot
caught by a crocodile. They are thus engaged in a fight for a thousand years until the elephant,
showing his devotion to Viṣṇu by offering a lotus flower to the god with the tip of his trunk and
532 | Florinda De Simini
famous episode of Vaiṣṇava inspiration is also narrated, in a more comprehen-
sive form, in other Purāṇas, most notably in Bhāgavatapurāṇa 8, with which the
scribal tradition of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda most likely reconnects this chap-
ter of the work.42 However, no notable textual parallels can be traced between this
section of chapter 21 and the gajendramokṣaṇa episode as expounded in the
Bhāgavatapurāṇa, while on the other hand direct textual borrowings connect this
part of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda with Viṣṇudharmottara 1.194, where the same
story is narrated.43 Other selections of Vaiṣṇava inspiration include the few stan-
zas that form the next and final chapter, chapter 22, as found in the manuscripts
||
chanting a stotra, is freed by the direct intervention of the god. In his previous life, the king ele-
phant had been the king Indradyumna, a great devotee of Viṣṇu who had been cursed by the
sage Agasti. The version of the story narrated in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda is rather short, and
proceeds from the story of another curse and animal rebirth, namely that of the crocodile that
assaults the king elephant. This crocodile is actually the gandharva Hahāhuhū who had been
cursed by the sage Devala and turned into a crocodile. The chance to recount this story is given
by the mention of the seven gandharvas in stanza 21.63 in connection with the seven musical
notes (svara), which are the topic of the preceding stanzas in chapter 21. The brief account of the
gajendramokṣaṇa episode is concluded with the liberation of the king elephant and the croco-
dile, each under the curse of a different sage.
42 The gajendramokṣaṇa episode of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa is also transmitted as a separate text:
see, for instance, manuscripts NAK 6/99, NGMPP A 1114–17, or NAK 6/2124, NGMPP A 1117–2. The
catalogue of the NGMCP lists 71 microfilms under the title gajendramokṣaṇa, although it is possible
that they contain texts belonging to different Purāṇas. Gajendramokṣaṇa, for instance, is also the
title of a short work that presents itself as part of the Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan, and is transmitted
either as a single work (UP Coll. 390, item 2664) or together with other devotional works (see Cam-
bridge UL Or.1818). However, this episode cannot be traced in the current edition of the
Mahābhārata. I managed to verify that the text transmitted in the Cambridge manuscript Or.1818
mostly corresponds to chapter 67 of the Viṣṇudharma. The catalogue information and the color pic-
tures of this manuscript can be found at the following link: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-
OR-01818/1 (last accessed: 5/1/2017).
43 The following textual parallels can be identified by comparing the corresponding sections of
the two works:
1) Viṣṇudharmottara 1.194.18ab: tasmin sarasi duṣṭātmā virūpo ’ntarjaleśayaḥ | =
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 21.68cd (N 187r[L4]): tasmin sarasi duṣṭātmā virūpo ’ntarjaleśayaḥ;
2) Viṣṇudharmottara 1.194.22cd–23: salilaṃ paṅkajavane yūtamadhyagato vrajam || 22 gṛhītas
tena raudreṇa grāheṇāvyaktamūrtinā | paśyataḥ sarvayūthasya krośataś cātidāruṇam || 23 =
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 21.70ab, 71 N 187r[LL5–6]): salile paṅkajavane yūthamadhye gatas
sukhī | […] [L6] gṛhītas tena raudreṇa grāheṇādṛśyamūrtinā || paśyantīnāṃ kareṇūnāṃ
krośantīnāś ca dāruṇam;
3) Viṣṇudharmottara 1.194.26cd: vyathitaḥ sa nirudyogaḥ paścimām āgato daśām || 26 =
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 21.72cd (N 187r[L6]): vyathitas anirudvegaḥ paścimām agamad
diśām;
4) Viṣṇudharmottara 1.194.27cd–28ab: jagāma śaraṇaṃ viṣṇuṃ tuṣṭāva ca parantapaḥ ||
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 533
of group V: in this short chapter, Maheśvara refers to the ten avatāras of Viṣṇu
(22.7–13), and praises Viṣṇu as the maintainer of the triple world. These verses
then conclude with a further request from the Lord to the Goddess as to what else
she would like to hear from him. His spouse poses no further questions, but a
conversation between the two again provides the frame narrative for the next
work in the corpus, variously called Uttarottarasaṃvāda, Umottarasaṃvāda, and
the like. As shown in De Simini and Mirnig 2017, the verses forming chapter 22 of
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda are also traceable in Umottarasaṃvāda 7 and
Lalitavistara 33, where they are inserted in a context that seems more suitable to
the understanding of these stanzas. Chapter 22 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda
thus seems to have been composed entirely on the basis of pre-existing materials,
and thus to belong to a second phase in the composition of the work, in which
this has been expanded by the addition of two more chapters.
In the case examined in the preceding paragraph, we observed a clear chron-
ological split between the two earliest manuscripts, N and N , and the rest of
the Nepalese tradition, with the sole exception of the 12th century Oxonian man-
uscript N , which could be associated with the two early 11th-century specimens.
This situation changes radically as concerns the final chapters of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda, for N transmits the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda in 22 chapters, cor-
responding to those of N . However, as pointed out above and argued in full de-
tail in De Simini and Mirnig 2017, the same manuscript also contains an
additional work, the Lalitavistara, which partly reproduces the text of the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda (only up to chapter 19), while also showing contamina-
tions from the Mahābhārata and Umottarasaṃvāda. This can be interpreted as a
further sign that, in manuscripts from the first half of the 11th century, both the
formation of the corpus and the composition of some of its works — particularly
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda — were still regarded as an ongoing process. Con-
cerning N , this manuscript is also consistent overall with the manuscripts of
group V, although it adopts a different criterion for the division of the chapters,
which number 23 here. However, the variation in the numeration of the chapters
depends in the first place on a different internal subdivision of the contents of
||
27 gṛhītvā sa karāgreṇa sarasaḥ kamalottamam | = Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 21.73 ( N
186r[L6]–187v[L1]): jagāma manasā [187vL1] devaṃ śaraṇaṃ madhusūdanaṃ | pragṛhya
puṣkarāgreṇa kāñcanaṃ kamalottamam ||;
5) Viṣṇudharmottara 1.194.50cd–51ab: mokṣayāmāsa ca gajaṃ pāśebhyaḥ śaraṇāgatam ||
50 sa hi devalaśāpena hāhā gandharvasattamaḥ | = Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 21.76
(N 187v[L2]): mokṣayāmāsa ca gajaṃ pāśebhyaḥ śaraṇāgataḥ | sa hi devalaśāpena hāhā
gandharvasattamaḥ ||. Note that the last pāda also has a loose parallel in
Bhāgavatapurāṇa 8.4.3cd: mukto devalaśāpena hūhūr gandharvasattamaḥ || 3.
534 | Florinda De Simini
chapter 9,44 and not on the insertion of new materials; furthermore, the scribe of
N mistakenly labelled ‘chapter 23’ what should have been chapter 22. As a con-
sequence, chapter 23 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda in N corresponds to chap-
ter 21 in N , including the colophon with the reference to the ‘bhāgavato gīta-
purāṇam’ (see N , fol. 197r[L3]). After chapter 23, N adds the same 16 stanzas as
N , on the avatāras of Viṣṇu, and likewise simply concludes the work with iti. A
reader of the text, or a scribe who used this manuscript, must have found this
solution annoying, or must have seen another manuscript of the corpus in which
those 16 stanzas were designated as ‘chapter 22’; therefore, he added a final ru-
bric to this portion where he mistakenly designates this section as ‘chapter 22’
(fol. 197v[L4]), unaware (or forgetful) of the fact that the previous chapter of the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda in this manuscript already bore the number 23. Another
possibility is that this is a clumsy attempt made by the scribe in order to somehow
fill the gap existing in N between chapter 21 and 23.
Therefore, as concerns the structure of the final chapters of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda, the case of manuscript N is truly unique, since this manuscript
turns out to be the only one transmitting an earlier version of the corpus, as well
as of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, lacking some of the materials found in all the
other specimens. On closer inspection, though, N might be regarded as slightly
less exceptional in the history of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda’s transmission,
since at least one other manuscript stands out from the bulk of the Nepalese tra-
dition precisely due to the peculiarities concerning the composition and trans-
mission of the final portion of this work. This is N , a palm-leaf manuscript dated
to 1201 CE, the first year of the reign of Arimalla (1200–12016 CE),45 which trans-
mits the eight standard works of the Śivadharma corpus. Various factors make
this manuscript relevant to the transmission history of the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda and, more generally, to the philological study of the composition of
the Śivadharma corpus. Firstly, N divides chapter 9 into two shorter chapters,
just like N , breaking the text approximately at the same point.46 As a conse-
quence, the numeration of the following chapters is altered, so that group V’s
chapter 20 corresponds to chapter 21 in N . The copyist of N — whose name
was Haricandra, as we learn from the final colophon (fol. 276r[LL3–4]) — appends
to chapter 21 the same rubric that was only available for chapter 20 in N , in
||
44 See fol. 175v[L5], where chapter 9 is split into two at stanza 9.25.
45 On this king, see Petech 1984, 80–82.
46 See fol. 166r[LL1–2]. The chapter is interrupted at stanza 9.26. I take the opportunity here to
correct my earlier observation, according to which it was chapter 20, not chapter 9, that had been
divided into two parts in this manuscript (see De Simini 2016b, 246, n. 34).
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 535
which the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda was linked to the ‘Dānadharma of the
Śāntiparvan’.47 The two manuscripts thus share a peculiarity that is not attested
anywhere else in the tradition, a circumstance that makes one suspect that they
could indeed be somehow linked, just like we might hypothesize a connection
with N due to the unique chapter division that it shares with N . Most likely,
manuscript N was the product of a complex contamination of different branches
of the tradition, while at the same time reflecting strong authorial intervention.
This becomes clear when we consider the case of group V’s chapters 21 (on music
and the liberation of the king elephant) and 22 (on the avatāras of Viṣṇu) as trans-
mitted in manuscript N .
Immediately following N ’s chapter 21, which corresponds to chapter 20 in
group V, we encounter a short chapter 22, called Bhīṣaṇādhyāya (see colophon at
fol. 183r[L2]), which is not available in any of the other manuscripts. This addi-
tional chapter is certainly the most macroscopic variant distinguishing N from
the entire tradition, and we might thus surmise that this chapter was either com-
posed by the copyist Haricandra specifically on the occasion of the production of
N , or that it belonged to N ’s lost exemplar, which has also remained discon-
nected from the rest of the tradition. Moreover, as shown by the table in the Ap-
pendix containing the diplomatic transcription of this chapter, 26 out of the 29
stanzas forming the Bhīṣaṇādhyāya have literal parallels in three chapters of the
Śāntiparvan of the Mahābhārata. Barring a few blunders and grammatical incon-
sistencies, which characterize this manuscript overall, the parallels of the
Śāntiparvan are so close that one might assume that the Bhīṣaṇādhyāya was in
fact modelled on the former. In this case, too, the Mahābhārata thus functioned
as a direct source of content and stanzas for the composition of a new chapter of
the work.
Haricandra’s work did not finish with the insertion of this new chapter, for
the Bhīṣaṇādhyaya is followed by chapter 23, which is nothing but an abridged
version of group V’s chapter 21, extending only up to stanza 21.30. After this, the
text skips everything else up to the conclusion at 21.78, which means that it also
skips the story of the gajendramokṣaṇa and, coherently, avoids any reference to
it in the final rubric. Moreover, Haricandra also avoided copying the concluding
chapter of group V, namely the short chapter 22 mentioning Viṣṇu’s avatāras,
which we suspected to be a later addition to the work. In brief, most of the textual
materials that were absent from the early N , but attested everywhere else, are
carefully avoided by those who were responsible for the production of manuscript
||
47 Fol. 182r[L2]: iti mahābhārate śāntiparvvani dānadharmaḥ || || • iti umāmaheśvarasaṃvāde
ekaviṃśatimo <’>dhyāyaḥ ||.
536 | Florinda De Simini
N . The professional who worked on this manuscript or on its exemplar, given its
date and features, must have certainly been aware of other manuscripts of group V,
but then decided to intervene in a very prominent way by deleting some materials,
introducing new ones, and thus altering the conclusion of the text. In the vast body
of Nepalese manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus, I could so far identify only one
that presents the same chapter division, and transmits the same text as N , namely
a rare case of a single-text manuscript of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, identified
with the NGMPP reel-number E 1804-9. This is a late paper manuscript in De-
vanāgarī script that almost certainly belonged to a former MTM, as we can deduce
from the siglum śi-dha-ca (=śivadharmacarita) running on the left margin. N
shares exactly the same chapter divisions of N , including the reference to the
Śāntiparvan in conclusion of chapter 21, the addition of the Bhīṣaṇādhyāya, and the
shortened version of chapter 21 transmitted as chapter 23. Before the final stanza of
this chapter, N adds c. 3 stanzas that are not available in N .
The reasons behind such a choice must remain speculative for now, as we still
know little of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda’s textual history. One would be tempted
to argue that a copyist might have found the presence of the Vaiṣṇava materials in
group V’s chapters 21 and 22 to be inappropriate for the conclusion of a Śaiva work,
such as the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda is purported to be, and thus set about deleting
and replacing them. We know that the coexistence of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava materials
is one of the most striking features of the Lalitavistara, and to a certain extent also
characterizes the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, to the point that one could surmise that
the two works were composed precisely with the idea of balancing the two cults (see
De Simini and Mirnig 2017). At any rate, N retains without problem the contents
of other Vaiṣṇava chapters of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda — such as, for instance,
chapter 4, on the vaiṣṇavayoga — so we cannot hypothesize that the copyist of
N conducted a systematic purge of all the Vaiṣṇava materials contained in the
work. On the other hand, one could also surmise that the reasons underlying the
removal of portions of text from the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda transmitted in N —
or in its lost exemplar — were merely philological. We observed how the verses
forming chapter 22 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda are also attested in chapter 7 of
the Umottarasaṃvāda, where they seem to be in their original context, with respect
to both their internal references and syntactical connections. At the same time, the
scribal tradition had consistently attributed the story of the gajendramokṣaṇa to a
bhagavato gītāpurāṇa, possibly identifiable with the Bhagavatapurāṇa, a text that,
unlike the Mahābhārata, is not used as a source of verses and topics in the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda and that — at least in the version known to us today — does not
actually have literal parallels to that portion of the Śivadharma corpus. A scribe
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 537
might thus have expunged the final chapters of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of ap-
parent interferences in the transmission of the text; at the same time, the philolog-
ical zeal of the person who intervened in the text did not restrain him — or one of
his colleagues — from introducing a chapter that, in light of our current knowledge
of the manuscript tradition, is not attested anywhere else, and thus seems to have
been composed with the purpose of replacing the missing chapter. However, unlike
the portions that were removed, this chapter had been duly composed following the
model of the Mahābhārata, coherently with further examples from the same work.
One last factor to consider in order to fully assess the production of this manu-
script and the editorial choices that might have been made by its copyist Haricandra
(or the copyist of the exemplar he was using) is that, as observed above, N was
penned in the first year of the reign of Arimalla, the founder of the early Malla dynasty,
who is praised in the colophon with his full royal titles, including explicit statements
of his devotion to Śiva Paśupati.48 The same colophon also specifies that the manu-
script was produced with the aim of granting material and immaterial benefits to its
sponsor, called Somadeva, and his family. Therefore, N was not only charged with
the responsibility of transmitting the texts of the Śivadharma corpus, but was also
endowed with two main kinds of agency: on the one hand, the celebration of a po-
litical power whose coming marks a significant change in the political history of
medieval Nepal; on the other, the protection and spiritual welfare of a wealthy
sponsor, a function that Nepalese manuscripts have served since early times. Those
who were responsible for the production of N were thus well aware that their work
was not just aimed at the transmission of the Śivadharma corpus, but that their
choices in dealing with the manuscript as a carrier of text must also be assessed
against the ideology that surrounded the manuscript as an object of power and a
protective tool.
||
48 For a transcript and study of the colophon of this manuscript, see De Simini 2016b, 255, and
Petech 1984, 80.
538 | Florinda De Simini
4 Conclusions: ‘Gegen die Kontamination ist kein
Kraut gewachsen’49
Two main types of conclusions can be drawn from the above case studies with re-
spect to the linkage of the different manuscripts and the methodological conse-
quences this has. In the first place, the case of Śivadharmaśāstra chapter 12 high-
lights the existence of regional variants in the transmission, characterized by the
inclusion or omission of specific groups of stanzas that might be absent from other
variants, as well as by different internal arrangements. The general consistency of
the Nepalese tradition is affected either by the presence of subgroups that transmit
a certain variant — such as the case of version P, variously linked to the Kashmiri
tradition — or by a deliberate alteration that can be attributed to a scribe or other
party involved in the transmission process. Moreover, the links that connect the
manuscripts within a subgroup may become weaker as we extend our analysis to
other parts of the corpus. Therefore, when we work on different sections of the cor-
pus, we find that there are different links to be established. For instance, while
manuscripts N , N , and N can certainly be considered related on the basis of
their common errors and shared variants in the arrangement of the stanzas of
Śivadharmaśāstra chapter 12, this connection dissolves once we observe the struc-
ture of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. On this point, N and N can be associated
with the ‘mainstream’ version of the Nepalese corpus, while N again diverges.
The latter manuscript indeed qualifies as very unique, since once we dig into it we
are able to find other cases in which its stanza arrangement does not comply with
any of the other manuscripts. One such example is the structure of chapter 11 of the
Śivadharmaśāstra: N skips from stanza 28 of the mainstream version to 69, mov-
ing back to stanza 29 only after stanza 106. If the uniqueness of this manuscript,
which also transmits a shorter version of the corpus, may also somehow be related
to its earliness, of which we have no further proof than its script, then we must also
accept that N may belong to a different branch than the entirety of the Nepalese
tradition. The fact that in chapter 12 of the Śivadharmaśāstra N shares with N
and N both a correct reading (the position of the stanzas on the ogdoads) and a
likely wrong one (the arrangement of the stanzas on dāna), while not sharing the
other macroscopic variants that we took into consideration, makes one suspect that
there are cases of contamination internal to the Nepalese tradition.
This is also hinted at by the case of N , a manuscript that respects version A in
the transmission of Śivadharmaśāstra chapter 12, and that one would easily discard
||
49 Maas 1957, 31.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 539
from a collation due to the high number of corrupted readings and overall bad state
of the text it transmits. Nonetheless, this manuscript turns out to provide an illumi-
nating example of the open attitude that a scribe could have towards this tradition,
to which they felt entitled, under certain conditions, to add and subtract text as
they pleased. Although in many cases we notice that the scribes of the Śivadharma
corpus were copying mechanically from their exemplars, the possibility that the
text could be altered on purpose, or on the basis of the reading transmitted by an-
other exemplar, was certainly there, and it is the principle that inspired and author-
ized somebody to add two more chapters to the 20-chapter Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda
of N , or to divide chapter 9 of the same text into two chapters, as we see in N and
in N . These examples suggest that we are likely to encounter many more such
interventions in the tradition as we proceed with our critical work on the corpus.
A mechanical copying process thus alternated with a non-mechanical one in
which copyists assessed the text and made decisions concerning its transmission.
Philologists know that this attitude leaves the door open to the horizontal contami-
nation of the tradition, which is one of the reasons why some manuscripts appear to
be very close, to the point of suggesting a genetic link, but only inasmuch as we con-
sider just one single segment of text. Another option that we should consider is that
contamination might also have occurred if the scribes working on a MTM copied the
works from different manuscripts. We don’t know much about the copying process of
these manuscripts, but we do know from codicological and paratextual features that
the works belonging to the MTMs of the corpus could and were used independently
of each other,50 so we cannot rule out the possibility that single blocks from different
MTMs were also employed as exemplars for the production of a new block of another
MTM. The genealogical-reconstructive method will help us clarify this and other
points, especially once we are able to systematically extend our considerations to all
the works of the corpus.
The extant southern manuscripts, produced at a much later date due to the well-
known defects that undermine manuscript transmission in such a hot and humid cli-
mate, otherwise prove immensely useful in the reconstruction of the history of the tra-
dition, once again confirming that the latest layers in the transmission might in fact still
preserve traces of a much earlier text. If we were to consider the southern materials as
just ancillary to the Nepalese manuscripts, we would no longer be able to apply the cri-
terion of the ‘peripheral areas’51 to philology in order to evaluate a reading.
||
50 See De Simini 2016b and 2016c.
51 On Lachmann’s introduction of this linguistic criterion in his edition of the New Testament — a
concept later theorized by Bartoli and the proponents of neolinguistics at the beginning of the 20th
century — see Pasquali 2014, 8.
540 | Florinda De Simini
From a methodological point of view, the so-called ‘method of Lachmann’,
with its rebuttal of some of the practices that were widespread in Humanist philol-
ogy — such as the acceptance of a vulgate version of the text, as well as the criterion
of the codex optimus, and its focus on a rigorous recensio of the manuscripts — cer-
tainly offers some principles that turn out useful also in the study of the transmis-
sion of the Śivadharma corpus. At the same time, the features of this tradition, from
the abundance and chronological distribution of its attestations to the likelihood of
horizontal contamination, make it less suited to a process of mechanical recensio
— of the sort that the reconstruction of a stemma presupposes — and better suited
to a so-called ‘open’ or non-mechanical one. Scholars are thus presented here with
a situation that is closer to the one envisaged by the post-Lachmannian philologist
Pasquali, who highlighted the role played by the study of the history of the tradition
that accompanies the reconstruction of a stemma. The author, in his analysis of
contaminated traditions (see his 1934 study, reedited in 2014), proposed to rely on
what he calls an open recension, a technique that proves useful in the case of tra-
ditions for which no definitive stemma can be proposed — as the tradition of the
Śivadharma will probably prove to be. This is based on the principle that, during
recensio, all manuscripts must be collated, while in the phase of editio the choice of
the best reading cannot happen mechanically — nor on the basis of fixed criteria
such as the genealogical stemma, the majority rule, or that of the ‘best’ manuscript
— but necessarily has to happen by assessing each reading in terms of the princi-
ples established by the editor on the basis of the history of the tradition. The colla-
tion of the manuscripts and the choice of the best reading must therefore be pre-
ceded by a precise assessment of the place that can be assigned to each manuscript
or group of manuscripts in the transmission of the text, and the impossibility of
reconstructing a complete stemma can be replaced by the awareness of which
forms the text assumed at different stages of its transmission. Thus the combined
application of the genealogical-reconstructive method and the method of the open
recension to the study of the complex transmission of the Śivadharma corpus —
whose ‘vulgate’ text (Naraharinatha 1998) is furthermore deeply unreliable — not
only promises the possibility of achieving a better understanding of the texts and
the production of better critical editions, but also offers an important methodolog-
ical contribution to the way we study Sanskrit texts and their transmission, enrich-
ing our knowledge and practice of philology and textual criticism.
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 541
References
Abbreviations
ALRC Adyar Library and Research Centre
ASC Asiatic Society of Calcutta
BHU Benares Hindu University
Bodl. Bodleian Library
CUL Cambridge University Library
GOML Government Oriental Manuscript Library (Chennai)
IFP Institut Français de Pondichéry
LU Leiden University
NAK National Archives of Kathmandu
NGMPP Nepalese-German Manuscript Preservation Project
ORL Oriental Library of Srinagar
UP University of Pennsylvania
WL Wellcome Library
Manuscripts
Sigla Accession Number Date
B CUL Add.1599 1682—83 CE
G ALRC 75429
G GOML 2442
||
For the manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus, I have used the system of sigla that was agreed
upon during the ‘Śivadharma Workshop. Manuscripts, Editions, Perspectives’. According to this
system, the first letter in the siglum denotes the script in which the manuscript is written (N for
Nepālākṣara, G for Grantha, etc.); the first superscripted letter is for the place where the manu-
script is kept (K stands for Kathmandu, C for Cambridge, Ko for Kolkata, L for Leiden, O for Ox-
ford, A for Adyar), while the subscribed number indicates the last two figures of the microfilm or
accession number.
Note that the Śivadharma manuscripts held at the Cambridge University Library are all photo-
graphed and catalogued in Vergiani, Cuneo and Formigatti 2011–14. Information on some of the
manuscripts catalogued by the NGMPP can be found at the following link: http://cata-
logue.ngmcp.uni-hamburg.de/wiki/Main_Page (last accessed: 20/12/2016). The paper tran-
scripts of the IFP can be downloaded from the website of the Muktabodha library (http://muk-
talib7.org/IFP_ROOT/access_page.htm; last viewing: 12/1/2017). The manuscript of the
Wellcome Institute is described in Wujastyk 1985. The two Śāradā and the Telugu manuscripts
are just mentioned in the lists of the holdings of the respective libraries, without description.
Neither the Leiden nor the Bodleian Śivadharma manuscript are described in catalogues.
542 | Florinda De Simini
G LU II.40 April 22, 1830 CE
N CUL Add.2102 *12th century
N CUL Add.1645 1139—40 CE
N CUL Add.1694 *12th century
N NAK 5-892 (NGMPP A 12/3) *9th century
N NAK 5–737 (NGMPP A 3/3) January 4, 1201 CE
N NAK 1–1075 (NGMPP B 7/3) January 4, 1170 CE
N NAK 1/1261 (NGMPP A 10/5)
N NAK 5–738 (NGMPP A 11/3) 1395–96 CE
N NAK 5–841 (NGMPP B 12/4) date of the exemplar: 1194—95 CE
N Kesar 218 (NGMPP C 25/1)
N NAK 6–7 (NGMPP A 1028/4) *late 10th /early 11th century
N NAK 2–153 (NGMPP A 1042/1)
N Kesar 597 (NGMPP C 57/5) 1742—43 CE
N NAK 3–393 (NGMPP A 1082/3) May 24, 1069 CE
N E 34612 (NGMPP E 1804-9)
N ASC G 3852 (cat. No. 4085) *12th century
N ASC G 4077 (cat. No. 4084) July 6, 1036 CE
N Sansk. A 15 (R) June 1187 CE
N WL δ 16 (I–VIII)
P IFP T32 June 26, 1959
P IFP T72 March 9, 1963
P IFP T514
P IFP T860
Ś ORL 1467
Ś BHU C1087 (cat. No. 7/3986)
T ALRC 66015
Secondary sources
Bisschop, Peter (2006), Early Śaivism and the Skandapurāṇa. Sects and Centres (Groningen Ori-
ental Studies XXI), Groningen: Egbert Forsten.
Bisschop, Peter (2014), ‘Invoking the Powers that Be: the Śivadharma’s Mahāśānti Mantra’, in
South Asian Studies, 30.2: 133–4.1.
Bisschop, Peter (forthcoming), Universal Śaivism. The Śivadharma Appeasement of All Gods and
Powers.
De Simini, Florinda (2013), Ritual Aspects and Manuscript Transmission in Premodern India: A His-
torical Study of Vidyādāna Through Textual Sources. With a first critical edition and English
translation of Śivadharmottara’s chapter two “On the Gift of Knowledge”. Università di To-
rino, Facoltà di Studi Orientali. Unpublished PhD Dissertation defended on May 29, 2013.
De Simini, Florinda (2016a), Of Gods and Books. Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the Manu-
script Cultures of Premodern India (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 8.), Berlin: De Gruyter.
Also available online as an open-access publication at the following link:
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/472498 (last accessed: 20/12/2016).
De Simini, Florinda (2016b), ‘Śivadharma Manuscripts from Nepal and the Making of a Śaiva Cor-
pus’, in Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke (eds), One-Volume Libraries: Composite and
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 543
Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 9), Berlin: De Gruyter, 233–286.
Also available online as an open-access publication at the following link:
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/476788 (last accessed: 20/12/2016).
De Simini, Florinda (2016c), ‘Long Live the King (and His Manuscripts!). A Story of Ritual and
Power from Medieval Kathmandu’, in Andreas Janke (ed.), Manuscripts of the Month 2015/16.
Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. Available online at the following link:
http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/mom/2016_01_mom_e.html (last ac-
cessed: 20/12/2016).
De Simini, Florinda, and Nina Mirnig (2017), ‘Umā and Śiva’s Playful Talks in Detail (Lalitavistara):
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal. Studies on the
Śivadharma and the Mahābhārata 1’, in Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo and Camillo For-
migatti (eds), Indic Manuscript Cultures through the Ages: Material, Textual, and Historical
Investigations (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 14), Berlin: De Gruyter, 587–653.
Goodall, Dominic (2004), The Parākhyatantra. A Scripture of the Śaiva Siddhānta (Collection Indo-
logie 98), Pondichéry: Institut français de Pondichéry/École française d’Extrême-Orient.
Goodall, Dominic (2011), ‘The Throne of Worship. An ‘Archaeological Tell’ of Religious Rivalries’, in
Studies in History, 27.2: 221–250.
Kafle, Nirajan (2015), The Niśvāsamukha, the Introductory Book of the Niśvāsatattvasaṃhitā. Criti-
cal Edition, with an Introduction, Annotated Translation Appended by Śivadharmasaṅgraha
5–9. Universiteit Leiden, Unpublished PhD Dissertation defended on October 15, 2015.
Naraharinatha, Yogi (1998), Paśupatimatam: Śivadharmamahāśāstram, Paśu-
patināthadarśanam. Kāshṭhamaṇḍapaḥ [Kathmandu]: Bṛhadādhyātmikaparishadaḥ.
Maas, Paul (1957), Textkritik. Leipzig: Teubner [3rd revised edition; first edition: 1927].
Pasquali, Giorgio (2014), Storia della tradizione e critica del testo. Premessa di Dino Pieraccioni.
Firenze: Casa Editrice Le Lettere [first edition: 1934].
Petech, Luciano (1984), Medieval History of Nepal (c. 750–1482) (Serie Orientale Roma LIV), Rome:
Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Is.Me.O.), [first edition: 1958].
Sanderson, Alexis (2003), ‘The Śaiva Religion among the Khmers. Part I’, in Bulletin de l’École
Française d’Extrême-Orient, 90–91: 349–462.
Shastri, Haraprasad (1928), A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government
Collection Under the Care of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Vol. V: Purāṇa Manuscripts. Cal-
cutta: The Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Timpanaro, Sebastiano (2003), La genesi del metodo del Lachmann. Torino: UTET Libreria [first
edition: 1963].
Trovato, Paolo (2014), Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lachmann’s Method. A Non-
Standard Handbook of Genealogical Textual Criticism in the Age of Post-Structuralism, Cla-
distics, and Copy-Text. Foreword by Michael D. Reeve. Padova: libreriauniversitaria.it. Storie
e Linguaggi.
Vergiani, Vincenzo, Daniele Cuneo, and Camillo Formigatti (2011–14), Cambridge Digital Library,
Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts: http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collections/sanskrit.
Wujastyk, Dominik (1985), A Handlist of the Sanskrit and Prakrit Manuscripts in the Library of the
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, vol. 1. London: The Wellcome Institute for the
History of Medicine.
544 | Florinda De Simini
Appendix: The Text of the Bhīṣaṇādhyāya along-
side Parallels from Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan
Manuscript , Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chap- Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan
ter 22, Bhīṣaṇādhyāya. Diplomatic Transcription
22.1–6 ≈ Mahābhārata 12.242.12–17
Fol.182r[L2] idaṃ śāstra<ṃ> likhi[L3]taṃ paṭhitan
datta<ṃ> vyākhyāta<ṃ> śrotavyan karttavyaṃ |
sarvveṣāṃ ślokasaṃkhyānāṃ navaśata-
ṣoḍhādhika<ṃ> likhitaṃ ||
vyāsa uvāca
[…]
tān nadīśatasrotyāni mithyālobhapravāhinī | sarvataḥsrotasaṃ ghorāṃ nadīṃ lokapravā-
paṃcendriyagrāhavatī manaḥsaṃkalparo- hinīm | pañcendriyagrāhavatīṃ
dhasāṃ || 1 manaḥsaṃkalparodhasam || 12
bhūtadrumas tṛnaś cchanna kāmakrodhasarīśṛpā lobhamohatṛṇacchannāṃ kāmakrodhasarīsṛ-
| satyatīrthānṛtaḥ kro[L4]dhaḥ ṣaḍkāśaridvarāṃ || pām | satyatīrthānṛtakṣobhāṃ krodhapaṅkāṃ
2 saridvarām || 13
avyaktam aprabhā śīghraṃm ahorātrāṅ ga- avyaktaprabhavāṃ śīghrāṃ dustarām a-
vāhiṇīṃ | pratar aśvanadī buddhyā du- kṛtātmabhiḥ | pratarasva nadīṃ buddhyā kā-
starātmākṛtātmabhiḥ || 3 magrāhasamākulām || 14
saṃsārasāgarāmāyāṃ yonipātanadustarāṃ | saṃsārasāgaragamāṃ yonipātāladustarām|
tamo marjjanadīn tāta jihvāvarttān durāsadāṃ || 4 ātmajanmodbhavāṃ tāta jihvāvartāṃ
durāsadām || 15
yā taranti kṛtā prajñā dhṛtimantro maṇīṣiṇaḥ | yāṃ taranti kṛtaprajñā dhṛtimanto manīṣiṇaḥ |
nātīrthasarvvatomuktā vipūtātmātma[L5]viśuci || 5 tāṃ tīrṇaḥ sarvatomukto vipūtātmātmavic
chuciḥ || 16
uttamā buddhim āsthāya brahmabhūto bhavi- uttamāṃ buddhim āsthāya brahmabhūyaṃ
ṣyati | saṃkīrṇṇasarvaśe kleśā prasaṃnātmā na gamiṣyasi | saṃtīrṇaḥ sarvasaṃkleśān pra-
kalāṣaḥ || 6 sannātmā vikalmaṣaḥ || 17
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 545
Manuscript , Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chap- Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan
ter 22, Bhīṣaṇādhyāya. Diplomatic Transcription
v. 22.7 ≈ Mahābhārata 12.290.55
krodhaḥ satvena cchidyanti kāmaṃ saṃkalpavar- chindanti kṣamayā krodhaṃ kāmaṃ saṃkalpa-
janāt | satvasaṃsevanā nidrām aprasādā bhayaṃ varjanāt | sattvasaṃśīlanān nidrām apramādād
tathā | chidanti pañcamāsvāsaṃ laghvāhāratayā- bhayaṃ tathā | chindanti pañcamaṃ śvāsaṃ la-
ṣarā || 7 ghvāhāratayā nṛpa || 55
vv. 22.8–18 ≈ Mahābhārata 12.29.60–70ab
rāgyajanasubhāgatvāṃs tāmasāś ca yathā- rājasān aśubhān gandhāṃs tāmasāṃś ca ta-
vi[Fol.182vL1]dhiṃ | anyāś ca satvatāgaṃdhāṃ svarg- thāvidhān | puṇyāṃś ca sāttvikān gandhān
gadehaṅgam āśritāṃ || 8 sparśajān dehasaṃśritān |
cchitvetāj jñānaśāstreṇa tapodaṇḍena bhārataḥ | chittvāśu jñānaśastreṇa tapodaṇḍena bhārata
atha duḥkhodakaṃ ghoraṃ cintāsokamahāhra- || 60 tato duḥkhodakaṃ ghoraṃ cintāśoka-
daṃ || 9 mahāhradam |
vyādhimṛtyumahāgrāhyatamamoham apāragaṃ vyādhimṛtyumahāgrāhaṃ mahābhayamahora-
| tamaścakrarajomīnaṃ velācāryam anuttamaṃ || gam || 61 tamaḥkūrmaṃ rajomīnaṃ prajñayā
10 saṃtaranty uta |
snehapaṅkajarāduḥkhasparśadīpam anuttamaṃ snehapaṅkaṃ jarādurgaṃ sparśadvīpam a-
| karmāśāyaṃ satyavī[L2]riṃ sthiravratatirakṛtaṃ riṃdama || 62 karmāgādhaṃ satyatīraṃ sthi-
|| 11 tavratam idaṃ nṛpa |
hiṃsādeśānānāratnamāyāmohamahoragaṃ | hiṃsāśīghramahāvegaṃ nānārasamahāka-
nānāprītimahāratnan duḥkhajvarasamīranaṃ || ram || 63 nānāprītimahāratnaṃ duḥkhajvara-
12 samīraṇam |
naikatīkṣṇamahāvarttantīkṣṇavyādhijarārujaṃ | śokatṛṣṇāmahāvartaṃ tīkṣṇavyādhimahāgajam
asthisaṃghātasaṃghāṭ śleṣmaphenam arin- || 64 asthisaṃghātasaṃghāṭaṃ śleṣmaphenam
damaḥ || 13 ariṃdama |
dānamuktodakaṃ bhīmaśronidahradadhidhrumaṃ dānamuktākaraṃ bhīmaṃ śoṇitahradavidru-
| amitokraṣṭanirghośaṃ nānāratnasu[L3]dustarāṃ || mam || 65 hasitotkruṣṭanirghoṣaṃ nānājñāna-
14 sudustaram |
romanāśrujalekhāraṃ saṅgabhyām a- rodanāśrumalakṣāraṃ saṅgatyāgaparāyaṇam
parāyaṇāṃ | punar ājamanālokaṃ putra- || 66 punar ājanmalokaughaṃ putrabāndha-
bandhanapatṛṇaṃ || 15 vapattanam |
546 | Florinda De Simini
Manuscript , Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chap- Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan
ter 22, Bhīṣaṇādhyāya. Diplomatic Transcription
ahiṃsāsatyamaryādaṃ prāṇatyāgamahormiṇaṃ ahiṃsāsatyamaryādaṃ prāṇatyāgamahormi-
| velātyāgam anātītaṃ sarvvabhūtadayodadhiṃ || ṇam || 67 vedāntagamanadvīpaṃ sarvabhūta-
16 dayodadhim |
mokṣadurllābhaviṣayaṃ vaṭavāmukhagauravaṃ mokṣaduṣprāpaviṣayaṃ vaḍavāmukhasāga-
| taraṃti svatayaḥ sukhāyā na yānena bhārataḥ || ram || 68 taranti munayaḥ siddhā jñānayogena
17 bhārata |
tatvā ca dustaraṃ sa[L4]rvvavisanti vimalaṃ nab- tīrtvā ca dustaraṃ janma viśanti vimalaṃ nabhaḥ
haḥ | atha tāsu kṛtīsakhyāsūryo vihati rasmibhiḥ || 69 tatas tān sukṛtīn sāṃkhyān sūryo vahati
|| 18 raśmibhiḥ |
vv. 22.19–26 ≈ Mahābhārata 12.179.8–15
nasyaṃdhyai<r> yo hi nīhārād vāyur ucchvasi naśyanty āpo hy anāhārād vāyur ucchvāsani-
sigrahā | nasyete koṣṭhabhedatvād agni<r> grahāt | naśyate koṣṭhabhedāt kham agnir
paśyaty abhojanāt || 19 naśyaty abhojanāt || 8
vyādhivranañ ca viśleṣair medhanī cāṣaryate | vyādhivraṇaparikleśair medinī caiva śīryate |
pīḍyate <’>nyatare teṣāṃ saghātaṃ yadi pīḍite 'nyatare hy eṣāṃ saṃghāto yāti
pañcadhā || 20 pañcadhā || 9
tasmin pañcatvam āpaṃno jīvakam anu[L5]dhāvati tasmin pañcatvam āpanne jīvaḥ kim anudhāvati
| kiṃ veda yadi jīvitaṃ śṛṇoti ca bravīti vā || 21 | kiṃ vedayati vā jīvaḥ kiṃ śṛṇoti bravīti vā || 10
eṣo gau paralokeṣv ātārayisyanti mām iti | yo eṣā gauḥ paralokasthaṃ tārayiṣyati mām iti | yo
datvā mṛyate jantuṃ sa gau kān tārayiṣyati || 22 dattvā mriyate jantuḥ sā gauḥ kaṃ tārayiṣyati ||
11
gau capratigṛhīṣaś ca dātāś caiva samaṃ yadā | gauś ca pratigrahītā ca dātā caiva samaṃ yadā
iheva vilayaṃ yānti kutas teṣāṃ samāgamaṃ || | ihaiva vilayaṃ yānti kutas teṣāṃ samāgamaḥ
23 || 12
vihagair upayuktasya śailāgrapatitasya kā | nag- vihagair upayuktasya śailāgrāt patitasya vā |
ninā yo pa[Fol.183L1]yuktaś ca kutaḥ saṃjīvina agninā copayuktasya kutaḥ saṃjīvanaṃ pu-
punaḥ || 24 naḥ || 13
yadi chiṃnasya vṛkṣasya mūlaṃ na pratirohati | chinnasya yadi vṛkṣasya na mūlaṃ pratirohati
bījānasya pravarttante mataḥ kva punar eṣyasi || | bījāny asya pravartante mṛtaḥ kva punar
25 eṣyati || 14
bījamātraṃ purā sṛṣṭiṃ pade parita varttate | bījamātraṃ purā sṛṣṭaṃ yad etat parivartate | mṛtā
mṛtāmṛtā praṇaṣyanti bījābījaṃ vivarddhati || 26 mṛtāḥ praṇaśyanti bījād bījaṃ pravartate || 15
When Lachmann’s Method Meets the Dharma of Śiva | 547
Manuscript , Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chap- Mahābhārata’s Śāntiparvan
ter 22, Bhīṣaṇādhyāya. Diplomatic Transcription
duṣkramā durāścaivamalasadvyāsanākulāḥ |
viṣayādibhir mātrāntā tamasā gādhagāmiṇī || 27
ahaṃkārāva[L2]rttamūḍhā buddhijñānavisarppinī
| tṛguṇaṃmīnaharaṇī bhūtendriyapuṭīkṛtā || 28
taṭaiś ca suviśāleś ca avyaktaḥ kṛtamekhalāḥ | evaṃ
sā parikhā bhūmi śivatattveṣu saṃsthitāḥ || 29
iti umāmaheśvarasaṃvāde bhīṣaṇādhyāyaḥ dvā-
viṃśatimaḥ ||
|
Cultural Studies
Daniele Cuneo
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words
UL Add.864, the so-called Cambridge Kalāpustaka manuscript
from early modern Nepal
Abstract: The article focuses on a masterfully illuminated manuscript from early 17th-
century Nepal preserved in the Cambridge University Library (Add.864), which was
possibly produced by a thriving atelier in Bhaktapur. This accordion book consists of
one hundred and forty-four polychrome miniatures of extremely vivid grace and ex-
uberant character, accompanied by Sanskrit captions. Among its many themes, it de-
picts several narratives of both sacred and secular nature —mostly taken from Brah-
manical sources such as the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa and
the Vetālapañcaviṃśati, but also including scenes from the Buddhist story of
Sudhana and the Kinnarī. The article examines the iconographic programme of
Add.864, suggesting that it may have been conceived as a didactic visual tool for the
elites that partook in the high culture of early modern Nepal.
1 Introduction*
Exactly half a century ago, Pratapaditya Pal, a leading scholar of Himalayan art his-
tory and former curator of South Asian art in many prominent US museums, pub-
lished a brief, pioneering article entitled ‘A Kalāpustaka from Nepal’ in the Bulletin of
The American Academy of Benares.1 The important paper was dedicated to Add.864,
a masterfully illuminated manuscript from early 17th-century Nepal, preserved in the
Cambridge University Library, and possibly produced by a thriving atelier in Bhakta-
pur.2 Now that Add.864 features among the almost 600 manuscripts that have been
fully digitised and made freely accessible online by the efforts of the AHRC-funded
||
I am deeply grateful to Vincenzo Vergiani, Camillo A. Formigatti, Nirajan Kafle and Imma Ramos
for their precious remarks and suggestions. All mistakes, of course, are mine alone.
1 Pal deals with portions of the same manuscript in two other works: Vaiṣṇava Iconology in Ne-
pal (1970, 22–26; 44–46; 90; 93–99; and passim) and The Arts of Nepal (1978, 97–100; 118–119;
and passim). The present contribution is an attempt at improving on Pal’s findings as well as a
tribute to his pioneering scholarship.
2 See the Conclusions.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-018, © 2017 D. Cuneo, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
552 | Daniele Cuneo
Sanskrit Manuscripts Project (2011–2014), the time is ripe for an updated study on this
so-called Kalāpustaka manuscript and for a reassessment of its significance, paired
with a hypothesis on its possible function as didactic, visual aid for the elites within
the high culture of pre-modern Nepal.
Add.864 is an accordion book consisting of seventy-two handmade paper folios
(7.3 cm high, 22.3 cm wide) painted on both sides, for a total of one hundred and forty-
four polychrome pictures of an extremely vivid grace and an exuberant, expression-
istic character. Simply put, it is an unparalleled artwork, an objet d’art of incalculable
value.3
Beside the mainly figurative nature of this manuscript, most of the images are
accompanied by one line of Sanskrit or Newari caption written in Nepālākṣara char-
acters carefully, or sometimes less carefully, traced in golden ink.4 The information
the caption provides is of great help in understanding and identifying the depicted
scenes, which are often linked together in longer narrative sequences spanning
across several folios.
The manuscript was bought in Nepal by Daniel Wright towards the end of the 19th
century. According to Bradshaw’s Notes on the Cambridge collections, its date of ac-
quisition is 26 February 1873, and the University Library stamp marks the date 21 July
1873.5 The physical object is in good general condition, although the drawings on
some pages are slightly damaged, quite possibly from before the journey to Europe,
and as a consequence some captions are not easily legible.
Its precious illuminated folios are protected by two artfully decorated wooden
covers (see, for instance, the front cover in Fig. 1).
||
3 For the whole digitized manuscript and a currently in-progress, image-by-image description
of it, see the website of the Cambridge University Digital Library (http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/
view/MS-ADD-00864/1).
4 I will just mention here the highly political nature of the very naming of the language that is
now commonly known as Newari. Its earlier, official name was Nepālabhāṣā and served as the
administrative language of Nepal from the 14th to the 18th century. Incidentally, one of the first
instances of the name nepālabhāṣā (or nepālavāc) and the first uses of Newari as a literary/schol-
arly language can be found in an unpublished commentary by Maṇika to the Amarakośa pre-
served in the Cambridge manuscript collections (Add.1698). See Formigatti 2016, for a prelimi-
nary study of its significance and a historiographical working hypothesis of a ‘Nepalese
renaissance’ —being both Sanskrit and Newari in nature— that would stretch from approxi-
mately the time of this Amarakośa manuscript up to the whole of the 17th century, thus including
the so-called Cambridge Kalāpustaka as one of its highest points of visual-cum-literary as well
as Sanskrit-cum-Newari achievement.
5 For a short and updated history of the Sanskrit collections kept in the Cambridge University
Libraries and detailed references to the numerous individuals who contributed to the formation
of the collections, see the article by Formigatti in the present volume.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 553
Fig. 1: Wood cover, Add.864. © All images in this article are reproduced by kind permission of
the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
Their description by Pal is worth quoting in full for the way it highlights the con-
nections between Nepal and Inner Asia:
The edge of each cover has painted petals of lotus; and then, within two borders in gold, a
bright green dragon motif, borrowed no doubt from Chinese art through Tibet, stretches
along the entire edge. In the remaining space inter-twining lotus tendrils from circular me-
dallions, within each of which is sketched in black outline, hardly visible, a figure of a di-
vinity. The vegetal motifs and the figures are set off against a background of light red, and
the entire surface of the cover is glossed over with a lacquer slip which enhances the cover's
dazzling quality (Pal 1967a, 23).6
The scenes presented in the illuminations are drawn from a variety of sources, of
both a sacred and secular nature, mostly Brahmanical works such as the
Bhāgavatapurāṇa,7 the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Vetālapañcaviṃśati
||
6 A further hint to a date oscillating between the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th
century is the general similarity between the wooden covers of Add.864 and the decorated cover
of a Mañjuśrīnāmasaṅgīti dated to 1570 CE and preserved among the Oxford collections with the
shelfmark Bodleian MS Sansk. d. 346(.R.). One more hint towards the same date range are the
Nepalese Temple Banners and a Paubhā that are described in a catalogue of the Rubin Museum
of Art, New York, by Vajracharya (2016, 106–110, 139–145, and passim). Not only do they present
similar iconographical features, but they also use the Napālākṣara captions in a comparable way
for identifying the various scenes. I thank Camillo Formigatti for these precious references.
7 The crucial presence of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and especially its tenth canto, quoted and de-
picted at both the beginning and the end of Add.864, remained only partially noticed by Pal. He
does implicitly recognize the importance of Vaiṣṇava myths and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa within
the pictorial project presented in the manuscript, as it is testified by the focus he puts on them
554 | Daniele Cuneo
along with scenes from the Buddhist story of the prince Sudhana and the Kinnarī
named Manoharā. As suggested by Pal (1967a, 23), this ‘strange medley of Brah-
manical and Buddhist legends in the same document is not commonly found
even in Nepal, where the line of distinction between them is indeed very thin.’
However, the presence of Buddhist narratives is not as noteworthy and central as
Pal seems to be assuming, since the aforementioned story of Sudhana and the
Kinnarī is the sole unquestionable reference to Buddhism and only occupies fif-
teen pages of depicted scenes, i.e., circa one tenth of the whole manuscript.8
Due to time constraints, the difficulty of deciphering and understanding
some of the captions, and the shortages in knowledge of the present author, a
small number of scenes still need to be properly identified and the present essay
is far from being an exhaustive study of Add.864.9 However, thanks to the work
done during the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project, not only is it possible now to try
and identify several new scenes, to correct some erroneous identifications, and
to present problematic cases, but also to discuss the larger narrative sequences,
and to attempt to situate the artwork within its wider cultural framework. As a
preliminary warning, since I am no art historian, the present paper will not focus
at all on the pictorial style of the depicted scenes, for the peculiarity of which a
couple of paragraphs of the seminal article by Pal (1967a, 28) will have to suffice:
The most striking feature of the style is the manner of the delineation of the background,
which is conceived as a sort of a stage back-drop, decorated with a florid pattern of scroll
work. This not only adds to the exuberance of the style but also enhances its decorative
quality. The design of the scroll-work shows a remarkable variation, from stylized floral
||
in his book Vaiṣṇava Iconolgy in Nepal (Pal 1970, 23ff and passim), but he probably did not iden-
tify the several verses quoted in the captions that are taken from that very text (see below).
8 It might be argued that the figures of the Mahāsiddhas, which occupy 12 pages of the manu-
script (see below), are indeed liminal figures that fall over and beyond any watertight religious
division, but are mostly worshipped in Himalayan Buddhism. But even so, the total count of
Buddhist and liminal depictions would occupy less than one fifth of the whole manuscript. Fur-
thermore, I would maintain not only that Add.864 is mostly ‘Brahmanical’ in content, but also
overtly Vaiṣṇava in intent, as the Viṣṇu-centred myths found both towards the beginning and
the end of the manuscript seem to suggest (see previous note). The presence of Śiva at the begin-
ning of both sides of the accordion book seems to offer evidence for the opposite, but here I do
share Pal’s opinion: ‘This invocation to Śiva, at the beginning of a manuscript given largely to
the illustration of Vaiṣṇava themes is not surprising in Nepal, where he is esteemed the country’s
patron god’ (1967a, 24).
9 In virtue of its sheer interest and beauty, Add.864 would certainly deserve a book-length mon-
ograph with complete high-quality reproduction of the whole manuscript in print. For the time
being, such a project is bound to remain a desideratum, but the present contribution is a first
step in that direction.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 555
motifs, tracery-like light arabesques, swaying flame or cloud patterns to naturalistic lo-
tuses, curving and voluting on slender and inter-twined tendrils. Generally, the colours em-
ployed for this ornate and delicately rendered background are red and blue, but occasion-
ally green is also used […]. The psychology of the style is determined as much by the
dramatic content of the paintings as by the ornamental devices so effectively employed as
is the background. It is essentially a linear and decorative style, acquiring its exuberant
quality from the gay and vivacious delineation of the rich scroll-work. The rhythm of the
scroll appears to imbue the figures with an added sense of movement and grace […]. The
purpose of the style is no doubt to achieve a picturesque and decorative effect […]. Despite
the almost frivolous and playful character of the florid scroll-work, a heroic quality is ap-
parent in the style, evident particularly in the illuminations of the two epics.
2 Where to start
In order to try and unveil the rationale of the choice of scenes and their sequence,
with the final aim of better understanding the purpose of the artwork as a whole,
the very first task is simply to determine where the manuscript starts, and hence
which side is the recto of the accordion book and which is the verso. Pal starts his
study by assuming that what is now digitised as page 73 is the beginning of the
artwork (see Fig. 2). He writes that ‘the illustrations begin with a hieratic repre-
sentation of a multi-armed Śiva dancing on his bull and attended by two compan-
ions. The lighter figure on Śiva’s right is identified as Nandi, but the inscription
below the dark and fierce-looking figure to Śiva’s left is illegible. But there is little
doubt that it is Mahākāla, one of the many pratihāras [“guardians”] of Śiva.’
Fig. 2: Dancing Śiva with attendants, Add.864, page 73.
556 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 3: The Opening Scene, Add.864, page 1.
However, I would argue that the hints given by the general structure of the nar-
rative sequences seem to point at what is now digitised as page 1 as the actual
opening scene (see Fig. 3). That is an auspicious representation of five deities
with their respective consorts and mythical vehicles (vāhanas), seated in five
niches in a sort of highly decorated arched porch, probably representing a royal
palace or a royal hall within a palace. In the middle, we find Śiva with Umā, on
Nāndin, here clearly represented as the main deities insofar as they are depicted
in the centre and in larger scale than all the other figures in the page. To their
right, Brahmā sits with his consort on the Haṃsa. Further to their right, Gaṇeśa
sits on the mouse. To their left, Viṣṇu and Lakṣmī sit on Garuḍa. Further to their
left, Skanda sits on the peacock. To have such a complete array of Brahmanical
deities in what would otherwise just be the middle of the manuscript seems to me
less likely than having the figure of the dancing Śiva with his attendants as the
image for the middle of the work, contrary to what Pal seemed to have assumed.
Moreover, the pages that follow this auspicious scene in the royal porch rep-
resent well-known mythological events that refer to the beginnings of time and
the previous eons, foundational myths that indeed find their ideal place at the
beginning of the seemingly motley composition of different narratives that
Add.864 is made of. A brief description of some of these scenes will show their
ideal position as opening. The second page is actually divided in two sub-scenes,
an illustrative stratagem which will be deftly used throughout the whole manu-
script, sometimes with divisions in three or even four sub-scenes. In this case, to
the left, we find the representation known as paramātman, also called
viṣṇunyagrodhaśāyin (see Fig. 4): Viṣṇu is reclining on a Banyan tree while the
seer (ṛṣi) Mārkaṇḍeya is represented twice, first as an emaciated sage adoring
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 557
Fig. 4: viṣṇunyagrodhaśāyin and śeṣaśayana, Add.864, page 2.
the supreme god and then jubilant in the water after discovering the whole uni-
verse in Viṣṇu’s mouth. To the right, we find the representation known as yogan-
idrā, also called śeṣaśayana: Viṣṇu is lying on Ananta, before the manifestation
of the entire cosmos, with the ‘creator god’ Brahmā seated on a lotus coming out
of Viṣṇu’s navel. Here on the second page one finds the first among the numer-
ous captions in Nepālākṣara characters, which are more often than not drawn
from the Sanskrit texts that the various scenes represent. This closely corre-
sponds to verse 12 of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.87, in which both episodes are re-
ferred to.10
From the third to the sixth page, we have the first short narrative sequence,11
centred on another mythical, foundational episode of origin, the churning of the
||
10 The almost entirely legible text reads: svasṛṣṭam idam āpīya, śayānaṃ saha śaktibhiḥ | tadante
bodhayāṃ cakru,s talliṃgaiḥ śrutayaḥ [-1-]raṃ [|]. It corresponds to 10.84.12 in the critical edition.
(NB: for the transliteration of the captions, I have adopted the conventions laid down for the San-
skrit Manuscript Project and recorded in the project blog: http://sanskrit.lib.cam.ac.uk/materi-
als/conventions, without however bothering to note the instances in which the images interrupt
the continuity of the text). The only missing akṣara cannot but be the pa as found in
Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and the text can be rendered as ‘After he has withdrawn this [universe] that
had been emitted by himself, as he was lying asleep together with his powers, the Vedas awak-
ened him at the end of that [cosmic period] by [chanting] his signs.’
11 As argued by Pal (1970, 23), the previous image could also be interpreted as linked to the
episode of the samudramanthana, as it was the sleeping Viṣṇu who, awakened by the gods, ad-
vised them to churn the ocean of milk together with the asuras.
558 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 5: samudramanthana, Add.864, page 3.
ocean of milk on the part of devas (‘gods’) and asuras (‘demons’) and its imme-
diate consequences. As it is clear from the caption on page five,12 this could also
be considered as the beginning of the scenes from the Mahābhārata, the longest
narrative sequence in the manuscript, ending with page forty-eight of what I am
considering the recto of the accordion book, and therefore practically occupying
almost one third of the whole manuscript. Thus, page 3 features the samudra-
manthana proper (see Fig. 5): the mount Mandara is in the middle functioning as
the churning stick, the serpent Vāsuki functions as the rope, while gods and de-
mons are forcefully pulling on the two sides. Pages 4, 5 and 6 represent, respec-
tively, some of the gems (ratnas) coming out of the milk ocean including the
deadly poison being swiftly drunk by Śiva, the seizing of the amṛta (‘the elixir of
immortality’) on the part of the gods thanks to the intervention of Viṣṇu dis-
guised as the stunning Mohinī, and the final defeat of the demons.13 In the fol-
lowing forty-two pages the whole story of the Mahābhārata is narrated by way
of only representing some crucial events, most probably with a conscious focus
||
12 The caption in Nepālākṣarā characters reads: ≀ manthānaṃ mandaraṃ kṛtvā, tathā netraṃ ca
vāsukiṃ, | devā mathitum ārabdhā,ḥ samudraṃ nidhim ambhasāṃ ||. It corresponds closely to
Mahābhārata 1.16.12 (verse numbering always from the Critical Edition, unless differently
stated). In Van Buitenen’s translation (1973, 73), the verse translates as: ‘Thus the Gods made
Mount Mandara the churning staff; and using the Snake Vāsuki as a twirling rope, started to
churn the ocean, treasury of the waters.’
13 For a more detailed description of these and all the other pages, see the online description of
the manuscript.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 559
on the figure of Bhīma, whose massive, red figure features prominently in many
action-packed and often gruesome events.14
Before describing the general composition of the various narrative and non-
narrative sequences in the manuscript and thus devoting some more space to the
storyline of the Great War, let’s briefly rehash and conclude my argument regard-
ing the identification of the actual beginning of the manuscript. I am well aware
that the presence of the five main ‘Hindu’ deities with their consorts and vehicles,
followed by foundational mythological scenes such as Viṣṇu sleeping on Ananta
and the churning of the milk ocean, are no knockout argument for the identifica-
tion of the recto. However, the hints for this side being the initial page outweigh
those for the other side, i.e. the dancing Śiva and the presence of Gaṇeśa, ‘god of
beginnings’, in the following image.15
3 Outline of the manuscript contents: the recto
Now that the issue of the beginning has been tackled, at least tentatively, it is
possible to give a general but accurate overview of the content of the manuscript,
along which I will focus on some images, chosen for their beauty, interest or prob-
lematic nature. After the opening page (1) and the initial scenes on various foun-
dational myths (2–6),16 we have forty-two pages (7–48) dedicated to the main
storyline of the Mahābhārata.
||
14 It is relatively safe to postulate, or at least hypothesize, a connection between the promi-
nence of Bhīma in the Mahābhārata as depicted in this manuscript and the centrality of the cult
of Bhīmasena as a form of Bhairava from the second half of the second millennium in Nepal (see,
for instance, Bühnemann 2013).
15 Moreover, after these two clearly introductory folios, the second longest narrative sequence
of the manuscript starts (thirty pages of length), the Rāmāyaṇa, for which the narration com-
mences in medias res with the sad (and possibly inauspicious) scene of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa
bidding farewell to their parents, Daśaratha and Kaikeyī. In my opinion, this would be no ideal
moment to be represented as the hypothetical first narrative snippet of the manuscript, as Pal
assumed in his article.
16 As the captions for pages 5 and 6 are already quotations from the Mahābhārata, one might
include the samudramanthana sequence already within the larger narrative sequence of the
Mahābhārata. However, the rest of the pages dedicated to the epic are clearly focused on the
adventures of the Pāṇḍava brothers and do not depict any of the numerous digressions and sub-
plots contained within the larger narrative. Therefore, it also makes sense to divide the structure
of the manuscript as I have just proposed, with a small section on foundational myths and then
a larger one on the story of the Great Battle. In any case, the general analysis is not impeached
by this interpretive choice.
560 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 6: The ‘second Hiḍimba-episode’, Add.864, page 21.
Fig. 7: The encounter with Hiḍimbā and Hiḍimba, Add.864, page 9.
By relying on the evidence of both the depictions and the Nepālākṣara captions,
the images can be subdivided according to the books of the Mahābhārata from
which the scenes are drawn. Thus, pages 7 to 16 depict episodes from the first
book, starting with the snake sacrifice by Janamejaya narrated in the framework
narrative of the epic (7), and ending with the depiction of Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa help-
ing the fire god to destroy the Khāṇḍava forest (16).17 Pages 17 to 20 depict four
||
17 The other episodes are the conflagration of the lacquer house (8); the encounter with the
Rākṣasas Hiḍimba and Hiḍimbā, the defeat of Hiḍimba, the union of Bhīma and Hiḍimbā and
the salutation of their son, Ghaṭotkaca (9–10); the defeat of the Rākṣasa Baka by the hand of
Bhīma (11); the episode of the Gandharva chieftain Citraratha (12); the lakṣyabheda scene at
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 561
among the most dramatic and crucial episodes from the second book: the killing
of Jarāsandha (17) torn apart by Bhīma, the killing of Śiśupāla (18) beheaded by
Kṛṣṇa’s discus, the fateful game of dice that sets the whole nefarious plot in mo-
tion (19), and the scathing humiliation of Draupadī on Duḥśāsana’s part (20).
Page 21 is extremely anomalous (see Fig. 6). The painting is divided in three
sub-scenes. To the left, the powerful and menacing forest-dweller Hiḍimba faces
the five Pāṇḍava brothers and Draupadī; in the centre, Bhīma fights with him; to
the right, Bhīma finally subdues and chokes Hiḍimba. What is utterly surprising
about this folio is that this scene seems to be nothing but a repetition of what has
already been portrayed in a different fashion between the right subdivision of page
9 (see Fig. 7), in which we see Bhīma wrestling with Hiḍimba, and the left subdivi-
sion of page 10 (see Fig. 8), in which we see Hiḍimba subdued by Bhīma. The epi-
sode is thus out of sequence here, as the killing of Hiḍimba occurs in the first book
and here the story has moved to the second book. The identification of the depicted
Rākṣasa as Hiḍimba seems to be safe, as it is based on the Nepālākṣara caption,
which closely corresponds to Mahābhārata 1.142.3118 and mentions the joy of the
Fig. 8: Hiḍimba defeated and Bhīma’s family, Add.864, page 10.
||
Draupadī’s svayaṃvara when Arjuna hits the target with his arrow (13); the battle of the Pāṇḍa-
vas against the other princes at the end of the svayaṃvara (14); and the meeting with the Fire
god that preludes the destruction of the Khāṇḍava forest (15).
18 It reads hiḍimbaṃ nihitaṃ dṛṣṭvā,, saṃhṛṣtās te tarasvinaḥ | apūjayan naravyāghraṃ,,
bhīmasenam arindamaṃ ||. Van Buitenen (1973, 299) translates ‘When they saw Hiḍimba dead,
they were wildly excited and complimented the tigerlike, enemy-taming Bhīma.’ Moreover, the
562 | Daniele Cuneo
Pāṇḍava brothers at the sight of Hiḍimba’s death. Therefore, the simplest interpre-
tation of the conundrum is that the misplaced scene is nothing but a mere mistake
on the part of the artist.
However, a bolder interpretation for this interesting anomaly might prove
more interesting: it is perfectly possible that the artist and the scribe were two
different people who carried out their respective tasks one after the other, first
the depiction of the scene and then the writing of the caption. It is, therefore, also
possible that the artist intended to represent in this page the ill-fated encounter
with the Rākṣasa Kirmīra —the brother of Baka whom Bhīma killed on page 11—
occurring at the beginning of the third book (Mahābhārata 3.12). According to
this alternative interpretation I am proposing, we have the Pāṇḍava brothers and
Draupadī facing Kirmīra on the left of the page. In the middle, it is then Kirmīra
that Bhīma is fighting. To the right, Bhīma subdues and finally kills Kirmīra. In
this way, the depicted episode is in the right sequence with the preceding images,
with a distinct implicit connection with the killing of Baka that is the reason of
Kirmīra’s furious rage, and also with the following pages of the manuscript that
describe events happening in the third book. Therefore, the mistake is not to be
attributed to the artist in the depiction of the events, but only to the scribe who
mistook the scene for the fight between Bhīma and Hiḍimba and accordingly
chose a Sanskrit śloka from that episode. Obviously, this interpretation remains
speculative, but it does seem more plausible than a simple but unlikely case of
extreme forgetfulness on the part of an artist who had the full and exclusive re-
sponsibility of each and every aspect of the production of this astonishing man-
uscript.19
Pages 22 to 31 depict episodes from the third book, starting with the killing of
the Daitya Mūka (22), who had assumed the form of a boar and is simultaneously
hit by the arrows of Arjuna and the Kirāta (Śiva in disguise), and ending with the
episode of Karṇa warned by his father, the Sun God, not to give away his magic
earrings and armour, but convinced by Indra to finally do so in exchange of a
||
verse that precedes this one, that is, Mahābhārata 1.142.30, is the one quoted as caption for page
10: ≀ bāhubhyām yokramitvā(!) taṃ,, valavān_ pāṇḍunandanaḥ | madhye bhaṃktvā mahābāhu,,r
harṣayām āsa pāṇḍavān_ ||. Van Buitenen (1973, 299) translates ‘The powerful son of Pāṇḍu
racked the body on his knee and bent it till the spine broke, to the delight of the Pāṇḍavas.’
19 Excluding this very anomaly that I am tentatively trying to explain here and a later anomaly
(page 45) that I even find less troubling, Pal’s statement regarding the lack of sequentiality in
the episodes of the Mahābhārata is indeed inaccurate. (‘Unlike the representations of the
Rāmāyaṇa, where a sequence of events is followed, the artist does not seem to have cared to
observe any such order in illustrating the Mahābhārata.’ Pal 1967a, 25).
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 563
Fig. 9: The viśvarūpadarśana, Add.864, page 35.
never-failing weapon that he intends to use on Arjuna.20 Pages 32 to 34 depict
episodes from the fourth book, the killing of Kīcaka, Virāṭa’s lustful marshal,
whose very extremities get literally pushed into his trunk by the mighty Bhīma
(32); Arjuna is ready to fight and retrieve the cattle that had been raided by the
Kauravas (33); and the Pāṇḍava brothers give up their disguise and identify them-
selves to king Virāṭa (34). Pages 35 and 36 depict episodes from the sixth book:
the viśvarūpadarśana, the crucial episode of the Bhagavadgītā (see Fig. 9),21 and
||
20 The other depicted episodes are the fight between Arjuna and the Kirāta ending with the sub-
dued Arjuna who recognizes and venerates Śiva in disguise (23); Draupadī carried by Ghaṭotkaca
to the next hermitage, followed by the Pāṇḍava brothers, in their tour of sacred fords (24); Bhīma
trying to lift the tail of Hanumān who has the form of a small monkey (25); Karṇa fighting against
Citrasena and his army of Gandharvas (26); the breaking of Karṇa’s chariot and the capture of
Duryodhana by the Gandharvas (27); the captured Duryodhana set free and put to shame by the
Pāṇdava brothers (28); the lustful Jayadratha of Sindhu abducts Draupadī, but is followed by the
ṛṣī Dhaumya (29); and, finally, the Pāṇḍavas reach Jayadratha who gets thrashed by Bhīma, so that
Draupadī is rescued (30).
21 Pal has a very suggestive description of the scene that is worth quoting in full: ‘The battlefield
is indicated by the confronted chariots of Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa on the one side and of the Kauravas
on the other. The dark central figure with many arms and legs, multiple heads and faces, some
of them awesome and painted even on his belly and chest, represents the universal manifesta-
tion. On the chariot to the left, the bewildered and frightened Arjuna shrinks away from the man-
ifestation with enjoined palms. The human Kṛṣṇa is seated in front of the chariot, assuring Ar-
juna with his right hand, and holding the reins of the horses with the left. The insignia on the
Pāṇḍava standard behind Kṛṣṇa is a monkey in a flying posture. This is no doubt Hanumān who,
on an earlier occasion, had told Bhīma that he would be present at the battle of Kurukṣetra. On
the other side of the manifestation are the Kauravas, led by Duryodhana, and they also seem
564 | Daniele Cuneo
the battle that ensues after Kṛṣṇa finally convinces Arjuna to fight and annihilate
his enemies. Pages 37 to 39 depict episodes from the seventh book: the fight be-
tween Arjuna and the king Bhagadatta (37), whose great elephant has just tram-
pled upon the mighty Bhīma; the killing of Ghaṭotkaca (38); and the treacherous
beheading of Droṇa on Dṛṣṭadyumna’s part (39).22 Pages 40 and 41 depict epi-
sodes from the eighth book, the fight between Bhīma and Duḥśāsana (40) that
famously ends with the former drinking the latter’s blood, and the final duel be-
tween Arjuna and Karṇa, who is killed while trying to set free the wheel of his
chariot that was stuck in the ground (41).
Pages 42 to 46 depict events from the ninth and tenth book, starting with
Duryodhana hidden in a tank after the battle, while his allies urge him to return
to fight (42). Then, on page 43, Duryodhana’s hideaway is discovered by Bhīma
who drags him out, forces him into a fight, and finally defeats him by treacher-
ously smashing his thighs. Page 44 depicts Aśvatthaman, Kṛtavarman and Kṛpa
sitting by a banyan tree and observing a ghastly scene: a nocturnal bird of prey
is swooping on sleeping crows and slaughtering them in their slumber (Fig. 10).23
||
wonder-struck, although only Arjuna was supposed to have beheld the manifestation. The in-
signia on their standard appears to be a lion’ (Pal 1970, 97–98). The barely legible caption in
Nepālākṣarā characters reads: [≀ anekabāhūdarava]ktranetraṃ paśyāmi tvāṃ sarvato
nantarūpaṃ | [nāntaṃ na ma]dhyaṃ na puna[s tavā]diṃ paśyā[mi vi]śveśvara viśvarūpaṃ ||. It
corresponds to Bhagavadgītā 11.16, which in the recent translation by Flood and Martin (Flood
2015, 57) is rendered as ‘I see your many arms, your bellies, faces; / I see you everywhere, whose
form is boundless, / endless, with no beginning and no middle, / Lord of the Universe, whose
form your own is.’
22 The caption reads: dṛṣṭadyumno vadhīd dronāṃ rathatalpe nararṣabha | śonitena pariklinno
rathād bhumim arindamaḥ || lohitāṃga ivādityo, durdarśaḥ pratyapadyata ||. It closely corre-
sponds to Mahābhārata 7.165.52cd and 7.165.53. It can be rendered as ‘O foremost of men,
Dṛṣtadyuma slew Droṇa on the deck of his chariot. [Then] the tamer of enemies jumped down
from the chariot on the earth, as he was drenched in blood, hard to look at, like the red sun.’
23 Pal’s identification of the episode as ‘the end of the battle, when the ravens and the vultures
sweep down on the battlefield as Yudhiṣṭhira and others mourn the death and destruction
around them (Pal 1967a, 25)’ cannot be right, as shown by the caption that starts in the preceding
page and reads: saṃnipatya tu śākhāyāṃ, nyagrodhasya vihaṃgamaḥ | suptāñ jaghāna subahū,n
vāyasān vāyasāntakaḥ || upadeśaḥ kṛto nena, pakṣiṇā mama saṃyuge | śatrūnāṁ kṣapaṇe yukta,ḥ
prāptaḥ kālaś ca me mataḥ ||. It closely corresponds to Mahābhārata 10.1.39 and 10.1.44, which
Crosby (2009, 13) renders as: ‘Now that rider of the sky, falling upon the banyan bough, killed
many a crow in slumber, bringing the crows their end.’ and ‘This winged bird has given me a
lesson in the art of war tailored to my enemies and I deem the time has come.’
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 565
Fig. 10: The owl and the crows, Add.864, page 44.
The episode gives Aśvatthaman the idea of stealthily attacking the Pāṇḍava camp
during the night, in order to avenge the unjust murder of his father Droṇa and the
death of the hundreds of warriors who were fighting on the Kaurava side. The
following page (45) presents one more problematic issue regarding the sequenti-
ality of the events: Aśvatthaman, Kṛtavarman and Kṛpa converse with the dying
Duryodhana, while he is surrounded by crows, vultures and scavengers, rav-
enously waiting for his death. The caption24 seems to indicate that this is the epi-
sode taking place at the end of the ninth book, and therefore before the massacre
of the crows at the banyan trees depicted in the previous page and narrated at the
beginning of the tenth book. To resolve the conundrum, one might argue that the
close succession of the two events prevents any illogicality in the admittedly in-
verted narrative as presented in the manuscript. Thus, unlike the more trouble-
some case of the ‘second Hiḍimba-episode’ (see above), no particular reason
needs to be postulated to account for this small anomaly, but a small oversight
on the part of the artist, which in any case does not disrupt the intelligibility of
the storyline. Alternatively, one might argue that this scene actually represents
the second meeting between the three Kaurava warriors and the dying
Duryodhana, the one occurring in the tenth book after the night massacre in the
Pāṇḍava camp. Accordingly, only the caption would be misplaced, just as in the
case of the second interpretation for the ‘second Hiḍimba-episode.’ Furthermore,
||
24 The caption reads: ≀ vṛttaṃ bhūtagaṇair ghoraīḥ kravyādaiś ca samantataḥ | yathā dhanaṃ
lipsamanai,r bhṛtyair nṛpatisattamaḥ ||. It closely corresponds to Mahābhārata 9.64.7, which
Meiland (2007, 391) renders as ‘[the long-armed hero] was surrounded on all sides by terrifying
hordes of spirits who feed on flesh—just as an eminent king is surrounded by dependents who
covet wealth.’
566 | Daniele Cuneo
verse 9.4 in the tenth book somewhat mirrors the śloka from the ninth book
quoted as caption here.25 The two verses might have easily been swapped will-
ingly or just used interchangeably in the version of the Mahābhārata that the
scribe was using. In page 46, as retold in Mahābhārata 10.6, Aśvatthaman,
Kṛtavarman and Kṛpa try and fight against a huge, monstrous incarnation of the
God Śiva, here represented as Mahākāla or Bhairava, before they manage to pro-
pitiate the great God, and then enter the enemy camp and slaughter the Pāṇḍava
army in their sleep, as graphically depicted in the right portion of the image.
Page 47 represents the śaraśayana episode from the twelfth book: Bhīṣma is
lying on his deathbed of arrows and is intent on instructing Yudhiṣṭhira and the
other Pāṇḍavas about the subtleties of dharma. Nevertheless, the caption quotes
a passage from the sixth book,26 illustrating the very moment that Bhīṣma,
pierced by a shower of arrows, falls on the ground and is defeated, although
thanks to a boon (the svecchāmṛtyu) bestowed by his own father he can choose
the moment of his death and so decides to postpone it until after the fateful end
of the Great War. Unlike the misplaced and unduly repeated episode/caption of
Hiḍimba that is found on page 21 or the somewhat problematic case of page 45,
this alleged case of apparent misplacement undoubtedly refers only to the cap-
tion and can be satisfactorily explained by assuming the intention to choose a
Sanskrit passage laden with pathos over and above any of the numerous prosaic,
didactic passages that could have been gleaned from the twelfth book. Therefore,
in my opinion, there is no need to hypothesize any complicated scenario as it was
proposed for the two previous cases.
Page 48 carries the last depiction from the storyline of the Mahābhārata: the
royal ablution of Yudhiṣṭhira after the victory of the Great War. However, the cap-
tion is drawn from the tenth chapter of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, which in a way en-
capsulates the narrative of the Mahābhārata by being cited both at the beginning
||
25 The verse reads: vṛtaṃ samantād bahubhiḥ śvāpadair ghoradarśanaiḥ | śālāvṛkagaṇaiś caiva
bhakṣyayiṣyadbhir antikāt ||. Crosby (2009, 99) translates it as ‘He was circled on all sides by a
great gathering of gruesome wild beasts, with packs of jackals and wolves closing in, in antici-
pation of their approaching meal.’
26 It reads: ≀ śarasaṃghakṣataṃ vīraṃ, sāśrukaṇṭhas tato vṛṣaḥ | bhīṣma bhīṣma mahābāho,, ity
uvāca mahādyutiḥ ||. It corresponds closely to Mahābhārata 6.117.4. It can be rendered as ‘[When
he saw] that hero pierced by a shower of arrows, the immensely glorious Vṛṣa with tears flowing
down to his neck said “Oh Bhīṣma, great-armed Bhiṣma.”’ It is the touching moment when Karṇa
realizes that Bhīṣma is doomed.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 567
and at the end of the storyline, possibly adding a further religious layer of inter-
pretation to the already Viṣṇu-focused narrative of the Sanskrit epic.27
After the long pictorial sequence centred on the Mahābhārata, two other nar-
rative sequences occupy the rest of the recto of the Kalāpustaka manuscript: the
Buddhist story of the prince Sudhana of Hastināpura and the Kinnarī named Ma-
noharā (49–64)28 and the Vetālapañcaviṃśati (65–72). I will postpone the treat-
ment of these two narratives to a forthcoming dedicated study, as both stories
exist in a plurality of recensions29 — even in multiple languages as far as the Bud-
dhist story is concerned — and therefore present a different and more complex
set of problems for the identification of the scenes and the study of the connec-
tions between the depictions, their textual sources and the ingenuity of the artist
in selecting and representing the episodes.30 Let’s move then to the verso of the
accordion book.
4 Outline of the manuscript contents: the verso
As already discussed and argued for above, the verso starts with pages 73 and 74,
introductory images depicting a dancing Śiva with his attendants (73) and a
multi-armed Gaṇeśa (74) accompanied by female attendants and a male figure
||
27 The caption reads: ≀ rājasūyāvabhṛthena, snāto rājā yudhiṣṭhiraḥ | brahmakṣatriviśāṃ
madhye,, śuśubhe surarāḍ iva ||, which can be translated as ‘Bathed through the ablution of the
royal consecration, the king Yudhiṣṭira shone among Brahmins, Kṣatriyas and Vaiśyas as if he
were the king of the gods’. It closely corresponds to Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.74.51.
28 Pal (1967a, 27) already identifies a few episodes of the story. In particular, page 57 represents
Sudhana scaling mountains and facing dangers in search of Kinnarapura, where his beloved
Manoharā lives; page 63 represents Sudhana finally reunited with Manoharā and back in his
kingdom. Page 64 represents, on the left, the ascension to heaven of Sudhana and Manoharā,
while on the right it represents the court of king Vikramāditya, as an introduction to the follow-
ing pages where scenes from the Vetālapañcaviṃśati are illustrated.
29 Pal (1967a, 27) traces some similitudes between the story of Sudhana and Manoharā as de-
picted in our manuscript and the version narrated in the Mahāvastu, although he postulates that
we are probably faced with a version specifically elaborated in Nepal. For a short but compre-
hensive review of the different versions of the story of Sudhana and the Kinnarī as transmitted
both in texts and artistic representations, see Straube (2006, 3–7). For a brief and updated survey
of the different versions of the Vetālapañcaviṃśati, see Sathaye (2011).
30 An additional difficulty in analyzing this portion of the manuscript is the Newari language
that is found in most of its captions. Furthermore, the rationale behind the linguistic choice of
Newari over Sanskrit also deserves a concerted reflection on multilingualism in early 17th-century
Nepal that cannot be pursued in the present study.
568 | Daniele Cuneo
who might be a Gaṇa as suggested by Pal (1967a, 24), or possibly a Rākṣasa, if
one compares the depiction of his face with the other Rākṣasas portrayed in the
Rāmāyaṇa storyline. And after these two initial images, one finds precisely the
beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa, the second longest narrative sequence of the manu-
script, starting with page 75 and ending with page 104, for a total of thirty pages,
more than one fifth of the whole accordion book.31 The crucial importance of the
two epics in the artist’s pictorial project appears evident by the brute fact that
together they occupy practically half of the pages of the entire manuscript.
Just as in the case of the Mahābhārata storyline, it is convenient to organize
the scenes according to the books of the epic they are drawn from. The story starts
in medias res with page 75 that marks the passage from the second to the third
book, from the Ayodhyākāṇḍa to the Āraṇyakāṇda: to the left, the farewell of
Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa to Daśaratha and Kaikeyī; in the centre, Rāma and
Lakṣmaṇa proceeding to the forest together with Sītā; and, to the right, the forest
has been reached and Rāma and Sītā are seating on a lotus-throne, in what seems
to be a cave (Fig. 11). The third book is then represented by two extremely theat-
rical scenes: the episode of the golden deer — already described in detail in Pal
(1967a, 24) — that lures away Rāma and then Lakṣmaṇa, so that Rāvaṇa in the
guise of an ascetic can approach Sītā (page 76); the episode of Jaṭāyu, a demi-god
who has the form of a giant bird of prey and who tried to save the kidnapped Sītā
from Rāvaṇa’s clutches (page 77). For its intense vividness, the scene deserves to
be shown here (Fig. 12): on the left, holding Sītā with one of his arms, Rāvana on
his flying chariot is battling against Jaṭāyu, who is represented twice, once flying
high in the heat of the fight and then falling down mortally wounded by Rāvaṇa;
in the centre, Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa are talking to the dying Jaṭāyu; to the left, a
scene probably representing the desperation of Rāma over the kidnapping of Sītā:
he is standing with an arm raised to the sky and a languid expression on his face,
while Lakṣmaṇa kneels down in front of him with the hands in an añjalī.32
||
31 I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to Mary and John Brockington who helped a
great deal in the identification and analysis of the scenes from the Rāmāyaṇa storyline.
32 The caption reads: [sa] bhinnapakṣaḥ sahasā rākṣasā bhīmakarmaṇā | ni[papāta hato] gṛdhro
dharaṇyām alpajīvitaḥ ||. This closely corresponds to Rāmāyaṇa 3.49.37, which is translated by
Pollock (1984, 195) as ‘The moment the savage rākṣasa cut off his wings, the vulture fell stricken
to the ground, barely alive’. The caption then continues: evam uktvā citāṃ diptā,m āropya pat-
ageśvaraṃ | dadāha rāmo dha[rmā]tmā, patatrīṃ[draṃ jaṭāyu]ṣaṃ ||. This closely corresponds
to Rāmāyaṇa 3.64.31. On the basis of Pollock (1984, 229), it can be translated as ‘So righteous
Rāma spoke, and placing the lord of birds upon the pyre, he lit it and cremated Jaṭāyus, the king
among flying creatures.’
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 569
Fig. 11: Rāmāyaṇa’s opening scene, Add.864, page 75.
Fig. 12: The episode of Jaṭāyu, Add.864, page 77.
Only page 78 is dedicated to the fourth book, the Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa, to its most cen-
tral and dramatic events: the alliance between Rāma and Sugrīva sealed by
Hanumān; and the duel between Sugrīva and his elder brother Bali, won by the
former only thanks to the help of Rāma who deceitfully shoots Bali with his arrow
while he is wrestling with his younger brother (Fig. 13).33 Pages 79 to 83 depict
||
33 The caption reads: sugrīvo rāghavaś caiva, vayasyatvam upāgato prahṛṣṭamanasau virau tāv
ubhau naravānarau || tataḥ śareṇābhihato, rāmenākṛṣṭamanā | papāta sahasā bhūmau [ni]kṛtta
iva pādapaḥ ||. The first part corresponds to Rāmāyaṇa 4.5.16cd–17ab. It can be translated, on
the basis of Lefeber (1984, 64), as ‘Then Sugrīva and Rāghava entered into an alliance, delighted
at heart, both Hari and the monkey’. The second śloka closely corresponds to Rāmāyaṇa 4.17.1.
570 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 13: The killing of Bali, Add.864, page 78.
episodes from the fifth book, the Sundarakāṇḍa. The sequence starts with
Hanumān’s heroic leap across the ocean, depicted in the moment preceding it, as
he is surrounded by other monkeys (79), and it ends with Hanumān’s fiery havoc
in Laṅka and his return back to Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and the camp of the monkeys
in Kiṣkindhā (83).34
All image from page 84 up to and including page 104 are dedicated to epi-
sodes from the sixth book, the Yuddhakāṇḍa. Therefore, way more than half of
the pages dedicated to the Rāmāyaṇa describe events narrating the final conflict
between Rāma and Rāvaṇa, a clear choice on the part of the artist who presuma-
bly wanted to represent the culminating moments of the narrative and chose
many of them among the pathos-laden scenes narrated in the prolonged war
among Rāma’s and Rāvaṇa’s armies. As stated by Goldman (Goldman et al. 2009,
3), the Battle Book represents ‘the guts, as it were, of the poem’ and ‘nearly twice
the length of the next-longest kāṇḍa, concerns itself with what, from an im-
portant perspective, may be considered the real business of the Rāmāvatāra’, i.e.
the dharmic elimination of the world-threatening Rāvaṇa.
||
It can be translated, on the basis of Lefeber (1984, 87), as ‘Then struck by the arrow, his heart
taken away by Rāma, he fell suddenly on the ground like a tree cut down.’
34 The other depicted episodes are Sītā tormented by Rāvaṇa while Hanumān is spying on
them; Rāvaṇa is then summoned away (or maybe held back) by two Rākṣasas (or, possibly, he is
quarreling with Vibhīṣaṇa, represented twice), and Sītā is consoled by a woman, presumably
Trijaṭā or Saramā (80); Rāvaṇa menacing Sītā again, Hanumān’s encounter with Sītā, and
Hanumān smashing the ladies’ grove (81); Hanumān defeats a Rākṣasa (possibly, Akṣa), but is
defeated by Indrajit, who captures him and takes him in front of Rāvaṇa (82).
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 571
Fig. 14: Illusionary Hero and Heroine, Add.864, page 88.
The first page of this long sequence (84) represents the well-known episode of the
setubandha, the construction of the bridge that joins Bhārata to Laṅkā: Rāma,
Lakṣṃaṇa, Vibhīṣaṇa and the monkey army are about to cross the ocean, while
Rāvaṇa is represented flying in his vimāna on the other side of the body of water
that is being bridged by the causeway (84). The page that closes the story of the
Rāmāyaṇa (104) depicts Rāma’s lavish royal consecration ceremony in Ayodhyā.
Two Brahmins (one of them should be the great ṛṣi Vasiṣṭha) are pouring water
over Rāma and Sītā, while Lakṣmaṇa, Hanumān and other monkeys surround
them.35
Among the many remaining images,36 I will focus on two more episodes, one
for its intrinsic interest, and the other one for correcting a misidentification on
||
35 The caption reads: rāmaṃ ratnamaye pīṭhe, prāṅmukhaṃ saha sītayā | upaviṣṭa(!)
mahātmānaṃ,, maharṣir abhyaṣecayat_ ||. It could be rendered as ‘The great sage was consecrat-
ing Rāma, the great-souled one, as he was sitting with Sītā on a gemmed throne with his head
leaning forward.’ The verse vaguely resembles Rāmāyaṇa 6.116.54 and is anyway a summary of
the main theme of sarga 116, which closes the sixth book of the epic.
36 The other depicted episodes are: Aṅgada delivers Rāma’s message of war to Rāvaṇa in his
court (85); the Rākṣasas fail at capturing Aṅgada, then he is back in the monkeys’ camp in front
of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa (86); the killing of Kumbhakarṇa, Rāvaṇa’s gargantuan brother (87); the
severed head of the fake Rāma and the illusory Sītā being slain (88, see below for a discussion of
it); the illusions are revealed: Sītā shows the illusory severed head of Rāma to Hanumān, and
then Hanumān shows Rāma’s illusory head in front of Rāma and his allies while the body of the
illusory Sitā (?), slain, still lies on the ground (89); Lakṣṃaṇa and the monkeys attack Indrajit
and disrupt his magical rite (90); the death of Indrajit (91); Rāvaṇa is informed of the death of
his son Indrajit and decides to enter the battlefield (92); Rāvaṇa fights against Lakṣmaṇa (93, see
below for a discussion of it); Lakṣmaṇa, unconscious after the fight with Rāvaṇa, lies on the lap
572 | Daniele Cuneo
Pal’s part. After the frantic battle scene depicting Kumbhakarṇa’s death (87),
page 88 represents a change in Rāvaṇa’s strategy to win the war against Rāma
and the monkey army (Fig. 14). The image is divided in two sub-scenes: on the
left, the magician Vidyujjihva presents an illusory severed head of Rāma to Sītā,
in order to break her resolve, while Hanumān is watching the scene hidden above
in a tree; on the right, a flying, green demon is cutting the throat of an illusory
Sītā (māyāsītā), in front of a distressed party that includes Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa,
Vibhīṣaṇa, Hanumān (?), Aṅgada and two other monkeys. The events continue
on page 89 (Fig. 15), where Rāvaṇa’s illusions are dissolved: on the left, Sītā (or
possibly Saramā) shows the illusory severed head of Rāma to Hanumān; on the
right, Hanumān has taken the fictitious head in front of Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa,
Vibhīṣaṇa and the monkeys, all struck with utter amazement, while what is pos-
sibly the body of the illusory Sītā, slain, still lies on the ground. What is peculiar
about these two pages is how the artist is heavily reinterpreting the story as retold
in the Rāmāyaṇa, or how he might be following a different (possibly Nepalese)
version I have not been able to track down yet.37 In the Rāmāyaṇa as critically
edited, the episode of the illusory severed head of Rāma occurs way before the
killing of Kumbhakarṇa, towards the beginning of the book. And it is not some
||
of Vibhīṣaṇa, while the monkeys inform Rāma about his brother’s defeat (94); a broken-hearted
Rāma seats with the wounded Lakṣmaṇa on his lap (95); Hanumān flies back, carrying the moun-
tain Gandhamādana, seat of magical medicinal herbs. Then, still on Rāma's lap, Lakṣmaṇa is
restored to life by the elixir (96); Lakṣmaṇa is restored to life and is warmly greeted by Rāma (97);
Rāvaṇa’s great sacrifice is disrupted (98); the final duel between Rāma and Rāvaṇa (99); Sītā’s
repudiation and ordeal by fire (100); Rāma and Sītā are happily re-united (101); Vibhīṣaṇa is
consecrated king of Laṅkā (102) and the return journey to Ayodhyā (103).
37 In a personal communication, Mary Brockington confirmed the as-yet untraceable nature of
the original traits of the storyline as represented in these two pages. Moreover, she suggested
that the female body to be seen on page 89 could originally derive from a motif found in
Rājaśekhara’s Bālarāmāyaṇa: Rāvaṇa attempts to demoralise Rāma and prevent him building
and crossing the causeway by throwing to the northern shore the severed head of a counterfeit
Sītā. A much-developed and narratively different version of the same motif is found in the eight-
eenth-century Thai Ramakien and in other Southeast Asian versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which
the female corpse is impersonated by Vibhīṣana’s daughter or some other character. For a dis-
cussion of this specific motif and some crucial methodological remarks on ‘visual texts’ and ‘ver-
bal texts’ in the historical reconstruction of narrative motifs, see Brockington 2012.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 573
Fig. 15: Illusions revealed, Add.864, page 89.
green demon, but Indrajit himself who conjures up the illusory Sītā and slaugh-
ters her in front of his enemies. Furthermore, what is crucially missing in the ver-
sion of the critical edition is the connection between the two episodes based on
the double-edged power of māyā. By juxtaposing the two episodes, the artist (or
the version he follows) manages to have the magic power of the Rākṣasas defeat
itself in a cunning twist in the plot: it is by the very illusory head of Rāma, brought
to his attention by Hanumān, that Rāma realizes the trick, overcomes his de-
spondency and is now ready to fight again.
Let’s move on to the other episode I wish to focus on. Page 93 (Fig. 16) repre-
sents a furious multi-headed and multi-armed black Rākṣasa flying on a vimāna
and on the verge of attacking Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and the other monkeys. Pal
(1967a, 24) identifies this scene as the famous struggle between Indrajit and
Lakṣmaṇa, ‘one of the most dramatic and poignant incidents relating to the great
battle. Hidden in the clouds, Indrajit (or Meghanāda) fatally strikes Lakṣmaṇa
with the divine weapon śaktiśel [sic!].’ However, the series of events narrated in
the previous images clearly shows that the flying multi-headed Rākṣasa must be
Rāvaṇa himself, who indeed strikes down Lakṣmaṇa with his mighty javelin in
the 88 sarga of the sixth book.38 In fact, page 91 depicts the killing of Indrajit and
page 92 sees Rāvaṇa receive the terrible news and rush into battle.
||
38 Moreover, the caption that starts on page 92 and also occupies the first part of page 93 corre-
sponds to Rāmāyaṇa 6.88.35 and reads: tato rāvaṇavegena, sudūram avagāḍhayā, śa[page-
break]ktyā nirbhinnahṛdayaḥ papāta bhuvi lakṣmaṇaḥ ||. Together with Goldman et al. (2009,
414), it can be rendered as ‘Then Lakṣmaṇa, his heart pierced by that javelin, so deeply embed-
ded through Rāvaṇa’s strength, fell to the ground.’
574 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 16: Rāvaṇa strikes back, Add. 864, page 93.
It is interesting to remark that, after the long sequence of the Rāmāyaṇa, the re-
maining forty or so pages of the accordion book are occupied by a plurality of
other themes in which the sequential order of the scenes seems to lose the cen-
trality that it had in the four narrative pieces that occupy the first hundred pages
of the manuscript. No general, explicit pronouncement can be made at this stage
of the research on the significance of this overall organization. For the time being,
before trying to draw some tentative general conclusions, a sheer description of
the remaining pages will have to suffice.
The following six pages (from page 105 to 110) are devoted to the representa-
tion of twenty-one among the eighty-four Mahāsiddhas, semi-historical figures of
Buddhist tantric masters venerated in North India, Nepal and Tibet, usually cut-
ting across sectarian divides and worshiped also within Hindu traditions.39 As in
the rest of the manuscript, the Nepālākṣara captions and the iconographic repre-
sentations are of great but not always definitive help in identifying the various
depicted characters. The first page of the sequence (105) represents Ādinātha and
Pārvati seated on Nandi and ensconced in a cave; Macchendranātha, one of the
patron saints of Nepal (‘first seen appearing from a fish with his arms raised. Then
he is seated with a yogapaṭṭa tied around his knees, and surrounded by four
fishes. He is also given the horizontal third-eye.’ Pal 1967a, 26); and Cauraṅgī,
seated on a tiger skin. The last page of the sequence (110) shows Camārīpā killing
||
39 The most well known book on the tradition of the Mahāsiddhas is Dowman (1989). For the
detailed descriptions of some of the depicted Mahāsiddhas, see Pal (1967a, 26–27), from which
the final sentence is worth quoting here: ‘[…] the majority of the siddhas portrayed here are ac-
companied by females carrying skull-cups in their hands, in keeping with the legends associated
with these sages, who invariably took a female partner before attaining siddhi.’
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 575
Fig. 17: Four Mahāsiddhas, Add. 864, page 110.
a boar, accompanied by a female partner; Kukkurīpā carrying a dog, accompa-
nied by a female attendant; Ghaṇṭāpā dancing with a female partner; and Godhi-
yāpā with birds and a female partner (Fig. 17).40 It remains a desideratum to un-
derstand the significance of the choice of these particular twenty-one
Mahāsiddhas out of the normal list of eighty-four, and to connect — beyond any
reasonable, scholarly doubt — their iconographic representations with their
names and life stories.
After the pages dedicated to the Mahāsiddhas, a single image, page 111, is
devoted to Sūrya: the sun god is represented on his flying chariot drawn by seven
horses and depicted within a circular golden frame; he is accompanied by two
||
40 The other pages can be sketchily described as follows: page 106 depicts Vaṃsāpā, playing
the flute; Gorakṣanātha, seated on a bull and overpowering another; Lūyīpā (commonly known
as Luipa) eating entrails of fish in front of Dānīrāja, king of Orissa; and Indrabhūti with an elab-
orate crown, accompanied by a female partner. Page 107 represents Virūpā carrying a skull in
his right hand and pointing at the sun and the moon with his left, accompanied by a female
partner whose caption seems to read Śauṇḍinī; Vyākipā (probably the character usually known
as Vyālipā) with a female partner; and Nāgārjuna seating on a serpent, whose hoods form a can-
opy over his head, as he is being addressed by a disciple. On page 108 the first Mahāsiddha is
seated on a nāga and accompanied by a female partner, but his caption is illegible; the second
one is feeding a monkey and accompanied by a female partner, but also his caption is damaged
and illegible; the third Mahāsiddha represented is identified by the caption as Gorakṣanātha (he
is seated on a bull and overpowering another, accompanied by a female partner). However, the
same Mahāsiddha was already represented on page 106. Page 109 depicts Jñānākarapā, with a
bull and a female partner; Kāmālīpā working metal with a female partner; Karṇṇapā with two
attendants; and Bhānrepā Bahulī (uncertain reading and identification) while beating a female
character.
576 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 18: Random Horses, Add. 864, page 125.
attendants who are throwing arrows at Rākṣasas on the background of a lush for-
est. The image bears no caption. After the representation of Sūrya, fifteen pages
(from 112 to 126) are dedicated to horses of different kinds, often accompanied by
captions with their names (see, for instance, Fig. 18, bearing as caption for the
three horses the terms ‘kaṃcukīdoṣa’ ‘uturuṃ’ and ‘manahi’, the second one be-
ing uncertain as it is hard to read, and all preceded by the siddhi sign). Pal (1967a,
25) connects this section of the manuscript with the Āśvaśāstra, a veterinarian
text, and refers: ‘There is a whole manuscript illuminating this text and rendered
in the same style in the Palace Museum at Bhaktapur in Nepal. The horses are
often labelled in this Cambridge manuscript as in the folios illustrated here […].’
Nevertheless, I have not been able to locate this manuscript yet. Moreover, the
rationale behind the choice of the various horses, their outlines, colours and pos-
tures as well as the significance of the names in the captions exceeds the
knowledge of the present author. This portion of the manuscript deserves a sep-
arate study by an expert of horse husbandry in premodern and early-modern
South Asia and Nepal.
The following four pages (from 127 up to 130) are illuminated with what seem
to be scenes of hunting, sports of animals, and flocks of birds. Pal (1967a, 30 and
passim) briefly lingers on these scenes in describing the pictorial features of the
composition, and he also proposes a possible narrative reading of the last image
(Fig. 19): ‘The scenes with the birds appear to represent some sort of tale, proba-
bly from the Hitopadeśa. Along the left we see a man discoursing with two birds,
one of them white (a dove?) and the other a raven. To the right the white bird with
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 577
Fig. 19: Mysterious Birds, Add. 864, page 130.
a raven biting its neck arrives before the same man, and again he appears to be
instructing them.’ As these images have no caption, I have no further evidence to
either support or counter his interpretation.
The following nine pages of the accordion book (from 131 to 139) are dedi-
cated to Vaiṣṇava legends, drawn from the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and mostly con-
nected with the figure of Kṛṣṇa. The series starts with the famous episode known
as gajendramokṣa: on the left, the king of elephants, Gajendra, and several other
elephants are sporting on a river bank, while a crocodile, or some aquatic mon-
ster, is approaching from below. On the right, Viṣṇu appears in the skies riding
Garuḍa and rushes to save his devotee, Gajendra, as the crocodile has caught its
foot (Fig. 20).41 The last image dedicated to Vaiṣṇava legends depicts the kuva-
layāpīḍavadha42 and the defeat of Kaṃsa, Kṛṣṇa’s evil uncle: on the left, Kṛṣṇa
||
41 The caption reads: so ntaḥsarasy uruvaśena gṛhīta ārtto dṛṣṭvā garutmati hari[ṃ] kha
upāttacakraṃ | utkṣipya sāṃvujakaraṃ śirasātikṛcchrāt nārāyaṇākhilaguro bhagavan namas te.
It closely resembles Bhāgavatapurāṇa 8.3.32. Together with Tagare (1976, 1113), it can be ren-
dered as ‘Beholding in the sky Lord Hari, seated on Garuḍa and with his discus upraised (in his
hand), the elephant, though greatly distressed, as he was seized with great strength [by a croco-
dile] inside the lake, lifted up his trunk holding a lotus (as an offering) and uttered with great
difficulty the words: “Oh glorious Nārāyaṇa, preceptor of the whole universe, I bow to you.”’
42 As indeed signaled by the caption: kuvalayāpīḍavadhaḥ ||.
578 | Daniele Cuneo
Fig. 20: gajendramokṣa, Add. 864, page 131.
defeats the gigantic elephant Kuvalayapīḍa; on the right, while a number of wres-
tlers (?) are engaged in an acrobatic feat, Kṛṣṇa defeats, and dances over, his evil
uncle Kaṃsa, 43 in front of his warriors and, probably, his wife.44
||
43 The rest of the caption reads: pragṛhya keśeṣu caratkirīṭaṃ, nipātya raṃgopari tuṃga-
maṃcāt_ | tasyopariṣṭāt_ svayam abjanābhaḥ, papāta viśvāśraya ātmatantraḥ ||. It closely corre-
sponds to Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.44.37. Together with Tagare (1978, 1523), it can be rendered as
‘Toppling down his crown and catching Kaṃsa by his hair, the Lord hurled him down from the
high dais to the groundfloor of the arena. And on him jumped the absolute willed, (the weighty)
support of the (heaviest of the heavy) universe, the veritable Lord Viṣṇu (the lotus-navelled God)
himself.’
44 As shown by their respective captions, the other seven pages depict various scenes drawn
from the myths narrated in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa: the episode of the dwarf-avatāra Vāmana and
his Viṣṇu Trivikrama form (132); Kaṃsa and his attempts to avert the prophecy that a son of his
sister’s daughter would kill him: on the right, he first tries to kill his own sister’s daughter
Devakī. Then dissuaded by her husband, he accepts to just kill all her sons (the scene in the
middle). But, as he is about to smash the last baby on a stone altar (scene on the right), the god-
dess Māyā appears in the sky and reveals that the child is just a substitute and that the real son
is safe and sound (133); the episode known as putanāvadha: Kṛṣṇa jumps out of Yaśodā's arms
and suckles the murderous demoness Putanā, and thus kills her (134); the episode known as
kāliyadamana: by dancing on his flaming hoods, Kṛṣṇa subdues the nāga Kāliya, who had poi-
soned the river Yamunā (135); the episode known as vastrāharaṇa: the naughty young Kṛṣṇa
playfully steals the clothes of the bathing cowgirls (136); and a two-page-wide maṇḍala-like rep-
resentation of the episode known as rāsalīlā, the joyful dance and amorous sport among Kṛṣṇa
and the Gopīs on the night of the full moon in the month of Kārttika (137–138).
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 579
As a further proof of the work-in-progress nature of the present article, the last
five pages of the manuscript (140–144) remain as yet only partially identified. As sug-
gested by the hardly legible śloka in Sanskrit45 in the caption, the left section of the
first image (page 140) represents the episode narrated at the beginning of the
Mahābhārata, in which Takṣaka, the lord of snakes, bites and kills Parikṣit, the
grandson of Arjuna and the father of Janamejaya, whose failed attempt at vengeance
towards all snakes (the sarpasattra) is depicted on page 7 of Add.864. The other sub-
sections of page 140 and the remaining four images seem to be connected as a con-
tinuous story, in which significant roles are played by a king,46 a minister and a lion
on whose back the ocean is crossed, as well as dancers, white elephants, a deer that
is being hunted and a cobra that is killed by the minister.47 A full understanding of
the sequence will have to wait for a future in-depth study.48
As a last general remark before moving to some tentative conclusions and point-
ers to avenues of further research, I would like to draw attention to the ways in which
the blended assortment of Brahmanical and Buddhist stories and characters that the
Add.864 contains presupposes the existence of a class of intellectuals who were con-
versant with both religious and narrative cultures in early modern Nepal, something
that was long lost in the Indian subcontinent during the same period.
||
45 The Sanskrit verse reads: [ve]ṣṭayitvā tu bhogena, vinadya ca mahāsvanaṃ | adaṃśata pṛt-
hivī[śvara]ṃ takṣakah pannageśvaraḥ ||. It is a verse expunged from the critical edition of the
Mahābhārata, marked as 411* and to be found after Mahābhārata 1.39.33. It can be rendered as
‘Subduing him with his coils and uttering a great noise, Takṣaka, the lord of snakes bit the lord
of the earth.’
46 In the first caption of page 143, the word hāla that follows the terms rāja and śrī might be a
proper name and thus a reference to well-known Śatavāhana king. This might be connected with
the story of the romance between king Hāla and the queen Līlāvatī of Siṃhaladvīpa, or with one
of the many other stories narrated about this celebrated monarch. But it is also possible that hāla
is no proper name, but it only stands for a Newari word also spelled as hāra or hare and meaning
‘to shout’, and hence ‘to order’.
47 The remaining captions are in Newari language. I thank Bal Gopal Shrestha and Nirajan Kafle
for helping me with a preliminary understanding of the captions (see, for instance, the previous
note).
48 The last folio is damaged in a peculiar way: a one-centimeter band at the bottom of the page
looks as if it had been torn away. It is possible that the damaged portion contained a further
(possibly final) caption, particularly on the left side of the page where the yellow frame seems to
be conceived to be encapsulating a piece of writing.
580 | Daniele Cuneo
5 Conclusions: cultural rationale, doubts, and
avenues of further research
As stated at the very beginning of this article, Add.864 is in many ways unique, a
masterpiece of pictorial technique and dramatic pathos, exceptional in the com-
posite choice of narratives as different and varied as the two Sanskrit epics, a
Buddhist story, the Vaiṣṇava myths from the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and so forth.
Nevertheless, its date has been established by Pal precisely by considering other
Nepalese manuscripts (and artworks) that do share some pictorial traits with
Add.864, but are more or less safely dated on account of their colophons around
the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century.
Here follows a list of these other manuscripts, three already mentioned by
Pal, and one added here by the present author: 1) a Hitopadeśa manuscript (an
accordion book) kept in the Bir Library of Kathmandu (Reel No. A 1169-7) and
dated 1594 CE, the closest one to the Cambridge Kalāpustaka in its exuberant
style and expressionistic flair, although the Sanskrit text occupies most of the
manuscript, and the actual illuminations are in a relatively small number;49 2) a
Pañcatantra manuscript kept in the J.P. Goenka Collection and also dated by Pal
around 1600;50 3) the Aśvaśāstra manuscript mentioned by Pal (1967a, 25) and
probably painted for the king of Bhaktapur, which I have not been able to locate
yet;51 4) a Devimāhātmya palm-leaf manuscript (Or.14325) preserved in the British
Library, dated 1549 CE and coming from Bhaktapur, also illuminated in a strik-
ingly similar style.52 The manuscript is currently on display in a BL exhibition,
and an example of its stunning drawings can be seen online on the British Library
website.53
||
49 For a black-and white image, see Pal (1978, figure 176). For a colour reproduction of the same
pages, see Kramrish 1964, 96.
50 For a black-and-white image, see Pal (1978, figure 177). For a colour reproduction of a differ-
ent page, see Goswamy (1999, 197), a prestigious catalogue of the paintings in the Goenka Col-
lection, in which the manuscript is — mistakenly, I think — attributed to the mid-18th century. A
close examination of this manuscript is a desideratum, especially because the few published
pages seem to attest that this is the only other specimen that shares with the Cambridge
Kalāpustaka the absolute predominance of the images over the textual portion of the manu-
script.
51 There are relatively few candidates for its identification to be found in the NGMCP website,
but their analysis will have to wait for the expert of horse husbandry I evoked earlier on.
52 I heartily thank Camillo A. Formigatti for recognizing the importance of this manuscript for
my present research and inspecting the text, the images and the colophon.
53 http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/sacredtexts/devimahatmya_lg.html, last accessed 31/01/2017.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 581
Moreover, Pal (1967b) investigates three long scrolls of Buddhist tales belong-
ing to the early seventeenth century (dated 1610, 1617 and 1619 CE), which are
also in a remarkably similar pictorial style. Accordingly, the article dedicates sev-
eral pages (13–17) to identify and describe the principal characteristics of the style
that unites these scrolls, the Hitopadeśa manuscript and the Cambridge
Kalāpustaka.54 To conclude this list, Pal (1967a, 32) mentions murals that ‘were
also executed at about the same time and in the same style’ in the palace of Bhak-
tapur. Therefore, considering also the additional evidence offered by the BL man-
uscript, Pal’s speculation (1967b, 13) that ‘all these paintings were done by the
artists belonging to the same atelier, probably in Bhaktapur’ seems now a quite
likely conclusion.
As to its origin and social function, Pal (1967a, 32) draws assumptions that go
beyond the mere date of the manuscript around the very beginning of the 17th
century. He convincingly argues that given ‘the richness and superb qualities’ of
its paintings, it is likely that this manuscript had ‘been a royal commission’, es-
pecially considering the artistic and technical capabilities necessary for its pro-
duction, not to speak of the economic capital needed for commissioning an atel-
ier55 to create an object for which the demand would have necessarily been
extremely low, if not unprecedented. In this regard, I would tentatively argue that
it is possible to build upon this conclusion by moving past his interpretation that
Add.864 is ‘an anthology of pictures’ and that the aim of the artist was merely ‘to
achieve prettiness in decoration as well as pictorial vividness in narration.’ Pal’s
clue is his statement (1967a, 23) that Add.864 was ‘made both for the edification
||
54 As the present article does not focus on the pictorial aspects of the Cambridge manuscript, I
will just summarize and appropriate here Pal’s characterizations of the commonalities in style
within what we might call the ‘early modern school of Nepalese painting’, or ‘early modern
school of Bhaktapur. painting’ if the hypothesis about the identification and location of the atel-
ier is accepted. He lists ten characteristics: 1) continuous narration divided by trees, architectural
motives, etc. (‘comic strip’ effect); 2) functional importance of central figures shown by their
larger size and central placement; 3) presence of a decorative stage back-drop; 4) floral scroll in
shades of red as background; 5) thick and broad proportions of the figures, and especially large
faces (unlike in the earlier styles found in Nepal); 6) heavy and vivacious drawing style; 7) rhyth-
mic animation and graceful mobility in the theatrically depicted narrations; 8) lack of verisimil-
itude in natural elements (trees, rocks, ocean, etc.) in favour of an expressionistic application of
joyous colours and the delineation of imaginative geometrical shapes; 9) remarkable variety of
dress and textile designs; and 10) free and expressive style of gestures, facial complexion and
physiognomy to convey emotional moods. The continuities of this style with the previous narra-
tive paintings from Nepal are dealt with by Pal (1978, 97–100; and passim).
55 I do not think that the legitimate question as to whether Add.864 is the work of a single artist
or a group of painters can be satisfactorily answered at the present state of research.
582 | Daniele Cuneo
and the delectation of the patron (emphasis mine)’. In his book on The Arts of
Nepal, Pal briefly deals with the use of depicted scrolls in Ancient India and their
very remote origin in time, and he also relates how these sorts of portable draw-
ings were called caraṇacitras or yamapaṭas and ‘were used by bards and story-
tellers who went about from village to village recounting their tales and sagas of
ancient lore and mythology as well as of life in the realm of Yama, the king of
death (Pal 1978, 96).’ Along these lines, I would like to propose an interpretation
of the function of Add.864 as going beyond the mere aesthetic value, on which so
much focus has been laid. As a royal commission, its main purpose might well
have been that of an aide-mémoire and the most appealing visual aid for the royal
preceptors of the young aristocracy. These royal pundits would have to educate
and edify the often very young princes and noblemen, precisely by narrating the
stories of the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, the Buddhist story of Sudhana and
Manoharā as well as the Vaiṣṇava legends and the like. I am postulating for the
Cambridge Kalāpustaka the role of a sort of ‘mirror for princes’ not in opaque
words but in vivid and colourful images. The pictures would then not only en-
compass the most crucial narratives widespread in early modern Nepal but also,
and most importantly, aim at visually conveying their core values with regard to
ethical conduct, knowledge and behaviour,56 such as the eventually unwavering
martial heroism of Arjuna, the unmistakably dharmic conduct of Rāma, the utter
devotion towards Kṛṣṇa, etc. A further, general clue to its connection with the
royal durbar and its educative function is precisely the crucial importance that
the two epics and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa play in the manuscript, likely to be seen
as apt reflections of the well-known identification of the Nepalese monarchs with
Viṣṇu and his incarnations.
What better instrument to shape and regiment the young minds and bodies
of the future rulers into the moral dispositions and the cultural habitus57 of early
modern Nepalese courtly life? According to the lines sketched in this hypothesis,
Add.864 should be studied at the vibrant intersection of ethics and aesthetics as
a piece of courtly cultural technology geared at the preservation, reinforcement
||
56 For such an interpretive proposal to make sense, one should entertain a Foucauldian ‘expan-
sive sense of ethics as a practice of remaking oneself as a moral being, reaching far beyond the
domain of moral rules and abstract judgments (Pandian and Ali 2010, 5).’
57 For the concept of habitus in this wide cultural and social sense, see Bourdieu (1990, 53): the
habitus is composed of ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures pre-
disposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize
practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presup-
posing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to
attain them.’
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 583
and reproduction of social norms, political conventions and cultural values.58
Therefore, for the contemporary scholar, the so-called Cambridge Kalāpustaka
represents a most privileged window on the courtly culture and ethical life of
early 17th-century Nepal along with its explicit and implicit disciplinary ideals of
social normativity and worthy kingship. Although this hypothesis of the Cam-
bridge Kalāpustaka as an ideally didactic instrument of visual culture for the Nep-
alese elites cannot be proved per se, the same goes with the hypothesis of its be-
ing simply an objet d’art, whose only purpose was aesthetic appreciation on the
part of the high-status courtiers. For the corroboration of this second hypothesis,
one would need a thorough understanding of the ideas of aesthetic fruition and
sensibility of Nepalese courtly culture that is simply beyond our reach given the
current state of research. Some light on this currently hazardous functional hy-
pothesis might well be shed by further exploration into the understudied sections
of the manuscript (for instance, the depictions of horses, an animal often con-
nected with nobility and rank, and the partially identified final pages that again
have clear regal resonances) and a thorough investigation into the few similar
manuscripts that have been identified so far (the BL Devīmāhātmya, for instance).
It is worth noticing that the Hitopadeśa and the Pañcatantra contained in the
other two illuminated manuscripts that pictorially resemble Add.864 can by and
large be included within the genre of nīti, ‘political policy’ or the ‘prudent and
wise behavior in the context of public life’ (Ali 2010, 24). It is a kind of didactic
literature customarily aimed at the education of the elites and the development
of their ethical sensibility and character in pre-modern South Asia, the very same
function that I am proposing for the Cambridge Kalāpustaka.
To conclude in a more concrete fashion, I would like to rehash some of the
possible avenues of further research I have partly hinted in the paper. The various
narrative and non-narrative sections of the manuscript deserve separate in-depth
studies, especially the Buddhist story of Sudhana and Manoharā and the
Vetālapañcaviṃśati, to which even Pal dedicated very little attention. The longer
sections of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa are better analysed now, espe-
cially thanks to the full, in-progress transcription of all the captions and the iden-
tifications of all the various episodes. In this connection, more than half of the
captions have already been identified as identical or slightly modified verses
||
58 The close imbrication between moral practices and aesthetic notions (the ‘cross-pollination
of beauty and virtue’ Ali 2010, 25) as one of the most distinctive characteristics of the courtly
culture and political life in Medieval South Asia is the object of the ground-breaking book by Ali
(2004), which directly inspired some of the reflections voiced in the present paper.
584 | Daniele Cuneo
from the critical editions of the two epics. Moreover, a preliminary cursory pe-
rusal of the critical apparatuses has shown that it is possible to further identify
the Sanskrit captions as coming from different manuscript recensions, both at the
level of whole verses expunged from the critical editions and at the level of word-
long variants relegated to the apparatus. For instance, numerous verses quoted
in the captions dedicated to the episodes of the fifth book of the Rāmāyaṇa cor-
respond very closely to variants found in the Nepalese manuscripts dubbed as Ñ1
and Ñ2, to the Northern recension and, more specifically, to the Northeaestern
recension.59 A very promising avenue of research would therefore be the attempt
at identifying the manuscripts, the groups of manuscripts, or the manuscript re-
censions of both the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa that are closer to the verses
found in the captions of Add.864.60 Understandably and interestingly, this initial
cursory investigation points at what might be considered Nepalese recensions of
the two epics.
||
59 Ñ1 is the oldest manuscript used for the critical edition, dated 1020 CE. Ñ2 is a recent paper
manuscript dated 1675 CE. For detailed information on these and the other manuscripts whose
sigla will be mentioned later, see the Introduction to the Critical Edition of the Sundarakāṇḍa.
For an impressionistic example of the pattern to be investigated, the ślokas quoted as captions
for pages 79 and 80 appear in the following form: sa sāgaram anādhṛṣyaṃ, vikramya haripuṃga-
vaḥ | citrakūṭataṭe laṃkāṃ, sthitaḥ svastho niraikṣataḥ || kapir mandodarīṃ tatra,, śayānaṃ
śayane śubhe [start of page 80] dadarśa nīlajalade, jvalantīm iva vidyutaṃ || jagāma madanon-
matto, daśagrīvo mahābalaḥ | kāṃcanī ddīpikāś citrā, jagṛhus tatra yoṣitaḥ ||. The first verse
loosely corresponds to Rāmāyaṇa 5.2.1, but the reading haripuṃgavaḥ is attested in manuscripts
Ś1, Ñ1, Ñ2, D1.2.4.10.11, the reading citrakuṭataṭe is only attested in Ñ2. The first part of the sec-
ond verse loosely corresponds to Rāmāyaṇa 5.8.48cd, but the reading śayane śubhe is specifi-
cally attested in Ñ1 and D11. The second part of the second verse is a half verse expunged by the
edition (marked as 283*) that is attested in this precise form in Ñ1, D1 and D4. The first part of
the third śloka is an expunged half verse (marked as 465*) that is attested after verse 5.16.10 in
Ñ, V2, B, D2.3.6, while the second part of the śloka corresponds Rāmāyaṇa 5.16.11ab, particularly
in the form attested in Ś1, Ñ, V2, B, D2-4.6.10.11. Obviously, no definitive conclusion can be
drawn from this restricted set of data, but they do represent a promising avenue of further re-
search.
60 I wish to express my sincerest thanks to John Brockington, who agreed to help me to pursue
this line of research and identify the other captions within the manuscript transmission of the
Rāmāyaṇa. The results will be included in the online description of Add.864.
Vivid Images, Not Opaque Words | 585
6 Appendix: Table summary of the manuscript
contents
Recto
Opening Scene 1
Foundational Mythological Scenes 2–6
Mahābhārata 7–48
Story of Sudhana and Manoharā 49–63
Vetālapañcaviṃśati 63–72
Verso
Dancing deities 73–74
Rāmāyaṇa 75–104
21 Mahāsiddhas 105–110
Sūrya on his Chariot 111
Horses (from the Aśvaśāstra?) 112–127
Hunting Scenes (fables?) 128–130
Scenes from the Bhāgavatapurāṇa 131–139
Partially Identified Scenes 140–144
References
Ali, Daud (2004), Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Ali, Daud (2010), ‘The Subhāṣita as an Artifact of Ethical Life in Medieval India’, in Anand Pandian
and Daud Ali (eds), Ethical Life in South Asia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 21–42.
Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bradshaw, H. (1870–80), Notes on the collections of Oriental, Tibetan and ‘Additional’ manu-
scripts [unpublished manuscript] Cambridge.
Brockington, M. (2012), ‘The Ladies’ Monkey: Hanumān in Boston’, in Journal Asiatique 300.1:
199–214.
van Buitenen, A.B. (1973), The Mahābhārata. 1. The Book of the Beginning, Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
Bühnemann, G. (2013), ‘Bhimasena as Bhairava in Nepal’, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlän-
dischen Gesellschaft 163(2): 455–476.
Crosby, K. (2009), Mahabharata. Book Ten. Dead of Night & Book Eleven. The Women, The Clay
Sanskrit Library. New York: New York University Press.
Dowman, K. (1989), Masters of Enchantment : The Lives and Legends of the Mahasiddhas, Lon-
don: Arkana.
586 | Daniele Cuneo
Flood, G. (ed.) (2015), The Bhagavad Gita, New York–London: Norton & Company.
Formigatti, Camillo A. (2016), ‘Towards a Cultural History of Nepal, 14th-17th Century. A Nepalese
Renaissance?’, in Rivista degli Studi Orientali 89: 51–66.
Goldman, R.P.; Goldman, S.J.S.; van Nooten, B.A. (2009), The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki. An Epic of An-
cient India. Volume VI: Yuddhakāṇḍa, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goswamy, B.N. (1999), Painted Visions. The Goenka Collection of Indian Paintings, New Delhi:
Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhavan.
Kramrisch, S. (1964), The Art of Nepal, New York: The Asia Society.
Lefeber, R. (1984), The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki. An Epic of Ancient India. Volume IV: Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Meiland, J. (2007), Mahabharata. Book Nine. Shalya. Volume Two, The Clay Sanskrit Library. New
York: New York University Press.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1967a), ‘A Kalāpustaka from Nepal’, in Bulletin of the American Academy of Be-
nares 1: 23–34.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1967b), ‘Paintings from Nepal in the Prince of Wales Museum’, in Bulletin of the
Prince of Wales Museum of Western India 10, 1–26.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1970), Vaiṣṇava Iconology in Nepal: A Study in Art and Religion, Calcutta: Asi-
atic Society.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1978), The Arts of Nepal, Leiden: E. J. Brill.
Pandian, Anand. and Daud Ali (2010), ‘Introduction’ in Anand Pandian and Daud Ali (eds), Ethical
Life in South Asia, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010, 1–18.
Pollock, S. (1984), The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki. An Epic of Ancient India. Volume II: Ayodhyākāṇḍa,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Sathaye, Adheesh (2011), ‘Vetālapañcaviṃśatika,’ Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Band 14. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 178–183.
Shastri, H.G.; Shelat, B.; Shastree, K.K. (eds) (1996–2002), The Bhagavata: Critical Edition, Ah-
madabad: B.J. Institute of Learning and Research.
Straube, M. (2006), Prinz Sudhana und die Kinnarī. Eine buddhistische Liebesgeschichte von
Kṣemendra. Texte, Übersetzung, Studie, Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag.
Tagare, G.V. (1976), The Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Part III, Delhi – Varanasi – Patna: Motilal Banar-
sidass.
Tagare, G.V. (1978), The Bhāgavata Purāṇa. Part IV, Delhi – Varanasi – Patna: Motilal Banar-
sidass.
Vajracharya, Gautama V. (2016), Nepalese Seasons: Rain and Ritual, New York: Rubin Museum of
Art.
Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Umā and Śiva’s Playful Talks in Detail
(Lalitavistara): On the Production of Śaiva
Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval
Nepal
Studies on the Śivadharma and the Mahābhārata 1
Abstract: This article offers insights into the processes and context of production,
in medieval Nepal, of the so-called ‘Śivadharma-corpus’, a collection of eight
works revolving around topics related to the practices and beliefs of lay Śaiva
householders and the establishment of a Śaiva social-religious order. Our focus
is on the earliest extant manuscript containing a version of the entire corpus,
namely manuscript G 4077 of the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, dated to 1036 CE.
What is exceptional about this manuscript is that it contains a unique work called
Lalitavistara as the final member of the corpus, while missing the Dharmaputrikā,
which from the second half of the 11th century onwards was always transmitted as
the last work in ‘mainstream’ versions of the Śivadharma corpus. While giving
some insights into the production of the corpus shortly before it reached its stable
form by the 12th century, we also offer an overview of the contents of the Lalitavi-
stara, as well as a study of its topics and sources, proving its connections with the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the Śivadharma corpus. We also show how both works
heavily draw on and are inspired by the Mahābhārata, and how the composi-
tional strategies may reflect the socio-religious and cultural milieu of the Kath-
mandu Valley at the time.
1 Early stages of corpus formation
The Śivadharma corpus is a collection of eight early Śaiva works whose study is
proving to be crucial for our understading of the formation of lay Śaiva religion in
the early medieval period. Their titles, following the arrangement given by the man-
uscript of the Cambridge UL Add.1645, are: Śivadharmaśāstra, Śivadharmottara,
Śivadharmasaṃgraha, Śivopaniṣad, Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, Uttarottaramahā-
saṃvāda, Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha, and Dharmaputrikā. Mainly addressing the sphere of
lay householders, these works provide rules of behaviour in the practice of rituals
and towards religious institutions, setting out a normative and doctrinal system
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-019, © 2017 F. De Simini/N. Mirnig, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
588 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
that defines the lay devotees’ adherence to the Śaiva religion. Systematic studies
of these texts, including critical editions, have only recently been initiated, and
deal particularly with the earliest of them, namely the Śivadharmaśāstra and the
Śivadharmottara. In this article, we will focus our attention on the emergence and
shaping of the Śivadharma corpus through the analysis of its earliest dated man-
uscript, preserved at the Asiatic Society, Calcutta, with the accession number
G 4077. Dated 1036 CE, this palm-leaf manuscript, according to the catalogue of
Shastri (1928), contains nine works, instead of the eight that typically comprise
the mainstream version of the corpus that is most widely attested in Nepalese
sources from the second half of the 11th century onwards. This additional work,
titled Lalitavistara, can be deemed particularly unsuccessful, as it was never
again transmitted in any of the numerous Nepalese manuscripts of the corpus,
nor seems to be attested anywhere else in the vast body of South Asian manu-
scripts that have come down to us. It thus appears that something must have gone
wrong in the composition of the Lalitavistara, and in the attempt made by the
producers of manuscript G 4077 to include it in the corpus. While the story of the
Lalitavistara is thus one of failure, this point of rupture offers us the opportunity
to examine a specific moment in the textual production linked to the assemblage
of a fixed Śivadharma corpus, in which we may more closely trace key aspects
and motivations that have led to the composition of more works on Śaiva topics
following the model of the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara. In partic-
ular, we aimed at assessing the structure of the Lalitavistara and identifying its
possible sources, as well as understanding the social and religious dynamics that
underpinned its composition and determined its fate. This study was made pos-
sible by the direct inspection of manuscript G 4077, but above all by the recent
acquisition of high-quality colour pictures that enabled us to see more clearly
through the Lalitavistara, and thus make some well-grounded considerations
concerning its contents, models, and historical context.1
||
1 It took three trips to Calcutta and a good dose of persistence before we managed to get a hold of
the pictures of all the folios of the Lalitavistara of manuscript G 4077, plus those of a few more works
transmitted in the same manuscript. During the first trip, in January 2012, Florinda De Simini was
only allowed to see manuscript G 4077 from a distance, and to have a quick look at the microfilm of
the same. Later on, a few digital reproductions of that microfilm, limited only to the folios of
‘Lalitavistara 9’ (see below), had been kindly made available by Anil Kumar Acharya, and reached
the authors of this article via Alexis Sanderson; we are deeply grateful to both for sharing their ma-
terial so generously. Things have changed for the better in the management of the library and of
the museum section of the Asiatic Society, so that the visit that Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
paid to this institution in February 2016 was more fruitful than the previous one, and led to the
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 589
We have no detailed knowledge concerning the time frame of the composi-
tion of the works of the Śivadharma corpus. We know that the Śivadharmaśāstra
and the Śivadharmottara must have reached Nepal some time between the 7th cen-
tury, a possible date for their emergence in northern India, and the 9th, to which
the earliest manuscript of the Śivadharmottara can most likely be dated. We as-
sume that the remaining six or seven works were composed in Nepal, as they are
attested and known for most of their transmission history solely in this region.
Further, in the earliest phases of their manuscript transmission, they feature ex-
clusively in multiple-text manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus.2 Even though
we don’t know exactly when these works were composed, we can still attempt a
||
acquisition of pictures of the Śivadharmaśāstra, the Śivadharmottara, and of Lalitavistara 8 of man-
uscript G 4077, as well as the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara of manuscript G 3852. In
large parts, we owe this success to the new curator of the museum section, Keka Banerjee, to whom
we are extremely grateful for having offered us guidance and support during our research in the
library. We are also grateful to the former General Secretary of the Asiatic Society, the late Mana-
bendu Banerjee, who was very supportive of our work. Finally, a third trip in January-February 2017
resulted in the acquisition of colour pictures of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and Lalitavistara 9 of
manuscript G 4077, which allowed us to form a much better understanding of the text than the
digitized microfilm pictures we had been using until then. Again, the support of Mrs Banerjee and
of the entire staff at the reprographic office, as well as the authorization that was kindly provided
by the current General Secretary, Satyabrata Chakrabarti, have proved immensely helpful in pur-
suing our research objectives. We thus express our deepest gratitude to the library and museum
sections of the Asiatic Society, without which we would never have been able to properly study
these materials.
We would also like to use this opportunity to thank the members of the team of the AHRC-funded
Sanskrit Manuscripts Project (2011–2014), Vincenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo and Camillo Formi-
gatti, for assisting us in our study of the Śivadharma manuscripts preserved in the collection of the
Cambridge University Library, and inviting us to give lectures and participate in the workshops or-
ganized in the frame of this project, as well as for funding within the project for three months
(March–June 2014) in the case of Nina Mirnig. We are happy that our research on the Lalitavistara
and the early stages in the formation of the Śivadharma corpus can now appear in this volume, and
grateful to its editors for all the work they have done. Our thanks also go to Harunaga Isaacson,
Yuko Yukochi and Somadeva Vasudeva for their comments on some points of this article, as well
as to Kristen de Joseph for her help in revising and proofreading the English text.
Further, we would like to thank our respective funding bodies, which enabled us to do the re-
search and travel undertaken for this article: in the case of Florinda De Simini, the project was
funded by the Italian Ministery for Education and Science at the ‘Orientale’ University of Naples
and titled ‘Political Power and Religious Groups in Early Medieval India: A study of epigraphic ma-
terials and unpublished manuscripts concerning the Śaiva traditions (VI-XII cent.)’; in the case of
Nina Mirnig, the research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 27838–G15 ‘Śivaliṅga
Worship on the Eve of the Tantric Age’, hosted in the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna.
2 On this, and for more information on the Nepalese manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus, see
De Simini 2016b, to which we will give more specific references throughout this introduction.
590 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
rough estimate for the time frame of the corpus’s formation, since we can trace
the process in the earliest extant manuscripts of the collection. With all due cau-
tion—as our observations only take into account the limited number of surviving
specimens—we can state that, beginning in the second half of the 12th century,
manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus started to take on the homogeneous shape
that they would preserve throughout the centuries; in comparison, the three
manuscripts that we can place before that period all contain some peculiar fea-
tures that are absent from subsequent manuscripts. These three early specimens
are (1) N ,3 which transmits only the Śivadharmottara and has been dated to the
9th century on the basis of its palaeographic features; (2) N , which is also un-
dated, but possibly constitutes our earliest attestation of a multiple-text manu-
script of the corpus, if the current estimate of its dating towards the end of the
10th and the beginning of the 11th century is confirmed; and (3) manuscript G 4077,
which is the first one to have a dated colophon. The difference between these first
attestations, on the one hand, and the version of the corpus that later becomes
mainstream in the dated (or datable) specimens from the second half of the 11th
century onwards is easily illustrated by the following table, in which we have
collected basic data on the five earliest manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus
that have so far been identified, all of which are from Nepal:
||
3 Throughout this article, we have partly adopted the system of sigla that was agreed upon dur-
ing the ‘Śivadharma Workshop: Manuscripts, Editions, Perspectives’ at Leiden University, 26th–
30th September 2016. According to this system, the first letter in the siglum denotes the script in
which the manuscript is written (N for Newari, G for Grantha, etc.); the first superscripted letter
is for the place where the manuscript is kept (K stands for Kathmandu, C for Cambridge, Ko for
Kolkata, L for Leiden, O for Oxford, A for Adyar), while the subscribed number indicates the last
two figures of the microfilm or accession number. Here we have only used this system in order
to refer to the manuscripts microfilmed by the Nepalese-German Manuscript Preservation Pro-
ject, in order to avoid the use of overly long sigla. Manuscripts from the Asiatic Society of Calcutta
and from the Cambridge University Library are referred to by means of their usual accession
numbers.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 591
G 4077 Add.1645
(9th cent.) (10th-11th cent.) (1036 CE) (1069 CE) (1138-39 CE)
Śivadha- Śivadharma- Śivadharmaśāstra Śivadharmaśāstra Śivadharma-
rmottara śāstra śāstra
Śivadharmottara Śivadharmottara Śivadharmottara Śivadharmottara
Śivadharma- Śivadharma- Śivadharma- Śivadharma-
saṃgraha saṃgraha saṃgraha saṃgraha
Umāmaheśvara- Umāmaheśvara- Umāmaheśvara- Śivopaniṣad
saṃvāda saṃvāda saṃvāda
Śivopaniṣad Śivopaniṣad Umāmaheśvara-
— saṃvāda
Śivopaniṣad Umottarasaṃvāda Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha Uttarottaramahā-
saṃvāda
Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha Dharmaputrikā Vṛṣasārasaṃ-
graha
Lalitavistara Uttarottaramahā- Dharmaputrikā
saṃvāda
Lalitavistara
The difference between G 4077 and N , the other early manuscript of the corpus,
is striking. N encompasses only the first four works up to the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda, with the Śivopaniṣad most likely being a later addition to the manu-
script, at least based on what we can deduce from its codicological features.4 In
the case of G 4077, the corpus has expanded to the extent that it not only ‘legiti-
mately’ includes the Śivopaniṣad, but also four more works that are attested for
the first time in this manuscript. Besides the increased number of works, what
also catches the observer’s attention is the presence of two texts bearing the same
||
4 See De Simini 2016b, 245–248. It is most likely that the position of the Śivopaniṣad within the
Śivadharma corpus was a debated issue, as also another manuscript, UL Add.1694.1, possibly
written in the 12th century, originally lacked the Śivopaniṣad; a unit containing the Śivopaniṣad,
severed from another, yet unidentified manuscript, was then added to the end of this specimen,
and is now catalogued as Add.1694.12. See De Simini 2016b, 248–250; a detailed description of
Add.1694.1, accompanied by digital colour pictures, is available at this link: https://cudl.
lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01694-00001/1.
592 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
title, namely Lalitavistara, a ‘Detailed Account of the Playful [Conversation]’. For
reasons of clarity, we will distinguish these ‘two Lalitavistaras’ by adding to their
titles the numbers by which they are identified in the catalogue, namely 8 and 9,
throughout this article.
The case of the Lalitavistaras is unique inasmuch as these are the only texts
that are attested in such an early manuscript of the corpus that later appear to
have been rejected by the entire subsequent tradition. In comparison, all the
other works transmitted in the two early manuscripts N and G 4077 went on to
have a long transmission history as part of the Śivadharma corpus, with only
some of them appearing as separately transmitted works at a later time.5 For in-
stance, the Umottarasaṃvāda of G 4077, titled Uttarottaramahāsaṃvāda in the
other manuscripts, is also attested for the first time in this manuscript but—un-
like the two Lalitavistaras—continued to be transmitted. The same applies to the
Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha. However, the pre-mainstream version of the corpus reflected
in N and G 4077 still lacks one further work that would become a stable element
of the corpus from that point onwards, namely the Dharmaputrikā, attested for
the first time only in N . Manuscript N is thus the first point in the extant man-
uscript tradition at which we can consider the composition of the works of the
corpus of the Śivadharma and the formation of the corpus itself to be closed: in
spite of the variation in the number of works attested in the different manuscripts,
no other works would be added, and later colophons expressly confirm that the
Śivadharma is made of ‘eight members’,6 almost as if to purposely fix the number
of texts in order to avoid and contrast possible attempts to further expand the
corpus.
The general concluding colophon of manuscript G 4077 not only dates the
manuscript to a specific day, but also places its production under the reign of a
specific king, namely Lakṣmīkāmadeva, who is praised in the colophon with his
full royal titles (see below). G 4077 thus belongs to that group of manuscripts that,
by establishing a firm connection with the political power, help us glean more
historical information on the context of their production, and gain a better un-
derstanding of the manuscript culture of the time. Petech lists the colophon of
G 4077 among the sources that contain a reference to king Lakṣmīkāmadeva,
||
5 On the creation of single-text manuscripts of works of the Śivadharma corpus from the dis-
memberment of original multiple-text manuscripts, see De Simini 2016b, 261 and n. 72.
6 This expression (aṣṭakhaṇḍa) is found in the colophon of N , a palm-leaf manuscript dated
1201 CE, but similar expressions have also been found in the colophons of later paper manu-
scripts (see De Simini 2016b, 254ff.).
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 593
whose rulership he dates to c. 1010–1041 CE.7 The earliest reference to him fea-
tures in a manuscript belonging to the collection of the Cambridge University Li-
brary, namely Add.1643, an illustrated manuscript—‘the earliest illustrated man-
uscript from Nepal’8—containing the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā along with
two shorter texts,9 and whose date Petech verifies as March 31, 1015 CE.10 In the
colophon of this manuscript, Lakṣmīkāmadeva is mentioned next to two other
kings, namely Bhojadeva and Rudradeva. By tallying this information with an
inscription in Patan, Petech deduces that in this year all three kings ruled over
Nepal, with Rudradeva from Patan as the senior partner of his successor Bho-
jadeva, while Lakṣmīkāmadeva ruled the other ‘half of the kingdom’ (see Patan
inscription), which could possibly correspond to the modern Kathmandu area.
However, in later manuscripts, Lakṣmīkāmadeva is mentioned independently
from other monarchs, namely in (1) NAK 3-359, transmitting the Bhaga-
vatyāsvedāyā yathālabdhatantrarāja, dated NS 1044, second day of the bright
fortnight in the month of Śrāvaṇa (July 10, 1024 CE, following Petech);11 (2) NAK 5-
877, of the Kulālikāmnāya, dated NS 158, i.e. 1037/1038 CE, just one year after our
Śivadharma manuscript;12 and (3) Cambridge UL Add.1683, containing the Sa-
ddharmapuṇḍarīka, dated NS 159, thirteenth day of the bright fortnight in the
month of Vaiśākha (March 30, 1039 CE, according to Petech’s reading).13 This sit-
uation reflects a tendency of this period by which the production of Buddhist
||
7 The scant extant information on the king Lakṣmīkāmadeva, and the study of the sources doc-
umenting his kingdom, can be found in Petech 1984, 37–39.
8 Kim 2013, 48. Note that this statement is true only if we limit our considerations to the illus-
trations on the folios, excluding the paintings decorating the covers. For if we also consider the
latter, then the earliest example of manuscript painting from Nepal must be attributed to the
early Śivadharmottara manuscript N , provided that we also establish that the decorated
wooden covers encasing this manuscript are contemporary with the manuscript—something
that we have not yet managed to verify beyond doubt.
9 On the contents of this manuscript and its features, see the detailed description given by For-
migatti in Vergiani, Cuneo and Formigatti 2011–2014, available online, along with the colour
pictures of the manuscript, at the following link: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-
01643/446.
10 Petech 1984, 37.
11 The microfilm identification number of this manuscript is A 47/16; its description can be
found at the following link: http://134.100.29.17/wiki/A_47-16_Bhagavat(%C4%AB)_sved%C4
%81_y%C4%81_yath%C4%81labdhatantrar%C4%81ja. (last accessed 18/2/2017)
12 This manuscript, microfilmed by the NGMPP as A 41/3, is described at the following link:
http://134.100.29.17/wiki/A_41-3_Kul%C4%81lik%C4%81mn%C4%81ya. (last accessed 18/2/2017)
13 Colour pictures of this manuscript are available at the following link: https://
cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01683/1.
594 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
manuscripts—at the time preciously illustrated objects used for worship and pro-
duced for accruing religious merit—was flanked by the production of manu-
scripts of Śaiva works, with Śaivism being the main religious current with which
monarchical power was identified. This does not mean that there is no trace left
of the manuscripts of Vaiṣṇava works produced in the 11th century. We have, for
instance, three manuscripts of the Viṣṇudharma dated to this time,14 as well as a
unique manuscript of the so-called Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra, dated NS 173 (1051–
52 CE), to which we will call attention later.15 Further, we have the earliest extant
samples of Vaiṣṇava Pāñcarātra works, which substantially contribute to our un-
derstanding of the earliest phase of this stream. One of these, the manuscript of
the Svāyambhuvapañcarātra (NAK 1-648, NGMPP A 54/9), which also interpo-
lates part of the Aṣṭādaśavidhāna, is dated NS 147 (1027 CE), and thus also during
the reign of Lakṣmīkāmadeva.16
Returning to manuscript G 4077, according to the catalogue information,17 and as
direct inspection has confirmed, the manuscript contains the following nine works, for
a total of 345 extant folios: 1) Śivadharmaśāstra (47 folios); 2) Śivadharmottara (65 fo-
lios); 3) Śivadharmasaṃgraha (58 folios); 4) Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda (35 folios);
5) Śivopaniṣad (22 folios); 6) Umottarasaṃvāda (24 folios); 7) Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha
(52 folios); 8) Lalitavistara (25 folios); 9) Lalitavistara (17 folios). Note that the
Umottarasaṃvāda lacks three folios, corresponding to folios 43 to 45, two of
which can be identified in exposures 23B/24A and 24B/25A of Lalitavistara 8. At
least two of the 25 folios of this work thus belong to a different text, so that the total
number of extant leaves for Lalitavistara 8 drops to 23. Shastri counted 30 folios for
the same work, seven more than those extant today, while he only had 11 leaves for
Lalitavistara 9.
Both the ductus of the script and other codicological features, such as the
scribal decorations, the constant number of lines on a page (five), as well as the
||
14 These are microfilmed by the NGMPP as B 5/8 (NAK 1-1002), dated NS 167 (see Petech 1984,
40, and the information at: http://134.100.29.17/wiki/B_5-8_Viṣṇudharma); C 1/2 (Kesar 2),
dated NS 197 (see Petech 1984, 49, and the information at: http://134.100.29.17/wiki/C_1-
2_Viṣṇudharma); A 1080/4 (NAK 1-1002/2), dated NS 210 (see http://134.100.29.17/wiki/A_1080-
4_Viṣṇudharma). (last accessed 18/2/2017)
15 See NGMPP A 27/2, http://134.100.29.17/wiki/A_27-2_Mah%C4%81bh%C4%81rata. (last ac-
cessed 18/2/2017)
16 Acharya 2015, xvi-xvii.
17 Shastri 1928, 718–723; this manuscript is numbered 4084.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 595
Fig. 1: Asiatic Society G 4077, original wooden covers (inner sides).
habit of reporting the total number of stanzas at the end of each work, confirm
the unity of production of the different blocks forming this manuscript. The
measures of a folio are, on average, 52.5 4.4 cm, with c. 107 akṣaras per line.
Each of the texts transmitted in ms. G 4077 is now divided into separate bundles,
wrapped together in the same envelope, and identified by paper slips with the
numbers that Shastri (1928) had attributed to the works based on their sequence
in the manuscript. However, at a certain point, Lalitavistara 8 and 9 were sepa-
rated from the main bulk and preserved, along with the decorated wooden covers
that must have originally belonged to the whole manuscript (Fig. 1), in a different
envelope, as if forming a separate manuscript, which is now identified as G 4077
R.18 No note of the wooden covers is made in Shastri’s catalogue. The separation
of the two texts can probably be attributed to the initiative of a curator, or of a
scholar who was puzzled by the occurrence of the two Lalitavistaras. For if one
were to compare the list of works contained in G 4077 with the one transmitted
by all the other manuscripts in the tradition of the Śivadharma corpus as known
so far, one would quickly notice that neither of the two Lalitavistaras has actually
been accepted. Our Calcutta manuscript is in fact the sole attestation of these two
works; their being foreign to all the other known versions of the Śivadharma cor-
pus is what must have prompted a zealous scholar to alter the actual composition
||
18 Note that in the catalogue there is no trace of this separate manuscript, which is just a portion
of the original G 4077. The split must certainly have occurred after the compilation of the cata-
logue, but also after (or maybe on the occasion of) the microfilming, since the old microfilm re-
productions in our possession still describe Lalitavistara 9 as part of G 4077. Therefore, when the
authors of this article were granted access to manuscript G 4077 for the first time, in February
2016, they found themselves in front of a rather anomalous case, as the manuscript was lacking
the last two works described in the catalogue, and nobody in the library seemed to know what
had happened with them. Fortunately, after a day-long search, the librarians were able to iden-
tify the remaining portion, manuscript G 4077 R, which is now preserved together with G 4077,
although they are still divided and kept in two different envelopes.
596 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
of the manuscript, even despite the information provided by the catalogue, and
split one manuscript into two. Moreover, the title Lalitavistara itself may have
called into mind the popular Buddhist work of the same title, and caused further
confusion.
A certain hesitation about the constitution of G 4077 may also be deduced
from Shastri’s description of the manuscript, which is not as detailed and uniform
as the one of G 3852 (entry no. 4085), which largely serves as the basis for the
catalogue record of G 4077. For instance, Shastri transcribes all the final rubrics
of the twelve chapters of the Śivadharmaśāstra, while referring the reader to the
following entry for analogous information concerning the other works of the
manuscript. By contrast, in the case of manuscript G 3852, Shastri also tran-
scribed the beginning and concluding portions of each chapter of the eight works
contained in that manuscript, and gave the exact folio numbers corresponding to
the beginning and end of each work. This was not entirely possible for manu-
script G 4077 because, as he states, in this manuscript ‘many leaves have lost
their leaf marks’. However, the overall impression we had while examining the
manuscript is that the loss of many folio numbers is not only due to the natural
deterioration of the margins, as Shastri seems to imply, but also because the right
and left margins were intentionally cut during restoration. This process consisted
in the lamination of the manuscript, whose string-holes were closed, while the
most fragile leaves were restored, and the margins made uniform by cutting. As
a result, folio numbers are absent in many cases, while being partially or com-
pletely visible in others.
From the little we are able to see of the extant folio numbers of this manu-
script, we can deduce that the foliation was not continuous, as is the case in man-
uscript G 3852 and other early manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus, but was
started anew with each work. The works were thus separated by leaving a blank
space and a blank page after the concluding colophon of each text and before the
beginning of the next one, starting at fol. 1v. The only exception is the sequence
Śivopaniṣad-Umottarasaṃvāda. The Śivopaniṣad ends at fol. 23v, with the final
rubric of the last chapter in lines 1–2. No general colophon applying to the whole
work is extant; the final rubric of the last adhyāya on line 2 (after the word
samāptaḥ ||) is followed by line fillers occupying almost one third of the page,
corresponding to the first block of text before the first string-hole. Following the
string-hole and a flower decoration, the Umottarasaṃvāda begins, its conclusion
on fol. 49v[L5] marking the end of this block of text. The next work in the corpus is
the Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha, which is separated from the preceding ones by a blank
page and the interruption of the foliation, as is the practice for all the other works.
However, upon closer inspection, fol. 23v, containing the end of the Śivopaniṣad
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 597
and the beginning of the Umottarasaṃvāda, shows clear traces of having been
partially reused, as the first one and a half lines—those occupied by the conclu-
sion of the Śivopaniṣad and the line fillers—used to host a different text, which
was erased and then covered by the one that is still readable today. This also jus-
tifies the use of line fillers, which in this case have no decorative purpose but
were just meant to cover the pre-existing text. The direct inspection of the manu-
script allowed us to identify a few of the akṣaras belonging to the first layer of
text, but not enough to help identify the text. This situation is only limited to the
first one and a half lines, since neither the remaining part of the page, containing
the first chapter of the Umottarasaṃvāda, nor the preceding page show any signs
of being a palimpsest.
The use of a non-continuous foliation, despite the above-mentioned exception,
makes G 4077 the earliest example of a manuscript of this corpus in which the
works were clearly distinguished from each other, viz. by the use of an interrupted
foliation, and suggests that the different texts could be used independently. In this
respect, ms. G 4077 can be associated with the only other manuscript of the
Śivadharma corpus dated to the 11th century, N , so far the only known example of
a palm-leaf manuscript of these texts to use non-continous foliation. The device of
interrupted foliation is thus limited to the specimens produced in the 11th century:
N , of uncertain date but most likely earlier than these two, used a continuous fo-
liation, which in this manuscript is also the only feature that allows the reader to
understand that the four works of the corpus transmitted there are conceived as a
unitary block, since the manuscript lacks a general concluding colophon. In
N , the foliation starts anew with the Śivopaniṣad, a circumstance that most likely
indicates that this text had been added to the main bulk of the manuscript after this
was produced.19 On the other hand, in the case of G 4077 and N , a final colophon
asserts the internal coherence of the works contained in these manuscripts, despite
the lack of unity in the foliation, which allowed for removing and adding works
without creating visible gaps in the production of the manuscript.
The general concluding colophon of G 4077 is located at the end of Lalitavistara
8, immediately following the final colophon of the individual work (Figs 2 and 3).
This general colophon is transcribed in its entirety by Shastri 1928, as well as par-
tially transcribed and translated by Petech 1984. Since neither transcript is devoid
||
19 On this manuscript and its characteristics, as well as the terminology used in the description
of the multiple-text manuscripts, see De Simini 2016b, 245–248ff.
598 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Fig. 2: Asiatic Society G 4077, ‘Lalitavistara 8’, exposure 26B.
Fig. 3: Asiatic Society G 4077, ‘Lalitavistara 8’, exposure 27A.
of misreadings, we offer here a new diplomatic transcription and interpretation
of the colophon:20
||
20 Since colophons often reflect a less standardized and more contaminated use of the lan-
guage, we have not emended the text of this and other transcriptions of colophons and chapter
rubrics. The necessary corrections are noted in the following translation.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 599
[exp. 26BL5] || Q || • samvat 156 śrāvaṇaśukladvādaśyāṃ | paramabhaṭṭāraka-
mahārājādhirāja[27AL1]param<e>śvaraśrīlakṣmīkāmadevasya vijayarājye || śrītaitti-
rīyaśālāyādhivāsinā kulapu • traratnasinhena likhitaṃ | śrīyaṃbūkramāyāṃ21 śrīsātīśvalake
paścimarathyāyā nivāsina rajakagadādharasinhena22 ka • raṇīyaṃ pustakaṃ23
śivadharmmaṃ || tasya puṇyasambhāreṇa yāvantaka sarvasatva atītānāga[L2]tapratyutpa-
nnasatvānāṃ24 | avīcinarakotpattisatvodharaṇakāmanām īpsitaṃ | śivamā • ṅgalyasreyasā
nairañjanapadaphalaṃ prāpto bhavantīti || ✥ ||
||
21 Note that the two existing transcripts of this colophon substantially disagree at this point.
Shastri (1928, 721) reads śrīpañcakramāyāṃ instead of śrīyaṃbūkramāyāṃ, while Petech 1984,
38, reads śrīyambukramāyāṃ śrīpañcakramāyām, thus de facto adding one word to the text of
the colophon.
22 Both Shastri 1928 and Petech 1984 read rajakarādādhara°.
23 Petech’s transcription stops here, dropping the word śivadharma.
24 This compound is incorrectly given in Shastri as atītānāgatapratyāsanna°.
600 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
The manuscript had thus been ‘copied in the year [NS] 156, on the twelfth [lunar
day] of the bright [fortnight] of the [month] Śrāvaṇa, during the victorious reign
of the supreme lord, paramount king, highest sovereign, the glorious Lakṣmīkā-
madeva, by Ratnasiṃha, son of a respectable family, a resident of the glorious
Taittirīya school. The book of the Śivadharma has been commissioned (read:
kāraṇīyaṃ) by the prince (read: rājaka°) Gadādharasiṃha, who resides along the
western road (read: paścimarathyāyā<ṃ> nivāsinā) …’. The date is verified by Pe-
tech as July 6, 1036 CE.25 The remaining text of the colophon gives further geo-
graphical details, in a syntactically and morphologically irregular Sanskrit, while
also dwelling on the motives that prompted the production of this manuscript,
namely the accumulation of merit, through which the sponsor wishes to benefit
all creatures, including those that lived in the past, those that would be born in
the future, and those that existed at the present time. The production of this man-
uscript was moreover urged by a desire to save those who are born in the avīcina
hell: ‘thanks to the highest good, which is Śiva’s favour, they earn the fruit of the
immersion in the [river] Nairañjanā’. Parallel to many of the Buddhist manu-
scripts that are extant from this historical period, and some of the Śivadharma
manuscripts,26 the final colophon thus emphasizes the apotropaic and salvific
agency of the manuscript, which helps to channel the grace of the God towards
all living beings.
The function of transmitting texts was thus enhanced by the specific powers
attributed to this manuscript by those who sponsored its production and possibly
made use of it. Given the widespread dissemination of the manuscripts of the
Śivadharma corpus, and their popularity especially in medieval Nepal, it is re-
markable that one of the earliest specimens—the earliest one whose date we can
ascertain—comes with an explicit declaration of the meritorious functions at-
tributed to its production, which could be one of the main factors accelerating the
copying of a high number of Śivadharma manuscripts in this and the following
||
25 Petech 1984, 38.
26 A colophon expressly mentioning the attainment of merit, for the sponsor or the sponsor’s
family, as a reason for the production of the manuscript, is found in N , dated 1201 CE (see De
Simini 2016b, 255–256, and 2017, § 3). A further manuscript, N , dated 1170 CE, contains a short
panegyric of the king Rudradeva in the colophon, suggesting that he might have sponsored the
production of the manuscript and been the person who would benefit from it (De Simini 2016b,
256–260, and De Simini 2016c). On the wooden cover of an unspecified Śivadharma manuscript
of the 12th century, Pal (1978, 123, fig. 52) discerns a portrait of a royal couple, who could be the
sponsors supporting the production of this particular manuscript. On the production of manu-
scripts for cultic and propitiatory purposes, both in Śaiva and in Buddhist sources, see De Simini
2016a.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 601
centuries. At the same time, this colophon exhibits another of the features that
would firmly characterize the transmission of the Śivadharma in Nepal, namely
its association with monarchical power. King Lakṣmīkāmadeva is praised in the
colophon of G 4077 with his full royal title, and the same will happen with future
monarchs of Śaiva faith, such as Rudradeva, Guṇakāmadeva and Arimalladeva,
all of whom are praised in various manuscripts of the Śivadharma corpus.27 The
importance attributed to the manuscript as a salvific tool for the donor and all
living beings is probably what justified the production of the two richly decorated
wooden covers which, following a trend that is typical of the covers of the
Śivadharma manuscripts, display several scenes of liṅga worship (Fig. 1).
Unfortunately, the colophon of G 4077, which makes reference to the ‘manu-
script of the Śivadharma’ as a single unit, does not specify how many smaller parts
this unit was composed of, leaving room for doubt as to whether Lalitavistara 9,
whose extant folios follow the colophon, was in fact originally included in the
manuscript. This doubt is reinforced by the unlikely circumstance that the same
manuscript would transmit two works with the same title, one after the other, at
least judging from the order in which the works comprising G 4077 have been
transmitted and preserved. At the same time, the block containing Lalitavistara 9
is by all means identical to those transmitting all the other works, thus pointing
to the unity of production of the parts that form this manuscript. This suggests
that Lalitavistara 9 was produced at the same time, possibly by the same hand,
as the other works constituting the corpus, but does not imply that it was actually
meant to be included in the manuscript right from the start. The almost complete
absence of folio numbers, and the use of a non-continuous foliation, contribute
to making it very hard, if not impossible, to establish beyond a doubt the actual
composition of G 4077 solely on the basis of its codicological features, especially
as far as Lalitavitara 9 is concerned. Only a study of the two controversial works
could help us understand whether it is possible that just one of them had been
conceived of as part of the Śivadharma corpus by those who compiled this man-
uscript, and why both of them were ultimately rejected by later tradition.
The relevant information found in the existing catalogue is indeed rather sus-
picious. Concerning Lalitavistara 8, Shastri transcribes 18 final rubrics of as many
chapters, ranging from 1 to 23; the missing rubrics correspond to chapter 3 and to
chapters 6 to 10. The final chapter of the work, the one immediately followed by
the dated colophon referring to the whole manuscript, is numbered 23. However,
this number is not coherent with the sequence of the extant chapters reported by
Shastri, as this alleged chapter 23 is preceded by another chapter 23. Therefore,
||
27 See De Simini 2016b, 268–272.
602 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
either the final chapter of the work does not correspond to chapter 23, or it must
belong to a different work. This question is crucial because, as we have just
pointed out, it is the colophon immediately following the final chapter that con-
tains both the date and the information concerning the ruling king and the spon-
sorship of the manuscript. Thus, by resolving the discrepency pertaining to the
sequence and numeration of the chapters of Lalitavistara 8 we will be able to
safely interpret the information contained in the final general colophon. Before
shifting our attention to the information that Shastri gives for Lalitavistara 9, we
must observe that all the rubrics of Lalitavistara 8 attribute titles to their chapters.
This does not happen regularly with the works of the corpus composed after the
Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara. The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, for in-
stance, only gives titles to its chapters in very few cases. We may take the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda as an example, since this work is evoked in the rubric of the final
chapter of the Lalitavistara, the supposed chapter 23, in which the work is actu-
ally called Lalitavistara Umāmaheśvarottarottarasaṃvāda (Fig. 2):
[exp. 26BL5] || Q || iti lalitavistare umāmaheśvara uttarottara • saṃvāde janārddanap[r]ādu-
rbhāvavikhyāpano nāmādhyāyaḥ trayoviṅsatimo28 parisamāptam iti || Q || •
The other rubrics, in contrast, always refer to the text simply as Lalitavistara. This
might sound like one more reason to believe that the final colophon does not be-
long here—the title of the work is different, and the chapter number does not make
sense in the order —but if we look closely, we will notice that the mention of the
dialogue between Umā and Maheśvara is in fact less random than it appears. To
start with, this rubric calls the work an uttarottara dialogue, which could mean two
things: firstly, that it comes after the Umottarasaṃvāda (in turn a continuation of,
or just a later addition to, the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda); and, secondly, that the
conversation consists of a sequence of replies by the Lord to the questions asked by
the Goddess. This is indeed the structure of all the chapters that in the preceding
rubrics are attributed to the Lalitavistara. Moreover, if we compare the titles of the
chapters of the Lalitavistara to those surviving for the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda in
the same manuscript, we can easily observe that the titles of the first and fifth chap-
ters are the same for both works. There must indeed be a connection between the
Lalitavistara and the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda that goes beyond the simple frame
narrative of the two works, and that may justify why the same work can sometimes
be called Lalitavistara and at other times Uttarottarasaṃvāda.
||
28 For our emendation concerning the correct reading of this word see below.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 603
Shastri presents Lalitavistara 9 as a fragmentary work, of which only ‘leaves
marked from 28 to 38’ survive. Again, he transcribes all the extant chapter rubrics
of this other Lalitavistara, which in this case range from 24 to 32. The numeration
of the chapters of Lalitavistara 9 thus seem to perfectly reconnect with the one of
Lalitavistara 8, which had stopped at 23, as if one were the extension of the other,
or as if the two were, in fact, the same work. The latter would indeed seem the
easiest and most intuitive way to interpret the two Lalitavistaras transmitted in
manuscript G 4077 according to the available catalogue. In order to take this sup-
position into consideration and make it our working hypothesis over the next
pages, we need to find a solution for the double chapter 23, which so far seems to
be the only obstacle to reading these 32 chapters in sequence as belonging to the
same work. Luckily, the acquisition of new colour pictures has enabled us to in-
spect that concluding colophon more closely, and identify one essential detail
that allowed us to propose a solution to the issue of the repetition of chapter 23.
For the akṣaras that Shastri reads as trayoviṅsa° have clearly been written on
other akṣaras that appear to have been rubbed out, or which had just faded away,
becoming less legible. Although the first layer of text is now completey covered
by the newly inscribed akṣaras, the trace of a short vertical stroke extending from
the akṣara -va- is still visible. Our hypothesis is that this stroke belongs to a pre-
existing –tra-, that the current -i- has been inscribed on a preexisting -s-, and that
the fading stroke seemingly (and wrongly) connecting what is now the long -a-
with the syllable -vi- is nothing but the still visible trace of a former -i-which
would indicate that the original reading here was trayastriṅsati, namely 33, in-
stead of trayoviṅsati, 23. This would solve all the contradictions in the chapter se-
quence of the ‘two’ Lalitavistaras, as we could thus avoid the repetition of chapter
23 and, at the same time, identify the final chapter of the work as chapter 33, which
would comply perfectly with the sequence that Shastri reports for Lalitavistara 9,
extending up to 32 (but then continuing into a new chapter). Moreover, the correc-
tion of -yovi- to -yastri-, for whatever reason it happened, is palaeographically very
easy, as it only requires closing the open left side of the akṣara -tra- and connecting
the top vertical stroke to the s- on the left. The following pictures show a detail of
the final rubric of what we assume was chapter 33, compared to the rubric of chap-
ter 31, which highlights the similarity between the two akṣaras, as well as the evi-
dent signs of corrections in the case of the colophon of chapter 23/33:
604 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Fig. 4: Asiatic Society G 4077, exp. 26B, final colophon of chapter 33, detail: trayo(yas?)-
vi(tri?)ṅsatimo
Fig. 5: Asiatic Society G 4077, exp. 51A[L1], final colophon of chapter 31, detail: ekatriṃsatmaḥ
On this basis, we could thus hypothesize that the two Lalitavistaras identified by
Shastri in manuscript G 4077 are actually one single work in 33 chapters, which
was titled both Lalitavistara and Umāmaheśvarottarottarasaṃvāda. The codico-
logical features of the folios belonging to the two bundles are perfectly con-
sistent, just like the general structure of the text, which in both cases is designed
as a dialogue between the Goddess and the Lord. Now that we have found a pos-
sible solution for the formal contradiction concerning the presence of two chap-
ters labelled 23, we can proceed to a systematic analysis of this work, which will
allow us to confirm or reject our hypothesis on the reconstruction of the text, as
well as clarify several aspects regarding the composition of this and other works
of the corpus amidst the cultural context of medieval Nepal.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 605
2 The Lalitavistara: An outline
Our attempt at reconstructing the Lalitavistara on the basis of the extant folios
preserved and catalogued as two different works has proven successful. We can
thus confirm that the two bundles actually contain the same text, which in its
current form only lacks the beginning, one folio belonging to chapter 2 and a folio
or two for chapter 26. On the other hand, some of the folios that are found among
those of the Lalitavistara must actually be discarded, since they belong to other
works in the same manuscript, or to unidentified works that are not in this manu-
script.29 The work is thus mostly complete. As for the chapter rubrics that Shastri
had not identified in his catalogue, we were able to find what must have been the
final colophon of chapter 3 in the folios collected as Lalitavistara 9; the rubrics of
chapters 6 and 7 were contiguous with the other folios of this chapter, in the bun-
dle containing Lalitavistara 8. The situation is more complicated for chapters 9
and 10, not simply because the folios with the final rubrics of these chapters are
missing, but because this work seems to lack these chapters altogether, skipping
from chapter 7 straight to chapter 11. We cannot account for this sudden change
in numbering, since the beginning of chapter 11 is on the same folio as the end of
chapter 7, and we have checked the consistency of the whole chapter so as to
exclude the possibility that folios had gone missing. Although there are no folio
numbers to confirm the correct arrangement of the pages, we do have extensive
parallel passages in other works, as we will point out shortly, that have helped
enormously in reconstructing the correct sequence of the stanzas. This number-
ing is also reflected in the numbering of the chapters from now on, thus moving
the chapter numbers up three. The work thus contains only 30 chapters, but we
will keep referring to them with the number by which each of the chapters is iden-
tified in the extant rubrics.
||
29 As pointed out in the preceding paragraph, exposures 23B/24A and 24B/25A correspond to
two of the three missing folios from the Umottarasaṃvāda contained in the same manuscript.
Other folios that do not belong to the Lalitavistara are a folio in Bengali script, corresponding to
our exposure 57B/58A, as well as exposure 42A/41B. The latter contains the beginning of a Śaiva
work, and is written only on one side (corresponding to exp. 42A), the other one left blank. Shas-
tri transcribes it in its entirety in his catalogue (1928, 722), rightly pointing out that this folio does
not belong to the Lalitavistara nor, we can add, to any other work contained in the same manu-
script. The script is very similar, though not exactly identical, to the one used in the Lalitavistara,
while the material features of the leaf seem to be perfectly consistent with those of the other
leaves of the manuscript (although, after restoration, our understanding of the material aspects
of these pages has been deeply altered). This folio might thus belong to a manuscript that was
copied in the same period, maybe in the same scriptorium, as our G 4077.
606 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
The most relevant trait emerging from the study of the contents and structure
of the Lalitavistara is the imposing number of verses that can be identified in other
works. More specifically, chapters 1 to 25 of the Lalitavistara parallel, in due se-
quence, chapters 1 to 20 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, another work of the
Śivadharma corpus. While we were not able to identify any parallels to Lalitavistara
chapters 27 to 28, chapters 26 and 29 to 32 show extensive literal borrowings from
the Anuśāsanaparvan, the thirteenth book of the Mahābhārata. Chapter 33, con-
cluding the work, has parallels to chapter 7 of the Umottarasaṃvāda, yet another
work of the corpus that is attested for the first time in this manuscript. The passage
that the Lalitavistara shares with the Umottarasaṃvāda is moreover partly featured
in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as chapter 22. Before moving on to a more in-depth
analysis of the contents and nature of these parallels, as well as of the composi-
tional techniques that this intricate textual situation seems to hint at, we should
stress that also some passages contained in both the Lalitavistara and the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda can ultimately be traced to the Anuśāsanaparvan. It is not entirely
surprising that, of all 18 books of the Mahābhārata, the composers of the Lalitavi-
stara and the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chose to draw materials exactly from the
Anuśāsanaparvan, since this book contains a whole section that is presented as
a conversation between the Lord and the Goddess. This ‘Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda
of the Anuśāsanaparvan’ provides a model and functions as a source of textual
material for the composition of the later works of the Śivadharma corpus that
adopt the same frame-narrative and deal with identical or similar topics as their
epic antecedent. These texts can thus be placed at the crossroad of the
Śivadharma corpus and the Sanskrit epics; as a consequence, the activity of se-
lecting, borrowing, and rearranging sources transcends the technical aspects of
textual composition, and suggests a more complex cultural operation aimed at
establishing the Śivadharma as part of a broader Brahmanical—not necessarily
nor exclusively Śaiva—tradition. We will come back to this point in the following
paragraphs, after completing a first sketch of the contents of the Lalitavi-
stara/Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. Despite the textual variants emerging from the
comparison between these chapters of the Lalitavistara with the corresponding
sections in the current critical edition of the Anuśāsanaparvan, the texts are so
close that manuscript G 4077 can in fact be counted among the earliest manu-
script evidence of the circulation and transmission of the Mahābhārata.
Our work of reconstruction of the Lalitavistara has been complicated by the
absence of folio numbers for this section, although Shastri in his catalogue still
seems to be able to read folio numbers at least for the pages of Lalitavistara 9.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 607
Nevertheless, with some patience, and thanks to the help of the parallel pas-
sages,30 we have been able to produce the following table, which illustrates the
chapter sequence and the contents of the Lalitavistara, with reference to the fo-
lios preserved for each chapter, a transcript of the extant chapter rubrics, and the
parallel texts. We reproduce it here for the benefit of the readers, and as a device
to foster further discussion in the coming pages. For practical reasons, we have
used the superscript numerals 8 and 9 in order to indicate whether the chapters
or exposures are to be found in Lalitavistara 8 or 9. We know that this makes less
sense now that we have established that these actually form one single work, but
nevertheless we thought that preserving some traces of the catalogue record
might be helpful for scholars who would like to go back to the original manu-
script, as well as show the reader how the text is actually distributed in the man-
uscript. Note that the summaries of chapters 1 and 2 of the Lalitavistara are partly
based on the parallel of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda (UMS), which helps inte-
grate the contents of the Lalitavistara’s missing folios.
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
Chapter 18. Rubric: exp. 3A[L5] UMS 1 The first chapter opens with the description of the God
|| ✥ || iti lalitavista • re cātu- and Goddess sitting on the Himavat mountain, where
rvarṇṇavibhāgo he conveys his teachings to her. The Goddess asks him
nāmādhyāyaḥ prathamaḥ || about the dharmas and goals pertaining to the various
✥|| classes and types of religious practitioners: Brahmins,
kṣatriyas, vaiśyas, śūdras, ascetics (tāpasa), those
Exps. 2A–3A; incomplete. who desire initiation (dīkṣābhikāṅkṣin), those who sur-
vive off grain left over from the harvest (uñchavṛtti),
seers (ṛṣi), divine sages (devarṣi), and women. Further,
she asks how Brahmins attain Brahmaloka. The God
obliges and conveys his teaching, describing the vari-
ous categories; however, he doesn’t explicitly address
the dīkṣābhikāṅkṣin nor the ṛṣi and devarṣi categories.
Instead, he introduces the wandering religious mendi-
||
30 We thank Anil Kumar Acharya for having produced and circulated an e-text of the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda based on the Naraharinath edition (1998). This resource has been extremely
helpful in the process of identifying parallel passages, despite the flaws of the edition itself that,
as we will have to point out several times throughout this article, has changed its text in several
crucial passages as if to make it sound more Śaiva-oriented. After realizing this, we double-
checked the text of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda edition against the one attested in the earlier
manuscripts.
608 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
cant (parivrājaka), who is said to attain mokṣa. It is no-
ticeable that none of the material is specifically Śaivite
or refers to Śaiva principles. Brahmaloka, an auspi-
cious rebirth (in the same varṇa), and eternal Brahman
seem to be the main objectives.
Chapter 28–9. Rubric: exp. UMS 2 This chapter is dedicated to the fate of those who
4A[L1] || Q || iti lalitavistare du- do bad deeds, namely those who injure (hiṃsaka),
ritabhedavibhāgo steal (paradravyahārin), behave badly in romantic
nāmodhyāya dvitīya • ḥ || ✥|| matters (kāmamithyopacārin), slander (durbhāṣin),
are overcome with envy (matsarāpahata), neglect
Exps. 3A, 55B, 54B, their service to others (aśuśrūṣākārin), are affected
55A, 3B, 4A; incomplete. by pride (mānahata) and those who have made mi-
nor mistakes (alpāparādhakṛt).
Chapter 38–9. Rubric: exps. UMS 3.1– In contrast to the preceding chapter, this section
54A[L5]–5B[L1] || ✥ || iti 43 talks about meritorious actions that lead to spiritual
lalitavistare suśrūṣa [5AL1] + + gains: not hurting others (ahiṃsaka), behaving in ac-
+… gā nāmādhyāya tṛtīyaḥ || cordance with the norms (nyāyavṛttin), always telling
Q || the truth (satyavādin), abstaining from drinking alco-
hol (madyapānavivarjita), serving the Guru
Exps. 4A, 53B-54A, 5B; com- (guruśuśrūṣaka), and not stealing (anasteya). It is
plete. noteworthy that the rewards are again not particu-
larly connected to Śaivite goals, but rather contain
generic prescriptions for reaching heaven and enjoy-
ing an auspicious rebirth once one’s merit in heaven
is exhausted.
Chapter 48–9. Rubric: UMS The chapter begins with general remarks praising
exp. 7A[L4] || ✥ || iti lalitavista- 3.43–56 + virtues, in particular emphasizing the importance of
re dhyānadhāraṇādhyāya ca- chapter 4 ahiṃsā, which is said to confer eternal Brahman.
turthaḥ [L5] || Q || The following stanzas contain a phalaśruti, praising
the merits of hearing and reciting the scripture’s
Exps. 5B–7A; complete. teaching, here even referred to as the secret śāstra
(śāstraṃ rahasyaṃ). Note that in the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda, this portion, 3.43–56, forms the end of
chapter 3.
Hereafter follows a discourse on the topic of medi-
tation (dhyāna). The Goddess asks about what is
prescribed for those who have committed bad
deeds or not performed religious activities such as
austerities or śrāddha rituals. The God’s answer is
that meditation has the power to remove all bad
deeds, so that at death they are freed of them and
attain heaven, just as those who have carried out
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 609
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
good deeds. After that, the Goddess wishes to know
the procedure for meditation and what kinds of
meditation there are, upon which the God essen-
tially teaches her two kinds. Of these, the first is re-
ferred to as adhyātman and vaiṣṇava, which has the
power to open the doors to liberation (for a descrip-
tion of the procedure, see § 3). The second one is a
meditation that has to be performed in secluded
places. There follows a description of the saṃsāra,
possibly being the object of meditation (see also
chapter 30, which contains the same procedure).
Referring to this, the text stresses both the possi-
bility of achieving liberation from saṃsāra and the
attainment of the brahmaloka.
Chapter 58. Rubric: exp. 8A[L1] UMS 5 The fifth chapter starts by praising the merit of sa-
|| Q || iti lalitavistare tīrthayā- cred sites (tīrtha) and lists various sacred places,
trādhyā • ya pañcamaḥ || Q || including standard locations such as Prayāga and
Kanakhala, as well as a long list of holy rivers, fea-
Exps. 7A–8A; complete. turing also those specific to the Kathmandu Valley,
such as the Vagmatī. Then follows a short descrip-
tion of the procedure of bathing and meditation at
the sacred water sites and their purificatory quali-
ties. At the same time, offerings (ijyā), austerities
(tapas), fasts and observances (sopavāsavrata) are
also given as options. The God also teaches about
the possibility to attain the supreme siddhi through
constant meditation on him, as well as the eventual
attainment of liberation (mokṣa), described as the
supreme state pertaining to Śiva (śaivaṃ paraṃ pa-
daṃ). The chapter closes on a cosmological note,
describing how everything is emitted by the liṅga
and reabsorbed by Viṣṇu.
Chapter 68. Rubric: exp. 9A[L4] UMS 6; This chapter deals with various topics. At the begin-
|| Q || iti lalitavistare ekaika- AP, ap- ning, the God condemns any form of slandering, par-
dharma • vibhāgo pendix no. ticular of Brahmins, as well as egotism, all of which
nāmodhyāya ṣaṣṭhamaḥ || Q 15, lines leads to hell. He also makes the point that his devo-
|| 779–803 tees should not slander viṣṇubhaktas. At the same
time, it is stated that those who are of a singular de-
Exps. 8A, 9A; complete. votion attain particular merits and reach heaven even
if they have carried out bad deeds. Then follows a dis-
course on the importance of catering to guests, par-
ticularly when they arrive in some unfortunate condi-
tion, such as afflicted by hunger or thirst. A large part
610 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
then revolves around the obligation to take care of
post-mortuary procedures should a guest die, re-
gardless of his social background. Then follows a dis-
course on the merit of giving and the importance of
doing so with a happy mind. This leads to a long list
of different meritorious categories, such as the gift of
land, the adherence to truth, and respect for one’s
parents, eventually arriving at the praise of the
gṛhāśrama, stating that, of all the āśramas, it is the
best. This gives rise to the God’s announcement that
he shall teach about the merits of the gṛhāśrama.
Chapter 78. Rubric: exp. UMS 7; Picking up from the previous chapter, the Goddess
10A[L1] || Q || iti lalitavistare AP, ap- asks the God about the conduct, observances and
bhūmī(?)dānagṛhāśramo pendix no. rules of the householder. He first commends obedi-
varttanodhyāya saptam [L2] || 15, lines ence to one’s parents and family and praises the im-
Q || 803–855 portance of worshipping one’s ancestors. Then the
Goddess asks what is prescribed to those who have
Exps. 9A, 8B, 10A; complete. no parents or are widows. The God answers with a list
of virtuous characteristics and deeds, such as non-vi-
olence, giving, feeding cows and certain processes of
bodily purification. The chapter also includes a sec-
tion on abstinence on certain occasions. The final
section revolves around declaring the gṛhāśrama to
be the foundation for all living beings and the entire
system.
Chapter 118. Rubric: exp. UMS 8 This chapter describes the inadequate behaviour
10B[L2] || Q || iti lalita • vistare that constitutes defects of the cosmic age and the de-
kaliyugavarṇṇano cline of dharma. The Goddess wants to know how the
nāmādhyāyaikadaśamaḥ || Q kaliyuga comes about and what happens once the
|| cosmic cycle reaches this point. In reply, the God al-
ludes to the Mahābhārata war and further describes
Exps. 10A, 9B, 11A, 10B; the conditions of the kaliyuga.
complete.
Chapter 128. Rubric: exp. UMS 9 The ninth chapter continues the topic of the kaliyuga
12A[L3] || Q || iti lalitavistare and describes various faults of that age (yugadoṣa),
yugāntani<r>deṣodhyāya which include the terrible behaviour of people as
dvādaśamaḥ || Q || dharma declines. Much of the chapter also revolves
around the various inauspicious signs that will fore-
Exps. 10B, 11B–12A; complete. bode the end of the yuga, with the constellations col-
lapsing, kings raging war and various unsettling nat-
ural phenomena such as huge, dark, thundering
clouds approaching and forest animals entering the
city.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 611
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
Chapter 138. Rubric: exp. UMS 10 The Goddess asks how it is possible that some men
13A[L4] || Q || iti lalitavistare and women, as the corruption of time (yugadoṣa)
yugāntādilakṣaṇo progresses, can lose their sense of shame (luptala-
nāmādhyāya tra • jjā). The God replies that, in this most unfavourable
yodaśamaḥ || ✥ || of aeons, the world works the other way around: old
people are under the influence of the youth, while
Exps. 12A, 25B–26A, 13A; the young and inexperienced are consulted as
complete. teachers. Thus, during the kaliyuga, even vile,
old men long for young wives, just as old women
wish for young husbands. However, in this kali-
yuga, all those who respect dharma, even just a lit-
tle, will gain enormous fruits, like becoming
wealthy, rightful people, generous and hospitable.
Then, after practising tapas for a hundred years,
men will return to the kṛtayuga. At the end of the
yuga there is general, widespread corruption: med-
icines and alchemic preparations lose their powers,
so that people become weaker, and old age, ail-
ments and death start spreading. The hetero-
dox rise to prominence, and they teach their way to
liberation as if they were teachers, and live in mon-
asteries. However, the offerings made to them are
fruitless due to the faults of the recipients (pātra-
doṣa). The God remarks that, for this reason, one
should always donate to the proper, orthodox recip-
ients, whose conduct will quickly lead to emancipa-
tion, and who alone are worthy of devotion. On the
contrary, the heterodox will lead to the corruption
of dharma and the confusion of varṇas (varṇa-
saṃkara). Prompted by a question of the Goddess,
the God explains which actions are appropriate for
each varṇa, and which ones are not.
Chapter 148. Rubric: exp. UMS 11 The topic of this chapter is the origin of the jīva, how
14A[L3] || ✥ || iti lalita • vistare it enters the womb and develops into an embryo,
mṛtyuvañcano nāmādhyāya then a body, and so on. After replying to this request
caturdaśamaḥ || ✥ || from the Goddess by explaining the process of con-
ception, growth and birth, the God—here generically
Exps. 13A, 12B, 14A; com- called Devadeva, which in chapter 24/19 is a syno-
plete. nym for Viṣṇu—shifts the focus of the conversation to
the inevitability of death, listing the possible causes
and circumstances for somebody’s passing. At the
end of the chapter, the God remarks that the destiny
612 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
(gati) of the jīvas in the realm of transmigration is
caused by the fruits of their actions
Chapter 158. Rubric: exp. UMS The first question of the Goddess concerns the pur-
14B[L2]: || Q || iti lalitavistare 12.1–31 poses of appeasement spells, medicines, herbs and
rasā • yanani<r>deśo mantras, provided that the course and length of
nāmādhyāya pañcadaśamaḥ one’s life is entirely determined by their previous
|| Q || actions. The God replies that there are thousands of
remedies and spells, and the gods are pleased by
Exps: 14A, 13B, 14B; com- the doctors who manage to apply the right remedy
plete. to extend a patient’s life. But all these remedies,
like herbs, benedictions and appeasement spells,
can also make one perish, as it is the karman that is
ultimately responsible for the ailments of the body
and, thus, for the length of the lives of humans and
animals. After this, the Goddess asks about those
who practice alchemy (rasāyanika). The God
praises the proper use of the ‘divine rasāyanas’: if
one is protected by these remedies, he will have a
long life even if he eats unproper food or drinks poi-
son.
Chapter 168. Rubric: exp. UMS The Goddess now asks about the topic of untimely
15A[L1] || Q || iti lalitavistare 12.32–42 death (akālamṛtyu). The God answers that time is
kālavañcano nāmādhyāya impartial towards everybody; nobody is dear or des-
ṣaṣṭyādasamaḥ || Q || picable to kāla. Therefore, once their time has
elapsed, it is not possible for a person to live any
Exp. 14B; complete. longer. Death is thus ‘untimely’ (a-kāla) for all living
beings.
Chapter 178. Rubric: exp. UMS 13 Chapter 17/13 starts with a request by the Goddess
16A[L4] || Q || iti lalitavistare to learn the ways of obtaining a long life; the God
citraguptavyākhyāno replies that this can only happen by the grace of
nāmādhyāya saptadaśamo • God or of the ṛṣis, while contemplation of the Lord
dhyāyaḥ || || will grant immortality. The discussion then moves
on to the nature and origin of time—which ulti-
Exps. 15A, 16A; complete. mately derives from Maheśvara—the cycles of crea-
tion and reabsorption of the universe, as well as the
destiny of human beings after death. The mention
of Yama’s servants, who lead the souls to the after-
life, and Citragupta, who will judge them, provides
the title for this whole chapter of the Lalitavistara.
Chapter 188. Rubric: exp. UMS 14 The chapter is dedicated to explaining the origins of
17A[L5] iti lalitavistare various celestial and demonic beings: yakṣas,
yatheṣṭāṅgabhūtavi[17BL1]dhi kiṃnaras, gandharvas, piśācas, nāgas, rakṣasas
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 613
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
nāmādhyāya aṣṭādaśamaḥ || and gaṇeśvaras. The original question of the God-
Q || dess had stressed the richness of these figures,
asking by means of which actions they ended up be-
Exps. 16A, 15B, 16B-17A; ing born rich and prosperous.
complete.
Chapter 198. Rubric: exp. UMS The first stanzas of chapter 19/15 deal with the or-
17B[L5] || Q || iti lalitavistare 15.1–15 igins of lion-men (narasiṃhas), who dwell in the
narasinhadīvavarṇṇa mountains and other remote places.
nāmādhyāya: [exp.18AL1]m e-
konaviṃśatimaḥ || Q||
Exps. 17A-17B; complete.
Chapter 208. Rubric: exp. UMS In this section the God, prompted by a question of
19B[L3] || Q || iti lalitavistare 15.16–97 the Goddess, describes the eight hells (avīci, rau-
nirayārṇṇavavañcano rava, kālasūtra, kumbhīpāka, yamalaparvatau,
nāmādhyāya [L4] vinsatimaḥ || kūṭaśālmalivṛkṣa, asipattravana, mahāraurava),
Q || specifying who are the sinners who head to each of
them after death, and what happens to them once
Exps. 18A-19B; complete. their sin is redeemed.
Chapter 218. Rubric: exp. UMS 16 The Goddess asks how the sinners, after burning in
20B[L1] || Q || iti lalita[L2]vistare hell, can again perform good actions, and how one
śrāddhāvidhināmādhyāyam manages to save their ancestors. The God’s reply is
ekaviṃsatimo dhyāyaḥ || Q || that one can save his or her own ancestors by do-
nating certain gifts to the Brahmins or to the Lord,
Exps. 19B-20B; complete. by the performance of bhakti, which includes ritual
gifting, as well as by the performance of śrāddha
ceremonies in Kurukṣetra, Prayāga and in the resi-
dences of Rudra (16.13). The following verses are
devoted to detailing the performance of the
śrāddhās, while the chapter concludes with a
praise of the well-behaved brahmacārin.
Chapter 228. Rubric: exp. UMS 17 The Goddess wants to hear about the good actions
21B[L3] || O || iti lalitavista • re that allow people not to go to hell, but rather to
svapnottaranirdeṣo dhyāya move towards an auspicious destiny after death,
dvāviṅsatimaḥ || Q || and what these auspicious destinies are in the first
place. The God first lists the rightful behaviours; the
Exps. 20B–21A, 22A, 21B; discussion then moves on to the impurity of a house
complete. in which somebody has died at night. The Goddess
further asks about the phenomenology of dreams,
to which the God replies that it is the mind (manas)
that moves places while dreaming, as the jīva stays
and protects the body. The following stanzas are
614 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
devoted to the topic of inauspicious dreams
(duḥsvapna).
Chapter 238. Rubric: exp. UMS 18 Chapter 18 is a praise of the Mahābhārata as the
23A[L3] || Q || iti lalitavistare utmost scripture and source of all knowledge. The
pañcavedaprasaṃso Mahābhārata, the fifth Veda, has been created for
nāmādhyāya trayoviṅsati- the benefit of the śūdras; the constant recitation of
maḥ || Q || this text will allow them to be reborn either as Brah-
mins or as kings on earth after spending time in
Exps. 21B, 22B-23A; com- brahmaloka. As this scripture is worthy of worship
plete. and meditation, śūdras become worthy of worship
as well.
Chapter 248–9. Rubric: exp. UMS 19 The Goddess asks how it is possible to satisfy
43A9[L4] || Q || iti lalitavistare Viṣṇu, the ṛṣis and Vyāsa. This question is not an-
trai • guṇyavarṇṇano swered by Maheśvara, but by Viṣṇu, with a brief in-
nāmādhyāya caturviṃsatimo terruption by Dharma. Viṣṇu says that he is upset
dhyāyaḥ || Q || about any offence caused to the Brahmins, while on
the contrary, what pleases him are acts of devotion
Exps. 23A, 42B–43A; com- towards Brahmins, as well as towards himself and
plete. his own avatāras, of which Vāmana and Vārāha are
expressly mentioned. The knowledge that has been
imparted by Vyāsa is celebrated as the utmost
Veda, capable of destroying the sins of those who
recite it and meditate upon it. Actions are classified
into different groups based on their capacity to lead
to different ultramundane realms. Towards the end
of the chapter, Viṣṇu briefly illustrates the doctrine
of the two paths of transmigration: the path of the
ancestors (pitṛyāna), associated with the moon,
and the path of the gods (devayāna), associated
with the sun.
Chapter 259. Rubric: exp. Vaiṣṇava- This brief chapter contains a list of the corporal
44A[L1] || iti lalitavistare śānti- dharma- faults (vṛṣāla) of the different varṇas, that are 6 for
dhyāne pitarāṃ tu śāstra the Brahmins, 7 for the kṣatriyas, 8 for the vaiśyas,
prasaṃbho nāmādhyāya (ĀśP, ap- and 25 for the śūdras. This is followed by a eulogy
pañcaviṃsatimaḥ || • || Q || pendix no. of the Brahmins, whose faith and devotion satisfy
4, lines their parents and ancestors, as well as the gods.
Exps. 43A–44A; complete. 1688– The chapter ends by stating that all the various se-
1717); cret teachings have now been revealed.
UMS 20
Chapter 269. Rubric: exp. AP, ap- The first passage preserved on exp. 44A parallels
45A[L3] || Q || iti lalitavistare pendix no. much of the beginning of Maheśvara’s speech in the
15, lines Mahābhārata about the king and hunting, stressing
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 615
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
mṛ[L4]gavyādhapaśubandha- lines that in this case no sin is incurred and the deer go
vidhi nāmādhyāya ṣa- 1268– to heaven if killed by the king. The last stanzas of
ḍviṃsatimaḥ || Q || 1281; chapter 26 preserved on 45A may contain verses
1251; and concerning rājadharma. The very first preserved
Exps. 44A, 45A; incomplete. 1253 stanza uses a common idiom to express the merit
one attains from listening to some recitation with
devotion, which suggests that the previous context
is that of recitation and listening to some work.
Then follow some verses on the rājadharma, and
how important it is that the king guards his subjects
and worships Brahmins who keep up their duties. It
is stressed that only if he keeps up his svadharma
will all the subjects in his kingdom follow his good
conduct.
Chapter 279. Rubric: exp. No paral- This chapter is dedicated to the question of animal
46A[L2] || Q || iti lalitavistare • lels identi- sacrifice and the eating of meat, especially during
saptaviṃsatimo dhyāyaḥ || Q fied the sacrifice for the ancestors, which is the only
|| context in which eating meat appears acceptable.
Even though not direct parallels could be estab-
Exp. 45A, 44B, 45B, 46A, lished so far, note that this topic also features in the
complete. AP, even though in a section which contains a dia-
logue of Yudhiṣṭhira and Bhīṣma rather than in the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda section.
Chapter 289. Rubric: exp. No paral- This chapter is dedicated to descriptions of the fate
48A[L1] || Q || iti lalitavistare lels identi- of those who killed cows, Brahmins and women, or
śākhopasākhādhyāya fied took the property of Brahmins and women etc. Their
aṣṭāviṃsatimaḥ || || fate includes hell, but also a range of terrible re-
births, which the chapter expounds upon. Note that
Exp. 46A, 46B, 47A, 48A, the title of the rubric is puzzling, especially as it is
complete? the same as given to Śivadharmaśāstra chapter 12,
but is of different content.
Chapter 299. Rubric: exp. UMS 4.1– The Goddess asks what is the best religious con-
48B[L3] || Q || iti lalitavistare 31 duct (vrata) to assure the destruction of sins. She
vaiṣṇavayogo prathamānām mentions a few (tapas, caraṇa, dāna and ahyāyana,
ādhyāyam ekonatriṃsatmaḥ but also ahiṃsā, satyavākya and guruśuśrūṣaṇa);
|| Q || the God replies that of all the vratas, the best one is
dhyāna, which has no equal on earth. In his long
Exps. 48A, 47B, 48B; com- praise of dhyāna, the God stresses its role as a re-
plete. mover of all sins and as a practice conducive to
heaven. After this, the Goddess asks for more de-
tails on how to practice this dhyāna, to which the
God replies by detailing what the text calls both
616 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
dhyānayoga and vaiṣṇavayoga (see the contents of
chapter 4, as the two texts are identical).
Chapter 309. Rubric: exp. UMS The God now describes a second type of meditation,
50A[L3] || Q || iti lalitavistare 4.32–39; that of the vanastha, who, in a secluded place,
trikaraṇaya • jñādhikāro AP 132.1– should meditate upon saṃsāra and his personal ex-
nāmādhyāya triṃsatmaḥ || Q 29 periences with it, both the positive and the negative
|| ones. One should meditate on transmigration as be-
ing an ocean of greed, ignorance and fear. As the
Exps. 48B–50A; complete. God announces that he will now expound on the
third type of meditation, the Goddess asks him to
explain how one can be freed from the bonds that
are created by actions, mind and words. The God re-
plies to this question by listing, in due order, the
rightful behaviours, as well as the correct uses of
speech and thought that will lead men to heaven.
Chapter 319. Rubric: exp. AP The Goddess asks about the purpose of the God’s
51A[L1] iti lalitavistare cātu- 131.40- third eye on his forehead, and why the big moun-
rmukhapinākatri- 47, tain—presumably Mount Kailāsa, where Śiva and
ṇetrādhyāyam ekatriṃsa- 127.51, the Goddess reside and have their conversations—
tmaḥ || Q || • 128.1–12 burnt down and was then restored to its natural
condition. The God expounds on the powers of his
Exps. 50A–50B; complete. third eye, then recounts that the mountain had been
destroyed by the heat that emanated from his third
eye, only to be restored by Śiva for the sake of the
Goddess. The reference to the four faces (of the
mountain) also occurs in the title of this short chap-
ter, and allows a comparison with the four-faced
liṅga. However, following a further question of the
Goddess, the Lord narrates the story of Tilottamā,
and how he developed his four faces in order to look
at her from all directions. The Goddess then asks
why he chose the bull as his mount, and Śiva replies
that his bull is a calf of the cow Surabhī, donated to
him by Brahmā.
Chapter 329. No extant ru- AP appen- The Goddess asks the Lord about the ways in which
bric. dix 15, devotees can please him. The God replies first by
lines mentioning offerings of food (naivedya), as well as
Exps. 51A–52A; complete. 4.325–27 of mantras and different incenses, and then by pro-
claiming a stotra to Harihara. Following this, the
Goddess asks for more details about the practice of
fasting (vratopavāsa). The God first explains to her
the offerings to make on the eighth and fourteenth
days of each fortnight, those associated with ritual
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 617
Lalitavistara Parallels Topic
fasting. In the second part of his reply, the Lord
praises the worship of cows as the mothers of all
beings, as well as the supreme purifiers and the
sources of yajña. Their cult is associated with that
of the Brahmins. The next topic brought up by the
God is that of the gift of the cows.
Chapter 33.9–8 Rubric: exp. US 7; The Goddess asks the reason for her existence as
26BL5: iti lalitavistare UMS 22 Sītā. The God explains that Sītā existed in order for
umāmaheśvara uttarottara • Ravaṇa to be killed by a Vānara, thus fulfilling the
saṃvāde janārddanap[r]ādu- curse that Nandi had placed on him. After this, the
rbhāvavikhyāpano nāmā- Goddess asks who Rāma and his father were, as well
dhyāyaḥ trayastriṅsatimo as who the most eminent of the Vānaras were. The
parisamāptam iti || Q || • God tells the story of the birth of Rāma, along with his
brothers Lakṣmaṇa, Śatrughna and Bharata. In order
Exps. 53B–54A, 26B; com- to kill Ravaṇa for having kidnapped Sītā, they were
plete. joined by the most powerful of the Vānaras, like Vāli,
Sugrīva and Hanumān. When the Goddess asks why
there was a need for a human being (such as Rāma),
if Viṣṇu is the Lord of the world, the God replies by
narrating the story of the birth of Viṣṇu as Janārddana
following the curse put on the ṛṣi Bhṛgu, as well as
the story of Viṣṇu’s ten avatāras.
3 Patterns of texts and devotion
The table on the preceding pages shows that the parallels between the Lalitavi-
stara and the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda are extensive, and in fact concern the vast
majority of the stanzas of those Lalitavistara chapters for which it was possible to
establish a direct equivalent. These parallels are literal, although the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda systematically adds stanzas that are not present in the Lalitavi-
stara, while the latter shows variant readings that do not belong to the tradition
of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. The nature of these parallels is crucial to the un-
derstanding of the reciprocal connections between the two works, and between
them both and the Anuśāsanaparvan of the Mahābhārata. At the same time,
along with the differences and inconsistencies that occur between these sources,
the textual connections account for the specific cultural aims that the authors
and redactors of these texts seemed to have, and give us clues as to how the com-
position of these texts might have proceeded.
618 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
By way of example, consider the incipit of Lalitavistara chapter 17—a chapter
on the possibility of obtaining a long life, the nature of time and what happens
when a person dies—which is transcribed below. This chapter is parallel to
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 13. We have compared the text of Lalitavistara 17 with
that of the corresponding chapter in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda transcribed
from the same manuscript; in this case, we have also collated the text against the
evidence of other early manuscripts of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, namely N
(fol. 181r[LL2-4]) and N (fol. 19v[LL2-5]), whose variants are reported in the footnotes.
The text of the Lalitavistara, in this and in the following transcriptions, is based
on a diplomatic edition of manuscript G 4077. We have not corrected the text as
far as orthographical and grammatical inconsistencies are concerned, but have
tried to make it more readable by silently reintroducing the correct sibilants (as
the three varieties are often confused), replacing homorganic nasals with
anusvāras, and by reintroducing the missing anusvāras and visargas, marked in
angle brackets. The peculiar arrangement of the lines, here and in the other tables
included in this article, is due to the attempt to place parallel stanzas at the same
level:
Lalitavistara chapter 17 Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chapter 13 (G 4077)
Exp. 15A[L1] Exp. 20A[L5]
|| devy uvāca || api cālpāyuṣā kaścid bhaved dīrghāyuṣo naraḥ
|31
garbhasambhavamānasya yathāpūrvakṛtena garbhasambhavamā[22L1]<nasya
vaiḥ | karmapratyayiko hy āyur alpadīrghaś ca yathā>pūrvakṛtena vai | karmapratyayikaṃ32 hy
dehinaḥ || LV 17.1 āyur alpadīrghaś ca dehināṃ || UMS 13.1
alpāyuṣo • naro yas tu nirvānenaiva nirmite | alpāyuṣo naro • yas tu nirmāṇenaiva33 nirmite |
śrotum icchāmi dīrghāyu<ḥ> kathaṃ bhūyo śrotum icchāmi dīrghāyuḥ katha<ṃ> bhūyo
bhaviṣyati || LV 17.2 bhaviṣyati || UMS 13.2
bhaga[L2]vān uvāca || deva uvāca ||34
||
31 N , like the Lalitavistara, drops these two pādas and starts the chapter with: devy uvāca ||
garbha°. N , on the other hand, is analogous to G 4077, except that it does not drop the reference
to the Goddess: devy uvāca || api cālpāyuṣā kaścid bhaved dīrghāyuṣo naraḥ |.
32 pratyaikā N
33 nirmāṇyaṃ yoga N
34 maheśvara uvāca N , devadeva N
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 619
Lalitavistara chapter 17 Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chapter 13 (G 4077)
śrūyatā<ṃ> karmaṇā yeṇa tathā dīrghāyuṣo śrūyatāṃ karmaṇā • kena35 yathā dīrghāyuṣo
naraḥ | dīrghāyuṣatva<ṃ> prāpnoti • naranārī narāḥ | dīrghāyuṣatvaṃ prāpnoti naro nārī36 ya-
yaśasvini || LV 17.3 śasvini || UMS 13.3
yasya brahmavaran dadyād indrognivaruṇo yasya [L2] brahmavaran dadyād indrognir37 var-
yamaḥ | trailokyādhipativiṣṇu<r> ṛṣayaś ca ta- uṇo yamaḥ | trailokyādhipatir viṣṇur ṛṣayaḥ ca
po • dhanāḥ || LV 17.3 tapodhanāḥ || UMS 13.4
teṣāṃ varaprāsādena yathā dīrghāyuṣo teṣāṃ varapradādena38 yathā dīrghāyuṣo narāḥ
narāḥ | ātmabhāvena māṃ paśye<n> nā[L3]rī | anyathā tan na paśyāmi yas tu kālaṃ vyatikra-
vā yadi vā naraḥ | LV 17.4 met ||39 UMS 13.5 ātmabhā • vena māṃ paśyen
nārī vā yadi vā naraḥ |
anudhyā yo ca40 māṃ devi bhavanti41 hy ajarā-
maraḥ42 || UMS 13.6
devy uvāca || de[L3]vy uvāca ||
sakālo dānavo devo gandharvā<ḥ> ragarākṣa- kaḥ43 kālo dānavo devo gandharvo44 ragarākṣa-
sā<ḥ> | pi • śācā kinnaro vāthaḥ kṛtakālasya sāḥ | piśācā45 kinnaro vātha • kṛtaḥ kālasya sa-
sambhavaṃ || LV 17.5 mbhavaḥ || UMS 13.7
pitā mātā ca kālasya ki<ṃ> vā kālo hy ayojitaḥ pitā mātā ca kālasya kiṃ vā kālo hy ayonijaḥ | e-
| etad icchā • mi vijñātuṃ bhagavāṃ vaktum tad icchāmy ahaṃ śrotuṃ46 bhagava<n> • va-
arhasi || LV 17.6 ktum arhasi || UMS 13.8
bhagavān uvāca || bhagavān uvāca ||47
||
35 yeṇa N N
36 naranārī N
37 indrogni° N N
38 prasādena N
39 vyatikramaṃ N
40 anudhyāto ya N anudhyā ya N
41 bhavate N bhavati N
42 ajarāmarāḥ N
43 sa N
44 gandharvo N
45 piśāca N
46 vijñātuṃ N
47 maheśvara N
620 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
The two texts are nearly identical, but still show important differences. The most
evident of these is the presence of six more pādas in the version of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda contained in G 4077, which however are not confirmed by manu-
script N , whose starting point is identical with that of the Lalitavistara. As a mat-
ter of fact, this manuscript shares more variant readings with the Lalitavistara than
the others, such as varaprasādena in G 4077 Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 13.5a (vara-
prāsādena in Lalitavistara 17.4), where other manuscripts have varapradānena, as
well as sa° instead of kaḥ in Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 13.7a, or vijñātuṃ (Lalitavistara
17.6) instead of aham śrotum (G 4077 Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 13.8). Some of the var-
iant readings belonging to the parallel text of the Lalitavistara are thus also part of
the tradition of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, which makes the connection between
the two works even tighter.
In the incipit of Lalitavistara 17, the Goddess asks how men can obtain a long
life, and the God’s first answer is that this is only possible by the grace of the gods.
The additional stanzas of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda do not add different content,
but are only meant to reinforce the previous or following statements of the text. One
therefore has the impression, here as well as at other points, that these are second-
ary additions made by the authors of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, which could re-
flect a slightly later text than that of the Lalitavistara. In the example above, the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda transmitted in G 4077 does not expressly attribute the first
stanzas to the Goddess; here the Lalitavistara has thus preserved a more original
arrangement of the stanzas, as have the other early manuscripts of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda, N and N . However, these two use different names to refer to
the God, who in the introduction of Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 13.6 is designated as
maheśvara by N , devadeva by N , while in G 4077 he is called deva (Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda) and bhagavan (Lalitavistara). This reflects a tendency attested so
often in the parallels between the Lalitavistara and the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda
that we believe it really constitutes a pattern, namely that the God is typically called
bhagavan or devadeva in the Lalitavistara, while the manuscripts of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda may replace this with maheśvaraḥ. This last appellation, very fre-
quent in the manuscripts of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as a designation of the di-
vine male speaker, is on the contrary hardly found in the Lalitavistara. The same
applies to the Goddess, who in the Lalitavistara is regularly called devī, while the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda more often designates her as Umā. In brief, the names
used in the Lalitavistara allow for greater ambiguity in identifying the two speakers
with either Śiva and Umā, or Viṣṇu and Lakṣmī. It is very likely that this ambiguity
in the identification of the divine couple is linked to a specific strategy to weaken
the differences between the two main gods, and thus blend the two figures into one
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 621
single deity. As we will point out in more detail in the following pages, the text of-
fers support for this interpretation, in light of which the use of the names designat-
ing the speakers also appears less random but rather a systematic choice.
The promotion of the unity of Śiva and Viṣṇu is a trait that also emerges from
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. If we move on from the first stanzas of chapter 17/13
to read the words of Bhagavan, we will be able to find an initial confirmation of
this statement. The God briefly illustrates the nature of time and, in verses that
are only partly attested in the Lalitavistara, states:48 śarīram arddhaṃ viṣṇoś ca
mama cārddha<ṃ> yaśasvini ||49 UMS 13.9 dvāv etāv50 ekasaṅghāt<au>51 rūpa<ṃ>
kālasya nirmitaṃ | mahākālasya rūdrāyaṃ52 yasya sarvagataṃ jagat53 || UMS
13.10. The Lalitavistara lacks both 13.9cd and 13.10cd; the other two manuscripts
have variants that do not alter the main point, namely that the body that consti-
tutes time is half Śiva and half Viṣṇu. The Nepalese printed edition, which is still
the only resource that makes this text accessible to readers, has completely cor-
rupted the text of these stanzas in order to reject the role of Viṣṇu, without any
basis in the manuscript transmission. The stanzas thus read (Naraharinath 1998,
pp. 482–83): śarīram ardhaṃ te devi mama cārthaṃ yaśasvini || dvāv etāv
ekasaṅghātaṃ rūpaṃ kālasya nirmitam | mahākālasya tadrūpaṃ yasya sarvaga-
taṃ jagat || 13.10. The modern editor must have found the attribution of a promi-
nent role to Viṣṇu abnormal, and thus replaced it with the Goddess. Another ex-
ample of the modern Śaiva normalization of what was a Śaiva-Vaiṣṇava hybrid is
offered by Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 13.13ab, two pādas that are also attested in
chapter 5 and 17 of the Lalitavistara. Here Viṣṇu is expressly mentioned as the
God who reabsorbs all creatures, who were previously emitted by the liṅga:
liṅga<ḥ> sṛjati bhūtāni viṣṇuḥ saharate punaḥ |. Again, the current printed edition
has replaced viṣṇu with rudra, introducing a reading that is not confirmed by any
of the known specimens, not even the most recent paper manuscripts.
The table of contents of the Lalitavistara shows that the textual materials
shared with the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda are rather evenly distributed, with an
almost perfect chapter-to-chapter correspondence, although the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda has significantly more stanzas in each chapter. However, there are
||
48 These verses are transcribed from ms G 4077, exp. 22A[LL3-4]. See also N fol. 181r[LL4-5], and
N fol. 19v[LL5-6].
49 śarīradharmaviṣṇoś ca mayā cārddha yaśasvini N . These two pādas are lacking in the
Lalitavistara.
50 etān N
51 ekasaṅghātaṃ N
52 mahāraudraś va tad rūpa N
53 Lalitavistara om. the sequence from mahākālasya to jagat.
622 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
three relevant cases in which the verses are distributed differently, one being that
of chapter 3 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, corresponding in part to chapter 3 of
the Lalitavistara, and in part to chapter 4, where however it forms a whole unit
with Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 4. What constitutes the last section of chapter 3 in
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, namely stanzas 3.43–56, forms the beginning of
Lalitavistara’s fourth chapter, though counting only eleven-and-a-half stanzas
instead of 14. There are various scenarios that could have led to this situation. If
we look at the structure of the floating passage in question and its immediate
context, it is possible to see why a redactor may have been confused about the
beginning and the end of the chapters. Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 3.42 appears to
end one discourse (3.42c etat te sarvam ākhyātam), which may cause a redactor
to see this as the end of the chapter. The next stanza, 3.43, appears to introduce
a new topic, since the God calls upon the Goddess to listen again, a feature that
we would expect at the beginning of a section (3.43ab śṛṇu devi rahasyaṃ te
manuṣyāṇāṃ sukhāvaham). The passage in question contains what Śiva pro-
claims to be the secret that brings happiness to men, mainly focusing on the vir-
tue of non-violence (ahiṃsā), but also featuring other categories such as obedi-
ence and abstention from drinking. The final verses of this passage then proclaim
that reading out and listening to this teaching leads to heaven and an auspicious
rebirth, the sort of phalaśruti we would expect at the end of a chapter. On the
other hand, if we turn to the stanzas that constitute the beginning of Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda’s chapter four, we find that to a redactor this may have not been
an obvious starting point, as the first three verses have the God plunge straight
into the next topic, namely the supreme quality of meditation (dhyāna, Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda 4.1–3). Only after this follows a question from Umā, which at
first appears unrelated, since she asks how people who have committed bad
deeds may attain freedom from sins (Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 4.4–5). Only with
the God’s answer at this point can the reader realize the connection to Śiva’s first
three stanzas, since the answer to Umā’s question is that meditation has the
power to purify even those who have committed crimes. Thus, one can see how
the boundaries between chapter 3 and chapter 4 could have been perceived as
unclear, and how a redactor may have been tempted to start a new chapter with
the God’s new discourse on the ‘secret’ in Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 3.43.54 How-
ever, it seems that this section fits better in chapter 3, where the overall topic is
||
54 Note that the section on the happiness-yielding secret of Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 3.43–47ab
could have been inspired and loosely modeled on another section of the Mahābhārata’s Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda, namely the text of the appendix to 13.15, lines 1020–1033, which contains a
similar discourse and in which one can locate echoes of the text of Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 3.43–
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 623
that of meritorious activities, while chapter 4 deals with meditation only. Never-
theless, neither chapter division is absolutely compelling, so one could put for-
ward arguments for both solutions.
Similar arguments can be made for chapter 12 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda,
whose text is split between chapters 15 and 16 of the Lalitavistara. While the first
two topics on which the God is questioned in Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 12—namely
the use of medicines and curative spells and the merits of alchemists (Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda 12.1–31)—are substantially coherent with each other, the connec-
tion with the third topic brought up by the devī, that of untimely death, is slightly
less consequential. It is at this point that the Lalitavistara starts a new chapter; how-
ever, given the typically miscellaneous nature of these texts, the beginning of a new
topic is no compelling reason to account for an alternative chapter division. We can
only observe that the authors/redactors of the Lalitavistara preferred to arrange the
text in shorter chapters, and this stylistic choice might have prompted the different
arrangement of the text. A similar case is that of Lalitavistara 19/20, paralleling
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 15. The break happens at stanza 15.16, corresponding to a
point at which the God had completed his exposition of the first topic—the origins
of the lion-men—and the Goddess questions him on a completely different issue,
namely the number and types of hells. At stanza 15.15, the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda adds two pādas that lack in Lalitavistara 19, and whose function is
that of concluding the exposition of the first topic (sambhavo narasiṃhānām eṣa
te parikīrtitaḥ). This is immediately followed by the next question of the Goddess,
which is reproduced with some variants by both texts without additional pādas,
namely in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as stanzas 15.16–18 and the Lalitavistara
as stanzas 20.1–3:55 devy uvāca || yadā śarīram56 utsṛjya mṛtyulokam upadyate
[prapadyate UMS] | • śrūyate [śrūyatā UMS] narakās tatra pāpakarmakarāś [°ka-
||
56. In the Mahābhārata, this teaching of the God is, in fact, the answer to Umā’s question, which
explains why the God asks for the Goddess’ attention in the first stanza (thus 13.15.1020 rahasyaṃ
śrūyatāṃ devi mānuṣāṇāṃ sukhāvaham). However, the parallel discourse would in that case
only be restricted to this short section, as in the Mahābhārata this passage leads to a longer dis-
course on how various aspects of dharma that require killing, such as the king’s waging war,
may be reconciled with the teaching of non-violence. In such a scenario, the oversight of failing
to remove the structural feature of the God demanding the Goddess’ attention in the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda/Lalitavistara could be taken as an argument that the section is slightly awk-
wardly placed, thus easily giving rise to the intervention of a redactor on the side of the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda or the Lalitavistara.
55 The text in the next lines is a transcript of Lalitavistara, exp. 18A[L1], collated with Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda, ms. G 4077, fol. 25r[L5]–25v[L2]. The folio numbers are still preserved in this section
of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda.
56 śarī° cod.
624 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
rmaratās UMS] ca ye || kīdṛśā narakās tatra pāpaṃ yatra kṣayīyate [pāpakarmaratāś
ca ye UMS] | kiṃ tatra [kim eko UMS] nara • kā hy ete bahavo vā na saṃśayaḥ || etad
icchāmy ahaṃ śrotu<ṃ> bhagavāṃ [bhagavan UMS] vaktum arhasi | bhagavā[L2]n
[maheśvara UMS] uvāca || aṣṭau te narakā devi mṛtyuloke yaśasvini [vidhīyate UMS]
||. The version of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda shows a clear case of dittography,
with the repetition of the final clause pāpakarmaratāś ca ye. However, besides
the typical replacement of bhagavān through maheśvara, there are no significant
variants that could change our understanding of the text, especially none that
would account for the different arrangement of the text in the two works. Again,
we can speculate that if the borrowing happened from the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda to the Lalitavistara, the redactor of the latter may have felt that stanza
15.16 was the beginning of a completely different topic, and must therefore have
started a new chapter at this point. Otherwise, the redactors of both works may
have drawn materials from a common source, and opted for different arrange-
ments. The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the Anuśāsanaparvan also has a section
on hells, prompted by a question of Umā: bhagavaṃs te kathaṃ tatra daṇḍyante
narakeṣu vai ||.57 The contents are comparable to those of Lalitavistara
20/Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 15, but there are no direct parallels between the latter
and the Anuśāsanaparvan. Therefore, this portion of the Anuśāsanaparvan can
have surely inspired the composition of the corresponding chapters in the two
works, but was not the direct source of their textual material.
On the other hand, in at least two cases we can prove that there was an ex-
ternal source being used in the composition of the text that both the Lalitavistara
and the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda share. In one of these cases, the source was pre-
cisely the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the Anuśāsanaparvan. As a matter of fact,
the Śivadharma’s Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 6.8–27 and the Lalitavistara 6.7–22, in
both cases the last verse of the passage constituting the end of the chapter, as
well as the entirety of chapter 7 of both works, are based on the text of the sup-
plement to the Anuśāsanaparvan, appendix no. 15, lines 779–855, with the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda containing more verses paralleled with the Anuśāsana-
parvan than the Lalitavistara (see additional verses of the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda in the footnotes). In terms of structure, the parallel passage of chapter
6 starts with the last part of a longer speech of the God in the Anuśāsanaparvan.
The chapter eventually ends with the statement that the gṛhāśrama is the best of
āśramas and that Śiva wishes to teach the Goddess about it, which sets up the
topic for the following chapter 7, which is entirely occupied with the immediately
following text of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the Mahābhārata:
||
57 See Anuśāsanaparvan 13.15.2682–83.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 625
Anuśāsanaparvan, appendix no. 15, lines Lalitavistara 6.7–2258
779–803
bubhukṣitaṃ pipāsārtam atithiṃ śrāntam [exp. 8A[L3]] kṣudhārtto vā tṛṣārtto vā [L4] atithim
āgatam | arcayanti varārohe teṣām api phalaṃ ārttam āgataḥ | ye bhavanti varārohe mahāpu-
mahat | ṇyaphalaṃ labhet |59
pātram ity eva dātavyaṃ sarvasmai dharma-
kāṅkṣibhiḥ |
āgamiṣyati yat pātraṃ tat pātraṃ tārayiṣyati | āga • miṣyati yat pātraṃ tat pātra<ṃ> tārayiṣya-
ti ||
pātram eva hi dātavyaṃ kāle kālāgato ’tithi | vi-
sṛṣṭam iva ma • nyante viśeṣānāṃ [sic!] tu cinta-
yet ||60
kāle saṃprāptam atithiṃ bhoktukāmam upa-
sthitam | cittaṃ saṃbhāvayet tatra vyāso ’yaṃ
samupasthitaḥ |
tasya pūjāṃ yathāśakti saumyacittaḥ prayoja- tasya pūjā yathāśaktya saumyacittaṃ tu bhāva-
yet | cittamūlo bhaved dharmo dharmamūlaṃ yet | [L5] + + + lo bhaved dharmaḥ dharmam
bhaved yaśaḥ |
tasmāt saumyena cittena dātavyaṃ devi sa- tasmāt saumyena cittena dātavyaṃ • devi nitya-
rvadā | śaḥ ||61
saumyacittas tu yo dadyāt tad dhi dānam anu-
ttamam | dāna<ṃ> pradīyate yatra ta<d> dānam iti cotta-
maḥ | putradāradhana<ṃ> dhānyaṃ mṛtānām
anutiṣṭha • ti ||
||
58 In the footnotes, the readings as well as additional passages of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda
are given following the manuscript N , fols 10v[L6] –11v[L1]. The readings of the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda as preserved in our G 4077 could not be included here, as thus far we were only able
to acquire the second half of the work in the manuscript.
59 Note that the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, as preserved in N , has two further pādas at this
point: pātram uddiśya dātavyam dharmaṃ ity eva nityaśaḥ.
60 N has two additional pādas at this point: na pṛcched gotracaraṇaṃ svādhyāyaṃ deśajanmanī
|| cittaṃ + bhāvayet etad vyāsaḥ svayam ihāgataḥ |
61 Note that the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as preserved in N has the following four pādas at
this point, echoing Anuśāsanaparvan, lines 788 and 793: saumyacittas tu yo dadyāt tad dhi
dānam anuttamaṃ | āpīḍayaṃs tu dārāṇāṃ bhṛtyānām atha bandheṣu.
626 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Anuśāsanaparvan, appendix no. 15, lines Lalitavistara 6.7–2258
779–803
yathāmbubindubhiḥ sūkṣmaiḥ patadbhir me-
dinītale | kedārāś ca taṭākāni sarāṃsi saritas
tathā |
toyapūrṇāni dṛśyante apratarkyāṇi śobhane |
alpam alpam api hy etad dīyamānaṃ viva-
rdhate |
pīḍayāpi ca bhṛtyānāṃ dānam eva viśiṣyate |
putradārā dhanaṃ dhānyaṃ na mṛtān anuga-
cchati |
śreyo dānaṃ ca bhogaś ca dhanaṃ prāpya ya- śreyo dātuṃ ca bhoktuṃ ca dhana<ṃ> prāpya
śasvini | yaśasvini |
dānena hi mahābhāgā bhavanti manujādhi-
pāḥ |
[exp. 9A[L1]] + + + + + dīyantam ahany āhani va-
rddhate |62 tathā puṇyena pūrṇās te svarge krī-
ḍanti māna • vā<ḥ> ||
mānuṣyam āgatā bhūyo bhavanti bahusaṃca-
yaḥ [sic!] |
nāsti bhūmisamaṃ dānaṃ nāsti dānasamo nāsti bhūmisamaṃ dānaṃ nāsti dānasamo nid-
nidhiḥ | nāsti satyāt paro dharmo nānṛtāt hiḥ || nā • sti satyasamo dharmaḥ nānṛtaṃ pāta-
pātakaṃ param | kaṃ param |
mātāpitṛsamo bandhu<r> na ca rājasamo gu-
ru<ḥ> ||
nāsti krodhasamo śatru mitraṃ vidyāsamo
[L2]
na ca | duḥkha<ṃ> kṣudhāsamo nāsti na cāhā-
rasama<ṃ> su • khaṃ ||
||
62 Note that in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda N adds six pādas at this point; these parallel the
text of the Anuśāsanaparvan lines 789ff: yathāṃbubindavo devi patantīha mahītale | kedārāś ca
taḍāgāś ca saraṃsi vananimnagāḥ || toyapūrṇṇāni dṛśyante avagāhyāni strīvare.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 627
Anuśāsanaparvan, appendix no. 15, lines Lalitavistara 6.7–2258
779–803
na cārogyasamo bhogya vyādhiś ca nidhanopa-
maḥ | na cāpatyasamo sneho na ca daivā<t> pa-
raṃ balam ||63
brāhmaṇe • bhyaḥ paraṃ nāsti tapo nāśānā<t>
param | gṛhāśramasamo devi āśramo neha vi-
dyate ||
āśrame yas tu tapyeta tapomūlaphalāśanaḥ | [L3] āśrame ye tu tapyante tapo mūlaphalāśana |
ekapādena ya<s> tiṣṭhed ūrdhvābāhur avacchi-
raṃ || •
ādityābhimukho bhūtvā jaṭāvalkalasaṃvṛtaḥ | ādityam abhivardhantā cīravalkaladhāriṇaḥ |
maṇḍūkaśāyī hemante grīṣme pañcatapā maṇḍūkayogī hemante grīṣmapañcā tapās
bhavet | tathā ||
samyak tapaś carantīha śraddadhānā vanā- ye yathokta • ṃ cariṣyanti śraddhā vā varjiten-
śrame | driyaḥ |
gṛhāśramasya te devi kalāṃ nārhanti ṣoḍaśīm gṛhāśramasya ya<d> devi phalaṃ vakṣyāmi tatt-
| vataḥ ||
va[L4]rṣe dvādaśame devi64 tat phala<ṃ> pratipa-
dyate65|
Another portion of the Lalitavista/Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda for which we can ra
identify a direct parallel with the Mahābhārata is Lalitavistara 25, paralleling the
short chapter 20 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. This time the source is not the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the Anuśāsanaparvan; rather, a substantial parallel of
about 14 verses is shared with the so-called Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra, a text framed
||
63 The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, as represented in N , adds the following four pādas at this
point: na vijñānasamaṃ cakṣur nna bhāratasamaṃ śrutiḥ | nāsti gaṃgāsamaṃ tīrthan na bhūtaṃ
keśavāt paraṃ.
64 The manuscript is not very legible at this point, reading something along the lines
svādaśa[bhiyena?]; the text supplied is conjectured on the basis of the parallel passage in the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda as represented in N .
65 These two pādas are found at the end of the passage in the Mahābhārata's Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda that parallels the Śivadharma’s Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda in chapter 7.
628 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
as a conversation between Yudhiṣṭhira and Viṣṇu, and associated with some recen-
sions of the Mahabhārata. Amounting to 1723.5 verses in the Poona edition, the text
is recorded to have been added after the last chapter of the fourteenth book, the
Āśvamedhikaparvan, in the so-called ‘southern transmission’ (i.e. the Telugu, Gran-
tha and Malayālam versions). However, as Grünendahl has pointed out,66 the text
is not only preserved in the south but also exists in an as-yet single palm-leaf
manuscript dated NS 169 (= 1049 CE), thus almost contemporary with manuscript
G 4077 of the Śivadharma corpus. The Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra manuscript was
microfilmed by the NGMPP with the reel number A 27/2, and was first recorded by
Shastri, even though he had not identified the text as the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra,
since the colophon of the manuscript proclaims it to be the Dānadharma, that is to
say the first sub-parvan of the modern Anuśāsanaparvan.67 On the basis of these
two different traditions of placing the text within the Mahābhārata, neither of
which are particularly meaningful regarding the immediate context, Grünendahl
argues that the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra should be considered as a separate tradi-
tion.68 As such, it appears to have been a rather influential text and part of the
Vaiṣṇava literary world; the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra also integrates 20 chapters of
the Viṣṇudharma, as Grünendahl shows in his edition.69
Without a certain dating of the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra we cannot be sure
whether the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and Lalitavistara used the text as a direct
inspiration or whether both shared a common source, though the former seems
more likely. As of yet we have only identified this single passage, which is how-
ever substantial. An indicator that may point to the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra as the
source could be that the pādas that mention the vocative pāṇḍava, ‘son of Pāṇḍu’
(see table), are rewritten in our works, thus removing the contextual indication
that this is a conversation featuring Yudhiṣṭḥira. As for the structural framing of
the text, we can note that the beginning appears rather abrupt, with no introduc-
tion or question from the Goddess to prompt Śiva’s teaching, nor any dialogue
following. The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda even lacks the indication of the speaker,
which is, however, added in the Lalitavistara (bhagavān uvāca).
Regarding the topic of the parallel passage, which comprises more than the
first half of the chapter, the text moves on to the different vices of human beings, in
particular those related to the various varṇas. In the context of the Vaiṣṇavadha-
rmaśāstra, the passage appears in the middle of Viṣṇu’s answer to Yudhiṣṭhira’s
||
66 Grünendahl 1984, Part II: 52–54.
67 Grünendahl 1984, Part II: 52–54.
68 Grünendahl 1984, Part II: 52–53.
69 Grünendahl 1984, Part II: 53.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 629
question about the qualities of the devotees, in which he explains the different
observances his devotees adhere to and their virtuous behaviour, followed by a
discourse on the various types of people that exist according to the guṇas (i.e.
sāttvika, rājasa and tāmasa). This leads to the passage on the vices. The choice
of using a Vaiṣṇava text as source for this chapter matches the position of the
chapter within the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and Lalitavistara, since it follows the
chapter dedicated to Viṣṇu’s teaching about his devotees, in line with the imme-
diate context of the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra. The last verse that parallels the
Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra passage teaches that a Brahmin of the purest sort, i.e. the
sāttvika kind, is one that particularly pleases the ancestors. The context is pre-
sumably that of the śrāddha rites, so the text advocates such a Brahmin as the
ideal recipient for śrāddha offerings. In fact, while the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra
continues with a different question of Yudhiṣṭhira, on religious giving, the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda/Lalitavistara use the opportunity to present seven more
verses related to the śrāddha procedure before ending the chapter.
As of yet, we cannot definitively establish the direction of influence between
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and the Lalitavistara. However, the current chapter
offers some observations that indicate an important fact, namely that it is un-
likely that our Lalitavistara manuscript contains the original composition, but is
rather a copy, probably produced by a less knowledgeable scribe. As is common
and noted above, the Lalitavistara contains fewer verses than the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda in this chapter, even though the difference here is less than in other
chapters. However, some of the stanzas that we can trace in the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda but not in the Lalitavistara indicate that the latter contains some de-
fective text that is likely to be the result of scribal errors, and unlikely to have
occurred on an authorial level. Thus, when the passages give the various list of
vices connected with the different varṇas, all three sources state that there are 8
in the case of the Vaiśyas and 25 in the case of the Śūdras, though the individual
items on this list differ in some places between the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda/
Lalitavistara and the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra. Within the two lists immediately
leading up to these numbers, the Lalitavistara lacks crucial pādas for both
groups, and thus ends up with shorter lists that don’t add up to the final number
of vices announced in both cases. The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, on the other
hand, contains the full lists. It does appear that the scribe had difficulties in un-
derstanding some passages or had a bad copy in front of him. For instance, the
phrase ity ete dehe ṣaḍ vṛṣalāḥ smṛtāḥ in both the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra and the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda is given as ity ete deva saḥ vṛṣalaḥ smṛtaḥ twice in the
Lalitavistara, concluding the list of six vices. This mistake is most likely due to an
error in reading combined with a poor understanding of the text. We can note
630 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
that this mistake appears to have also caught the attention of a later reader, as
the second instance is marked in red in the manuscript. In establishing further
patterns based on the number of verses in both texts, we must therefore keep in
mind that our copy may also be defective in some places due to scribal error. The
following table illustrates connections and divergences characterizing the paral-
lel passages of these three texts.
Mahābhārata 14, Vaiṣṇavadhar- Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 2070 Lalitavistara 25
maśāstra, Appendix no. 4, lines
1688–1717
[exp. 33B[L1]] [exp. 43A[L4]]
ekastambhe navadvāre tristhūṇe ekastambhe navadvāre triṣṭhū- bhagavān uvāca
pañcadhātuke | ne [L2] pañcaśākhike | ekastambhānavadvāre •
ṣṭhūne pañcasākṣike (un-
metr.) |
etasmin dehanagare rājasas tu etasminn antare devi etasminn antare devi savṛtas
sadā bhavet | sadvṛtyas71 tu sadā vaset || tu sadā bhavet ||
udite savitaryasya kriyāyuktasya uditoditavipra • sya kriyāyukta- uditodi[L5] + yuktasya kriyā-
dhīmataḥ | sya dhīmataḥ | yuktasya dhīmataḥ |
caturvedavidaś cāpi dehe ṣaḍ vindanti72 sakhilān vedāṃ dehe
vṛṣalāḥ smṛtāḥ | ṣaḍ vṛṣalāḥ smṛtāḥ ||
kṣatriyāḥ sapta vijñeyā vaiśyās tv kṣatriyāś ca smṛtā sapta vaiśyā kṣatriyā smṛtā sapta vaiśyā
aṣṭau prakīrtitāḥ | niyatāḥ pāṇḍa- • ś cāṣṭau samāvṛtāḥ | pañca- cāṣṭau samā • smṛtāḥ || pa-
vaśreṣṭha śūdrāṇām ekaviṃśatiḥ viṃśas tathā śudrā yac cheṣa73 ñcaviṃśa tayā śudrā yac
| so ’tra brāhmaṇaḥ || cheṣā so 'tra brāhmaṇā |
kāmaḥ krodhaś ca lobhaś ca mo- kāma[L3]ś ca lobhaś ca74 rāgo kāmakrodhāś ca lobhāś ca
haś ca mada eva ca | dveṣaś ca pañcamaḥ [c.m.] | rāga dveṣaś ca pa<ñca> •
[exp. 43B[L1]] • maḥ ||75
||
70 In addition, the readings of N fols. 28r[L1]–[L6] are reported in the footnotes.
71 sadvṛtas N
72 vidanti N
73 cheṣaṃ N
74 kāmaḥ krodhaś ca lobhaś ca N
75 There is a dittography regarding the last two stanzas, probably caused by an eyeskip after
the last syllable. The text as reproduced in the table omits the dittography for better reading,
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 631
Mahābhārata 14, Vaiṣṇavadhar- Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 2070 Lalitavistara 25
maśāstra, Appendix no. 4, lines
1688–1717
mahāmohaś ca ity ete dehe ṣaḍ mahābhogāś ca76 ity ete dehe mahābhogaś ca ity ete deva
vṛṣalāḥ smṛtāḥ | ṣaḍ vṛṣalāḥ smṛtā • ḥ || saḥ vṛṣala smṛtaḥ |
kāmaḥ krodhas tv ahaṅkāra ab- kāmakrodham ahaṃkārām
himānas tv amatsaraḥ | abhimāni tv amatsaraḥ |
garvaḥ stambho hy ahaṃkāra ī-
rṣyā ca droha eva ca |
pāruṣyaṃ krūratā ceti saptaite pāruṣya<ṃ> krūratā caiva pari- [L2] paribhuktvā ninidrā ca pai-
kṣatriyāḥ smṛtāḥ | vṛttiś ca kakṣayoḥ77 || śunyāmā nṛśaṃsatāḥ | aśra-
dadhānā śaṭhā ātmāślāghyā •
praśa<ṃ>satāḥ ||
tīkṣṇatā nikṛtir māyā śāṭhyaṃ ḍa- ślakṣṇatā ni • kṛti<ṃ> māyā
mbho hy anārjavam | ’sūyā śāṭhyam anārjavam78 |
nṛśansatā79 vai kārppaṇyaṃ nṛśaṃsṛtā paribhūtā vaiśā-
vaiśyasyāṣṭau80 pra ++[L4]tāḥ81 ṣṭau parikīrtitāḥ ||
||
tṛṣṇā bubhukṣā nidrā ca
paiśunyam anṛtaṃ caiva vaiśyās paiśunyam anṛtan tamaḥ | [L2] paribhuktvā ninidrā ca
tv aṣṭau prakīrtitāḥ | aśraddadhānaṃ śaṭhatā ātma paiśunyāmā nṛśaṃsatāḥ |
• ślāghyā82 praśaṃsatā || aśradadhānā śaṭhā
ātmāślāghyā •
praśa<ṃ>satāḥ ||
tṛṣṇā bubhukṣā nidrā ca ālasyaṃ
cāghṛṇādayā |
||
restoring the missing syllable ‘ñc’, which does feature after the right stringhole on exp. 43A[L5], com-
plementing the ‘pa’ to the left of the stringhole, givine ‘pañcamaḥ’; whereas on exp. 43B[L1], due to
the dittography only ‘ma’ righ of the stringhole is preserved, with ‘pañca’ on the left of it.
76 mahāmohaś ca N
77 kṣatriyāḥ N
78 anārjavaḥ N
79 nṛśatā N
80 vaiśyāś cāṣṭhau N
81 prakīrttitāḥ N
82 ātmaślāghya N
632 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Mahābhārata 14, Vaiṣṇavadhar- Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 2070 Lalitavistara 25
maśāstra, Appendix no. 4, lines
1688–1717
ādhiś cāpi vivādaś ca pramādo anivṛttaviṣādaś ca pramādo hī-
hīnasattvatā | nasatvatā |
bhayaṃ viklabatā jāḍyaṃ pāpa- bhayaṃ viklavatā kṣudraḥ pā-
kaṃ manyur eva ca | patām anyase • vatā83 ||
āśā cāśraddadhānatvam anava-
sthāpy ayantraṇam |
nilajānāśakāhiṃsā anavasthā nilajjatāś ca hiṃsāś ca
na yantratā | anavasthā na yantraṇā |
āśaucaṃ malinatvaṃ ca śūdrā hy ete śudrā<ḥ> pañcaviṅśat ti- ete śudrā pañcaviṃśa
ete prakīrtitāḥ | ṣṭha[L5]nte deham āśritāḥ | tiṣṭhante deham āśṛtāḥ • |
yasminn ete na dṛśyante sa vai yasminn ete na dṛśyante sa vi-
brāhmaṇa ucyate | dvān brāhmaṇaḥ smṛtaḥ ||
yeṣu yeṣu hi bhāveṣu yatkālaṃ yeṣu • yeṣu ca bhāveṣu yatkā- yeṣu yeṣu ca bhāveṣu yatkā-
vartate dvijaḥ | la<ṃ> varttate dvijaḥ | la varttate dvijaḥ ||
teṣu teṣu ca tatkāla<ṃ> na li- teṣu teṣu ca tatkāl<e>na
ṅgatir84 ucyate | liṅgaṃ matir ucya[L3]te |
yāva<d> juhoti japati tāva • <d> yāva juhoti japate yāva
dānaṃ prayacchati || dāna prayacchati ||
tattatkālaṃ sa vijñeyaḥ
brāhmaṇo jñānadurbalaḥ ||
brāhmaṇo bhavate tāva śe- brāhmaṇo bhavate tāva śe-
ṣaṃ85 kālam yathetaraḥ || ṣaṅ kāla • yatherataḥ86 |
prāṇān āyamya yatkālaṃ yena
māṃ cāpi cintayet | tatkāle vai
||
83 anyasevakāḥ N
84 Eyeskip for liṅgagatir.
85 tāvac cheṣa N
86 Read yathetaraḥ.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 633
Mahābhārata 14, Vaiṣṇavadhar- Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 2070 Lalitavistara 25
maśāstra, Appendix no. 4, lines
1688–1717
dvijo jñeyaḥ śeṣakālo hy athe-
taraḥ ||
tasmāt tu sāttviko bhūtvā śuciḥ
krodhavivarjitaḥ | mām arcayet tu
satataṃ matpriyatvaṃ yad ic-
chati ||
alolajihvaḥ samupasthito dhṛtir | alolajihvā sa[35AL1]maloṣṭakā- alolajihvā sa-
ñcanaṃ87 | gataspṛho • rāga- maloṣṭakāñcana || gata-
vivarjito vaśī || spṛho rāgavivarjito vaśī |
nidhāya cakṣur yugamātram eva
ca ||
manaś ca vācaṃ ca nigṛhya ca-
ñcalaṃ |
jitendriya saṃgavimuktadoṣa- jitendriyo saṅgaviva • rjito
vān | sadā ||
bhayān nivṛtto mama bhakta u- bhagāṃ nivṛtto bhagavāṃn i- bhagā nivṛto bhagavān
cyate || hocyate || ihocyate |
īdṛśādhyātmino ye tu brāhmaṇā īdṛśādhyānayukte88 • hi brā- idṛśaṃ dhyānayuktena
niyatendriyāḥ | hmaṇāḥ89 [L2] saṃśritavratāḥ90 | brāhmaṇa saṃśri[L4]tav-
rataḥ ||
teṣāṃ śrāddheṣu tṛpyanti tena tṛ- yeṣāṃ śrāddhe niyujyante teṣāṃ śrāddhe niyujyante
ptāḥ pitāmahāḥ || tṛptās teṣā<ṃ> pitāmahaḥ || tṛptā teṣā pitāmahāḥ |
The influence of the Mahābhārata was therefore far-reaching, and systematically
impacted the composition of the Lalitavistara/Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. If we
shift our analysis to the chapters of the Lalitavistara that are not shared with the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, we can observe that direct parallels with the
Anuśāsanaparvan become more frequent, extensive and literal. Far from being
||
87 *kāñcano N
88 *yukto N
89 brāhmaṇaḥ N
90 *vrataḥ N
634 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
just a model of inspiration and source of topics, portions of the text of Śiva and
Umā’s conversation from the Anuśāsanaparvan are firmly embedded in chapters
30 to 32 of the Lalitavistara, as well as a part of chapter 26 (note that the same
also applies to chapters 6 and 7 of the Lalitavistara and Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda,
as discussed above). However, the Lalitavistara’s use of the text of the
Anuśāsanaparvan, though faithful, turns out to be more productive when com-
pared to the parallels with the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. In the latter case, the
Lalitavistara shows a simpler, less convoluted text, at times even missing im-
portant pieces of information. In the case of the parallels with the Anuśāsana-
parvan, we see that the Lalitavistara may add pieces that are not in the
Mahābhārata, as well as combine stanzas from different, non-consecutive chap-
ters of the Anuśāsanaparvan, as is the case of Lalitavistara 31, or even join the
Anuśāsanaparvan with other texts.
The topics of the text borrowed from the Anuśāsanaparvan in chapters 26 and
30 to 32 are rather miscellaneous, although from a more general look at this sec-
tion it is possible to detect the broader motive underpinning their selection. Chap-
ter 26 contains a more general discourse on rājadharma, particularly in connec-
tion with hunting,91 while Lalitavistara chapter 31 is deeply Śaiva in nature: the
stanzas of the Anuśāsanaparvan that form this chapter—131.40-47, 127.51, 128.1–
12—deal with such etiological myths as the reason for Śiva’s third eye, the appear-
ance of his four faces and the choice of Nandi as his mount. There is no room here
for any hybrid form of a half-Śaiva, half-Vaiṣṇava god, nor is any other deity
given prominence. This situation is symmetrical to that of Lalitavistara chapter
24 (parallel to Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 19) and 33 (parallel to Umottarasaṃvāda
7 and Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 22), which deal with topics that are solely related
to Vaiṣṇava devotion. When we read these chapters in the broader context of the
work, the textual material loses its sectarian exclusiveness, and contributes to
the construction of the amalgam of Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism that this text seems
to promote. This applies perfectly to chapter 31, whose significance can truly be
assessed by examining the contents of that portion of text in which it is inserted,
which forms a sort of triad with chapters 30 to 32.
||
91 Chapter 26 parallels 17 pādas of the Mahābhārata’s Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, in the passage
between the appendix to 13.15, lines 1268–1281 in the Poona edition. It appears that the topic of
rājadharma is not addressed in such a systematic manner in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and
the text of the Lalitavistara that runs parallel to it. These chapters may have been designed to
integrate the topic into the work, and were either rejected by the former or added by the latter.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 635
The most intricate case from the point of view of the construction of the text
and its being intertwined with other parts of the work is offered by chapter 30. This
chapter is unique inasmuch as it joins some stanzas that are paralleled by chapter
4 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda together with a long portion of the Anuśāsana-
parvan. Moreover, the stanzas that are also found in Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chap-
ter 4 actually continue a longer parallel with this chapter that had already started
in chapter 29 of the Lalitavistara, which is entirely parallel to Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda 4. The two chapters 29 and 30 of the Lalitavistara must therefore be read
together, the text of Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chapter 4 flowing into that of
Anuśāsanaparvan chapter 132. This situation is further complicated by the circum-
stance that the Lalitavistara had already used the text of chapter 4 of the Umāma-
heśvarasaṃvāda in its own chapter 4; however, that time the text was not followed
by anything else, but preceded by the final part of Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 3,
which the Lalitavistara had included into the same chapter (cf. below).
To sum it up: the Lalitavistara twice uses the same text, which also corre-
sponds to Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 4 (but which has not been identified in the
Anuśāsanaparvan), in three different chapters, chapter 4 and chapters 29 to 30;
the first time, this text is contained in one single chapter, while the second time it
is split into two, the second part being joined with a text from the Mahābhārata.
This circumstance seems to speak in favour of the idea that the Lalitavistara is a
compilation of pre-existing materials drawn from different sources. However, even
though it is the same text that is used twice in the same work, it is also clear that
this portion, while redundant, serves different purposes in the two distinct loci.
The text used in chapter 4 and in chapters 29 to 30 deals with the topic of
dhyāna, of which the God describes two main types. In the first one, referred to
as adhyātman and vaiṣṇava, the process starts with perceiving the various parts
of the body with the divine eye, gradually moving inward until reaching the
heart. In the middle of that, within the moon and sun disk, the soul rests on the
flame of the sacrificial fire. Then one is to visualize the process of the soul leaving
the body at death, for which a very graphic description is given, starting with the
hissing sounds the soul makes while travelling through the throat and eventually
leaving through the palate. Having seen the state of things, the yogin resorts to
meditative yoga (dhyānayoga), in which he is constantly meditating on Viṣṇu,
and constantly perceives himself through his Self. This leads to the attainment of
supernatural powers. This description corresponds to the text of Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda 4.1–31. This form of meditation is thus expressly centred on Viṣṇu,
and for this reason the text, in a stanza featured in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda
as well as in the two chapters of the Lalitavistara, also calls it vaiṣṇavayoga (exp.
6B[L5]): e • tat me paramaṃ dhyāna<ṃ> vaiṣṇava<ṃ> parikīrttitaḥ ||. Barring a few
636 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
grammatical inconsistencies, these pādas also suggest that the speaker of this
chapter is Viṣṇu in person; however, the same pāda in chapter 29 has te instead
of me (exp. 48B[L3]), while the text transmitted in manuscripts of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda confirms the use of me.
The text of Lalitavistara 4 and Lalitavistara 29 is not exactly identical, presenting
variants that, despite not altering the main contents of the text, still seem to point at
a different transmission, as though they were drawn from different sources, or at
least presupposed the use of different manuscripts. As a general rule, the text trans-
mitted as chapter 4 has proved to be closer to that of the manuscript tradition of the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. The discrepancies, as we observed, do not change the na-
ture of the text, as the modern Nepalese editor does once again, changing a
Vaiṣṇava form of yoga into a purely Śaiva one.92 At the same time, there is one key
point in which the two texts of the Lalitavistara differ. In chapter 29 (exp. 48B[L2]),
the pādas dhyānayoga<ṃ> samāśṛtya tanmana<s> tatparāyaṇaḥ are followed by
pradīpenaiva dīpena paśyaty ātmā • nam ātmanaḥ; in chapter 4, these two hemi-
stichs are reworded and non-contiguous, being separated by two more pādas ex-
pressly prescribing meditation on Viṣṇu (exp. 6B[L4]): dhyānayoga<ṃ> samāśṛtya
dhyātavya<ḥ> yaḥ tapasvini || dhyāyeta bhagavā<n> viṣṇu<s> tanma • <nas> tatpa-
rāyaṇaḥ | pradīptenaiva dīptena paśyaty ātmātmānam ātmanā. This is the version
of the text that is also featured in Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda chapter 4, confirming
again that the two texts are closer. In light of the omission of Viṣṇu as an object of
meditation in chapter 29, one could perhaps speculate that the occurrence of te in-
stead of me in the pāda quoted above (e • tat te paramaṃ dhyāna<ṃ> vaiṣṇava<ṃ>
parikīrttitaḥ) is not coincidental, but is consistent with this version of the text, in
which Viṣṇu is not expressly mentioned as the focus of meditation—and, therefore,
the ‘supreme dhyāna’ is not qualified by the possessive ‘my’. At the same time, the
text of chapter 29 confirms that this meditation is called vaiṣṇava, so we are not
dealing with a text of a different religious orientation. We could however hypothe-
size that, given also its lesser length, chapter 29 may reflect an earlier version of the
text, to which a later redactor made the additions that are attested in Lalitavistara
||
92 Without any basis in the manuscript tradition, Naraharinath’s edition deletes all references
to Viṣṇu, and replaces them with Śaiva-related expressions. For instance, in 4.31cd, this form of
dhyāna is not called vaiṣṇava, but māheśa: evaṃ me paramaṃ dhyānaṃ māheśaṃ parikīrtitam.
The mention of bhagavān viṣṇu as the focus of meditation (see Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 4.28a) is
replaced with a reference to Śambhu: dhyāyate bhagavān śambhus tanmanās tatparāyaṇaḥ |.
Similarly, the viṣṇuloka mentioned as one of the rewards for the practice of this form of yoga is
turned into a śivaloka. As we stressed before, the editorial choices made by our modern Śaiva
editor are relevant inasmuch as his edition, and the e-text based on it, is still the only resource
available to readers and scholars for easy access to this text.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 637
4 and Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 4, including the reference to Viṣṇu as the focus of
dhyāna.
The definition of the supreme dhyāna as vaiṣṇava ends chapter 29, while chapter 4
of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda goes on with the topic of the ‘second meditation’, which
in the Lalitavistara marks the opening of chapter 30. The redactors thus once again pre-
ferred to start a new chapter with the beginning of a new topic. As for chapter 4 of the
Lalitavistara, the second type of dhyāna is dealt with in the same chapter, but the verse
that initiates this new topic (dhyānaṃ dvitīya<ṃ> vakṣyāmi, exp. 6B[L5]) is separated
from the preceding one ([…] vaiṣṇava<ṃ> parikīrttitaḥ) by two pairs of double daṇḍas
framing a circle-like sign of punctuation, which is used in this manuscript before and
after the concluding rubrics of the chapters. This is a clue that those who copied or com-
posed the text felt that there was an interruption at that point, or that this text was cop-
ied from a version in which it was divided into two chapters, the break between the two
being still recorded by the use of punctuation.
The second type of dhyāna is instructed to take place in some deserted spot in the
woods or elsewhere. By constantly meditating there, one destroys all sins. The chapter
then ends with a description of the process of saṃsāra, and how it is desire (tṛṣṇā) that
sets this cycle in motion. The final stanzas reiterate how meditation liberates the soul
from saṃsāra and leads to the attainment of the brahmaloka. This is the end of the chap-
ter both in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and in chapter 4 of the Lalitavistara, while in
chapter 30 the God announces that he will now teach a third type of dhyāna. The verse
revealing the God’s intention to disclose further teachings (dhyāna<ṃ> tṛtīyaṃ
vakṣyāmi śrūyatāṃ dharmavā • riṇi | śrotukāmo mahādevi dhyāyeta manasā naraḥ ||,
exp. 49A[L3]) also serves as a junction between the preceding passage, parallel to the
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda (or to an unidentified common source) and the next one, par-
allel to the Anuśāsanaparvan. However, the passage to the latter is abrupt, and its con-
tents unrelated to the topics of the preceding pages. The text of the Anuśāsanaparvan/
Lalitavistara no longer refers to a ‘third dhyāna’, nor in fact seems to describe one,
but teaches about good conduct and what sins to avoid and deeds to perform ‘through
actions, mind and speech’ for those who want to reach heaven (the latter formula given
as a sort of refrain throughout the chapter). The sole line that refers to this as a form of
dhyāna was thus the introductory verse quoted above, which is not extant in the
Anuśāsanaparvan; given its faint connection with the context, this stanza looks like a
crude device that the redactors of the Lalitavistara used to smooth out the beginning of
the next topic and the transition to another source. The implication of this stanza, and
of this whole section being included in a chapter that started with a discussion on the
meditation of the vanastha (we now know that the redactors of the Lalitavistara pre-
ferred to break different topics into different chapters, and keep similar topics together),
is that the correct behaviour of laypeople as described below equaled a form of dhyāna.
638 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
The occurrence of a long textual reuse of the Anuśāsanaparvan offers an oppor-
tunity to assess which version of it was known to the the redactors of the Lalitavistara,
and how far removed this was from the current critical edition, which was not realized
on the basis of such early materials. In the following lines, we have given a transcript of
the relevant stanzas of the Lalitavistara, compared to the corresponding text of the
Anuśāsanaparvan’s edition:
Lalitavistara Anuśāsanaparvan
[exp. 49A[L3]]
devy uvāca || bhagavāṃ bhūtabhavyeṣu sarva- 132.1 umovāca | bhagavan sarvabhūteśa surā-
bhāvabhaveśva • raḥ | suranamaskṛta | dharmādharme nṛṇāṃ deva
brūhi me saṃśayaṃ vibho ||
karmaṇā manasā vācā trividho ye naraḥ sadā | 132.2 karmaṇā manasā vācā trividhaṃ hi naraḥ
badhyate bāndha vā pāśaiḥ mucyate [L4] ca ka- sadā | badhyate bandhanaiḥ pāśair mucyate ’py
tha punaḥ || atha vā punaḥ ||
kena śīlāpado deva karmaṇā kīdṛśena vā | sa- 132.3 kena śīlena vā deva karmaṇā kīdṛśena vā |
mācārāguṇai<r> vā • <’>pi svargīyānti narā samācārair guṇair vākyaiḥ svargaṃ yāntīha
bhuvi || mānavāḥ ||
bhagavān uvāca || devi dharmārthatatvajñe sa- bhagavān uvāca || 132.4 devi dharmārthatatt-
rvabhūtadayopare | sarvaprāhiṇihi • ta pathya vajñe satyanitye dame rate | sarvaprāṇihitaḥ
śrūyatā dharmavāriṇi | praśnaḥ śrūyatāṃ buddhivardhanaḥ ||
[…]
132.11 mātṛvat svasṛvac caiva nityaṃ duhitṛvac
adṛṣṭāparadāreṣu te narā svargagāminaḥ | ca ye | paradāreṣu vartante te narāḥ svargagāmi-
naḥ ||
stenyā<n> [L5] nivṛtt<āḥ> satata<ṃ> saṃtuṣṭā ye 132.12 stainyān nivṛttāḥ satataṃ saṃtuṣṭāḥ
na nityaśaḥ || svadeham upajīvanti te narā sva- svadhanena ca | svabhāgyāny upajīvanti te na-
rggagāminaḥ • || rāḥ svargagāminaḥ ||
sarvendriyāni manasya gopayanto vyavas-
thitāḥ | yasyātmāna<ḥ> paraloka<ṃ> mukhyaṃ
yānti maṇīśiṇaḥ ||
sva • dāreṣv abhisaṃtuṣṭā ṛtukālābhigāmiṇaḥ | 132.13 svadāraniratā ye ca ṛtukālābhigāminaḥ |
abhagnavanayogās ca te narā<ḥ> svargagā- agrāmyasukhabhogāś ca te narāḥ svargagāmi-
mi<naḥ> naḥ ||
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 639
Lalitavistara Anuśāsanaparvan
[Exp. 49B]
[L1] prāṇābhi<r> pāpaniratā<ḥ> śīlavarttasamāhi-
tāḥ | saṃyatā<ḥ> niyatā<ḥ> dāntās te narā sva-
rgagā • minaḥ || sarvabhūtadayāvanto viśvāsā
sarvakarmasu | paraśve nirmalā<ḥ> nityaṃ vā
nityam avalopamāḥ ||
jitendri • yā svargaparās te narā 132.14cd yatendriyāḥ śīlaparās te narāḥ svarga-
svargagāminaḥ | eṣa kāye kṛto dharma se- gāminaḥ || 132.15 eṣa devakṛto mā-rgaḥ sevi-
vitavyo tu śrayakaiḥ || tavyaḥ sadā naraiḥ | akaṣāyakṛtaś caiva mārgaḥ
sevyaḥ sadā budhaiḥ ||
132.16 dānadharmatapoyuktaḥ śīlaśauca-da-
yātmakaḥ | vṛttyarthaṃ dharmahetor vā sevita-
vyaḥ sadā naraiḥ |
svargalokam abhīpsantā ninditam tatva<ṃ>
[L2] svargavāsam abhīpsadbhir na sevyas tv ata u-
uttamaṃ | ttaraḥ ||
devy uvāca || vācayā badhyate deva • mucyate 132.17 umovāca || vācātha badhyate yena mu-
vā katha<ṃ> punaḥ | tāni karmāṇi me deva ka- cyate ’py atha vā punaḥ | tāni karmāṇi me deva
thayasva mahāvrataḥ || vada bhūtapate ’nagha ||
bhagavān uvāca || ātmaheto<ḥ> parārthe • vā 132.18a ātmahetoḥ parārthe vā na-
dharmahāsyakriyāsu va | mṛṣāvādaṃ na bhā- rmahāsyāśrayāt tathā | ye mṛṣā na vadantīha te
ṣyante te narā svargagāminaḥ || narāḥ svargagāminaḥ ||
dravyārthe kā[L3]maheto vā dveṣarāgakṛtena vā | 132.19 vṛttyarthaṃ dharmahetor vā kāmakārāt
anṛta<ṃ> ye na bhāṣyanti te narā svargagāmi- tathaiva ca | anṛtaṃ ye na bhāṣante te narāḥ
naḥ || • svargagāminaḥ ||
132.20 ślakṣṇāṃ vāṇīṃ nirābādhāṃ madhurāṃ
pāpavarjitām | svāgatenābhibhāṣante te narāḥ
svargagāminaḥ ||
praruṣa<ṃ> ye na bhāṣyanti niṣṭhurā<ḥ> kaṭu- 132.21 kaṭukāṃ ye na bhāṣante paruṣāṃ ni-
kan tathā | anudvegakarā nityaṃ te narā svarga- ṣṭhurāṃ giram | apaiśunyaratāḥ santas te narāḥ
gāminaḥ || svargagāminaḥ ||
svāgatety abhibhā • ṣyanti te narā svargagāmi-
naḥ |
640 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Lalitavistara Anuśāsanaparvan
piśunā<ṃ> na prabhāṣante mitrabhedakarīn ṛ- 132.22 piśunāṃ ye na bhāṣante mitrabhedaka-
ṇe | rājamāna<ṃ>[L4] prabhāṣanti te narā svarga- rīṃ giram | ṛtāṃ maitrīṃ prabhāṣante te narāḥ
gāminaḥ | svargagāminaḥ ||
śuṣkavāṇī<ṃ> na bhāṣante + + duṣkṛtavādinī | •
132.23 varjayanti sadā sūcyaṃ paradrohaṃ ca
mānavāḥ | sarvabhūtasamā dāntās te narāḥ sva-
rgagāminaḥ ||
śaṭhāpralāpād viratā viruddhaparivarjitā | vira- 132.24 śaṭhapralāpād viratā viruddhaparivarja-
tā bhedavākyena te narā svargagāminaḥ || kāḥ | saumyapralāpino nityaṃ te narāḥ svarga-
gāminaḥ ||
amṛta<ṃ> niṣṭhura<ṃ> • caiva tyaktadharmam
adharmivan | kāle ca saṃprabhāṣyante te narā
svargagāminaḥ || 132.25 na kopād vyāharante ye vācaṃ hṛdaya-
dāraṇīm | sāntvaṃ vadanti kruddhāpi te narāḥ
svargagāminaḥ ||
eṣa vā[L5]ṇikṛto dharmaḥ sevitavyo ṛṣi sadā | de- 132.26 eṣa vāṇīkṛto devi dharmaḥ sevyaḥ sadā
vyo nityaguṇopetā sadā bhṛtavivarji • taiḥ || naraiḥ | śubhaḥ satyaguṇo nityaṃ varjanīyā
mṛṣā budhaiḥ ||
devy uvāca || manasā bandhate yeṇa karmaṇā 132.27 umovāca || manasā badhyate yena kar-
puruṣā sadā | tāni me pāśakarmāṇi devadeva maṇā puruṣaḥ sadā | tan me brūhi mahābhāga
pinā • kadhṛk || devadeva pinākadhṛk ||
bhagavān uvāca || apratītamano yas tu calacitto 134.57/15.3717 duṣpratītamanā yas tu calaci-
nirākṛti<ḥ> | tto nirākṛtiḥ |
manobandhā[50AL1]ni sāmasya śṛṇu devi 132.28 maheśvara uvāca | mānaseneha dha-
viṣeśataḥ | rmeṇa saṃyuktāḥ puruṣāḥ sadā | svargaṃ ga-
cchanti kalyāṇi tan me kīrtayataḥ śṛṇu ||
132.29 duṣpraṇītena manasā duṣpraṇītatarākṛ-
tiḥ | badhyate mānavo yena śṛṇu cānyac chubhā-
nane ||
araṇyajanasaṃsthaṃ ca parahyā nābhinandati 132.30 araṇye vijane nyastaṃ parasvaṃ vīkṣya
|| • manasā karmaṇā vācā te narā svargagāmi- ye narā | manasāpi na hiṃsanti te narāḥ svarga-
naḥ | gāminaḥ ||
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 641
Lalitavistara Anuśāsanaparvan
grāme gṛhe vā yaṃ dravyaṃ parāhya<ṃ> vijane 132.31 grāme gṛhe vā yad dravyaṃ pārakyaṃ
sthitaṃ || nābhinanda • ti manasā te narā svar- vijane sthitam | nābhinandanti vai nityaṃ te na-
ggagāminaḥ | malāṣṭakāñcanā nityaṃ parāhya- rāḥ svargagāminaḥ ||
paravarjakāḥ ||
132.32 tathaiva paradārān ye kāmavṛttān raho-
gatān | manasāpi na hiṃsanti te narāḥ svarga-
gāminaḥ ||
132.33 śatruṃ mitraṃ ca ye nityaṃ tulyena ma-
nasā narāḥ | bhajanti maitrāḥ saṃgamya te na-
rāḥ svargagāminaḥ ||
132.34 śrutavanto dayāvantaḥ śucayaḥ satya-
saṃgarāḥ | svair arthaiḥ parisaṃtuṣṭās te narāḥ
svargagāminaḥ ||
132.35 avairā ye tv anāyāsā maitracittaparāḥ
sadā | sarvabhūtadayāvantas te narāḥ svarga-
gāminaḥ ||
sarvabhūtadayāvanto cākṣāś cokṣa janapri- 132.36 śraddhāvanto dayāvantaś cokṣāś cokṣa-
[L2]
yāḥ | dharmādharmavido nitya te narā sva • rga- janapriyāḥ | dharmādharmavido nityaṃ te narāḥ
gāminaḥ || svargagāminaḥ ||
132.37 śubhānām aśubhānāṃ ca karmaṇāṃ
phalasaṃcaye | vipākajñāś ca ye devi te narāḥ
svargagāminaḥ ||
nyāyopetaguṇopetā svargamārgahiteṣiṇā | sa- 132.38 nyāyopetā guṇopetā devadvijaparāḥ sa-
tyathaparimārganti te narā svargga • gāminaḥ dā | samatāṃ samanuprāptās te narāḥ svarga-
|| gāminaḥ ||
132.39 śubhaiḥ karmaphalair devi mayaite pari-
kīrtitāḥ |
ukta<ṃ> dharma<ṃ> yatho devi damai<s> te ku-
śalam mayāṃ |
svargamārgopamā [L3] proktāḥ ki<ṃ> bhūya<ḥ> svargamārgopagā bhūyaḥ kim anyac chrotum i-
śrotum icchasi || Q || cchasi ||
642 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Chapter 30 of the Lalitavistara ends here, while chapter 132 of the Anuśāsanapa-
rvan proceeds with a further question from the Goddess, who asks by means of
which actions a person can obtain a long life, and by means of which ones the
lives of others are destroyed. There are so many opposing types of men, the God-
dess observes, and she now wants to hear about the ways karman ripens for them.
The two texts of chapter 30 and chapter 132 thus run parallel until 132.38; the
Anuśāsanaparvan has more stanzas that are not in the Lalitavistara, especially
towards the end of the parallel passage, while the latter follows the correct stanza
sequence of the Anuśāsanaparvan, and adds a few more stanzas that are not
available in the model. Variant readings include the use of proper paraphrases
(see Lalitavistara, adṛṣṭāparadāreṣu te narā svargagāminaḥ, against Anuśāsana-
parvan 132.11, mātṛvat svasṛvac caiva nityaṃ duhitṛvac ca ye | paradāreṣu vartante
te narāḥ svargagāminaḥ).
This text has nothing specifically Śaiva or Vaiṣṇava, being limited to a list of
good actions that allow men to go to heaven, with some further considerations;
it is rather presented as a lay form of dhyāna, after the more complex forms of the
preceding chapters on which this one depends. As the text paralleled in chapter
29 and in the first half of chapter 30 is permeated with Vaiṣṇava devotion, the
following chapter 31, as already observed, is purely Śaiva in inspiration. The au-
thors/redactors of the Lalitavistara, unlike the modern editor of the Umāmahe-
śvarasaṃvāda, must not have found this problematic, as they allowed these ma-
terials to coexist side by side. The reason for this is clearly stated in chapter 32,
which closes the sequence of chapters modelled after paragraphs of the
Anuśāsanaparvan, and almost seems to epitomize the core teachings of the whole
work. This chapter opens with three pādas that have a parallel in a supplement
of the Anuśāsanaparvan (13.15.4325–27). This parallel is short and isolated, as the
text of chapter 32 is, for the rest, independent of any model, or at least any that
has been possible to identify. The Goddess addresses a God that, given the epi-
thets through which she refers to him, can only be Śiva. In the initial verses he is
called, among other expressions, ‘three-eyed’ (triyakṣa, triyambaka), ‘destroyer
of Dakṣa’s sacrifice’ (dakṣayajñapramathana), ‘spear-holder’ (śūlapāṇi), as well
as ‘dressed in a tiger’s skin’ (vyāghracarmanivāsana). The Goddess asks him how
he wants to be pleased by his devotees. After listing the usual substances for wor-
ship (food offerings, incenses, ghee), the God, who is here still simply identified
as Bhagavan, instructs his devotees to worship him with a stotra whose initial
words are: (exp. 51A[L3]) namo <’>stu • te mahādeva namo <’>stu bhaktivanmalaḥ
|| 6 trailokyādhipate viṣṇu namo hariharāya ca | namaḥ śrīvatsadharāya • nama
tṛptabhujāya ca || 7 arddhamāheśvararūpaṃ hared arddhaharasya ca | dvav
etā<v> hy ekarū[L4]peṇa prasīdatu mamekataḥ || 8. The God to whom the Lalitavi-
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 643
stara addresses the devotion of lay bhaktas is thus Harihāra, the fusion of Viṣṇu
and Śiva that also symbolizes an attempt at harmonizing the two main devotional
currents animating the religious landscape of the Kathmandu Valley, as attested
from the earliest epigraphical evidence in the 5th century. This is likely to be the
reason why the redactors of the text have juxtaposed Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava materi-
als, or have used more ambiguous designations in referring to the God and the
Goddess. The same motivation underlay the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the
Śivadharma corpus, although the authors frame it more clearly as a Śaiva work
by being more consistent in addressing the gods as Umā and Maheśvara. How-
ever, besides these last few chapters, the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda uses exactly
the same mixed Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava materials as the Lalitavistara, since it was
possibly pursuing the same agenda.
There is a third work that the final colophon of the Lalitavistara evoked, and
that we have not yet had the opportunity to involve in our discussion, namely the
Umottarasaṃvāda, also known in other manuscripts as the Uttarottarama-
hāsaṃvāda. Fashioned as a dialogue between Maheśvara and Umā, several stan-
zas of its chapter 7—starting with 7.113 and ending with 7.163, which is also the
end of the chapter—form the body of the thirty-third and final chapter of the
Lalitavistara. As shown in the table of contents in the preceding paragraph, this
chapter also has a strong Vaiṣṇava inspiration, evoking the story of Rāma and
ending with Viṣṇu’s avatāras, a topic that thus also concludes the Lalitavistara
tout court. The peculiarity of these stanzas lies in the fact that the section from
Umottarasaṃvāda 7.144 until the end, opening with the Goddess’s question that
prompts the God’s narration of the ten avatāras, also forms the final chapter 22 of
the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda. This chapter is not available in the earliest manu-
script (N ends the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda with chapter 20, while G 4077 also in-
cludes chapters 21 and 22), and will eventually be expunged by at least one other
manuscript of the early palm-leaf transmission.93 Barring a few variant readings
and the typical omissions characterizing the Lalitavistara, the final section of its
final chapter thus equals Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 22, which in its turn has a paral-
lel in Umottarasaṃvāda 7. In synthesis, the same text is used thrice, in three works
transmitted in the same manuscript. The most natural position for these stanzas is
the one they have in the Umottarasaṃvāda/Lalitavistara: following the story of
Rāma, the Goddess asks what is the purpose of having ‘this son of man’ (putro
<’>yaṃ mānuṣasya, Umottarasaṃvāda 7.144), if Viṣṇu is the Lord of the world. In
chapter 22 of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, this verse comes at the very beginning
of the chapter, so the reader completely misses the reference to ‘this’ human being
||
93 On this topic, see De Simini forthcoming.
644 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
mentioned by the Goddess, as chapter 21 is on a completely different subject
(mainly on music, as well as a few myths connected to the Gandharvas).
The stories of Rāma and Viṣṇu thus conclude this work which, coherently
with its purposes, proclaims to be part of the Śivadharma in the same general
concluding colophon that is attached to the stanzas recounting Viṣṇu’s avatāras.
The inclusion within the Śivadharma corpus, whose earlier and best known
works were authorities on Śaiva devotion, and which established the basis for the
social behaviour of lay Śaiva bhaktas, was probably seen as the ultimate step to-
wards the recognition of this blended form of religion in which Śaiva and
Vaiṣṇava devotion were tentatively intermingled and kept faithful to the Brah-
manical socio-religious order.
4 Conclusions: The Śivadharma between Śaivism
and Vaiṣṇavism in the Kathmandu Valley
From our analysis of the Lalitavistara of G 4077 as well as the Umāmaheśva-
rasaṃvāda, we have seen that both texts—or their still unidentified common
source—pursue a twofold agenda, namely the integration of mainstream Brah-
manical values related to the varṇāśrama system, as well as elements of Vaiṣṇava
devotion, into the Śaiva corpus. These two agendas can be considered to be
closely linked, since Vaiṣṇava devotional literature from its earliest layers on-
wards tends to propagate a system that is strictly interwoven with the Brahmani-
cal socio-religious order, laying more emphasis on performing one’s svadharma,
a line of discourse completely missing in the early Śaiva works.94 A similar ten-
dency can already be observed, though with a lesser level of pervasiveness, in the
earliest works of the Śivadharma corpus, the Śivadharmaśāstra and Śivadha-
rmottara, that attempt to integrate the teachings on the varṇāśrama into the Śaiva
world view by creating a parallel system of ‘Śaiva life-stages’ (śivāśrama), whose
members correspond to those of the traditional post-Vedic normative literature,
but are qualified by adjectives and compounds specifying their Śaiva affiliation.95
However, this idea seems to be more mature in the Śivadharmottara than in the
Śivadharmaśāstra, which follows an agenda of propagating a Śaiva social order
||
94 See Mirnig forthcoming.
95 See Śivadharmottara, chapter 12, as well as Śivadharmaśāstra, chapter 11. For more details,
see De Simini 2016a, 52ff.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 645
that more radically transcends the Brahmanical norm.96 The Śivadharmottara, by
contrast, has some clear connections to the Mahābhārata and, thus, to the
Vaiṣṇava milieu in which the latter was composed, by using, in its chapter 3 on
the jñānayoga, verses and notions that are also traceable in the Bhagavadgītā.
This trend towards a broader inclusivism into a Śaiva world view, which the
Śivadharmottara had developed in a more systematic way also for reasons of
proselytism, is thus especially discernible in these later works that form the
Śivadharma corpus, such as the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and the Lalitavistara,
reflecting a cultural context that saw each work complementing the more radical
Śaiva position by providing a scriptural layer that linked the Śaiva ritual sphere
with the Vaiṣṇava one.
The choice of the Mahābhārata as the main source of inspiration suits this
agenda on several levels. The Mahābhārata itself is a text that is closely linked to
Vaiṣṇava devotionalism; however, in the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda of the
Anuśāsanaparvan, the epics accommodate Śaiva precepts and myths in a broader
Vaiṣṇava context. This text thus provides an ideal template for a reverse opera-
tion in the Śaiva corpus. The core of this process is the incorporation of Vaiṣṇava
devotional material, such as that of the Anuśāsanaparvan or the Vaiṣṇavadha-
rmaśāstra. The juxtaposition of Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava materials within these works
is striking, and is epitomized in chapter 32 of the Lalitavistara in the propagation
of devotion to Harihara, which also characterized the religious landscape of the
Kathmandu Valley. It is in this area that we locate the composition of our texts,
and it is thus to this context that we have to link the religious and cultural facets
emerging from them.
Already from the earliest layers of recorded history, the Licchavi period (c. 4th–
th
8 centuries CE), we find a strong presence of both Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava religious
communities in the Kathmandu Valley. Thus, for instance, the earliest major tem-
ples—the Śaiva Paśupatināth and Vaiṣṇava Chāṅgu Nārāyaṇa temples—are both
sites of royal inscriptions as well as recipients of the same amount of funding
from the royal budget in the late 6th century, suggesting that they are somehow
considered on equal footing.97 While these pieces of evidence precede the com-
position of our texts by centuries, we can already see a similar attempt to foster
some sort of harmony between the Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava religious communities
||
96 Thus, for instance, the first chapter of the Śivadharmaśāstra explicitly asserts the superiority
of the śivadharma over the Vedic religious sphere, claiming that even as a mleccha or dog-eater
one may attain the status of the highest Brahmin by following the Śivadharma. See Mirnig forth-
coming.
97 Cf LA 77. See also Mirnig 2013, 340.
646 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
amongst the earliest records in the Valley, using the same theme of the combined
deity Harihara that we find alluded to in our text. Thus, in saṃvat 487 (565 CE), a
certain Svāmivarta established a sculpture of Śaṅkaranārāyaṇa (i.e. Harihara) in
the area of the Paśupatināth temple, describing the fusion of the two deities into
one body while their wives Parvatī and Lakṣmī look upon them,98 and referring
to this combined deity as the ‘cause of the origin, maintenance and annihilation
of the entire universe’,99 similar to the cosmic principle advocated in our texts.
The motivation of bridging the communities that we suspect behind our text is
made more explicit in Svāmivārta’s record, in which he claims that Śiva and
Viṣṇu have become one single body in order to remove the confusion that arises
by having to choose one over the other.100
On the basis of art-historical material, the argument had been put forward
that on a popular devotional level, Viṣṇu was at times even more prominent than
Śiva,101 and thus Vaiṣṇavism constitutes an integral part of the religious life in the
Valley despite Śaivism's predominance on a political level. We have many images
produced in the Licchavi period and after, besides the Harihara image, that relate
scenes or themes of Viṣṇu iconography and can also be linked to our texts. For
instance, an extremely popular motive is the Jalāśayana Viṣṇu, depicting the God
in his cosmic sleep;102 when comparing this to our texts, we find that the theme of
Viṣṇu at the end of the cosmic cycle and the reabsorption of all the worlds into
him is a common motive. Śiva, on the other hand, is given the role of producing
the world.
The field of iconography may indeed provide some further evidence for the
phenomenon analyzed in the preceding pages. The manuscripts of the
Śivadharma corpus were not solely conceived as carriers of text, but also as ob-
jects of art, and as such they offer a relevant contribution to the knowledge and
study of religious iconography. Unlike contemporary Buddhist manuscripts, the
iconographic program of the Śivadharma manuscripts is not developed through
illustrations painted on the folios, but is exclusively focused on the inner space
of the wooden covers in which the manuscripts are encased. In the few cases in
||
98 LA 50, lines 1–2: patyor nnau paśya he śrīr yyugalam amithunaṃ śūlabhṛcchārṅgapāṇyor ekai-
kasyātra kin tan na sukaram anayos tau yad ekatra pṛktau | mūrttityā<gena> nūnaṃ sakhi mada-
naripor evam uktvā bhavānyā yo dṛṣṭo jātu tasmai satatam iha namos tv arddhaśaurīśvarāya ||.
99 LA 50, line 5: sakalabhuvanasambhavashititpralayakāraṇam [...] śaṅkaranārāyaṇasvāminaṃ.
100 LA 50, lines 7–8: bhinne puṃsāṃ jagati ca tathā devatābhaktibhāve pakṣagrāhabhramita-
manasāṃ pakṣavicchittihetoḥ ity arddhābhyāṃ samuparacitaṃ yan murārīśvarābhyām ekaṃ
rūpaṃ śaradi jaghanaśyāmagauraṃ [...]
101 Slusser 1982, 239.
102 Slusser 1982, 241–243.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 647
Fig. 6: UL Add. 1645, original wooden cover, inner side, scene with Śiva, Pārvatī, and Nandin.
Fig. 7: UL Add. 1645, original wooden cover, inner side, scene with Viṣṇu, Lakṣmī, and Garuḍa.
which these have survived,103 as is also the case of our manuscript G 4077, we
observe that the main decorative motifs are represented by scenes of liṅga wor-
ship and/or representations of lay devotees worshipping deities, among which
Śiva, along with his consort Pārvatī and his mount Nandi, is assigned a central
position. This would thus qualify our manuscripts as preeminently Śaiva objects,
with the cult of Śiva being clearly identified with the veneration of both the God’s
iconic and aniconic forms. At the same time, traces of Vaiṣṇavism are not absent
from the iconographic programs of the surviving covers, as there are at least two
specimens in which the cult of Viṣṇu is attributed either equal or even greater
importance than the one of Śiva. One such example is the manuscript of the Cam-
bridge University Library Add.1645, dated NS 259, whose original wooden covers
have a very peculiar design in comparison to the other extant specimens: instead
of decorating the entire oblong space of the covers, dividing them into panels,
this manuscript only has one central illustration on each cover, with the rest of
the surface being painted in red. These illustrations consist in the group of Śiva,
Pārvatī and Nandi on the inner panel of the front cover (Fig. 6), and Viṣṇu being
worshipped by Garuḍa and Lakṣmī on the inner face of the back cover (Fig. 7).
Thus Add.1645 symbolizes a Śaiva-Vaiṣṇava unity in the devotional practice by
representing the two deities equally as objects of devotion, although one might
argue that the God represented on the front side may be the one who is attributed
||
103 For a brief survey, see De Simini 2016a, 206–207.
648 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
higher importance. Another case that is worthy of mention, but on which we can-
not be so specific because we could not directly inspect the object, is that of the
wooden covers of ‘a Śivadharma manuscript’ mentioned by Pal without further
attribution, and generically dated by him to the 13th century.104 These covers, of
which we can see some partial black and white reproductions as figures 27–28 in
Pal 1970, represent the ten manifestations of Viṣṇu. Unfortunately, we do not
know to which manuscript they used to belong, and considering the fact that Pal
calls this manuscript a Śivapurāṇa in the text105 (but Śivadharma in the captions
of the pictures), we have to be very careful in dealing with this piece of evidence.
If the attribution of these covers to a Śivadharma (or a Śivapurāṇa) manuscript
could ever be confirmed, this would be a case of a manuscript of a Śaiva work
being decorated with Vaiṣṇava iconography, thus achieving the synthesis at
which works such as the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, the Umottarasaṃvāda and the
Lalitavistara aimed. The study of the iconographic program of these manuscripts
is still in progress and might reveal more relevant clues in the future. A big inter-
pretive obstacle is represented by the possibility that the covers might actually be
later than the manuscripts themselves,106 or not originally have belonged to those
manuscripts, but were mistakenly associated with them by library curators.
While the latter case would hopelessly affect our interpretation, the case of the
covers being produced later than the manuscripts, though at any rate intention-
ally realized for encasing a certain object, would only have an influence on the
dating, and not on the general hermeneutic framework. Since these manuscripts
are also objects of private and public devotion, we expect to see in the decorations
of their covers, the most external part and thus the one that is also physically
most exposed to the devotion of the bhaktas, a program that furthers or is at least
coherent with the (perceived) aims of its texts.
Despite the strong presence of Vaiṣṇavism and its relevance in some of the
texts forming the Śivadharma corpus as well as in contemporary iconography, we
know that, on an institutional level, it was the sphere of Śiva that maintained
close links with the ruling elite from the time of Aṃśuvarman onwards,107 as can
also be traced through the centuries in inscriptions as well as manuscript colo-
phons.108 This may account for the robust production of manuscripts of the
Śivadharma corpus (while texts such as the Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra appear to
||
104 Pal 1970, figs 27–28.
105 Pal 1970, 65.
106 Losty 1980, 21.
107 Mirnig 2013.
108 Petech 1984.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 649
have gotten lost), but it could also explain why some Vaiṣṇava groups were trying
to disguise their own cults within the framework of the dharma of Śiva. The in-
corporation of this important aspect of Vaiṣṇava devotionalism, an operation
that was planned and fulfilled by some of the Nepalese works of the Śivadharma
corpus, may be one of the key aspects that contributed to the success of the cor-
pus, but may also be one of the reasons why the corpus emerged at all. We know
that the Śivadharmaśāstra and the Śivadharmottara had an autonomous trans-
mission in India, being associated in some rare cases, but mostly transmitted as
independent works. The reasons why more texts were associated with them once
they reached the Kathmandu Valley, some possibly composed expressly to be-
come part of a broader collection of works, are still largely unknown. The study
of the Lalitavistara, along with that of the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda and, partly,
the Umottarasaṃvāda, seems however to suggest that the formation of the
Śivadharma corpus might also have responded to the need local Nepalese com-
munities had of harmonizing Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism, though within a frame-
work that could still clearly be identified as Śaiva, given that this was ultimately
the cult associated with monarchical power.
Within this broader framework, we can thus clearly see what could have been
the mission of our Lalitavistara. Drawing from pre-existing sources, this was one
of several contemporary works pursuing the objective of harmonizing aspects of
Śaiva and Vaiṣṇava dharma, although this synthesis is often simply achieved by
juxtaposing diverse materials in an unsystematic combination. On the other
hand, in the 10th and 11th centuries, the Śivadharma corpus was still being system-
atized. One of the redactors must have included this work, which was judged co-
herent with the general purposes of the composition of the corpus, only to be re-
jected by all the other agents in the vast manuscript production and transmission
of the Śivadharma corpus. On the basis of the study presented in the preceding
pages, we can speculate that this rejection came to pass because the work was
too close to the Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, but its structure less coherent. At the
same time, the higher level of ambiguity that we have observed in the Lalitavi-
stara might have played an important role in the choice of rejecting this work
from the Śivadharma corpus. The Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda, which uses most of
the materials included in the Lalitavistara, adopted a more unequivocal Śaiva
frame, even just by more systematically identifying the two speakers as Umā and
Maheśvara throughout the work. This must have been very evocative in the minds
of contemporary readers, as one of the most popular images of the Valley bears
exactly the same imagery as expressed by our text, namely that of Umāmahe-
śvara, depicting Śiva and Parvatī in embrace on the mountainside (Fig. 8). Once
650 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Fig. 8: Umāmaheśvara image located in the Paśupatināth temple area, Kathmandu, Nepal.
again, the cultural milieu of medieval Nepal provides themes and motifs that in-
teract and complement its rich textual production.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 651
References
Abbreviations and sigla
AP Anuśāsanaparvan
ĀśP Āśvamedhikaparvan
LA Vajracharya 1973
LV Lalitavistara
NAK National Archives of Kathmandu
NGMPP Nepalese-German Manuscript Preservation Project
N Manuscript NAK 5-892, (NGMPP A 12/3)
N Manuscript NAK 5–737 (NGMPP A 3/3=A 1081/5)
N Manuscript NAK 1–1075 (NGMPP B 7/3=A 1082/2)
N Manuscript NAK 6–7 (NGMPP A 1028/4)
N Manuscript NAK 3–393 (NGMPP A 1082/3)
NS nepālasaṃvat = year given according to a lunisolar calendar attested in Nepal,
starting in the month of Kārtika (October–November), 878 CE
UL Cambridge University Library
UMS Umāmaheśvarsaṃvāda
US Umottarasaṃvāda
Conventions and Symbols
<> enclose expected letters
[] enclose foliation and line numbers; in the collated texts, square brackets
enclose variant readings
+ in the transcriptions, it indicates unreadable akṣaras
wavy underline in the transcriptions, it indicates damaged akṣaras
| daṇḍa
|| double daṇḍa
• stringhole
: linefiller
✥ puṣpikā
? uncertain reading
Q decoration:
652 | Florinda De Simini and Nina Mirnig
Secondary sources
De Simini, Florinda (2016a), Of Gods and Books. Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the
Manuscript Cultures of Premodern India (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 8), Berlin: De
Gruyter. Also available online as an open-access publication at the following link:
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/472498 (last time accessed:
18/2/2017).
De Simini, Florinda (2016b), ‘Śivadharma Manuscripts from Nepal and the Making of a Śaiva
Corpus’, in Michael Friedrich and Cosima Schwarke (eds), One-Volume Libraries: Com-
posite and Multiple-Text Manuscripts (Studies in Manuscript Cultures 9), Berlin: De
Gruyter, 233–286. Also available online as an open-access publication at the following
link: https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/476788 (last time accessed:
18/2/2017).
De Simini, Florinda (2016c), ‘Long Live the King (and His Manuscripts!). A Story of Ritual and
Power from Medieval Kathmandu’. in Andreas Janke (ed.), Manuscripts of the Month
2015/16. Hamburg, Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. Available online at the
following link: http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-hamburg.de/
mom/2016_01_mom_e.html (last time accessed: 18/2/2017).
De Simini, Florinda (2017), ‘When Lachmann’s method meets the Dharma of Śiva: Common
Errors, Scribal Interventions, and the Transmission of the Śivadharma Corpus’”, in Vin-
cenzo Vergiani, Daniele Cuneo and Camillo Formigatti (eds), Indic Manuscript Cultures
through the Ages: Material, Textual, and Historical Investigations (Studies in Manu-
script Cultures 14), Berlin: De Gruyter, 505–547.
Grünendahl, Reinhold (1984), Viṣṇudharmāḥ. Precepts for the Worship of Viṣṇu, Part 2.
Adhyāyas 44-81. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
Kim, Jinah (2013), Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book
Cult in South Asia. Berkeley–Los Angeles–London, University of California Press
Losty, Jeremiah P. (1980), The Art of the Book in India, London: The British Library.
Naraharinath, Yogī (1998), Paśupatimatam: Śivadharmamahāśāstram, Paśupatinā-
thadarśanam. Kāshṭhamaṇḍapaḥ [Kathmandu], Bṛhadādhyātmikaparishadaḥ.
Mirnig, Nina (2013), ‘Favoured by the Venerable Lord Paśupati. Tracing the Rise of a New Tu-
telary Deity in Epigraphic Expressions of Power in Early Medieval Nepal’, in Indo-Iranian
Journal, 56: 324–347.
Mirnig, Nina (forthcoming), ‘Rudras on Earth in the Śivadharmaśāstra: Creating Śaiva Com-
munities in Early Medieval South-Asia’, in Nina Mirnig, Marion Rastelli and Vincent
Eltschinger (eds), Tantric Communities in Context, Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sci-
ences Press.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1970), Vaiṣṇava Iconology in Nepal: A Study in Art and Religion with 110
Illustrations, Calcutta: Asiatic Society.
Pal, Pratapaditya (1978), The Arts of Nepal. Vol. 2: Paintings, Leiden: Brill.
Petech, Luciano (1984), Medieval History of Nepal (c. 750-1482), Rome: Istituto Italiano per il
Medio ed Estremo Oriente (Is.Me.O.), Serie Orientale Roma LIV [first edition: 1958].
Slusser, Mary Shepherd (1982), Nepal Mandala. A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley,
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Shastri, Haraprasad (1928), A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Govern-
ment Collection Under the Care of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. V: Purāṇa Manu-
scripts. Calcutta: The Asiatic Society of Bengal.
On the Production of Śaiva Works and their Manuscripts in Medieval Nepal | 653
Vajracharya, Dhanavajra (1973). Licchavikālakā Abhilekha. Kathmandu: Nepāla ra Eśiyālī
Anusandhāna Kendra, Tribhuvana Viśvavidyālaya.
Vergiani, Vincenzo, Daniele Cuneo, and Camillo Formigatti (2011–14). Cambridge Digital Li-
brary, Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts: <http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/collec-
tions/sanskrit>
Lata Mahesh Deokar
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of
Subhūticandra
Abstract: The Buddhist monk-scholar Subhūticandra (c. 1060–1140 CE) is known
as the author of the commentary Kavikāmadhenu (c. 1110–1130 CE) on the Amara-
kośa. He appears to have also written a grammatical text called Subantaratnākara.
There are altogether twelve manuscripts entitled Subantaratnākara: ten in Nepal
and two in Cambridge. Out of these, six are indeed of the Subantaratnākara, while
the remaining six are of four different texts, which are somewhat related to the Suba-
ntaratnākara. There are two Tibetan translations of the text. Many of these manu-
scripts mention Subhūticandra as the author of the text. There also exists a com-
mentary on the Subantaratnākara. The article discusses the contents of these
manuscripts, and the Tibetan translations and their mutual relationship. It also
deals with the issue of the authorship of the different texts available in these man-
uscripts. In this connection, the article also discusses the issue of Subhūticandra’s
common authorship of the Subantaratnākara and the Kavikāmadhenu.
1 Introduction
The Buddhist monk-scholar Subhūticandra (c. 1060–1140 CE) is known to us from
his Kavikāmadhenu commentary1 (c. 1110–1130 CE) on the Amarakośa.2 He was
one of the teachers of Pa tshab Lo tsā ba Tshul khrims rgyal mtshan (d. after 1130),
who had studied the Āryasaddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra with Subhūticandra at
Vikramaśīla. According to Pa tshab Lo tsā ba, Subhūticandra was ‘a scholar of
grammar, poetics, and “the modality of the Sanskrit language”, (legs par sbyar
ba’i skad kyi lugs la mkhas pa), whereby the latter phrase may, but only may, be
a clumsy way of designating lexicography’ (van der Kuijp 2009, 8). An analysis
of the citations from Subhūticandra’s Kavikāmadhenu substantiates Pa tshab Lo
tsā ba’s statement. Out of at least 228 texts from which Subhūticandra quotes,
fifty-three are grammatical works, six are on poetics, and thirty-three lexicons.
||
1 The work of a critical edition of this text has been undertaken by Prof. Mahesh A. Deokar and
myself.
2 For a detailed discussion on Subhūticandra’s date and place and his Kavikāmadhenu com-
mentary, cf. Deokar Lata 2014, 1–91.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-020, © 2017 L. Deokar, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
656 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
In the field of Sanskrit grammar, Candragomin’s Cāndravyākaraṇa, and its
commentarial literature, namely, the Cāndravṛtti of Dharmadāsa, the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā of Ratnamati, and the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā of Pūrṇa-
candra, are the principal authorities for Subhūticandra. On some important gram-
matical issues, he also brings in the discussions taking place in the Pāṇinian
grammatical tradition. Apart from the main texts belonging to this tradition such
as the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the Vyākaraṇamahābhāṣya and the Kāśikāvṛtti, Subhūticandra
cites from the Bhāgavṛtti of Vimalamati (625 CE)3 and the Anunyāsa of Indumitra
(before 1100 CE).4 Being a junior contemporary of Puruṣottamadeva, Subhūtican-
dra cites from the former’s Bhāṣāvṛtti, the Jñāpakasamuccaya, and the Lakṣya-
lakṣaṇadurghaṭa. One more important grammarian whom Subhūticandra quotes is
his senior contemporary Maitreyarakṣita. The third important grammatical tradi-
tion, namely, that of Śarvavarman’s Kātantravyākaraṇa has also found its way in
to the Kavikāmadhenu. Subhūticandra cites from Śarvavarman’s and Vararuci’s
Kātantravyākaraṇa as well as from the commentarial literature which includes the
Durgaṭīkā and the Kātantraviśeṣākhyāna. Among the Prakrit grammarians, he
quotes from Hevvara’s commentary on Vararuci’s Prākṛtaprakāśa and the
Prākṛtasaṃjīvanī of Vasantarāja. There are two more grammars of Prakrit that Sub-
hūticandra has referred to, one of which is the Prākṛtānuśāsana. Subhūticandra re-
fers to the author of this text by the honorific title Gomin. The rule he has cited from
this text is found in the Prākṛtānuśāsana of Puruṣottama.5 The second text is
Saṁskṛtabhavaprākṛtānuśāsana, which Subhūticandra has ascribed to Candrago-
min. Sanskritists until this date do not seem to be aware of any such text composed
by Candragomin. Apart from these, Subhūticandra also quotes from a number of
texts related to lists of verbal roots (dhātupāṭha), handbooks on grammatical gen-
der (liṅgānuśāsana), and manuals on phonetics.
On the background of Subhūticandra’s in-depth knowledge of the Sanskrit and
the Prakrit grammatical traditions, I was curious to find out if there was a grammat-
ical text ascribed to him. This curiosity brought me to the reference to a text entitled
Subantaratnākara ascribed to Subhūticandra in J. P. Dwivedi’s book Saṃskṛt ke
bauddh vaiyākaraṇ (‘Buddhist Grammarians, Commentators and Tibetan Transla-
tors of Sanskrit Grammar’). According to the description of one of the manuscripts
given by the NGMCP, namely, B 35–23 (NAK 4/148), this text deals with ‘the declen-
sion of nouns and adjectives (subanta), following the Cāndra school of grammar.’6
||
3 For a detailed discussion on Vimalamati and the Bhāgavṛtti, cf. Dwivedi 1987, 194–202.
4 For a detailed discussion on Indumitra and the Anunyāsa, cf. Dwivedi 1987, 231–232.
5 ādīdūtām alope saṃyoge hrasvaś ca | (IV.7 [= 126], p. 5).
6 http://catalogue.ngmcp.uni-hamburg.de/wiki.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 657
Bruno Liebich (1895, 7, 34–35) was probably the first modern scholar to mention
and discuss the Subantaratnākara based on its Tibetan translation (Sup mtha’ rin
chen ’byung gnas). Unfortunately, he had an incomplete translation at hand. As a
result, he could not obtain any information regarding the author of the text. More
than a century later, Verhagen (2001, 132–136) discussed this text in greater detail
based on the revised translation of the Subantaratnākara preserved in the collected
works of Si tu paṇ chen. In 2001, in an article entitled ‘Bhikṣu Haribhadra’s Vibhak-
tikārikā. An Unknown Grammatical Text Edited with a Brief Introduction (First
Part)’, Wezler (2001, 249) commented: ‘CG 37 and 38 (Subantaratnākara /
Vyākaraṇa-Subanta): The author’s name, I should like to add, is Subhūti.’ How-
ever, Wezler has not clearly mentioned the reasons for ascribing both these texts to
Subhūti(candra).
Dwivedi (1987, 289), who is probably the first scholar to discuss the Sanskrit
manuscripts of the Subantaratnākara, informs us that there exist five manuscripts
of this text in Nepal. Since I was already working on Subhūticandra’s Ka-
vikāmadhenu, I decided to collect and edit the manuscripts of the Subantaratnākara
as a sequel to my ongoing research. Thanks to the Nepalese German Manuscript
Cataloguing Project (NGMCP), it has been possible to have access to all the availa-
ble manuscripts of the Subantaratnākara in Nepal. I am grateful to the late Dr Al-
brecht Hanisch, the then Resident Representative of the NGMCP, for promptly
providing me with all the necessary information and making arrangements to send
the digital copies of all the available manuscripts through Namraj Gurung, who de-
serves special thanks for the same. In 2013, in an article ‘Subhūticandra: A Forgot-
ten Scholar of Magadha’, I briefly introduced the manuscript materials and rec-
orded some of my early impressions of the text. In the meanwhile, after completing
the first volume of the Kavikāmadhenu, I began reading afresh the manuscripts of
the Subantaratnākara and the Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama, another work also
ascribed to Subhūticandra. This reading proved some of my earlier remarks obso-
lete, which made it necessary for me to present the analysis of the manuscripts ma-
terial in a revised form. Here in the following pages, I wish to present to the schol-
arly world my fresh analysis of the same. I will start this analysis with a description
of altogether six manuscripts:
658 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
2 Sanskrit manuscripts of the Subantaratnākara
1. NAK 1/468 (Reel No. A 1311-5 = A 1162-10) is a palm-leaf manuscript (33 × 5 cm)
containing 60 folios with 4–7 lines per folio. The manuscript is written in the
Nepālākṣara Although there is no real physical damage to the manuscript, some
folios are not clearly legible. At a few places, akṣaras are partly rubbed off, while
at some other places the text is not readable due to the spreading of ink.
The name of the text Suvantaratnākaraḥ in both the Nāgarī as well as the Ro-
man script appears on a piece of paper pasted on the outer side of the wooden
cover. On this paper, we also find the number assigned to the manuscript,
namely, Pra. 468 (in the Nāgarī script) and No. A 468 (in Roman letters and Arabic
numberals). We also find the date of the manuscript, namely, visaṁ 112 (in the
Nāgarī script). The inner side of the wooden cover contains a didactic verse writ-
ten in the Nepālākṣara script:
dhanadhānyaprayogeṣu tathā vidyārjjaneṣu7 ca |
āhāravyavahāreṣu tyaktalajjo (! ˚lajjaḥ) sadā bhavet ||
(Cāṇakyarājanītiśāstra 3.21)
This side also preserves the date of the manuscript, namely, visaṁ 112 written by a
different hand in the Nāgarī script.
In the top margin of fol. 1r, we find the following inscriptions: Pra. 468, patra
60, Subantaratnākara and vi. saṁ. 112 (all written in the Nāgarī script). The folio
contains two verses. The handwriting of these verses is different from the handwrit-
ing of the inscriptions on 1r as well as that of the text of the Subantaratnākara. The
first three lines of this portion contain the following verse:
āsā (!) nāma nadī manoharajalā tṛṣṇātaṃ(!)raṅgākulā
rāgagrāhavatī vitakra(!)vāhagā dhikyaṃ mahābhoga(2)niḥ (!) |
mohāvarttasudu(s)sahātigahanā yā tuṃgaciṃtāṭaṭaiḥ
tasyā[ḥ] pāragatā visu(!)dhamana(3)sā naṃdatī (!) nandati jāgesvarā(ḥ) (!) || (fol. 1r 1–3)
This verse is found in Bhartṛhari’s Śatakatrayī (verse 173). It reads:
āśā nāma nadī manorathajalā tṛṣṇātaraṅgākulā
rāgagrāhavatī vitarkavihagā dhairyadrumadhvaṃsinī |
mohāvartasudustarātigahanā prottuṅgacintātaṭī
tasyāḥ pāragatā vibudhamanaso nandantu yogīśvarāḥ ||
||
7 The printed edition reads vidyāsaṃgrahaṇeṣu.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 659
The River of Hope having Desire for its water, Greed for agitating waves, Passion for its sharks,
Sceptic reasoning for birds, Patience for the tottering trees on its sides, and worldly Care and Anx-
ieties for its lofty banks, is very difficult to be crossed on account of its total whirlpool of Illusion.
Those pure-minded Yogi-s who have swum over to the opposite bank of this mighty stream are
therefore leading a safe and happy life. (P. G. Nath’s translation; Sternbach III, 1304)
This verse is followed by one more verse, which I am unable to read at present.
Isaacson suggests that ‘someone at some point wrote [these] two verses on the orig-
inally blank 1r.’ (email correspondence dated 29/01/2017)
The actual text of the Subantaratnākara begins on fol. 1v with the benedictory
verse paying homage to Śākyamuni Buddha. This is preceded by homage to
Vāgīśvara (namo vāgīśvarāya), which, in all probability, is the homage paid by the
scribe. The manuscript is incomplete. The last word derived in this manuscript is
gorakṣa. The text ends on fol. 60 with the words gorakṣaśabdāt supaḥ so(r) lopaḥ |
padānta- . The last folio preserves an inscription atha preceded by an auspicious
sign written in the Maithili script. Most folios are foliated with both letter-numerals
as well as numerals. The majority of folios have letter numerals in the left-hand
margin and numerals in the right-hand margin of the verso side of the folio, but in
the case of some folios these are inverted. Other folios only have numerals in either
side of the verso. The title of the text is found on fol. 19r1 in a final rubric to the
section:
uktāḥ (!) ajantā halantāś ca puṃsi |
iti subantaratnākare puliṅgakāṇḍaḥ samāptaḥ |
The other three manuscripts of the Subantaratnākara do not mention the name of
the text in the corresponding final rubric.8
2. NAK 4/148 (Reel No. B 35–23) is a palm-leaf manuscript (31.5 5 cm) contain-
ing 77 folios with 5–7 lines per folio. The script is Nepālākṣara. On a few folios, the
writing is partially rubbed off. In quite a number of instances, the scribe has indi-
cated lacunas by filling up these portions with auspicious signs. The manuscript
begins with a benediction to Daśabala ([na]maḥ śrīdaśabalāya) and a benedictory
verse paying homage to Śākyamuni Buddha. The manuscript is complete. It ends
||
8 uktā ajantā halantāś ca puṃsi saviśeṣāḥ | pula(!)liṅgakāṇḍaḥ (pulliṅga˚ NAK 4/148) prathamaḥ
samāptaḥ | NAK 4/148 (20r5), Or.148 (25v2–3); uktā’jantā halantāś ca pusi (!) viśeṣaḥ (!) | puṃ-
liṅgakāṇḍaḥ samāptaḥ prathamaḥ | C 54-7(1) (Kesar 582) (27b3–4).
660 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
with three concluding verses, followed by the final rubric to the text9 and the colo-
phon.10 According to the latter, the manuscript was copied for a certain monk bear-
ing the title Śrījñāna of the Śrīdharmadhātu Mahāvihāra. The foliation consists of
letter-numerals in the middle of the left-hand margin and numerals in the middle
of the right-hand margin of the verso (only on folios 1–12). From folio 13 onwards,
only the numerals appear in the left-hand margin of the verso. Exposures 2 and 79
show the back of folios 1 and 77 respectively, which are used as flyleaves, showing
some other inscriptions in Nepālākṣara characters. In the bottom of fol. 77r, another
hand has added: namaḥ śrīdasa(!)balāya | preceded by an auspicious sign in the
Nepālākṣara script.
3. NAK 5-7989 (Reel No. B 35-30) (30 × 5 cm) is a palm-leaf manuscript containing
12 folios with 5 lines per folio. The script is Nepālākṣara. The manuscript is incom-
plete and damaged. At many places, the akṣaras are rubbed off. The text preserved
in this manuscript is not continuous. These are stray leaves. The second image of
the exposure 2771 preserves a final rubric to the first section:
cāndravyākara(5) .. .. .. yādhyāyasya prathamaḥ pādaḥ samāptaḥ |
Most probably, based on this final rubric, the NGMCP has listed this as a manuscript
of the Cāndravyākaraṇa. In the bottom margin of the first image of this exposure,
we find an inscription by a second hand in Nāgarī script:
cāndravyākaraṇasambandhiśabdarūpāvalīpada(..)(..)
While discussing this manuscript in his Verschiedene neu-entdeckte Texte des
Cāndravyākaraṇa und ihre Verfasser (Studien zum Cāndravyākaraṇa II), Oberlies
as named this text as Cāndra-vyākaraṇa-sambandhi-śabda-rūpāvalī apparently
based on the above-mentioned inscription. He has quoted two passages from this
manuscript, which I reproduce below (Oberlies 1992, 177–178):
etasya cānvadeśaḥ (sic!) dvitīyāyāñ caina iti etacchabdasya ya etaśabdas tasya kathitānu-
kathanaviṣaye dvitīyāyāṃ ṭākāre osi ca (! sic) enādeśo bhavati / etaṃ cchātraṃ vedam
adhyāpaya / || atho enaṃ vyākaraṇam adhyāpaya / iha kasmān na bhavati / etam ātaṃ ṅitaṃ
vidyād iti pūrvavad anvādeśābhāvāt / tathā hi īṣadarthe kriyāyoge [/] maryādābhividhau ca ya
itīṣa || dādiṣv ākārasya nirdeśaṅ kṛtvā etamātaṃ ṅitaṃ vidyād iti vedanakriyāyām āhuḥ / karm-
abhāvo vidhīyate / atho etau atho enān [/] atho enat / atho enāḥ / [svaṃ] / a || tho enayā ... hri /
||
9 kṛtir iyaṃ paṇḍitasthavirasubhūticandrasya | granthapramāṇa[m a]sya sahasra 1 śata 4 gran-
tha 30 likhitam idam | (77r2–3).
10 śrīdharmmadhātumahāvihārasya | krammaśrījñānasya bhikṣu(ḥ) pustako ʼyaṃm (!) idaṃ
likhitam iti | (77r2–3).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 661
striyāṃ / etā ene [/] enā / enayā / enayoḥ / napuṃsake / dvitīyāyām iti viṣayasaptamī .. [na]
pūrvavad ... ty enādeśānivṛtti...k. [t(y)ad]ādyatvā || [bh]āvaḥ / vā virāme [C 6.4.149] iti dasya
(sic! [lies: jhasya?]) cartvaṃ / enat ene enāni / enena enayoḥ // [2r1–5]
etasya cānvadeśe dvitīyāyāṃ caina idamśabdasyānvādeśaviṣayasya dvitīyāyām ṭausi ca
enādeśaḥ / i.. / gurupūja.. / a.. ena[ṃ] /// || [bh]ojaya / atho enau / atho enān / anena chāttreṇa
chando ’dhītaṃ / atho enena vyākaraṇam adhītaṃ / iha kasmān na bhavati / ayaṃ daṇḍo
harāneneti yatra kiñcid vidhāya vākya /// || ..]ṇa nukaraṇānyad (sic!) upadiśyate so ’nvādeśaḥ
/ iha tu vastunirdeśamātraṃ kṛtvā ekam e(va vi)dhānaṃ tathā hi ayaṃ daṇḍa ity aneneti
haraṇakriyāyā[ñ ca] daṇḍasya karaṇabhāv[o] /// / [5r2–4]
I was able to trace these passages to folios 68r3–68v2 and 67r3–6 respectively of
the manuscript NAK 4/148. Verhagen (2001, 133) had already identified these pas-
sages in the Tibetan translation of the Subantaratnākara as preserved in the col-
lected works of Si tu paṇ chen (60r6–60v3; 59v1–4). However, being misled by
Oberlies’ (1992, 176–179) identification of this manuscript as Cāndravyākaraṇasa-
mbandhiśabdarūpāvalī, Verhagen (2001, 133) remarked:
[a] manuscript of the Sanskrit original, bearing the title Cāndra-vyākaraṇa-sambandhi-śabda-
rūpāvalī, has been brought to light (...) .11
I wonder why Verhagen did not raise any question about this identification even after
tracing the said passages to the Tibetan translation of the Subantaratnākara. The fact
that the above-mentioned passages match with the manuscripts of the Subanta-
ratnākara and its Tibetan translation proves beyond doubt that these are the stray
leaves of a manuscript of the Subantaratnākara, and not those of a previously un-
known text as was earlier thought by Oberlies.
As mentioned earlier, this manuscript contains altogether 12 folios. The respec-
tive exposure numbers are from 2760 to 2772. Out of these, 2760 and 2772 have only
one image while the rest of the exposures have two images. Here follows a table of
folios and their corresponding images along with the word(s) discussed in them
and their approximate parallels in NAK 4/148:
||
11 MS-no. 5-7989, Reel-no. B 35/30, 11.5 ff., 5 lines per side (Verhagen 2001, 133, n. 533).
662 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
Fol. no. Exposure no. Word(s) discussed Approximate parallels in B 35–23 (NAK
4/148)
2760
2761a
2771a pitṛ- 9v
2770b pitṛ-, nṛ-, praśāstṛ- 9v, 10r, 10v
2770a uktā ṛdantāḥ | rai- 10v
2769b go-, glau- 11r, 11v
2769a bhūbhuk- 12v
2768b parivrāṭ- 13v
2767b śikharalū- 41r
2768a śikharalū- 41r
2767a pratyañc- 46r4
2766b tiryak-, viśvadryañc- 46v
2763b bhavat- 53r1
2764a adan- 53v
2766a gaganarudh- 54v6
2765b pīvan- (?) 55v1
2763a bahvap- 56v
2762b bahvap-, arituph- (?) 56v
*69 2765a adas- 66v2
70 (?) 2764b etat- 67r3–6
2762a etat- (f.) 67v6
*71 2761b eka- 68v2
The second image of the exposure 2771 reads as follows:
-viṣyati | yasya punar aṇantaṃ nāma tat(r)āṇ eva | namatuv (?) ity āha | bhāgīrathītyādi |
tasmād divāyāpi (?) matupaṃ vyavasthārthaṃ tan nāmnīti śrayitavyaṃ | tathā vā .. .. .. .. (2)
(na)dyāṃ deśe matub iṣṭaḥ | madhūni sthāna(!)vo ’smin deśe santi madhumān | sthānu(!)mān |
atvasor iti dīrghaḥ | puṃsuṭy ugita iti num | sor lopaḥ | saṃ .. .. .. .. (3) kasyādīny api matvantānīti
saṃjña(!)yām asaṃjña(!)yām vā sāmānyena vidhāsyamāno matup atra saṃjñayām (!)
bhaviṣyatīti | si .. .. .. .. (4) ity āśaṁkyāha | mādhava ityādi | tato noṇ m arthād a(tra) bhaviṣyati
| tan nāmnīti niyamo[ ’]tra (?) | cāndravyāka(raṇe tṛtī)(5)yādhyāyasya prathamaḥ pādaḥ
samāptaḥ | samba(.. ..) prathamāṣāḍha (.. ..) saptamyāṃ likhitam idaṃ puṃsaka-
This appears to be a part of some commentary on the Cāndravṛtti on vuñcha-
ṇkaṭhajilaseniraḍhañṇyayaphakphiñiññyakakṭhakchakīyaḍmatupḍvalacaḥ (CV
3.1.68):
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 663
... Udumbarāvatī, Ikṣumatīti matvantaṁ nadīnāma. Bhāgīrathī, Bhaimarathī, Sauvāstavīty
aṇantam api dṛśyate. Madhumān, Sthāṇumān ityādīny api matvantāni deśanāmāni. Mādhava
ityādīni tu na deśanāmānīti nāto 'ṇ bhaviṣyati.
When I requested Dragomir Dimitrov to crosscheck CVṛ on CV 3.1.68 with Ratnamati’s
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, he compared it with the photographs of the manuscript of
the Pañjikā taken by Rāhula Sāṅkṛtyāyana. In an email dated 23.12.2015, he con-
firmed that ‘[s]o we have one more tiny fragment of this commentary’.
4. Kesar 523 (Reel No. C 49-2) (31.6 × 4.4 cm) is a palm-leaf manuscript. It is writ-
ten in Nepālākṣara script. This is a multi-text manuscript, which includes altogether
five portions of four texts. These are:
a. Amarakośa (31.3 × 4.3 cm), 4 folios; palm-leaf; incomplete, damaged;
Nepālākṣara
b. Amarakośa (31.3 × 4.3 cm), 34 folios; palm-leaf; incomplete, damaged;
Nepālākṣara
c. Kātantravyākaraṇa (31 × 4.5 cm), 1 folio; palm-leaf; Nepālākṣara
d. [Vyākaraṇa] (32.3 × 5 cm), 16 folios; palm-leaf; incomplete, damaged; Maithili
e. Subantaratnākara: This is a palm-leaf manuscript (31.6 × 4.4 cm) containing 40
folios with 4–5 lines per folio. The script is Nepālākṣara. The manuscript is dam-
aged. A few folios are illegible because the letters are rubbed off. The manuscript is
incomplete. It begins with the words (dvijihvā)t padaracanāyāṃ bhayaṃ bha-
vati (2r) which is a part of the second introductory verse of the Subantaratnākara.
The manuscript ends with the derivation of the word prasū: prasūḥ | prasvau |
prasvaḥ | ityādiḥ | (...) (46r5). The foliation consists of letter numerals written in the
left-hand margin as well as numerals in the right-hand margin of the verso side. On
some folios, the numerals are not visible either due to the rubbing off of akṣaras or
the physical damage to the folio. The last folio (46v) preserves two inscriptions:
idaṃ sustakaṃ (! pustakaṃ) idaṁ pustakaṃ, ra 523, kātantraṭīkāyāṃ (..). A close
scrutiny of the exposures belonging to the Amarakośa (‘b’ above) revealed that im-
ages 7924b, 7925a, 7926b and 7927a are, in fact, the exposures of two folios of the
Subantaratnākara, which correspond to folios 24v6–25r7, and 25v4–26r1 of B 35–23
(NAK 4/148). These folios contain the declensions of the words jāyā, jarā, and niśā.
After the analysis of these two folios, I came to the conclusion that these are the
missing folios 37 and 38 of the present manuscript of the Subantaratnākara (Kesar
523e). Thus, we now have a text of the Subantaratnākara including folios 2–32, 34,
36–38, 40, 42–43, and 46.
664 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
5. Kesar 582 (Reel No. C 54-7 and C 55-1) (= C 102-39) (33.1 × 4.5 cm) is a palm-
leaf manuscript containing 118 folios with 5 lines per folio. The script is
Nepālākṣara. The manuscript is damaged. Some folios are partially rubbed off
while others suffer from the spreading of ink. At many places one image is partly
imposed upon another. The manuscript is complete. Before the benedictory verse
paying homage to Śākyamuni Buddha, we can read the akṣaras -devāya. Folios
117r4–117v2 contain three concluding verses, the final rubric to the text12 (117v2–
3) as well as the colophon13 (117v3–118r2). According to the colophon, the scribe’s
name was Māṇikarāja. He copied this manuscript during the reign of king Śrījyo-
timalla, i.e. Jayajyotirmalla (1408–1428). The folios have double foliation: letter-
numerals in the left-hand margin and numerals in the right-hand margin. The
year of the copy is Nepāla Saṃvat 533, which corresponds to 1413 CE. After the
colophon, there are three folios, the contents of which are unclear.
Apart from these manuscripts from Nepal, one manuscript of the Subanta-
ratnākara is preserved in the Cambridge University Library (Or.148).14
6. Or.148 (31 × 5 cm) is a palm-leaf manuscript containing 89 folios with 5 lines
per folio. It is written in the Nepālākṣara. The first and the ninth folios of this man-
uscript are missing. The manuscript begins with kīrttitāḥ | tatrādau tāvad
vipraśabdāt (2r). It ends with the three concluding verses (88r3–6), the final rubric
to the text,15 and colophon.16 The foliation consists of letter-numerals written in the
left-hand margin and of numerals in the right-hand margin of the verso side of a
folio. The manuscript, which is dated Nepāla Saṃvat 540 (= 1420 CE), was copied
by a certain Buddhist monk Dharmaraṣika (sic!) in the Śrīṣaḍakṣarīmahāvihāra in
||
12 kṛtir iyaṁ subhūticandrasya | granthapramāṇam asya sahasra 1 śata 4 grantha 30 |
13 bhīmasyāpi bhaved gaṅge vyāsasya mativibhramaḥ | yathā dṛṣṭan tathā likhitaṃ lekhako nāsti
doṣakaḥ | vahnau vahnau hi vānābde māse phālguṇa(!)kṛṣṇake | tithau (..)dābhidhāne (.. ..)
rīṣebhe śe (..) sūte | rājādhirā(ja)parameśvaradevamūle vidyākalāśa(!)kalanītisuveditasya | (.. .. ..
..) śa(!)kalaśāstrapraveditata(..)śrījyotimallanṛpate khalu lisyato (!)[’]yam | saṃlikhyate
māṇikarāja iti prasiddho mātāpitāsahita(..)āmramake nivāsaḥ | śāstrisuvala(.. .. ..)guṇiṇāṃ pra(..
.. ..) jñānarucirapadanṛnṛmālām | śubham astu jagatām |
14 I am thankful to Vincenzo Vergiani for bringing this manuscript to my notice.
15 kṛtir iyaṃ paṇḍitasthavirasubhūticandrasyaḥ (!) | granthapramāṇa (!) sahasra 1 śata 4 grantha
30 | iti subaṃtagrantha(ḥ) saṃpūrṇṇa(ḥ) | (89r6-89v1)
16 bhagnapṛṣṭ(h)akati(!)grīvaṃ (!) taptadṛstir (!) adhomukhaṃ | kastena (!) likhitaṃ śāstraṃ
jīvavat pratipālayet | nepālahāyanaḥ samvat 540 bhād(r)apadaśukla(2)pañcamyān titho (!)
budhavāśa(!)re svātinakṣatre brahmayoge | rājādhirājaparameśvaraparamabhaṭṭārakaḥ śrīmat-
māneśvarāva(! pa)ralabdhapraś(!)ādaśrīśrījayajyotimalladevasya (3) vijayarājye | śrīmad-
gaṅgūlapatanake śrībaṭakṣarīmahāvihāre śrīśrīśrīlokeśvaraścaraṇasevitabhikṣunā (!) dharm-
maraṣikena (!) svapustakaṃ likhitaṃ śubham astu | (4) sarvvajagatāḥ (!) | (89v1–4).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 665
the reign of the king Jayajyotirmalla. After the colophon, on folio 90, we find the
following stray scribbles related to grammar:
(fol. 90r) āgamo (’)nupaghātī syād ādeśaś copamardakaḥ |
pratyayaḥ paradekaś (!) ca upasargaś ca pūrvagaḥ ||
kriyā karttā tataḥ karma paścād vai kārakāntaram |
yojaneṣāṃ (!) (2) tu vijñeye (!) gadeṣu (!) ca padeṣu ca ||
saṃjñā ca paribhāṣā ca vidhir niyama eva ca |
pratiṣedho (’)dhikāraś ca ṣaḍvidhaṃ sūtralakṣaṇam ||
(90v) mahān uttamaḥ vṛhan vi(sta)ra vṛṣan mṛga
dau (!) nañau ca samākhyotau (!) pratyudāśaprasajyakau (!) |
pratyudāśa (!) sadṛggrāhī prasajyas tu niṣedhakaḥ ||
This manuscript was purchased by Prof. Bendall during his 1898–99 tour in Nepal
(see Formigatti’s contribution in this volume).
3 Tibetan Translations of the Subantaratnākara
(Tibetan: Sup’i mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas)
While working on the Kavikāmadhenu, I had already searched through the Tibetan
Tanjur for any other translated work of Subhūticandra. However, that was in vain.
Now, with the availability of the titles of his works and so much manuscripts mate-
rial at hand, it became possible to search the Tibetan Tanjur once again. The Sna
Tshogs section of the Derge edition preserves an incomplete translation of the Sub-
antaratnākara.17 The translation bears the title Sup’i mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas zhes
bya ba Supadmākaranāma (sic! Subantaratnākaranāma). The text abruptly ends
while explaining the derivation of the word veman, which belongs to the second
section dealing with masculine nouns ending in consonants.
In volume tha of the collected works of Si tu Paṇ chen (1699?–1774) there is a
complete translation of the Subantaratnākara. It consists of 68 folios. According to
the colophon found in this revised translation, the size of the text is 1420 ślokas and
its author is Pa ṇḍi ta chen po gnas brtan zla ba (*Mahāpaṇḍitasthaviracandra?).18
We are further informed that the canonical translation was done by Chos kyi rgyal
||
17 Derge: no. 4430, Fol. 122b3–134a6; Peking: Vol. 149, Mdo-ḥgrel, Ṅo-tshar, 5894, 446b7–460b1.
18 sup’i mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas zhes bya ba ’di ni paṇḍi ta chen po gnas brtan zla bas mdzad
pa’o || (fol. 68r3) ‘This (treatise) entitled “Source of jewels” (on the derivation of forms) ending
in a sUP (suffix) has been written by the great scholar Gnas-brtan-zla-ba [*Sthaviracandra?]’
(Verhagen 2001, 134).
666 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
mtshan dpal bzang po.19 The title page of the scanned copy of the text available on
the website of the Tibetan Buddhist Resource Center erroneously records the trans-
lator as Zhwa lu lo tsā ba Chos skyong bzang po.20 According to Verhagen (2001,
132), this revised translation was done by Si tu Paṇ chen. However, from the reading
of the colophon, I understand that it is not Si tu paṇ chen who actually revised the
work himself, but rather it was Yon tan rgya mtsho who corrected the canonical
translation as far as possible following the instructions of Si tu paṇ chen.21 Be lo has
also provided important assistance in the entire process of revising the earlier trans-
lation.22 Karma Tshe dbang kun khyab prepared the printing blocks of the text in
the monastery of Dpal spungs thub bstan chos ’khor gling. Talking about the awful
state of the canonical translation, Yon tan rgya mtsho remarks that it suffers from
‘very great errors of translation and at intervals there were some gaps remaining
and also [widely diffused =] throughout (the work) there was a multitude of ortho-
graphical errors.’23 (Verhagen 2001, 135). About his own corrections, Yon tan rgya
mtsho says:
If one [could] find an Indian manuscript [of this text] it would be possible to make the final
corrections, but as [I] did not [manage to] find [one], [I] did not have the means to do so (... ?).
||
19 de ltar brda sprod pa tsa ndra pa’i sup mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas ’di lo tsā bā chos kyi rgyal
mtshan dpal bzang pos bod skad du bsgyur pa la ’gyur ... . (fol. 68r4). ‘The preceding (treatise),
this sUB-anta-ratnākara, belonging to the Cāndra (system of) grammar, had been translated into
Tibetan by the translator Chos-kyi-rgyal-mtshan(-dpal-bzaṅ-po).’ (Verhagen 2001, 134). Verha-
gen (2001, 134, n. 538) says that this translator is ‘thus far unidentified.’
20 www.tbrc.org.
21 ’jam mgon bla ma’i gsung gi legs bshad ltar legs par bcos shing rje’i tsa na ṭīg chen mo’i yan
lag zhabs ’degs su dpal spungs thub bstan chos ’khor gling gi chos grar par du bkod pa’i byed pa
po ni ka rma tshe dbang kun khyab ces pa’i da ri dra yis so || ... slad du’ang skyabs rje’i bka’ ltar
yon tan rgya mtsho bdag gis zhu dag lam tsam bgyis mod | ‘According to the aphorisms of the
words of ’Jam-mgon-bla-ma [i.e. Si-tu Paṇ-chen] these (errors) have been corrected. And as [lit. a
foot-support, i.e. an aid scil. for interpretation] auxilliary to the great ṭīkā on Cāndra by the master
[i.e. Si-tu Paṇ-chen] printing blocks [of the present text] have been prepared in the monastery of
Dpal-spuṅs Thub-bstan-chos-’khor-gliṅ by Karma Tshe-dbaṅ-kun-khyab. ... Again, in accordance
with the words of the master who is our refuge, I, Yon-tan-rgya-mtsho, have roughly made correc-
tions.’ (Verhagen 2001, 135)
22 gzhi nas ’gyur skyon che zhing dpe ngan rgyun ’byams mang ba’i thog | par ’di’i ma dpe ma dag
che ba la ’be los kyang zhib cha mdzad grub ’dug cing | ‘But, as there were great errors in the initial
translation [or: great fundamental errors in the translation] and a great multitude of bad [i.e. erro-
neous] examples [in the translation], while moreover grave corruptions [had entered] the original
copy of this xylograph, ’Be-lo has also thoroughly worked through [the text].’ (Verhagen 2001, 135)
23 skyon shin tu che zhing bar skabs ’gar hol khong ’ga’ re las ’dug pa dang | yig nor rgyun ’byams
yang ches mang bar ’dug pa rnams |
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 667
[Therefore?] [I] have made the corrections that were certain [i.e. evidently necessary] in ac-
cordance with the contents of the basic texts on grammar.24 (Verhagen 2001, 136)
4 About the text of the Subantaratnākara
Benediction
The benedictory verse of the Subantaratnākara pays homage to Śākyamuni Bud-
dha:
maināke hariṇā svakukṣivasater ādāya toyākarāt
kṣipte kokanadībhavatsmaracamūśastrapraticchāyayā |
yaṃ devendram iva pratītya saruṣaṃ {vy}āvarttamāne (˚mānair ?) bhayāt
bodhau mārabhaṭaiḥ palāyitam asau śākyo muniḥ pātu vaḥ || (fol. 1v1–2) (Metre: Śārdūla-
vikrīḍita)
The exact meaning of this verse is not clear. It seems to refer to the event of Śākya-
muni Buddha’s fight with Māra’s army just before the enlightenment. Here is a ten-
tative translation of the verse, which certainly needs revision:
May this Śākyamuni protect us whom the withdrawing army of Māra considered like the angry
king of gods and fled out of fear at the time of enlightenment, when Hari took mount Maināka
from the ocean, in whose womb he had made (his) own residence, (and) hurled it as a return
cast (praticchāyayā) of those weapons of troops of the god of love (smaracamū), which turned
into red water-lilies (kokanadībhavat).25
I was unable to find a similar mythological reference about mount Maināka in the
Sanskrit literature. There is one reference in Kṣemendra’s Daśāvatāracarita:
||
24 rgya dpe rnyed na zhu dag dpyis phyin nus par ’dug kyang ma rnyed pas bya thabs bral sgra
gzhung rnams kyi bstan don bzhin sngar las dag nges su bcos yod do ||
25 I am thankful to Harunaga Isaacson (email correspondence dated 15/7/2015 and 30/12/2016)
for suggesting this translation, which is so far the best translation one can offer. He suggests
reading kokanadībhavat˚ as one compound, without which ‘it will be impossible (or nearly so) to
construe the verse at all.’ He drew my attention to a verse in the Buddhacarita (13.42): tadbodhi-
mūle pravikīryamāṇam aṅgāravarṣaṃ tu savisphuliṅgam | maitrīvihārād ṛṣisattamasya babhūva
raktotpalapattravarṣaḥ ||. Here the weapons of Māra, in the form of a rain of coals with sparks,
turn into red-utpala petals. About the image in the second half, Isaacson suggests: ‘[w]hen
Maināka is thrown by Hari, the army thinks that the Buddha is the lord of the gods (Indra, being
defended by Hari = Upendra), and flees.’ In my opinion, this is a brilliant innovative explanation,
which I accept thankfully.
668 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
mānāya mainākam athārṇavena viśrāntaye ratnagiriṃ visṛṣṭam |
kareṇa saṃspṛśya sa laṅghitābdhir laṅkāṅkaśailasya taṭe papāta || (7.190)
Here the ocean is said to have sent forth the mount Maināka with jewel peaks for
Hanumān to rest on it. Hanumān touched the mountain with his hand and, having
crossed the ocean, landed on another mountain on the shore of Laṅkā. This story
originally occurs in the Rāmāyaṇa (5.56.8ff). However, these references do not
match with the present narrative.
Purpose
The benedictory verse is followed by a verse that explains the purpose of the Sub-
antaratnākara:
santy eva nātra sudhiyāṃ kim u supprabandhās
te kin tu vistaratayālpadhiyām agamyāḥ |
tatsāraleśam apagṛhya tataḥ kṛto [’]yam
avyāsataḥ smaraṇamātraphale [’]bhyupāyaḥ || (1v2–3) (Metre: Vasantatilaka)
Is it not the case that here indeed exist compositions about sup-[anta]s composed by excel-
lent scholars? However, due to the sheer vastness (of these texts), they are difficult to un-
derstand for those who are of limited intelligence (alpadhīs). (Therefore,) after taking the
essence of those texts, this (work) is composed as an excellent means (for achieving) the
goal of mere memorization without being verbose.
Thus, the text is a pedagogic guide meant for beginners, which would help them
in learning the vast ocean of declensions of nouns and adjectives (subantas), as
the name of the text suggests.
The author’s confidence in the merits of his own composition is evident in
the next verse:
mama parapadāvicalituḥ
sadvidyopāsanaikanipuṇasya |
kṛśam api kuto dvijihvāt
padaracanāyāṃ bhayaṃ bhavati || (fol. 1v2–3) (Metre: Āryā)
With respect to (this) composition, for a person like me, who does not fall down from the
highest (spiritual) position and is extremely skilled in good lore (of taming snakes like the
jāṅgulividyā), from whence can there be even a little fear of a slanderer who is like a double-
tongued snake?
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 669
This verse speaks of the author’s higher spiritual attainments. The intended pun
on the words parapada, sadvidyā, and dvijihva is worth noting. These three verses
are testimonies to the author’s poetic skills.
Contents
Next comes a verse explaining the contents of the Subantaratnākara:
rūḍhiśabdā nigadyante puṃsi śaṇḍhe striyām api |
guṇadravyakriyāyogā[s] triliṅgās tadanantaram ||26 (fol. 1v4) (Metre: Anuṣṭubh)
Words that convey their meaning by usage (i.e. conventional words) are enumerated in the
masculine, in the neuter, (and) also in the feminine. Thereafter (follow those words,) which
have three genders and are associated (either) with the quality, the substance, or the action
(that is to say, qualifying words).
Each of these sections is further sub-divided into nouns ending in vowels and
consonants. There are two more sections, which are not mentioned in this verse.
These are of pronouns and numerals. It seems that for the author they are in-
cluded in the section dealing with qualifying nouns (triliṅgas). Thus, altogether
there are six sections:
1. The masculine nouns ending in:
a. vowels27 (fols 1v5–11v5)
b. consonants28 (fols 11v5–20r5)
2. The neuter nouns ending in
a. vowels29 (fols 20r5–22v1)
b. consonants30 (fols 22v1–24v2)
3. The feminine nouns ending in
||
26 The NGMCP records a text entitled Syādyantakoṣa (A 54–3) of unknown authorship. Just as
the Subantaratnākara, it deals with nominal declensions following the Kātantra system of gram-
mar. Interestingly, this text, after its benedictory verse, also contains this and the next verse,
namely, rūḍhiśabdā nigadyante ... and viprāgni˚. According to the NGMCP, ‘[t]his text, styled
Syādyantaprakriyā [Si la sogs pa’i mtha’i bya ba, Derge 4287] and attributed to a certain
Mañju(śrī)kīrti or Mañjughoṣakīrti [’Jam dpal grags pa], is equally following the Kātantra system
and might very well be the translation of the original Sanskrit version preserved on (sic!) A 54/3.’
27 uktāḥ puṃsy ajantāḥ | (fol. 11v5)
28 uktā ajantā halantāś ca puṃsi saviśeṣāḥ | pulaliṅga(!)kāṇḍaḥ prathamaḥ samāptaḥ | (fol. 20r5)
29 idānīṃ napuṃsakaliṅgā ucyante | (fol. 20r5–6)
30 halantā ucyaṃte | (fol. 22v1), napuṃsakakāṇḍo dvitīyaḥ samāptaḥ | fol. (24v2–3)
670 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
a. vowels31 (fols 24v3–33r3)
b. consonants32 (fols 33r3–37r4–5)
4. Adjectives ending in
a. vowels33 (fols 37r5–44r6)
b. consonants34 (fols 44r6–61v1)
5. Pronouns35 (fols 61v1–72v4)
6. Numerals (fols 72v4–76v5)
Method of explanation
Each of these sections begins with a list of words to be dealt with in that particular
section. Cf. for instance, the beginning of the first section dealing with masculine
nouns ending in vowels:
viprāgnisakhipatyaṃśukroṣṭṛpratibhuvaḥ pitā |
nā praśāstā ca raigāvau puṃsy ajantāḥ prakīrttitāḥ || (1v4–5) (Metre: Anuṣṭubh)
In the masculine, (nouns) ending in vowels (such as) vipra, agni, sakhi, pati, aṃśu, kroṣṭṛ,
pratibhū, pitṛ, nṛ, praśāstṛ, rai, and gau are explained.
The order within each of these sections is alphabetical, that is to say, nouns are
arranged according to their last vowel or consonant.
After this list, the noun under discussion is mentioned. For instance, at the be-
ginning of the section dealing with masculine nouns ending in vowels, we find:
tatrādau tāvad vipraśabdāt ... (fol. 1v5)
There, at the outset, after the noun vipra ...
Many a time, the author provides a derivation of these nouns. For instance, cf. the
derivation of the word hāhā (fols 3v7–4r1):
ādanto gandharvvanāma hāhāśabdaḥ | heti kṛtvā jahāti | hāhā | ‘kv(i)b-vic-manip-kvanip-vani-
paḥ’ iti vic | cakāraḥ sāmānyagrahaṇārthaḥ | “ikāro ‘ver anaca’ iti cihnārthaḥ” |36 vakāra-
syānenaiva lopaḥ | ‘kārakaṁ bah(u)lam’ iti samāsaḥ |
||
31 idānīṃ strīliṅgā ucyante | (fol. 24v3), uktāḥ striyām ajantāḥ | (fol. 33r2–3)
32 halantā ucyante | (fol. 33r3), strīliṅgakāṇḍas tṛtīyaḥ samāptaḥ | (fol. 37r4–5)
33 idānīṃ vācyaliṅgā ucyante | (fol. 37r5), uktā ajantāḥ | (fol. 44r6)
34 uktā halantāḥ | (fol. 61v1)
35 idānī(ṃ) sarvādaya ucyante | (fol. 61v1), uktāḥ sarvādayaḥ | (fol. 72v4)
36 Cf. CVṛ on CV 1.2.53: ikāro ver anaca (5.1.64) iti cihnārthaḥ.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 671
The noun hāhā ending in the vowel ā is the name of a gandharva ‘celestial musician’. (He is
called) hāhā (because) he leaves by making (the sound) hā. (The suffix) vic (is added by the
rule) kvibvicmanipkvanipvanipaḥ (CV 1.2.53). The (indicatory letter) c (in the suffix vic) is for
the sake of common reference. The (vowel) i is for the sake of marking it distinctly (as in the
rule) ver anacaḥ (CV 5.1.64). The (phoneme) v is elided by this very (rule). The compound
(hāhā) (is formed by the rule): kārakaṁ bahulam (CV 2.2.16).
The author then proceeds to derive various declensions of that particular noun. For
this, he relies on the Cāndravyākaraṇa. Cf. for instance, the derivational procedure
for various declensions of the masculine noun hāhā ending in the vowel ā:
svādayaḥ | so rutvavisarggau | hāhāḥ | ‘prathamayor aci’ iti dīrghatvasya ‘dīrghāj jasi ca’ iti
pratiṣedhe ākāraukārayor ‘eci’ ity aukāraḥ | hāhau | adantayor ‘ako ’ki dīrghaḥ’ | hāhāḥ | (fol.
4r1–4)
(The case terminations) su etc.37 (The suffix) su is replaced by ru (which is further substituted
by) visarga. (Thus, the nominative singular form) hāhāḥ (is derived). When the lengthening
(of the vowel) by the (application of the rule) prathamayor aci (CV 5.1.109) is prohibited (by the
rule) dīrghāj jasi ca (CV 5.1.112), (the substitution of the vowel) au in the place of (the vowels)
ā and au (together) (takes place) by the rule eci (CV 5.1.84). (Thus, the nominative dual form)
hāhau (is derived). Both a (which is the initial letter of the suffix as) and the final letter (of the
noun hāhā, i.e. ā) are substituted by the long (vowel) (by the rule) ako ’ki dīrghaḥ (CV 5.1.106).
(Thus, the nominative plural form) hāhāḥ (is derived).
Authorities
The author of the Subantaratnākara appears to be an erudite scholar well versed in
various genres of Sanskrit literature. This is evident from occasional citations scat-
tered in his work. Noteworthy is his expertise in the Cāndra grammatical tradition.
He cites not only from the Cāndravyākaraṇa but also from its commentarial litera-
ture, such as the works of Ratnamati (fols 17v5–7, 17v6, 21v4, 27r5 and 28v4), and
Pūrṇacandra (fols 21v4, 28v4 and 47r3). Apart from these two authorities, the au-
thor has also cited from ‘verses on gender by the master [i.e. Candragomin?]’ (67r7)
(Verhagen 2001, 134). At times, he also refers to the other two important grammat-
ical traditions, namely, the Pāṇinian and the Kātantra (51v4). From the former, he
has cited Maitreyarakṣita and Puruṣottamadeva’s Bhāṣāvṛtti (35v5, 39v6). At a few
places, we find citations from the Bhaṭṭikāvya (37v5). At one place, the author has
||
37 Cf. svaujasamauṭchaṣṭābhyāmbhisṅebhyāmbhyasṅasibhyāmbhyasṅasosāmṅyos sup (CV 2.1.1).
672 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
cited from a hitherto unknown text called Yid bzhin nor bu’i bstod pa’i rgya cher ’grel
(*Cintāmaṇistutiṭīkā) composed by a certain Śākya’i blo gros (18r4).38
Concluding verses
The text concludes with three verses:
iti ghaṭitam idaṃ mayā s(uvarṇṇaiḥ
sulalitala)39kṣaṇaratnabhūṣitañ ca |
sravasi (!) vinihitaṃ dhṛtañ ca kaṇṭhe
śiśumukhamaṇḍalamaṇḍanaṃ dadhātu || (Metre: Puṣpitāgrā)
Thus, with gold-like excellent letters, I have fashioned this (ornament-like treatise), which is
decorated with jewels of extremely charming marks in the form of very beautiful jewel-like
aphorisms. When put on ears and wore around the neck by way of paying an (attentive) ear
and learning it by heart may it decorate the face of children.
aye kumārā vibudhaśriyaṃ parā(ṃ)
d(rutaṃ bhavanto yadi labdhum icchava)40ḥ |
punaḥ punaḥś (!) cintanamantarādiṇā (! ˚mandarādriṇā)
subantaratnākara eṣa mathyatām || (Metre: Vaṃśastha)
O young men! If you want to achieve quickly the divine glory, that is to say, the fame of a
learned person, then (you) should churn again and again this ocean of nouns (ending in a sUP
suffix), that is to say, the treatise Subantaratnākara, with the mount Mandara of (your) conte-
mplation.
śubham abhavad idaṃ vidhāya yan me
vacanarucā jaga(tas)41 tamo nihatya |
mihira iva tataḥ sadartharāśer
aham upadarśayitā sadā bhaveyam || (fols 76v5–77r2) (Metre: Puṣpitāgrā)
||
38 Verhagen 2001, 134. Śākya’i blo (*Śākyabodhi) (!) is the author of Āryadaśabhūmisūtra-
nidānabhāṣya (P 5500). He is also the author of the Pramāṇavārttikaṭīkā (P 5718). Śākya’i blo gros
(*Śākyamati) is the author of the Āryagayāśīrṣasūtramiśrakavyākhyā (P 5493).
39 Since the folio of NAK 4/148 is damaged, this portion is supplied on the basis of Or 148 (89r3–4).
40 parāṃ drutam bhavanto yadi lubdam (!) icchavaḥ (Kesar 582–1, 117r5). Since the folio of NAK
4/148 is damaged, this portion is supplied on the basis of Kesar 582. padāṃ (p.c.; parā (a.c.))
druta bhavanto yadi labdhum icchavaḥ (Or 148 (89r4–5))
41 So reads Or 148 (89r5).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 673
Whatever merit has occurred to me after composing this (ornament-like treatise), on account
of that (merit), having destroyed the darkness (of ignorance) of the world with the light of
words may I become one who always illuminates the heap of excellent things like the Sun.
The issue of authorship
Neither in the introductory nor in the concluding verses of the Subantaratnākara
we come across the name of the author of this text. It appears only in the colophon:
kṛtir iyaṁ paṇḍitasthavirasubhūticandrasya | (fol. 77r2)
This is a composition of the scholar-monk Subhūticandra.
Not a single final rubric mentions either the name of the text or its author. The two
commentaries on the Subantaratnākara (discussed below) ascribe this text to Sub-
hūticandra. The colophon of the Tibetan translation records the author of this text
as Pa ṇḍi ta chen po gnas brtan zla ba (*Mahāpaṇḍitasthaviracandra).42 Although
Verhagen (2001, 135, n. 542), while discussing the Tibetan translation of the Sub-
antaratnākara, mentions that ‘in the introductory section [of his commentary on
the Cāndra grammar], Si-tu enumerates the many grammatical treatises he investi-
gated, including a sUBanta-ratnākara by Subhūti (su-bhū-tis-mdzad-pa’i-sup-
mtha’-rin-’byuṅ, vol. 1 fol. 6v3)’, he does not seem to conjecture that Pa ṇḍi ta chen
po gnas brtan zla ba should, in fact, point to Pa ṇḍi ta chen po gnas brtan [Rab
’byor] zla ba (*Mahāpaṇḍitasthavira[Subhūti]candra). The facts that a) the three
Sanskrit manuscripts in which the end of the text is preserved unequivocally men-
tion Subhūticandra as the author of the text, and b) the Tibetan translation of the
Subantaratnākara matches with these Sanskrit manuscripts prove the identity of
Gnas brtan zla ba and Sthavira Subhūticandra beyond any doubt.
The question whether Subhūticandra, the author of the Subantaratnākara, is
the same as the author of the Kavikāmadhenu, however, needs further considera-
tion. Unfortunately, I have not come across any reference to the Subantaratnākara
in later works. In spite of that, the following external evidence is worth considering.
As mentioned above, Subhūticandra, the author of the Kavikāmadhenu, had a
scholarly command over all the three important Sanskrit grammatical traditions.
||
42 sup’i mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas zhes bya ba ’di ni paṇḍi ta chen po gnas brtan zla bas mdzad
pa’o || ‘This (treatise) entitled “Source of jewels” (on the derivation of forms) ending in a sUP
(suffix) has been written by the great scholar Gnas-brtan-zla-ba [*Sthaviracandra?].’ (Verhagen
2001, 134)
674 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
There are at least 288 citations from as many as 53 grammatical texts in his com-
mentary. Pa tshab lo tsā ba has referred to Subhūticandra as a scholar of grammar
(van der Kuijp 2009, 8). This statement would make more sense if we accept that
the same author had composed a grammatical work.
Besides this, there are internal evidences, which prove the identity of both the
authors. From the benedictory verses of both these texts paying homage to the Bud-
dha, it is clear that their author was a Buddhist.43 Both these benedictions express
a wish that the Buddha may protect and bestow his grace on the mankind.
As I have shown in the introduction to the critical edition of the Ka-
vikāmadhenu (2014, 58–61), this commentary was composed sometime between
1110 and 1130 CE. It is interesting to note that the latest authority referred to in the
Kavikāmadhenu as well as in the Subantaratnākara is Puruṣottamadeva, who, ac-
cording to Vogel (2015, 53), flourished in the first half of the 12th century. Thus, both
the texts share the same lower limit. In this connection, it is worthwhile to note that
in the Kavikāmadhenu, Subhūticandra has referred to many grammatical texts and
authorities while deriving a particular word. However, despite being an important
text in the Cāndra tradition, there is not a single reference to the Subantaratnākara
or its author. As far as I have studied the manuscript material, there is no reference
to the Kavikāmadhenu in the Subantaratnākara. This evidence, though negative, is
important, as it at least does not prove the antithesis.
||
43 The initial portion of the original Sanskrit text of the Kavikāmadhenu is missing. I have at-
tempted at translating the Sanskrit behind the not always correct Tibetan rendering of Si tu’s
Tibetan translation of these verses (1b–3b):
sa chen po yi rtser gshegs shing || rdzu ’phrul ’dab ldan bdud rtsi brnyes || thams cad mkhyen
pa’i dpag bsam shing || khyod la me tog ’bras dud shog || gang gi thugs rje lam gsum ’gro || mtho
ris las ’bab ga ṅgā bzhin || dpal mtsho bdud rtsi’i gter srid pa’i || zla phyed rab sbyin der bdag
’dud || srid pa’i mtsho chen sgrol bar byed pa chos kyi gru || snying rje’i dpag bsam ljon pa’i
shing las grub khyod kyis || rab dangs sems kyi tshogs chen skya bas rab bskul nas || pha rol
phyin te mngon ’dod rin chen thob par mdzod || ‘May the Wish-Fulfilling Tree, the Omniscient
one (the Buddha), standing at the summit of the great bhūmis (i.e. who has attained all the
stages of a Bodhisattva), endowed with the leaves of supernatural powers, and has attained
immortal state (nirvāṇa) bend down for you with its flowers and fruits. I bow unto him whose
compassion, like the river Ganga that originated from heaven, has gone three ways, who is
an ocean of prosperity, and the reservoir of immortality, and dispeller of worldly existence.
May you reach the other shore and acquire the most desired jewel (of enlightenment) by the
ship, the Dharma (teachings) carrying one across the great ocean of worldly existence, which
has been accomplished from the Wish-Fulfilling Tree of compassion; being propelled by the
great multitude of the oarsmen with a perfectly serene mind.’ (Deokar Lata 2014, 97, 301).
For the benedictory verse of the Subantaratnākara, cf. the section on the benediction.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 675
In the Kavikāmadhenu, the principal grammatical authority for Subhūticandra
is Candragomin’s grammatical aphorisms and the Cāndra grammatical lineage. In
the same way, the Subantaratnākara is also based upon the Cāndra grammatical
tradition. Both these works draw upon common authorities such as the grammari-
ans Maitreyarakṣita, Puruṣottamadeva, and Śarvavarman, the lexicographers Ru-
dradāsa and Rudra, and literary works like the Bhaṭṭikāvya and the *Cintāmaṇi-
stutiṭīkā.
There are a number of passages in the Kavikāmadhenu and the Subantaratnā-
kara that show a close affinity. Two instances may be cited in this regard:
i. sarvo ’nayā lakṣaṇīyaḥ syād iti lakṣmīḥ | ‘lakṣer muṭ ca’ iti īpratyayaḥ | (lakṣmī, AK I.1.27, Deo-
kar Lata 2014, 143)
(She is called) Lakṣmī since Sarva, that is, Lord Viṣṇu is to be marked by her. The suffix ī (is
added) by the rule lakṣer muṭ ca (Cāndra Uṇādi 1.89)
sarvo ’nayā lakṣaṇīyaḥ syād iti lakṣe(r) muṭ ceti ... (lakṣmī, Subantaratnākara, NAK 4/148, 27r2)
(She is called) Lakṣmī since Sarva, that is, Lord Viṣṇu is to be marked by her. Thus, by the rule
lakṣer muṭ ca (Cāndra Uṇādi 1.89) ...
ii. niśyati tanūkaroti sarvavyāpāram | ‘ātaḥ prādibhyaḥ’ iti kaḥ | (niśā, AK I.4.4a, Deokar Lata
2014, 284)
(She is called niśā since) she reduces, i.e., lessens all the activities. (The suffix) ka (is added by
the rule) ātaḥ prādibhyaḥ (CV 1.1.142).
niśyati tanūkaroti sarvvavyāpāram ity ‘ātaḥ prādibhyaḥ’ iti kaḥ | (niśā, Subantaratnākara, NAK
4/148, 25v3)
She reduces, i.e., lessens all the activities. (The suffix) ka (is added by the rule) ātaḥ
prādibhyaḥ (CV 1.1.142).
From the literary point of view, the opening verses of the Kavikāmadhenu and the
opening and the concluding verses of the Subantaratnākara exhibit a special liking
for śliṣṭarūpakas. The following two verses from the Kavikāmadhenu and the Sub-
antaratnākara are worth considering from the stylistic point of view:
Kavikāmadhenu:
I will prepare in the manner of decoration and accomplishment (rab tu sgrub byed cho ga) this
well-arranged ‘Necklace of the Wise Ones’ using this treasure (lexicon), which is full of word-
676 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
jewels gathered from the infinite ocean of treatises, with the help of the excellent strings
(sūtras ‘aphorisms’) of the illustrious Candragomin.44
Subantaratnākara:
Thus, with gold-like excellent letters I have fashioned this (ornament-like treatise), which is
decorated with jewels of extremely charming marks in the form of very beautiful jewel-like
aphorisms. When put on ears and wore around neck by way of paying an (attentive) ear and
learning it by heart may it decorate the neck of children.45
In these verses, the author is talking about his own composition. Their parallel
structure is quite striking. In both the texts, the composition is compared to an or-
nament decorated with jewels. Similarly, there is a pun on the words sūtra and
lakṣaṇa while referring to the aphorisms of the Cāndra grammar.
It is quite unlikely that two persons bearing the same name flourished around
the same period and had so much in common. Hence, in all likelihood, one and the
same Subhūticandra composed both the treatises. In the concluding verse of the
Subantaratnākara, the author expresses his wish to become an illuminator of a
heap of good meanings. This may well be taken as an indirect reference to the com-
position of the Kavikāmadhenu, which, being a commentary on the Amarakośa, ac-
tually clarifies the meanings of the words occurring in it. This might be an indica-
tion that Subhūticandra first composed a comparatively simpler text in the form of
the Subantaratnākara and then at a mature age wrote the Kavikāmadhenu, which
is much profound than the former.
5 Commentarial literature
The Subantaratnākara was commented upon at least twice. The first reference to its
commentary is found in a collection of 1820 entitled ‘Hodgson’s Private Papers at
the British Library’. The corresponding entry reads as follows:
||
44 mtha’ yas gzhung lugs rgya mtsho’i mngon brjod rin chen gang || mdzod ’dis mkhas pa’i mgrin
pa’i do shal rnam bkod pa || dpal ldan tsa ndra go mis byas pa’i mdo mchog gis || de ni rab tu sgrub
byed cho ga sbyar bar bgyi || (Deokar Lata 2014, 302).
45 iti ghaṭitam idaṃ mayā s(uvarṇṇaiḥ sulalitala)kṣaṇaratnabhūṣitañ ca | sravasi (!) vinihitaṃ
dhṛtañ ca kaṇṭhe śiśumukhamaṇḍalamaṇḍanaṃ dadhātu || (Subantaratnākara, NAK 4/148, 76v
5–6).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 677
[t]he manuscript is written on machine-made paper. Colophon of a commentary on a Buddhist
scripture known as Suvantaratnākara of Subhuticandra written by Pandit Abhayaraj during
the reign of King Yaksha Malla of Nepalmandala (c. 1428–1482).
The said manuscript is neither found in the Hodgson’s collection nor listed in the
catalogue of the NGMCP. The second reference to a commentary on the Subanta-
ratnākara is found in Hara Prasad Shastri’s catalogue of the palm-leaf manuscripts
belonging to the Durbar library, Nepal. Shastri (1905, 128) has described the manu-
script as:
1076 | kha | Rūpasādhanam. By Subhūticandra. 10 1½ inches. Folia, 96. Lines, 6 on a page.
Extent, 2160 çlokas. Character, Newāri. Date, (?). Appearance, old. Prose. Incorrect.
Beginning. Oṃ namo vāgīśvarāya |
natvā śivaṃ vidhuviriñcikarīndravaktraṃ
vāgīśvarīṃ gurupadaṃ janakaṃ kaviñ ca |
cetaḥ śiśor jaḍarujāntakajāyu divyaṃ
śrīrūpasādhanavaraṃ vimalaṃ pravakṣye ||
maināka ityādi | pātu rakṣatu kau(!)’sau muniḥ sarvvākāreṇa sarvvapadārthānāṃ yathāvad
bodhanātmanāṃ muniḥ | athavā akathyakathane maunayogān munir bhagavān samyaksam-
buddhaḥ || kathambhūtaḥ | śākyaḥ śākeṣu bhavaḥ śākyaḥ | athavā śākyasyāpatyaṃ pautrādi-
kaṃ śākyaḥ | ityādi |
The pratīkas commented upon in this opening portion reveal beyond doubt that the
Rūpasādhana is a commentary on the Subantaratnākara. Interestingly, the deriva-
tion of the word muni found in this commentary and in Subhūticandra’s Ka-
vikāmadhenu is almost identical. Cf. the Kavikāmadhenu on the Buddha’s epithet
muni (AK I.1.14):
sarvākāreṇa sarvadharmāṇāṃ mananād adharmāvavādeṣu vā maunān muniḥ | (Deokar Lata
2014, 124)
However, from the benedictory verse, which pays homage to the lord Śiva, Viṣṇu,
Brahman, Gaṇeśa, Sarasvatī, teacher, father and poet, this does not appear to be
the commentary written by Subhūticandra described by Shastri.
The manuscript of the Rūpasādhana appears to be incomplete. For, Shastri
(1905, 128) further says:
End. uktārthetyādi | un lopaḥ | akāreṇa sandhiḥ | manas śabdarūpasādhanaṃ | 62 ||
hakārakṣakārāntāny aprasiddhāni ||
Colophon. iti subhūticandramahākaver viracite supprakaraṇe napuṃsakakāṇḍāni dvitīyāni
paricchedāni samāptāni (!) || (?)
678 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
In the Subantaratnākara, the last neuter noun ending in a consonant is vetas and
not manas. However, we do come across a comment in the Subantaratnākara at the
end of the section dealing with the neuter nouns similar to the one mentioned
above:
hakārakṣakārāntā aprasiddhāḥ | (Subantaratnākara, NAK 4/148, 24v2)
It is worthwhile to note that this manuscript mentions Subhūticandra as the author
of the root text. However, the latter is called Supprakaraṇa instead of Subanta-
ratnākara. This tendency of using a generic name instead of a specific one seems to
be in vogue. I am particularly reminded of Subhūticandra’s Kavikāmadhenu, which
is mostly referred to as Subhūtiṭīkā. (Deokar Lata 2014, 67). This is probably the first
time where Subhūticandra is referred to as a great poet (Mahākavi). At other places,
he is mentioned as a great monk-scholar (Mahāpaṇḍitasthavira).
Apart from the six manuscripts of the Subantaratnākara discussed above, there
are six more manuscripts with the title Subantaratnākara. Out of these, four are
listed by the NGMCP, and one each by the Cambridge University Library and the
Durbar library:
1. NAK 1/813 (Reel no. A 585-4 (= A 1211–3) is a paper (?) manuscript (22.3 7.2
cm) containing 154 folios with 6–7 lines per folio. The website of the NGMCP men-
tions ‘Folio number 131 is missing but the text is continuous. Fol. 151 is missing.’
However, the said information is incorrect since both the folios are available. The
script is Nepālākṣara; the first folio is written in the Rañjanā script. The manuscript
is illegible at many places due to the spreading of ink. The foliation figures are writ-
ten in the middle of the right-hand margin on the verso side of a folio. The manu-
script was copied by a scribe named Kāśirāma in NS 737 (= 1617 CE) during the reign
of King Jagajjyotirmalla. This description matches with the one found in Dwivedi
(1987), according to whom, the number of this manuscript is pra. 813 with the sub-
ject code (viṣayāṅka) 361.
About the text
Benediction
The manuscript begins with the benediction to the All-knowing one (oṃ namaḥ sar-
vajñāya) and the benedictory verse, which is the same as that of the Rūpāvatāra of
Dharmakīrti:
sarvvajñam anantaguṇaṃ praṇamya bālaprabodhanārtham aham |
rūpāvatāram alpasukalāpam ṛjuṃ kariṣyāmi || (fol. 1v2–3) (Metre: Āryā) (Rūpāvatāra p. 1)
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 679
After paying homage to the All-knowing one, who has infinite qualities, I shall (now) elucidate
the Rūpāvatāra in a brief and well-classified manner with the purpose of enlightening the ig-
norant ones.
Purpose
The benedictory verse is followed by a verse describing the purpose of this work. It
is apparently not written by Dharmakīrti himself:
kṛtā sukṛtinā ceyaṃ prakriyā dharmmaki(!)rttinā |
potānā(ṃ) potavat kṣipraṃ śabdābdhau pāragāmināṃ || (fol. 1v3) (Metre: Anuṣṭubh)
(Rūpāvatāra Intro. ii)
The learned Dharmakīrti has prepared this boat-like (treatise) dealing with the derivational
process for the (benefit of the) young ones who wish to quickly cross over the ocean of nouns.
Rangacharya, the editor of the Rūpāvatāra, who has quoted this verse in his intro-
duction (p. i–ii) to the text, informs us:
In the catalogue of the manuscripts published by Mahāmahopādhyāya Haraprasāda Śāstrī, it
can be found that the Rūpāvatāra is one of the texts available in the manuscripts collection in
the royal palace of Nepal. Moreover, at the beginning of the text printed there, the following
verse occurs: kṛtā sukṛtinā ceyaṃ prakriyā dharmmakīrttinā | potānāṁ potavat kṣipraṃ
śabdābdhau pāragāmināṃ ||.46
The statement of Rangacharya is indicative of the fact that the text listed by Hara-
prasāda Śāstrī differs from the text of the Rūpāvatāra, at least as far as the opening
verse is concerned.
Contents
A close comparison of our present text with that of the Rūpāvatāra shows that the
present text is either a commentary on or some text based upon the Rūpāvatāra. Cf.
for instance, the initial portions of both texts. The edited text of the Rūpāvatāra
reads:
||
46 Translation mine. The original Sanskrit reads: nepālarājabhavanasthalikhitagran-
thasamudaye rūpāvatāro ’py ekatama iti mahāmahopādhyāyaharaprasādaśāstriprakaṭitāyāṃ
tatsūcikāyāṃ dṛśyate | api ca tatramudritaitadgranthādau śloko ’yaṃ vartate - kṛtā sukṛtinā
ceyaṃ prakriyā dharmakīrtinā | potānāṃ potavat kṣipraṃ śabdādhau pāragāminām ||.
680 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
atha saṃjñāvatāraḥ || tatrādau tāvat pratyāhāraś śāstre saṃvyavahārajñāpanārtham
anuvarṇyate | tadyathā || aiuṇ, ṛḷk, eoṅ, aiauc, hayavaraṭ, laṇ, ñamaṅaṇanam, jhabhañ,
ghaḍhadhaṣ, jabagaḍadaś, khaphachaṭhathacaṭatav, kapay, śaṣasar, hal | iti
pratyāhārasūtrāṇi || tatra prathamam aṇ ity eṣa pratyāhāro gṛhyate | kathaṃ? aiuṇ ity atra
ṇakārasya, upadeśe’j anunāsika it (I.3.2.) ity ataḥ upadeśe it iti anuvartamāne, halantyam
(I.3.3.) – upadeśe yad antyaṁ hal tad itsaṁjñaṃ bhavati | ke punar upadeśāḥ?
āgamādeśadhātugaṇapāṭhapratyayapratyāhārasūtrāṇy upadeśāḥ -
dhātusūtragaṇoṇādivākyaliṅgānuśāsanam|
āgamapratyayādeśā upadeśāḥ prakīrtitāḥ ||
itītsaṃjñāyāṃ; svaṃ rūpaṃ śabdasyāśabdasaṃjñā (I.1.68.) ity ataḥ svaṃ rūpam iti anuvar-
tamāne, ādir antyena sahetā (I.1.71.) - ādivarṇo’ntyena itā saha gṛhyamāṇas tanmadhyap-
atitānāṃ varṇānāṃ grāhako bhavati svasya ca rūpasya | iti aṇ iti akārekārokārā ucyante | evaṃ
ak ik uk ityādayo grāhyāḥ || ... aṇādayaś ca pratyāhārā ekacatvāriṃśat | (p. 1–2)
NAK 1/813:
tatrādau tāva(2)t pratyāhāraḥ sā(!)stre saṃjñāsaṃvyavahārajñāpanā(rtha)ḥ anuvarṇyate |
tadyathā | aiuṇ | ṛḷk eoṅ aiauc (3) hayavaralaṇ ñamaṅanaṇam jhabhañ ghaḍhadhaṣ jab-
agaḍadaś khaphachaṭhatha caṭatav kapay saṣasar hal iti pratyāhāra (!) | aṇ | a ā a3 i ī i3 u ū u3
| ak | a ā a3 (fol. 2r1) i ī i3 u ū u3 (.. .. .. .. ..) || ik ... (3b5) ... upadeśe ’j anunāsika it ity a(6)dhikṛtya
tatropadeśe (..) dhātusūtragaṇoṇādivākyaliṅgānuśāsanaṃ | upad(e)(.. ..) ti pā(..) rūpā(fol.
4r1)deśavicakṣaṇāḥ | upadeśe ’j anunāsika ita47 i(..)(ṣ)i | upadeśā(d a)supy āṃ yo ac anun-
āsi(2)kaviśiṣṭaḥ sa itsaṃjñako va (!) (deleted) bhavati | halantyaṃ | upadeśe yad antyaṃ hal tad
itsaṃjñakaṃ bhavati | itsa(3)ṃjñāyāṃ svaṃ rūpa(ṃ) śabdasyāśabdasaṃjñā ity ataḥ svaṃ
rūpa(ṃ) ity anuvarttane ādir antyena sahetā | ādir vvā(4)(..)’kena itā itsaṃjñakena saha
gṛhya(m)āṇas tanmadhyapā (!) tināṃ varṇānāṃ grāhako bhavati | (5) i(..)ti pratyāhāra-
grahaṇavi(bh)āgaḥ | kathaṃ punar ihānupa(..)ī(.. .. .. ..) savarṇa(6)sya grahaṇāt k(ār)yā(r)thaṃ
aṇudit savarṇṇasya cāpratyayaḥ | anaṇdvad (!) it(..) uccāryamāṇaḥ savarṇṇasya grāhako (7)
bhavati | svasya ca rūpasya ca rūpasya pa(..)yaṃ varjjayitvā | taparas tatkālasya bhavaro (?)
yasmāt samayenaḥ (?) (fol. 4v1) (..)paro (.. .. .. .. ..) g(r)āhako bha(va)ti | kiṃ punaḥ savarṇṇa(..
..) (2) savarṇṇa(ṃ) tu (.. .. .. .. .. ..) (sthā)naṃ prayatnaḥ spṛṣṭatā (..)i (.. .. .. ..) ete yathākramaṃ
hrasvadīrghaplutasaṃjñakā bhavati (!) | (fols 1v3–4v5)
As can be seen, both the texts bear a considerable similarity. An interesting point
worth noting here is that the Rūpāvatāra, following the Pāṇinian tradition, has two
pratyāhāras, namely, hayavaraṭ and laṇ whereas following the Cāndra school, the
author of the present text has only one pratyāhāra: hayavaralaṇ.
After this explanation of pratyāhāra formation, we come across an explanation
of the Saṃjñā and the Saṃhitā sections of the Rūpāvatāra.48 At the end of the
||
47 ita p.c. ] ikata a.c.
48 iti saṃjñāvatāraḥ | (fol. 6v1), atha saṃhitāvatāra ucyate | (fol. 6v1).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 681
Saṃhitāvatāra,49 the author announces the beginning of the next section, namely,
the Vibhaktyavatāra:
atha vibha(ktya)vatāra ucyate | (fols 22r6 – 22v1)
Now, the vibhaktyavatāra will be taught.
What one would expect next is a brief explanation of the Vibhaktyavatāra. How-
ever, this is not the case. Instead, we find homage to Mañjuśrī (oṃ namaḥ
mañjuśriye |) followed by the benedictory verse of Haribhadra’s Vibhaktikārikā:
mañjuśriyaṃ praṇamyādau bālānāṃ pratibodhaye |
bhikṣuṇā haribha(2)dreṇa kṛtā vibhaktikārikā ||50 (fol. 22v 1–2)
After paying homage to Mañjuśrī in the beginning, the monk Haribhadra has composed (the
text called) Vibhaktikārikā for the understanding of the ignorant ones.
Instead of continuing with the Vibhaktikārikā,51 our author provides an explanation
of seven cases based on the Vibhaktyavatāra section of the Rūpāvatāra:
dve vibhaktī (|) kā (?) supaś ca tiṅaś ca | vibhak(t)iś cety anena supān tiṅā(3)ñ ca vibhaktisaṁjñā
(..)i(..)ā(..)te | supaḥ sapta vibhaktayaḥ sarūpeṇopadiśyante | kāḥ punas tāḥ | (4) (svau)jasa iti
p(r)athamā | am(au)ṭa(!)śas iti dvitīyā (|) ṭābhyāma(!)bhis iti tṛtīyā | ṅebhyāma(!)bhyas iti (5)
catu(r)thī (|) ṅasibhyāma(!)bh(y)as iti pañcamī (|) ṅasosām iti ṣaṣṭhī | ṅiosa(!)sup iti saptamī |
etāś ca sapta (6) vibhaktayaḥ iti paṭhitā daś (?) ca bhavanti | dvivi(..)dhañ ca prātipadikaṃ |
ajantaṃ halantañ ca (|) tada t(r)iṣu (fol. 23r1) (..)ividha(ṃ) (tat trividhaṁ ?) (p)u(ṁli)ṅgaṃ
(na)puṁsakaliṅgañ ceti | (fols 22v2–23r1)
Cp. the Vibhaktyavatāra of the Rūpāvatāra:
atha vibhaktyavatāraḥ ||
ajantapuṁliṅgaprakaraṇam ||
||
49 iti saṁhitāvatāraḥ samāptaḥ | (fol. 22r6).
50 That this is a benedictory verse of the Vibhaktikārikā is confirmed by its Tibetan translation
(Derge 4272, 46a–65a): thog mar ’jam dbyangs phyag ’tshal te || byis pa’i blo can rnams kyi phyi ||
rnam dbye’i tshig ler byas pa dag || dge slong ’phrog byed bzang pos bya ||.
51 The introductory portion of the Vibhaktikārikā (fols 46r7–46v2) reads as follows: su | au | dzas
| am | auṭ | śas | ṭā | bhyām | bhis | ṅe | bhyām | bhis (!) | ṅa si | bhyām | bhyās (!) | ṅas | os | ām | ṅi |
os | sup | ’di rnams su la sogs pa’i rnam dbye’o || gang las pha rol du ’gyur na | don gcig nyid la sogs
pa’i tshig gi sgra las pha rol du’o || de la | don tsam la dang po’o (CV 2.1.93) zhes pa rnam dbye
dang por ’gyur ro || gang yang dang po’i rnam dbye su au dzas zhes pa dang po’o || de la gcig gnyis
mang po’i tshig rnams las don gcig la gcig gi tshig su | don gnyis la gnyis kyi tshig au | don mang po
rnams la mang po’i tshig dzas zhes pa ’di rnams ni rnam dbye dang po’o ||.
682 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
dve vibhaktī | tiṅas trīṇi trīṇi prathamamadhyamottamāḥ (1.4.101.), supaḥ (1.4.103.), ity
anuvartamāne, vibhaktiś ca (1.4.104.) – suptiṅau pratyāhārau; supaḥ tiṅaś ca trīṇi trīṇi vibhak-
tisaṁjñāś ca bhavanti | evaṁ supāṁ tiṅāñ ca vibhaktisaṁjñāvidhānāt tatra trīṇi trīṇīty anena
supaḥ sapta vibhaktayaḥ | kāḥ punas tāḥ? svaujas ityādiṣu – su au jas iti prathamā; am auṭ śas
iti dvitīyā; ṭā bhyāṁ bhis iti tṛtīyā; ṅe bhyāṁ bhyas iti caturthī; ṅasi bhyāṁ bhyas iti pañcamī;
ṅas os ām iti ṣaṣṭhī; ṅi os sup iti saptamī | etāḥ sapta vibhaktayaḥ prātipadikāt pare bhavanti |
dvividhaṁ prātipadikam ajantaṁ halantaṁ ca | tat punaḥ trividhaṁ pratyekaṁ puṁliṅgaṁ
strīliṅgaṁ napuṁsakaliṅgaṁ ceti |
From here onwards, our text takes another turn and starts following the Subanta-
ratnākara. This would be clear from the following passages from both the texts,
which deal with the derivation of the nominative singular of the noun vipra:
tatrājanteṣu pulliṅgeṣu p(r)athamam akārāntād vipraśabdā(2)(t sa)pta
(vibha)ktayaḥ prada(r)śyante | tatrādau tāvad akārād vipraśabdāt ‘mid aco ’ntyāt
paraḥ’ (CV 1.1.14, P 1.1.47) | ‘yuṣmadi madhyama(3)traya(m)’ (CV 1.4.146)52 (.. ..)
‘ekadvibahuṣu’ (CV 1.4.148) iti cānuvartamāne svādisūtreṇa53 sahekavākye (!) kṛte
yā tata svauja(4)samau(ṭchaṣ)ṭābhyāmbhisṅebhyāmbhyasṅasibhyāmbhyasṅasos-
ām(ṅyos)sup | i (.. .. .. .. .. ..) (vi)(5)bhakta(yo) bhavanti | tata arthamātre prathameti
(CV 2.1.93)54 a(rth)ātri(!)rikte śabdārthamātre prathmā vibhaktir bhavati | kā
puna(6)(ḥ) p(r)athamā (|) suaujas iti p(r)athamā (|) tatraikasminn arthe eka-
vacanaṃ su (|)
Cf. Subantaratnākara:
tatrādau tāvad vipraśabdān ‘m(i)d aco ’ntyāt paraḥ’ (CV 1.1.14) | ‘yuṣmadi madh-
yamatrayam’ (CV 1.4.146) ity etābhyāṃ paran trayam ity adhikṛtya ‘ekadvibahuṣu’
(CV 1.4.148) iti cānuvarttamāne svādisūtreṇa sahaikavākya(6)tayā arthamātre
prathameti (CV 2.1.93) prathamā vibhaktir bhavati | tatrekasminn (!) arthe eka-
vacanam su | (1v5–6, NAK 1/468)
Thus, this text (NAK 1/813), although certainly different from the Subanta-
ratnākara, is definitely based upon it. The order of nouns, the nouns themselves,
and the division of the text is also similar in both the texts. Cf. for instance, the final
rubrics of our present text:
iti halantāḥ (|) puṁliṅgakāṇḍaḥ prathamaḥ samāptaḥ | (fol. 62v2)
iti subantagranthe napuṁsakakāṇḍo dvitīyaḥ samāptaḥ | (fol. 70v4)
iti subantagranthe strīliṅgakāṇḍas tṛtīyaḥ samāptaḥ | (fol. 90v5)
idānī(ṃ) vācyaliṅgā ucyante | (fol. 90v5), uktā halantāḥ | (fol. 132r3)
||
52 yuṣmady upapade samānādhikaraṇe sthāniny api madhyamaḥ (P 1.4.105).
53 svaujasamauṭchaṣṭābhyāmbhisṅebhyāmbhyasṅasibhyāmbhyasṅasosāmṅyossup | (CV 2.1.1).
54 prātipadikārthaliṅgaparimāṇavacanamātre prathamā (P 2.3.46).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 683
idānī(ṃ) sarvvādaya ucyante |55 (fol. 132r3–4)
From these final rubrics, the name of the text appears to be Subantagrantha, a text
dealing with subantas. The text ends with the first two concluding verses, namely,
iti ghaṭitam idaṃ ... (fol. 153v3) and aye kumārā ... (fol. 153v5), and the colophon of
the Subantaratnākara:
(fol. 153v6) iti (fol. 153v7) subhūticandrakṛto( ’)yaṁ subantaratnākara(ḥ) samāptaḥ |
Thus ends this (text called) Subantaratnākara composed by Subhūticandra.
Concluding verse
This is followed by the concluding verse:
śuddhād bhāvād aśuddho ʼpi (fol. 154r1) yatnena likhito (mayā) |
ayaṃ śu(!)bantasā(!)st(r)añ ca śodhaṇi(!)yo vidujanāṃ (!) ||
Even though (this text or manuscript?) is incorrect, I have written it with pure inclination and
with (great) effort. The wise ones should correct this treatise, which deals with nouns.
This concluding verse, either corrupt or written in bad Sanskrit, talks about the cor-
rupt state of the manuscript. It calls this text by the name Subantaśāstra, which,
like the other title Subantagrantha mentioned in the final rubrics, is general in na-
ture. It can be taken to refer to the Subantaratnākara. It may be noted that the
Rūpasādhana (mentioned above) refers to the Subantaratnākara as Supprakaraṇa.
Colophon
The colophon of the manuscript mentions that in the reign of king Jagajjyotirmalla,
a certain Kāśirāma copied this text for the benefit of his son Rāma on Thursday, the
second day of the bright half of the lunar month of Caitra in Saṃvat 737.56
||
55 Cf. corresponding final rubrics of the Subantaratnākara (mentioned above).
56 akhilabhuva(2)nasāraṃ trailokyamallanarendraḥ bhuvaḥ patiratnaṃ ca jagajyotimarlla(!)-
nṛpendraḥ | ga(3)ganodayacandravantau sarvvaḥ sā(!)strārthapāṇau etat samaya (!) likhitaṃ tam
nābhidha(4)k (!) kāśirāmaḥ | caitramāse śukrapakṣe | dviti(!)yāyāṃ tithau bṛ(ha)spativāre taddine
(5) likhitaṃ | kāśi(rā)masya ātmaputraḥ | santerāmaḥ bodhanārthaṃ asmiṃ pusṭaka likhi(6)taṃ
tasya śubham astu punaḥ punaḥ | sambat 7037 (! 737) | śrī śrī śrī paśupatirur (!) bhaktir a(s)tu |.
684 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
Issue of authorship
The text in its present form, although complete, is not entirely that of the Subanta-
ratnākara and cannot be ascribed to Subhūticandra. As mentioned above,
Kāśirāma compiled this text for the benefit of his son. He must have brought to-
gether portions related to nouns, namely, saṃjñā, sandhi, vibhakti, and nominal
declensions from the Rūpāvatāra and the Subantaratnākara. It is possible that the
NGMCP has designated this manuscript as that of Subhūticandra’s Subanta-
ratnākara solely on the basis of the colophon of this work (mentioned above) found
in the manuscript. While describing the manuscript of the Subvi-
dhānaśabdamālāparikrama, also ascribed to Subhūticandra, the NGMCP remarks:
Subhūticandra (11th/12th c.), its author, is known to have commented in his Kāmadhenu on
Amarasiṃha's Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana and in his Subantaratnākara on Dharmakīrti’s
Rūpāvatāra.
As our enquiry has already proved, this information is partly incorrect as what we
find in this manuscript is a compilation from two different texts.
2. Kesar 52857 (Reel No. C 49-6) (19.5 x 4.3 cm) is a palm-leaf manuscript con-
taining 26 folios with 5 lines per folio. The script is Nepālākṣara. The manuscript
is damaged. This incomplete manuscript begins with the derivation of the word
upānah, which is the last word discussed in the section dealing with feminine
nouns ending in a consonant. The manuscript ends abruptly while explaining the
derivations of the word kaṭacikīrṣ- (?), which belongs to the adjectives ending in
consonants, with the words: kakāra kitkāryārthaḥ | (.. .. .. .. .. .. ..) (fol. 52v). The
foliation numbers appear in the right-hand margin of a folio. The website of the
Kaiser library records this manuscript as that of Vyākaraṇa (Sarvaliṅgakāṇda).
A comparison of this manuscript with that of the Subantaratnākara reveals the
fact that the former is not a copy of the latter:
upap(ū)rvvaṃ | upanahyatīti | kvip | nahivṛtivṛṣi(i)tyādinā pūrvvapadasyātvaṁ |
upānahaśabdaḥ | (.. ..) ... (fol. 17r1–3)
Cf. Subantaratnākara:
upapūrvasya naheḥ kvip | nahivṛtivṛṣi(i)tyādi(2)nā pūrvvapadasya dīrghatvam | ‘nahāho dhaḥ’
(CV VI.3.65) iti padānte ... (NAK 4/148, 37r1–2)
||
57 The website of the Kesar library records this manuscript as that of Vyākaraṇa (Sarvaliṅga).
The NGMCP, however, records it as a manuscript of the Subantaratnākara.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 685
The present text also differs from NAK 1/813, which reads:
upānahśabdaḥ | nahāh(o) dha iti padānte ... (fol. 90r6)
About the text
Name of the author
The manuscript in its present form preserves the last word of the section dealing with
feminine nouns and an incomplete next section, which deals with adjectives. Thus,
there is only one final rubric available. It reads:
i(ti) (..) (5) (śrī)mahāgurusubhūticandraviracite strīliṅgakāṇḍe tritīyaḥ paricchedaḥ | (fol. 17r 4–5)
Thus (ends) the third part of the section dealing with feminine nouns composed by the great
teacher Subhūticandra.
The name of the text, however, does not appear anywhere in the manuscript.
3. NAK 1/1078 (Reel no. B 35–29) (24 4.5 cm) is a palm-leaf manuscript containing
10 folios with 4–5 lines per folio. It is written in the Nepālākṣara script. The manu-
script is complete. The writing on fol. 1v, and 6v/7r is partly rubbed off. Foliation fig-
ures appear in the middle of the right-hand margin of the verso; on fol. 1–2 letter nu-
merals occur in the middle of the left-hand margin. On the right-hand margin of 1v, a
modern hand has written in Devanāgarī characters: pra 1078 subantaratnākara.
About the text
Benediction
The text begins with a benediction to Kṛṣṇa:
praṇamya devakīputraṃ lakṣmīvāgīśvarīpriyaṃ |
vakṣe (!) (’)haṃ śabdaśloko ʼyaṃ ligaṃ(!)trayādisaṃgrahaḥ || (fol. 1v1)
After paying homage to the son of Devakī (i.e. Kṛṣṇa), and to the one who is the favourite of
Lakṣmī and Vāgīśvarī, I (now) teach this compendium of three genders etc. composed in the form
of a śabdaśloka (i.e. a verse consisting of nominal stems).
686 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
Title and contents
On the basis of the benedictory verse, the text can be tentatively called Liṅgatrayādi-
saṅgrahaḥ Śabdaślokaḥ ‘A Compendium of the Three Genders etc. [composed in the
form of a] śabdaśloka (i.e. a verse consisting of nominal stems).’ The NGMCP has rec-
orded this as a manuscript of the Subantaratnākara, the title being ‘drawn from a
verse (cited below),58 which also occurs in B 35/23 (Subantaratnākara).’59
Contents
Regarding the contents of the text, the NGMCP remarks:
... the contents of this MS are, however, different from B 35/23. Thus, this MS might be really
another specimen of Subhūticandra’s works.
The text only gives lists of nouns and adjectives, which are grouped into masculine,
neuter, and feminine stems, in the same sequence as that of the Subantaratnākara.
These stems are given again in the alphabetical order of the final sound. That the
division of this text is similar to that of the Subantaratnākara is evident from the
final rubrics:
puṃliṅgaḥ kāṇḍaḥ | (fol. 3v5)
subhūticandraviracite dvitīyo napuṃsakaḥ (!) kāṇḍo dvitīyaḥ | (fol. 5v3–4)
sū(!)bhūticandraviracitāyāṃ tṛtīyaḥ paṭalaḥ | (fol. 8v1)
The fourth section dealing with adjectives is not marked by a final rubric. There is
no section dealing with numerals.
Each section begins with a mnemonic verse providing a list of nouns ending in
a particular vowel or a consonant. Cf. for instance, the mnemonic verse occurring
at the beginning of masculine nouns ending in the vowel a:
ghaṭamaṭhakaṭabāḍhagrāmasaṃgrāmakāmaḥ
praharakarasamīraḥ sarggasvarggāpa(va)rggāḥ (!) |
paṭapaṭahacakorasvādadevodayārthaḥ
kṣayabhujagabhuja(ṅ)go (!) rāmakumbhīrakumbhāḥ ||
śārddūlakramaśīkaradrumasuronmādapramādavyayo
vyādhabrāhmaṇamāraśarkaraśarakrośapradoṣagrahāḥ || śiṃgha(!)vyāghraturaṅgabhaṅga-
subhaṭasvāsāśvadantāḍhaka-drohaḥ krodhakuṭhārakaṇṭhakamaṭhagrāsapravāśāśramāḥ ||
paṇḍitaḥ plavagakūpakuberaślokabhekasukasāvakabhṛṅgāḥ
||
58 iti ghaṭitam idaṃ mayā suvarṇṇaḥ ... (fol. 10r1).
59 http://catalogue.ngmcp.uni-hamburg.de/wiki/Main_Page.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 687
saṃganādamadamanmathanāthaḥ
kvāthadantacaṭakaviṭapāś ca ||
After this mnemonic verse, we find single words in their stem forms together with
their synonym:
vipraḥ | brāhmaṇa(ḥ) | [akārāntaśabdaḥ] || 1 ||
Name of the author
The name of the author is found in two final rubrics:
subhūticandraviracite dvitīyo napuṃsakaḥ (!) kāṇḍo dvitīyaḥ | (fol. 5v3–4)
(Thus ends) the second section dealing with neuter (nouns) composed by Subhūticandra.
sū(!)bhūticandraviracitāyāṃ tṛtīyaḥ paṭalaḥ | (fol. 8v1)
(Thus ends) the third section composed by Subhūticandra.
4. Or.133 (30 4 cm) is a manuscript from the Cambridge University Library.60 It is
a relatively recent palm-leaf manuscript (14th–15th century CE) containing 33 folios.
It is written in medieval Bengali. According to a modern inscription on the manu-
script, ‘it agrees with HP Shastri Nepal cata. I. p. 38’. The text preserved in this man-
uscript does not seem to be continuous. Rather, these appear to be stray leaves.
Folios 1–7, 11–12, 14–16, 19–27, 29–31, 33, 35, 39–41, and 43 seem to be available.
However, it should be noted that this conclusion is still tentative as more work
needs to be done on the manuscript. The manuscript begins with a homage to
Nārāyaṇa (oṃ namo nārāyaṇāya) and a benediction to Sarasvatī:
namaḥ sarasvatīpādapaṅkajāya hitaiṣiṇe |
yat prasādāj jagat sarvvam amyakam (?) upajāyate || (fol. 1v1–2)
Salutation to the lotus-like benevolent feet of Sarasvatī, due to the grace of which the entire
world becomes ... (?).
This benedictory verse is followed by the second and the third introductory verses,
namely, rūḍhiśabdā nigadyante ... , and viprāgni˚, found in the manuscripts of the
Subantaratnākara. The last word described in this manuscript seems to be div-,
which belongs to the feminine nouns ending in consonants.
||
60 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-00133/1.
688 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
Within each section, we find derivations of words following the Cāndra system
of grammar. However, that this is not a manuscript of the Subantaratnākara is clear
from a comparison of the derivation of the declension of the word pathin from this
manuscript with that of NAK 4/148:
NAK 4/148
pathinśabdasya ‘pathimathyṛbhukṣām ād’ (CV 5.4.38) iti sor akārasyātvam | (fol. 16v1–2)
Or.133
pathinśabdāt svādayaḥ | ‘pathimathyṛbhukṣām āt’ (CV 5.4.38) iti nakārasyātvaṃ | (fol. 19r1)
The first section dealing with masculine nouns ends on fol. 20v (prathamaḥ kāṇḍaḥ
samāptaḥ). As is evident from this final rubric, neither the name of the text, nor its
author are mentioned. I have so far been unable to find any other final rubric in this
manuscript.
5. The catalogue of the palm-leaf and selected paper manuscripts from the Dur-
bar Library, Nepal, records 1152 (nga) as a manuscript of the Subantaratnākara
(Shastri 1905, 38).61 This manuscript is written in the Maithili script. Its benedictory
verse is the same as that of Or.133. Just like Or.133, the benedictory verse is followed
by the third introductory verse of the Subantaratnākara, namely, rūḍhiśabdā ni-
gadyante .... From this, it appears that 1152 (nga) is a copy of Or.133 or vice versa.
Dwivedi (1987, 189) might have referred to this manuscript, which has the number
Pra. 1152 with the subject code (viṣayāṅka) 364. So far, I have not been able to locate
this manuscript.
6. NAK 1/1152 (Reel No. B 35–15) was originally recorded as a palm-leaf manu-
script of the Subantaratnākara (31.5 5 cm) containing 63 folios. The manuscript is
written in the Maithili script. It is incomplete, and damaged. The NGMCP has now
identified this text as that of the Prajñāvistārikā, a sub-commentary on the Kātan-
travyākaraṇa written by Billeśvara.
The NGMCP records one more text ascribed to Subhūticandra. It is entitled as
Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama. This palm-leaf manuscript is numbered NAK
5/416 (Reel No. B 34-16) (21 4 cm) and contains 18 folios with 4 lines per folio. It
is written in the Nepālākṣara script. The letter-numerals appear in the middle of the
left-hand margin and numerals in the middle of the right-hand margin of the verso
side of a folio. Folios 3–11 are slightly damaged; the writing on fols 6v, 7r, 9v, and
||
61 I am grateful to Prof. S. S. Bahulkar for bringing this manuscript to my notice.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 689
10r is partly rubbed off. The manuscript is dated Nepāla Saṃvat 560 (= 1440 CE). It,
in fact, contains two texts ascribed to Subhūticandra:
a. Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama (fols 1–11). The manuscript begins with a
homage to Vāgīśvara:
(fol. 1v1) oṃ namo vāgīśvarāya |
Homage to the Lord of Speech.
This is followed by a homage to Subhūticandra:
namo mā(!)hāsubhūticandragurave |
Homage to the great teacher Subhūticandra.
The text begins with a verse introducing the first section that deals with a list of
masculine nouns ending in the vowel a. This verse also mentions the name of the
teacher Subhūti as the author of this text:
prathamapuliṅgakāṇḍe ajantā śabdamālikā(2)ḥ |
kathitāś ca akārādiṃ (!) sū(!)bhūtiguruṇā kṛtāḥ || (fol. 1v1–2)
In the first section dealing with masculine nouns, lists of nouns ending in vowels composed
by the teacher Subhūti are explained starting with the sound a.
nlike other texts concerned with nominal declensions in the widest sense, this text
does not give any paradigms of declension, but only enumerates the respective sub-
antas in the form of the nominative singular, stating in what kind of final vowel or
consonant the stem ends. For instance, vipraḥ | akārāntaḥ śabdaḥ || 1 || hāhāḥ |
ākārāntaḥ śabdaḥ || 2 ||.
690 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
Division
There are five sections in this text, namely, those dealing with masculine,62 neuter,63
and feminine genders,64 adjectives,65 pronouns, and numerals. Numbers 1 to 100
are given in full. Within the first four sections, nouns are arranged alphabetically
according to their stem final.
Authorship and title
The name of the text, namely, Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama, as well as the
name of its author Subhūticandra, are found in the colophon:
iti subhūticandraviracitaḥ subavidhānaḥ śabda(2)mālāparikrama saḥ pūrṇṇabhūtaḥ
samāptaḥ | saṃkṣepamātraḥ | samvat 560 dināṣāḍhavadi 3 | (fol. 11v1–2)
Thus (ends) the (text entitled) Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama composed by Subhūticandra.
It is completed, i.e., has come to an end. (It is) an abridgement only. (It was composed in)
saṃvat 560 (= 1440 CE) on the Āṣāḍha day (?).
After the colophon, there is an inscription listing eight metals:
suvarṇṇarajataṃ kāśyaṃm (!) āraṃ śulvasavaṃgakaṃ |
ayaḥ śīsakam ity aṣṭau lohāni kāṣṭakuṭake (!) ||
śubha || śubha || (fol. 11v3)
Gold, silver, bronze (kāśya), brass (āra), copper (śulva), together with tin (savaṃgaka), iron,
lead (śīsaka) – these are eight (kinds of) metals in the kāṣṭakuṭaka (?).
(May) auspicious (be everywhere), (may) auspicious (be everywhere).
The NGMCP remarks:
This text is styled Suvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama on the index card of the NAK. Subhūtican-
dra (11th/12th c.), its author, is known to have commented in his Kāmadhenu on Amarasiṃha's
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana and in his Subantaratnākara on Dharmakīrti's Rūpāvatāra.
||
62 iti sū(!)bhūticandraviraci(fol. 3v)tāyāṃ puliṅgakāṇḍasagaṇaḥ prakaraṇaḥ prathamaḥ | (fols
3r4–3v1).
63 iti (3) sū(!)bhūticandraviracitāyāṃ dvitīyanapuṃsakakāṇḍaḥ sagaṇaḥ dvitīyaḥ | (4r2–3).
64 ity etat subhū(fol. 6r)ticandraviracitāyāṃ strīligaṃ(!) kāṇḍe paripūrṇṇaḥ paṭalatrayaḥ | (fols
5v4–6r1).
65 iti vācyaligaṃ(!)kāṇḍaḥ subhūticaṃdraviracito (’)yaṃ caturthaḥ parīcchedaḥ (!) | (fol. 9r4).
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 691
It appears that the mention of a commentary on Dharmakīrti’s Rūpāvatāra is prob-
ably a reference to manuscript NAK 1/813, which shares the benedictory verse of
the Rūpāvatāra.
b. Liṅgatrayādisaṅgrahaḥ śabdaślokaḥ (fols 12–18). This appears to be an incom-
plete copy of NAK 1/1078 mentioned above. The text is available up to the sec-
tion dealing with adjectives. In this manuscript, homage is paid to Vighneśvara:
oṃ namo vighnesvarāyaḥ (!) | (fol. 1v1)
This is followed by the word vipraḥ and the mnemonic verse found in NAK 1/1078,
namely, ghaṭamaṭha˚(fol. 1v1–3) As is evident from the final rubrics, this text is also
divided in a way similar to that of the Subantaratnākara.66
In the Derge edition, immediately after the Sup mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas,
there occurs a text called Lung du ston pa su ba nta zhes bya ba (*Vyākaraṇa-sub-
anta nāma).67 The text is not handed down to us in its entirety. The first section
dealing with the masculine nouns ends on fol. 141b. The first noun dealt with in the
next section of neuter nouns is mana (?). The text ends abruptly while describing
the nominative plural of this noun. As a result, we do not know either the author or
the translator of this text. While Subantaratnākara starts with the declensions of
the word vipra, this text starts with that of the word rudra. From the noun hāhā
onwards, the sequence of words in the *Vyākaraṇasubanta and in the Subanta-
ratnākara is the same. From the derivations given for all the nouns, it also becomes
clear that, just like the author of the Subantaratnākara, the present author has also
followed the Cāndra system of grammar. On the basis of these similarities, we can
probably say that the *Vyākaraṇasubanta is also somehow related to the Subanta-
ratnākara.
It appears from the foregoing discussion that NAK 1/813 is a compilation from
various texts, and its last part is related to the Subantaratnākara. The remaining
six manuscripts, except NAK 1/1152, preserve four texts ascribed to Subhūtican-
dra: 1. Śabdasaṃgrahakāṇḍa (Kesar 528), 2. Liṅgatrayādisaṃgrahaḥ Śabdaślokaḥ
(NAK 1/1078, NAK 5/416b), 3. Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama (NAK 5/416a),
and 4. the text preserved in Or.133 and 1152 (nga) from the Durbar library. Inter-
estingly, in all these texts, the division of the text and the nouns dealt with in
each of the sections remain the same. We find salutation to Subhūticandra at the
beginning of NAK 5/416a. It also mentions Subhūticandra in the first verse. The
||
66 prathamaḥ puliṅgaḥ | (fol. 4v1); dvitīyaḥ kāṇḍanapuṃsaka(4)ṃ | (fol. 5v3–4); strīliṅgakāṇḍas
tṛtīyaḥ | (fol. 7v3); vācyaliṅgaḥ samāptaḥ || (ity ete) (2) ślokā(s te) | (fol. 8v1–2).
67 Derge no. 4431, fols 134a6–141b7; Peking no. 5895 460b1–470a6.
692 | Lata Mahesh Deokar
other three texts, just like the Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama, are basic in na-
ture. From the abridged and enumerative nature of all these texts, it appears that
these are later handbooks based on the Subantaratnākara prepared by those be-
longing to Subhūticandra’s lineage. It should be kept in mind, however, that
these conclusions are still tentative. It will be possible to say something more
conclusive only after a diplomatic edition of all these texts is prepared.
I am thankful to Prof. Harunaga Isaacson for going through the draft of this paper and making val-
uable suggestions.
References
Primary sources
The Buddhacarita: Or Acts of the Buddha. Ed. by E[dward] H[amilton] Johnston. Pt. 1. Sanskrit Text.
Pt. 2. Cantos i to xiv transl. from the original Sanskrit supplemented by the Tibetan version,
together with an introduction and notes. Calcutta 1935-36. (PUOP. 31. 32.)
Cāṇakya-nīti-text-tradition (Cāṇakya-nīti-śākhā-sampradāyaḥ), Vol. I, part II: V. The
Laghucāṇakya Version, VI. The Cāṇakya-Rāja-Nīti-Śāstra Version. Ludwik Sternbach. Vish-
veshvaranand Vedic Research Institute Publications. 1964.
Candra-vṛtti: Der Originalkommentar Candragomin’s zu seinem grammatischen Sūtra. hrsg. von
Bruno Liebich. Leipzig 1918. (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, 14).
Cāndra-Vyākaraṇa. Die Grammatik des Candragomin. Sūtra, Uṇādi, Dhātupāṭha. hrsg. von Bruno
Liebich. Leipzig 1902. (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, herausgegeben von
der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft unter der verantwortlichen Redaktion des
Prof. Dr. E. V. Windisch. XI. Band. No. 4.)
Das Cāndra-Vyakaraṇa. Bruno Liebich. Aus den Nachrichten der K. Gesellschaft der Wissenschaf-
ten zu Göttingen. Philologisch-historische Klasse. Heft 3. 1895.
Daśāvatāracaritam. By Kṣemendra. Edited by Pandit Durgāprasāda and Kāśinātha Pāṇḍuraṅga
Parab. Nirṇayasāgara Press. Mumbai. Second edition. 1891.
Sup’i mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas. Collected Works of The Great Ta’i Si-tu-pa Kun-mkhyen Chos-
kyi-’byun(!)-gnas-bstan-pa’i-nyin-byed. Vol. tha. Kangra. 1990.
The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartṛhari Including the Three Centuries for the first time collected and
critically edited, with principal variants and an Introduction. D. D. Kosambi. Munshiram Ma-
noharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd. 2000. (First edition: 1948 Singhi Jain Series, no. 23).
Le Prākṛtānuśāsana de Purushottama. Paris. Luigia Nitti-Dolci. (1938).
The Rupavatara of Dharmakīrti. Part I. Edited by M. Rangacharya. G. A. Natesan & Co., Esplanade,
Madras.
Subhūticandra’s Kavikāmadhenu on the Amarakośa 1.1.1–1.4.8 Together with Si tu Paṇ chen’s Ti-
betan Translation. Lata Mahesh Deokar. Indica et Tibetica, Vol. 55. Marburg, Germany. 2014.
Subantaratnākara: An Unknown Text of Subhūticandra | 693
Secondary sources
Deokar, Lata Mahesh (2013), ‘Subhūticandra: A Forgotten Scholar of Magadha’, in Journal of
Buddhist Studies, Vol. X. 137–154.
Deokar, Lata Mahesh (2014), See Subhūticandra’s Kavikāmadhenu on the Amarakośa 1.1.1–
1.4.8.
Dwivedi, Janaki Prasad (1987), Sanskrit ke bauddh vaiyākaraṇ (Hindi)(Bibliotheca Indo-Tibetica
XIII), Sarnath:
Kosambi, D. D. See The Epigrams Attributed to Bhartṛhari.
van der Kuijp, Leonard W. J. (2009), ‘On the Vicissitudes of Subhūticandra's Kāmadhenu Com-
mentary on the Amarakoṣa in Tibet’, in Journal of the International Association of Tibetan
Studies, Issue 5: 1–105.
Liebich, Bruno. See Cāndra-vyākaraṇa.
Nitti-Dolci, Luigia. See Le Prākṛtānuśāsana de Purushottama.
Oberlies, Thomas (1992), ‘Verschiedene neu-entdeckte Texte des Cāndravyākaraṇa und ihre
Verfasser (Studien zum Cāndravyākaraṇa II) ’, in Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik,
16/17: 161–184.
Rangacharya M. See The Rupavatara of Dharmakīrti.
Sastri, Hara Prasād (1905), A Catalogue of Palm-Leaf & Selected Paper Mss. Belonging to the
Durbar Library, Nepal. Vol. I. Calcutta.
Sternbach, Ludwik. See Cāṇakya-nīti-text-tradition.
Verhagen, Pieter Cornelius (2001), A History of Sanskrit Grammatical Literature in Tibet. Assim-
ilation into Indigenous Scholarship, Volume Two, Leiden: Brill.
Vogel, Claus (2015), Indian Lexicography. Revised and enlarged edition. Edited by Jürgen
Hanneder and Martin Straube. Munich: Indologica Marpurgensia
Wezler, Albrecht (2001), ‘Bhikṣu Haribhadra’s Vibhaktikārikā. An Unknown Grammatical Text
Edited with a Brief Introduction (First Part)’, in Journal of Nepal Research Centre, Vol. 12:
243–254.
Mahesh A. Deokar
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: An Important
Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavutti-
vivaraṇapañcikā
A Case Study Based on a Cambridge Fragment of the
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā with Special Reference to CV 2.2.1
and MV 3.1
Abstract: The 12th-century Pali grammar by the Sinhalese elder Moggallāna called
Moggallānavyākaraṇa and its auto-commentary Vutti are heavily indebted to the
Cāndravyākaraṇa and its Vṛtti. Similarly the Moggallānapañcikā written by the
same author is closely linked to the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā composed by the
Sinhalese monk-scholar Ratnamati in the 10th century. In order to demonstrate
the close relationship between the two Pañjikās, and to highlight the importance
of studying them side by side, a sample text of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā on
CV 2.2.1 from the Cambridge Add.1657.1 and the Moggallānapañcikā 3.1 are pre-
sented in this article with an English translation. The subsequent discussion ex-
emplifies how the study of these two texts together is not only useful, but also
mandatory for ensuring any further progress in their textual study. It underlines
the importance of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā in understanding the text of the
Moggallānapañcikā and Moggallāna’s grammatical ideology in the broader con-
text of the changing trends in the Pali grammatical literature of Sri Lanka. It also
suggests the utility of such a study for the understanding of the methodology
adopted by Moggallāna to translate scholastic Sanskrit into Pali.
Candragomin’s Śabdalakṣaṇa (5th century CE),1 popularly known as the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇa, is an attempt to revise Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī. Soon this new grammar
became popular and evolved into a full-fledged grammatical school independent
of the Pāṇinian system. The major known commentarial works of the Cāndra tra-
dition are:
||
I am thankful to Prof. Em. George Cardona and Dr habil. Dragomir Dimitrov for going through the
draft of this paper and making valuable suggestions.
1 For the date of Candragomin, see Oberlies 1989, 11–14; 1996, 269–275.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-021, © 2017 M. Deokar, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
696 | Mahesh A. Deokar
1. Dharmadāsa’s Cāndravṛtti (c. 6th century CE)2 on the Cāndrasūtras
2. Three Pañjikās on the Cāndravṛtti:
a. Ratnamati’s (c. 900–980 CE) Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā (c. 920s–
930s)3
b. Pūrṇacandra’s Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā (sometime between
the 6th and the beginning of the 12th century CE)4
c. Sumati’s Sumatipañjikā (second half of the 10th century CE)5
3. Three commentaries on the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā:
a. Sāriputta’s Candrālaṃkāra (first quarter of the 12th century CE)6
b. Ānandadatta’s Ratnamatipaddhati (middle of the 12th century CE)7
c. Ratnadatta’s Nibandha (after the 10th century CE)8
||
2 Cf. Oberlies 1989 and 1996. For an overview of the controversy regarding the authorship and
date of the Cāndrasūtra and the Cāndravṛtti, see Vergiani 2009.
3 For a detailed discussion on the date of this erudite Sri Lankan monk-scholar and his Pañjikā,
see Dimitrov 2016, esp. 599 ff.
4 Being a commentary on the Cāndravṛtti, the lower limit of the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā
is 6th century CE. Since Pūrṇacandra as well as his Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā and the
Dhātupārāyaṇa are mentioned in Subhūticandra’s (c. 1060–1140 CE) Kavikāmadhenu commen-
tary (c. 1110–1130 CE) on the Amarakośa and in Ānandadatta’s Ratnamatipaddhati (cf. below),
the upper limit of Pūrṇacandra can be safely assumed to be the end of the eleventh century or
the beginning of the twelfth century (Deokar Lata 2014, 58ff, Dimitrov 2016, 664). After compar-
ing a number of passages from the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā of Pūrṇacandra with the par-
allel passages in Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, Dimitrov (2016, 687) expresses doubt re-
garding the exact chronology of the two works. He says: ‘Neither the passage quoted above [see
ibid., p. 684] nor any other passage from the Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā consulted by us so
far permits us to determine confidently whether Pūrṇacandra’s work has been influenced by
Ratna or whether it was written before him.’ According to Dimitrov (2016, 688) ‘[t]he question of
Pūrṇacandra’s date, therefore, needs to be investigated further, and more evidence is required.’
5 Dimitrov 2016, 690: ‘... this commentary was composed by a scholar from the Kathmandu Val-
ley less than a century, perhaps just a few decades, after Ratna had written his Cāndravyākaraṇa-
pañjikā.’
6 A detailed discussion on the date of this learned Sinhalese monk can be found in Dimitrov
2010, 46; 2016, 601, n. 8.
7 For a detailed discussion of Ānandadatta’s date, cf. Dimitrov 2016, 626, 676, and 687.
8 In the absence of a manuscript of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā on the portion for which the
text of the Nibandha is available, Dimitrov compared the available portion of the latter with the
corresponding portion in Ānandadatta’s Paddhati. After comparing the two texts, Dimitrov
(2016, 696) remarks that ‘[i]t is safe to reach this conclusion after observing that, for example, in
the commentary on Cān. 1.4.34 and 1.4.39 both Ānandadatta’s Ratnamatipaddhati and the work
contained in the Cambridge fragment share the same pratīkās (!) which prove that both authors
have been commenting upon the same text, namely, the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā.’ Regarding
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 697
The textual and inscriptional evidence indicates that the Cāndravyākaraṇa
was well-received and was also quite influential in the Buddhist academia in Sri
Lanka, Tibet, and Myanmar. In Sri Lanka, Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā
gave an impetus to the creation of new scientific treatises based on the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇa. Besides the composition of Candrālaṃkāra by Sāriputta mentioned
above, it inspired a simplified pedagogical handbook of the Cāndravyākaraṇa
called Bālāvabodhana written by Mahākassapa (12th century CE).9 Another Sinha-
lese monk Buddhanāga, about whom very little is known, wrote a commentary
called the Līnārthadīpa or Pātrīkaraṇaṭīkā some time between the middle of the
tenth and the middle of the fifteenth century.10 It is a Sanskrit commentary on
another abridged version of the Cāndravyākaraṇa namely the Pātrīkaraṇa written
apparently by a Mahāyāna Buddhist of Indian origin named Guṇākara.11 This Sri
Lankan scholarly lineage of the Cāndravyākaraṇa prepared a solid foundation for
the advent of a new school of Pali grammar based on the Cāndra system.
Moggallāna, who flourished during the reign of King Parakkamabāhu I (r.
1153–1186 CE) in the second half of the twelfth century, was a junior contempo-
rary of Sāriputta. He composed all by himself three major works on the Pali gram-
mar, namely, the grammatical aphorisms (suttas) known as Saddalakkhaṇa or
Moggallānavyākaraṇa, their gloss named Vutti, and the commentary called
Vuttivivaraṇapañcikā. This threefold composition replicates the Cāndra gram-
matical lineage consisting of the Cāndrasūtras, their Vṛtti, and the Pañjikā.
As early as 1890, H. Devamitta brought out the first edition of the Moggallāna-
vyākaraṇa along with its commentary, the vutti, printed in Sinhalese script. In
this publication, the editor pointed out the relation between the Moggallāna-
vyākaraṇa, on the one hand, and the Pāṇinian, the Cāndra, and the Kātantra
||
the date of the Nibandha, Dimitrov (2016, 695) says: ‘Ratna’s date supplies, therefore, the termi-
nus post quem for Ratnadatta who cannot have composed his Nibandha any earlier than the mid-
dle of the tenth century and may have been a close contemporary of Ānandadatta. The question
of Ānandadatta’s and Ratnadatta’s relative chronology, however, still remains unanswered.’
9 Cf. Gornall 2013, 46, Dimitrov 2016, 565.
10 Based on the information provided by Pannasara (1958, 86–97), Dimitrov (2016, 566) states:
‘… it is possible to establish that Buddhanāga has quoted anonymously the seventh stanza from
the introductory part of the Śabdārthacintā.’ This implies that Buddhanāga certainly flourished
later than Ratnamati. Following Bechert (1987, 11) and Wijesekera (1954–55, 96), Gornall (2013,
190–191) mentions: ‘It is uncertain whether this work was also produced during the reforms
though it must have been before 1458 since Sri Rāhula quotes it in his Moggallāna-Pañcikā-Pra-
dīpaya (Mogg-pd). Wijesekera, though, has tentatively linked this Buddhanāga with Sāriputta’s
disciple of the same name, who authored the Vinayatthamañjūsā (Kkh-ṭ), a commentary on the
Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī (Kkh).’ For Śrī Rāhulaʼs quote, see also Dimitrov 2016, 565, n. 1.
11 Cf. Pannasara 1958, 88–90, and Dimitrov 2016, 565.
698 | Mahesh A. Deokar
grammars, on the other. Soon after this publication, in 1902, R. Otto Franke pub-
lished an excellent monograph on the history of Pali grammar and lexicography
entitled Geschichte und Kritik der einheimischen Pāli-Grammatik und Lexicogra-
phie. In the subsequent years, he wrote two important articles concerning Mog-
gallāna’s grammar. In the first of the two articles, Franke, for the first time, dis-
cussed in detail the relationship between the Moggallānavyākaraṇa and the
Cāndra grammar. He prepared an elaborate concordance of parallel rules from
the Moggallānavyākaraṇa and the Cāndravyākaraṇa and also pointed out a par-
tial correspondence between the Moggallānavutti and the Cāndravṛtti (Franke
1903, 71–95). In spite of this early breakthrough in the comparative study of these
two grammatical systems, no further advances were made for more than a cen-
tury.
In 2008, in a book entitled Technical Terms and Technique of the Pali and the
Sanskrit Grammars, I presented my observations on Moggallāna’s indebtedness
to the Cāndravyākaraṇa in terms of technical terminology, and the technique of
writing a grammar. In the following year, I published a brief comparative survey
of the samāsa sections of these two grammars in an article The Treatment of Com-
pounds in the Moggallānavyākaraṇa vis-à-vis Cāndravyākaraṇa.
Alastair Gornall, in his doctoral dissertation Buddhism and Grammar: The
Scholarly Cultivation of Pāli in Medieval Laṅkā, presented a dialogical analysis of
the Pali grammatical literature of the twelfth century Laṅkā. In this connection,
he undertook a serious comparative study of the treatment of cases in the Cāndra-
vṛtti and the three above-mentioned works of Moggallāna. By focusing on the im-
mediate texts and personalities that inspired Moggallāna, Gornall claimed that
Ratnamati’s commentarial lineage influenced the creation of the new Moggallāna
school of Pali grammar, and that ‘Moggallāna’s use of the Cāndra was facilitated
by Ratnamati’s Cāndra-Pañjikā and its commentary the Candrālaṃkāra of Sāri-
putta’ (Gornall 2013, 136). He also speculated about the possible correlation be-
tween the Moggallānapañcikā and the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā on the basis of a
quotation from Śrī Rāhula’s Buddhippasādinīṭīkā12 on the Padasādhana of
Piyadassī and from some other references to Ratnamati and his work found in the
Moggallānapañcikā and its commentaries Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā by Saṅghara-
kkhita and Moggallānapañcikāpradīpaya by Śrī Rāhula. Gornall could not, how-
ever, fully determine the exact scope of this correlation due to the unedited and
incomplete nature of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā (Gornall 2013, 89).
In November 2012, during my short visit to Germany, I had a chance to meet
Dr Dragomir Dimitrov of the University of Marburg. He was then busy working on
||
12 Padasādhanaṭīkā 6, 13–14 quoted and translated in Gornall 2013, 53.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 699
his habilitation thesis entitled The Legacy of The Jewel Mind focused on the San-
skrit, Pali, and Sinhalese works written by Ratnamati. By that time, he had al-
ready noticed the close affinity between Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā
and the Moggallānapañcikā. Due to our common interest, we decided to read to-
gether selected portions of these texts. In the spring of 2013 and 2014, we further
studied the two texts along with the relevant portions from Pūrṇacandra’s
Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā and Ānandadatta’s Paddhati.
Our study of this important material confirmed Dimitrov’s following conclu-
sions:
1. Just as the Moggallānavyākaraṇa and its Vutti are heavily indebted to the
Cāndravyākaraṇa and its Vṛtti, similarly the Moggallānapañcikā is closely
linked with the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā.
2. Pūrṇacandra’s Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā is an independent commentary
on the Cāndravṛtti.
3. Ānandadatta’s Ratnamatipaddhati is a direct commentary on Ratnamati’s
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā.
In his Legacy of the Jewel Mind Dimitrov has discussed at some length the
influence of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā on the Moggallānapañcikā. He (2016,
606ff) has presented three passages from the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, namely,
CV 2.1.85, 2.1.87, and 2.2.23, along with their parallels from the Moggallāna-
pañcikā, namely, MV 2.32, 2.28, and 3.10 and demonstrated (2016, 22) that ‘on
many occasions the Pali commentary contains nothing less than a very precise
translation of carefully selected passages from Ratna’s seminal work.’
In the following pages, I propose to cite a sample text of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā on CV 2.2.1 from Add.1657.1.13 The text that I am going to pre-
sent is based on the excerpt provided for the first time by Dimitrov in his book,
which also includes an edition of the corresponding part of Ānandadattaʼs
Ratnamatipaddhati on this section (2016, 650–658). I will then supply the corre-
sponding portion from the Moggallānapañcikā 3.1 in order to demonstrate the
close relationship between both texts. This will substantiate Dimitrov’s claim that
||
13 http://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-01657-00001. As summarized by Dimitrov 2016,
675, this fragmentary manuscript of fifty-five folios preserves Ratnamati’s commentary on
Cāndravyākaraṇa 2.2.1–18, 2.2.19–23, 36–46, 48–81, and 83–87 covering the samāsa section. The
last one or two folios of this manuscript are missing, which initially made its identification diffi-
cult. When Bruno Liebich (1862–1939) examined the said manuscript, he thought that it also
contains a part of Ānandadatta’s Paddhati, like the other three manuscripts of the said text. Di-
mitrov (2016, 645 ff.) has provided evidence for the correct identification of the Cambridge frag-
ment. By juxtaposing the text of Cāndravyākaraṇa 2.2.1 of this manuscript and Ānandadatta’s
Paddhati, he has shown that this is a text of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā.
700 | Mahesh A. Deokar
the two works can be mutually helpful in the process of editing them. It will
clearly underline the important role of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā in under-
standing the text of the Moggallānapañcikā and Moggallāna’s grammatical ide-
ology in the broader context of the changing trends in the Pali grammatical liter-
ature. Apart from this, the comparison of the two passages will demonstrate
Moggallāna’s methodology of adopting and adapting materials from the Cāndra
tradition.
Cāndrasūtra:
sup supaikārtham (2.2.1)
[A word ending in] a siglum sup together with [another word ending in] siglum sup forms a
single integrated meaning.
Cāndravṛtti:
subantaṃ subantena sahaikārthaṃ bhavatīty etad adhikṛtaṃ veditavyam. sa ca pṛthagar-
thānām ekārthībhāvaḥ samāsa ity ucyate.
‘A word ending in the siglum sup together with another word ending in the siglum sup forms
a single integrated meaning.’ This should be understood as a heading phrase (adhikāra).
Furthermore, this formation of a single integrated meaning out of words having separate
meanings is called ‘a compound’.
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā:
sub iti prathamaikavacanam ārabhya saptamībahuvacanapakāreṇa pratyāhāragrahaṇam.
vidhigrahaṇanyāyena tadantagrahaṇam ity āha: subantam ityādi.
Sup is accepted as a siglum starting from the nominative singular suffix [su] and
ending with the letter p of the locative plural suffix [sup]. As per the maxim con-
cerning the understanding of a grammatical injunction, sup is accepted as the
word ending in it. Therefore, [the Vṛttikāra] says subantaṃ (‘a word ending in the
siglum sup’), and so on.
sāmānyoktāv api yasya yena saṃbandhas tena saha tad ekārthaṃ bhavatīti saṃbandhād
vijñāyate. tadyathā: mātari vartitavyaṃ pitari śuśrūṣitavyam iti. na cocyate svasyāṃ svas-
minn iti. atha ca yā yasya mātā yaś ca yasya piteti saṃbandhāt pratīyate. tadvad ihāpi.
tenāniṣṭaṃ na kiṃ cid ihāpadyate. ata eva vyapekṣāsāmarthyaparigrahāya samarthava-
canaṃ nāśritam. ekārthībhāvas tv ekārthavacanenaiva saṃgṛhītaḥ. tenātra vṛttāv
ekārthībhāva eva, na vākye vyapekṣābhedādilakṣaṇe.
Even though it is a general statement [describing the compound of two unspecified sub-
antas], due to a relation, it is understood that a subanta forms a single integrated meaning
[only] with that subanta which is related to it. For instance, [it is said,] ‘One should attend
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 701
to the mother’ (mātari vartitavyam), ‘One should obey the father’ (pitari śuśrūṣitavyam).
However, it is not said ‘to one’s own mother’ and ‘one’s own father’. Rather, due to the re-
lation, it is understood that [the respective act is related with] the one who is one’s mother
and the one who is one’s father. It is the same here too. Hence, nothing undesirable is likely
to happen here [in the context of the present aphorism]. Therefore, [the Sūtrakāra] has not
resorted to the word samartha [in the aphorism] so as to imply the semantic connection in
the sense of mutual expectancy [between words]. The formation of a single integrated
meaning is rather implied by the word ekārtham itself. Therefore, here in a compounded
word-formation, only the formation of a single integrated meaning is present, but not so in
an uncompounded expression, which is characterized by mutual expectancy [between
word-meanings] as well as by differentiation [of word-meanings], etc.
tathā hi rājñaḥ puruṣa iti rājā svāmyantarād bhedakaḥ, puruṣaḥ svāntarād iti bhedaḥ.
saṃsargo ’trārthagṛhītaḥ. na hi vyāvṛttasya saṃbandhyantareṇāsaṃbaddhasya svāder
avasthānam asti. yadā rājā mamāyam ity apekṣate, puruṣo ’ham asyeti ca tadā saṃsargaḥ.
vyāvṛttir arthagṛhītā. na hy avyāvartamānayoḥ saṃbandhyantarebhyaḥ saṃsarga
upapadyate. yadā tūbhayam api prādhānyenocyate tadobhayabhedasaṃsargo vākyārthaḥ.
Thus, as for the expression rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ, the king differentiates [himself] from other own-
ers [of the servant], and so does the servant [who differentiates himself] from other owned
things [of the king]. This is the differentiation. Here the association [between the two word-
meanings] is discerned by reasoning. Because, an owned thing, etc., cannot be so distin-
guished, if it is unrelated to another related [word-meaning]. When the king expects ‘he is
my [servant]’, and when the servant expects ‘I am his [servant]’, then there is an association.
The distinction [of both the word-meanings from other similar word-meanings] is discerned
by reasoning, because the association [between these word-meanings] cannot take place
unless both are being distinguished from other related [word-meanings]. Furthermore,
when both [the differentiation and the association] are expressed primarily, then both, the
differentiation as well as the association [among the word-meanings] is the meaning of an
uncompounded expression.
ekārthībhāvasya samāsavyapadeśa iṣyate cārthasamāsa ityādau [cf. Cān. 4.1.149:
cārthasamāsamanojñādibhyaḥ] vyavahārārthaḥ. sa katham ity āśaṅkyāha: sa cetyādi.
anvākhyānāya rājapuruṣādau buddhyā pravibhajya yāni padāni pṛthagarthāni prakalpitāni
rājan as puruṣa su ityādīni teṣāṃ pṛthagarthānāṃ bhinnārthānām ekārthībhāvaḥ
sādhāraṇārthatā viśeṣaṇasya svārthaparityāgena viśeṣye vṛttau saṃpadyate. tataś
caikārthībhavanaṃ samasanam iti kṛtvānugatārthatayā samāsa ity ucyate.
[The Vṛttikāra] wishes to designate the formation of the single integrated meaning as
samāsa with the purpose of using [the said designation] in the expressions cārthasamāsa
(‘a compound having the copulative sense’), etc. [Anticipating the objection], ‘How is it [jus-
tified]?’, [the Vṛttikāra] says, sa ca (‘Furthermore, that’), and so on. For the sake of expla-
nation of the words rājapuruṣa (‘a royal servant’), etc., the words rājan as puruṣa su, etc. are
mentally analyzed and considered to possess a separate meaning; the formation of a single
integrated meaning, [that is to say] the compositeness of meaning, out of those words hav-
ing separate meanings [that is to say] isolated meanings is accomplished, when a qualifier,
by abandoning its own meaning abides in the sense of a qualificant noun. Thus, since the
702 | Mahesh A. Deokar
formation of a single integrated meaning is [equal to] compounding, it is called ‘a com-
pound’ (samāsa) because of the similarity of meaning.
nanu ca jahatsvārthāyāṃ vṛttau śrīyamāṇāyāṃ rājapuruṣam ānayety ukte puruṣamātra-
syānayanaṃ prāpnoti, na jātu cid rājaviśiṣṭasya? naitad asti. jahad api rājaśabdaḥ svārthaṃ
nātyantāya hāsyati. tadyathā: takṣā rājakarmaṇi pravartamānaḥ svaṃ takṣakarma
rājakarmavirodhi jahāti, nāviruddhaṃ hasitakaṇḍūyitādi. tathā rājaśabdo ’pi
viśeṣyārthavṛttivirodhinam arthaṃ hāsyati, na tu viśeṣaṇam. athavānvayād rājaviśiṣṭasya
grahaṇam. tadyathā: campakapuṭo mallikāpuṭa iti niṣkrāntāsv api sumanaḥsu vyapadeśo
’nvayād bhavati. tathehāpi. tena rājaviśiṣṭasyānayanam, na puruṣamātrasya.
[The opponent argues:] If one resorts to the type of formation where [a qualifier] loses its
own meaning, then, when one asks ‘Bring a royal servant!’, it may result in the bringing
merely of a servant, but certainly not of the servant qualified by [the adjective] royal. [The
proponent responds:] It is not the case. Even while abandoning its own meaning, the word
rājan will not abandon it in the absolute sense. For instance, a carpenter, while performing
a royal duty, abandons his own duty of a carpenter, which is in conflict with the royal duty;
but not [the acts of] laughing, scratching etc., which are not in conflict [with the royal duty].
Similarly, the word rājan will also abandon that meaning which is in conflict with the mean-
ing of a qualificant noun (viśeṣya), but not the qualifying meaning. Or alternatively, due to
[their former] association, the comprehension [of the meaning ‘servant’] qualified by [the
adjective] ‘royal’ is possible. For instance, the designations, namely, ‘a wrapper of campaka
flowers’ (campakapuṭa), ‘a wrapper of mallikā flowers’ (mallikāpuṭa) are used on account
of their [former] association, even when the flowers are no longer there. The same is also
valid here. Hence, only that servant who is qualified by [the adjective] ‘royal’ is brought,
and not someone who is merely a servant.
Moggallānasutta:
syādi syādinekatthaṃ (3.1)
Moggallānavutti:
syādyantaṃ syādyantena sahekatthaṃ hotīti idam adhikataṃ veditabbaṃ; so ca bhinnat-
thānam ekatthībhāvo samāso ti vuccate.
Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā:
si ādi yassa so syādi – si yo aṃ yo nā hi sa naṃ smā hi sa naṃ smiṃ su ti idaṃ vidhig-
gahaṇañāyena tadantaggahaṇam icc āha: syādyantam iccādi.
sāmaññena vutte pi yassa yena saṃbandho tena saha tad ekatthaṃ bhavatī ti
saṃbandhato viññāyati. taṃ yathā: mātari vattitabbaṃ pitari sussusitabban ti. na coccate
sakāya sake ti. atha ca yā yassa mātā yo yassa pitā ti saṃbandhato patīyate. tathehā pi.
tenāniṭṭhaṃ kiñci pīha na hoti. ato yeva vyapekkhāsāmatthiyapariggahāya samatthava-
canaṃ na kataṃ. ekatthībhāvo pana ekatthavacanen’ eva saṃgahīto. ten’ ettha vuttiyaṃ
ekatthībhāvo. vākye vyapekkhā bhedādilakkhaṇā.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 703
tathāhi rañño puriso ti rājā sāmyantarato bhedako, puriso sāntarato ti bhedo. saṃsaggo
ettha atthagahīto14. na tu vyāvuttassa saṃbandhyantareṇāsaṃbaddhassa sādino avat-
thānam atthi. yadā rājā mamāyan ti apekkhate, puriso ahaṃ asseti tadā saṃsaggo. vyāvutti
atthagahītā15. na hi avyāvuttānaṃ saṃbandhyantarehi saṃsaggo uppajjate. yadā tūbhayam
api padhānatāya vuccate tadobhayaṃ bhedasaṃsaggo vākyattho.
ekatthībhāvassa samāsavyapadeso abhimato catthasamāse ti ādo [cf. MV 2.143] vyava-
hārattho. so kathaṃ icc āsaṅkiy’ āha so ca iccādi. anvākhyānāya rājapurisādo buddhiyā
pavibhajja yāni padāni puthagatthāni pakappitāni rāja sa purisa si iccādīni tesaṃ puthagat-
thānaṃ bhinnatthānam ekatthībhāvo sādhāraṇatthatā visesanassa sakatthapariccāgena
visesse vuttiyaṃ saṃpajjate. tato c’ ekatthībhavanaṃ samasanaṃ iti katvā anugatatthatāya
samāso ti vuccate.
nanu ca jahamānasakatthāyaṃ vuttiyam upādiyamānāyaṃ rājapurisam ānayeti vutte
purisamattassānayanaṃ pappoti, na kadāci rājavisiṭṭhassa. nedaṃ atthi. jahanto api
rājasaddo sakatthaṃ nāccantāya jahāti. taṃ yathā: ṭhapati rājakamme pavattamāno sakaṃ
tacchakammaṃ rājakammaviruddhaṃ (jahāti, nāviruddhaṃ) hasitakaṇḍuyatādiṃ. tathā
rājasaddo pi visessatthavuttiviruddham atthaṃ jahāti, na pana visesanaṃ. athavā ’nvayato
rājavisiṭṭhassa gahaṇaṃ. taṃ yathā: campakapuṭo mallikāpuṭo ti niṭṭhitesu pi kusumesu
vyapadeso anvayato bhavati. tathehā pi. tena rājavisiṭṭhass’ ānayanaṃ, na purisamattassa.16
The main topics discussed in these passages are as follows:
1. An explanation of the words subanta or syādyanta.
2. Proving the futility of the Pāṇinian metarule samarthaḥ padavidhiḥ (A. 2.2.1).
3. Three views about the meaning of an uncompounded expression (vākyārtha).
4. Justification for accepting the technical term samāsa used in the Pāṇinian
school.
5. The problem in accepting the type of compounded word-formation where the
qualifier loses its own meaning (jahatsvārthā vṛtti) and the solutions thereby.
When we compare the above two passages, it becomes evident that the Pali text
is a literal translation of the Sanskrit original as in some of the other cases demon-
strated by Dimitrov (2016, 606 ff.). In view of such a close affinity, the comparison
of these texts proves helpful with regard to the textual study of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā and the Moggallānapañcikā alike. As far as the progress of the
textual study of both these texts is concerned, we are not in a very happy position.
||
14 ˚gahīto em. ] ˚gahito Printed text
15 ˚gahītā em. ] ˚gahitā Printed text
16 Dharmānanda 1931, 138–139. Here the orthography of the text has been standardized, and
the pratīkas and the quotations are marked distinctly for the sake of convenience.
704 | Mahesh A. Deokar
As Dimitrov reports, the available manuscripts material of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā suffers from its fragmentary nature and partly poor quality.17
Moreover, although the text of Ānandadattaʼs Ratnamatipaddhati is helpful in
some cases, it cannot be used for editing the entire text of the Pañjikā, since the
former is a commentary only on some selected rules of the Cāndravyākaraṇa.
Thus, it is a challenging task to edit the text of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā.
In the case of the Moggallānapañcikā, the situation is equally gloomy. Alt-
hough we have a printed text of this work in Sinhalese and Burmese scripts pub-
lished in 1931 and 1954 respectively, these are not critical editions. As Ven.
Dharmānanda (1931: Preface ii), the editor of the Sinhalese publication, informs
us, the text presented by him is based on a single manuscript preserved in the
library of the Asgiri Vihāra. There is no information available on the date and the
condition of this manuscript. The Burmese edition of the Pañcikā seems to be
based on the Sinhalese edition with a few corrections made by its editor Bhadanta
Aggadhammābhivaṃsa Thera. Obviously, these printed texts should be used
with great caution, since they are not entirely reliable.
On the background of these inconveniencies, it will be worthwhile studying
the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā and the Moggallānapañcikā in close juxtaposition
in order to achieve further progress in the textual study of these two texts. Dimi-
trov (2016, 622) has already pointed out that ‘[b]ecause [...] Moggallāna’s partial
rendering of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā is so close and reliable, the Pali
Pañcikā may be regarded as an additional incomplete textual witness of Ratna’s
work.’
There is one instance in our present passage that can illustrate how the text
of the Moggallānapañcikā can indeed help us to verify reliably the reading of the
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. In the above-mentioned passage of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā the manuscript reads: rājan as puruṣaḥ su. In this case, the
visarga in the word puruṣaḥ is unwarranted. Ānandadatta in his Ratnamatipad-
dhati has preserved the correct reading:
tad ekārthaṃ vidhīyamānam ekārthībhāvayogyānāṃ rājan as puruṣa su ityādīnāṃ
samāsāyopakalpitānām eva vidhīyata iti tadarthākṣepo labdha iti. (Dimitrov 2016, 656).
Here, the parallel Pali text reads rāja sa purisa si, which further confirms the ab-
sence of the visarga after the word puruṣa. In the light of these witnesses, the
Sanskrit text should be emended to rājan as puruṣa su despite the evidence of the
||
17 For an overview of the fragmentary manuscripts of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā identified
until now, see Dimitrov 2016, 623ff.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 705
manuscript. Although in this particular case it is possible to emend the text on
the basis of our general knowledge of Sanskrit grammar and grammatical con-
ventions, it suffices to prove the utility of the Moggallānapañcikā as one of the
witnesses to verify readings of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā.
Apart from this, there is another instance where the text of the Moggallāna-
pañcikā helps us to verify the reading of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā against the
Ratnamatipaddhati. While commenting on the word subantaṃ in the Cāndravṛtti,
Ratnamati says: vidhigrahaṇanyāyena tadantagrahaṇam. However, Ānandadatta
seems to have had a different reading before him, for he begins his comment on
this portion of the Pañjikā with the following words:
paravidhinyāyeneti. parādhikāravihitasya vidher nyāyaḥ. kevalasyāsaṃbhavāt pratyaya-
grahaṇe yasmād asau vihitas tadādes tadantasya grahaṇam iti yas tena tadantagrahaṇam.18
‘As per the maxim concerning a grammatical injunction under [the head-word] para’ means
a maxim concerning a grammatical injunction prescribed in the section headed by the word
paraḥ (‘follows’, i.e. ‘a suffix’). Since it (i.e. a suffix) does not occur alone, sup is accepted
as the word ending in it; as per this maxim, namely, whenever there is a mention of a suffix
[in a grammatical injunction,] it is accepted as a word beginning with that to which the
suffix is prescribed and ending with that [very suffix].
Moggallāna, on the other hand, in his Pañcikā, confirms the reading of the
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā by using the same words in Pali: vidhiggahaṇañāyena
tadantaggahaṇam. Here it is interesting to note that Saṅgharakkhita in his Ṭīkā
reproduces the reading of the Pañcikā, but explains the said nyāya exactly as
Ānandadatta does in his Paddhati. He says:
vidhiggahaṇañāyenā ti paccayaggahaṇe yasmā so vihito tadādino tadantassa ca gahaṇan
ti ñāyena.
‘As per the maxim concerning the understanding of a grammatical injunction’ means, ac-
cording to the maxim, namely, whenever there is a mention of a suffix [in a grammatical
injunction], it is accepted as a word beginning with that to which the suffix is prescribed
and ending with that [very suffix].
This implies that the text of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, which was available to
Moggallāna, must have been the same as the one preserved in the Cambridge
manuscript. The probable source of Saṅgharakkhita’s comment is, however, un-
clear for the want of sufficient evidence. It is quite possible that Sāriputta’s Can-
drālaṃkāra was Saṅgharakkhita’s direct source of this Paribhāṣā. However, this
||
18 Dimitrov (2016, 653, n. 130) has attested this Paribhāṣā in Puruṣottamadeva’s Paribhāṣāvṛtti.
706 | Mahesh A. Deokar
cannot be proved with certainty, since the corresponding part of the Can-
drālaṃkāra is not available.
During our joint reading of these two texts, Dimitrov and I strongly felt that
just as the Moggallānapañcikā can be used to verify readings of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā, the latter text too will be helpful when re-editing the text of
the Moggallānapañcikā by rectifying the possible corruptions in the text. These
corruptions are either of the nature of obvious printing mistakes, or that of faulty
readings. In order to give some illustrations let us turn once again to the passage
discussed above.
There are two instances of minor corruptions in the corresponding passage
of the Moggallānapañcikā. In the first instance, the printed Pali text reads at-
thagahito and atthagahitā. It is quite obvious that here ī is required instead of i,
and the long vowel has indeed been retained at another place, namely,
saṃgahīto. The parallel Sanskrit text has the correct reading in both places. At
another instance, the Pali text has the reading kaṇḍūyata. In the corresponding
passages of the Vyākaraṇamahābhāṣya and the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, we
find the correct form kaṇḍūyita. Although once again these are simple cases of
correcting the typographical errors, they are sufficient to prove our point.
Besides these two cases of minor corruptions, there is one instance in which
the printed text of the Moggallānapañcikā indicates a different reading than that
of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. The Sanskrit text reads as follows: na hi vyāvṛt-
tasya saṃbandhyantareṇāsaṃbaddhasya svāder avasthānam asti. The corre-
sponding Pali text, on the other hand, says: na tu vyāvuttassa saṃbandhyantar-
eṇāsaṃbandhassa sādino avatthānam atthi. The use of the particle tu in the Pali
portion, which might be a result of misreading, does not make much sense. The
Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā is of no help in this regard, since Saṅgharakkhita has not
commented on this particular sentence. Based on the parallel Sanskrit passage,
however, it is possible to emend the Pali text as: na hi vyāvuttassa saṃbandhyan-
tareṇāsaṃbaddhassa sādino avatthānam atthi. It is noteworthy that a couple of
sentences later we have a similar statement in Pali where the correct reading na
hi can be found: na hi avyāvuttānaṃ saṃbandhyantarehi saṃsaggo uppajjate.
Let us now turn to another interesting and complex textual problem. While
explaining the difference between the compounded and uncompounded expres-
sions, the text of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā reads tenātra vṛttāv ekārthībhāva
eva, na vākye vyapekṣābhedādilakṣaṇe. Here the corresponding Pali text differs
considerably, for it reads: tenettha vuttiyaṃ ekatthībhāvo. vākye vyapekkhā
bhedādilakkhaṇā ‘Therefore, here, the formation of a single integrated meaning
is present in a compounded word-formation. [However,] in an uncompounded
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 707
expression, there is mutual expectancy [among word-meanings], which is char-
acterised by a differentiation [of word-meanings], etc.’
Here Ānandadatta’s gloss confirms the reading of the Cāndravyākaraṇa-
pañjikā. He says:
evakāro bhinnakramaḥ. vṛttāv ity asmād anantaraṃ draṣṭavyam. tenāyam artho vṛttāv eva
vṛttyartham upakalpitavākya evaikārthībhāvo nānyatra vākya iti. vyapekṣābhedādil-
akṣaṇa iti. vyapekṣā parasparasaṃbandhalakṣaṇaḥ saṃsargaḥ. bhedo ʼnyato vyāvṛttiḥ.
ādiśabdāt tad ubhayam padāntarasaṃbandhādiś ca. sa eva lakṣaṇaṃ svabhāvo ʼsyeti
vigrahaḥ. (Dimitrov 2016, 656)
The word eva is misplaced and should be read after the word vṛttau. Thus, the meaning is
as follows: The formation of a single integrated meaning is present only in a compounded
word-formation, that is to say, only in a sentence imagined with respect to a compounded
word-formation, [but] not elsewhere in an uncompounded expression. The analysis of the
compound vyapekṣābhedādilakṣaṇe is as follows: The mutual expectancy [among word-
meanings] means an association [between word-meanings], which is characterised by a
mutual relationship. Differentiation means distinguishing from others. The word ‘etc.’ im-
plies these two together [namely, the association and differentiation] as well as the relation
with another word, and so on. This is the characteristic, that is to say, the nature of that
[uncompounded expression].
On the other hand, Saṅgharakkhita in his Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā confirms the
reading of the Moggallānapañcikā. He says:
evakāro na vākye tathā ti dīpeti,19 vākye kathaṃ ti āha – vākye ti ādi. vākye ti viggahavākye.
… kāyaṃ byapekkhā ti āha – bhedādilakkhaṇā ti. ādisaddena saṃsaggabhedasaṃsaggānañ
ca gahaṇaṃ. (Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā20 on Moggallānavyākaraṇa 3.1)
The word eva indicates that it is not so in an uncompounded expression. [Anticipating the
question] ‘How is it with respect to an uncompounded expression?’, [Moggallāna] says: ‘In
an uncompounded expression (vākye)’, and so on. ‘In an uncompounded expression’
means in a sentence presenting an analysis of a compound. … [Anticipating the question]
‘What does this mutual expectancy mean?’, [Moggallāna] says ‘It is characterized by differ-
entiation etc.’ By the word ‘etc.’ association as well as both the differentiation and associa-
tion together are understood.
||
19 It is noteworthy that the word eva, which is necessary in this context, is missing from the
printed text of the Moggallānapañcikā. Based on the reading of the Ṭīkā, the text of the Pañcikā
should be emended as: tenettha vuttiyaṃ ekatthībhāvo va.
20 In the online version of the Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana edition, the text is wrongly titled as Mog-
gallānapañcikā.
708 | Mahesh A. Deokar
Thus, the above-mentioned testimonia leave no doubt with respect to the read-
ings of both the Pañjikās. However, this leads us to the next question, namely,
what might have caused the difference between the two texts at this point. Did
Moggallāna have a different reading of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā before him
or did he modify the text for some reason? Or is the text of the Moggallānapañcikā
as we have it today somehow corrupt?
As shown above, the difference between the two readings under considera-
tion is observed in the latter half of the sentence. In the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā,
the said portion begins with negation, namely, na vākye. It is followed by the ex-
pression vyapekṣābhedādilakṣaṇe (‘characterized by the mutual expectancy
[among word-meanings] as well as differentiation [of word-meanings] etc.’),
which Ānandadatta explains as a bahuvrīhi compound qualifying vākye. In the
Moggallānapañcikā the negation before vākye is missing, and the portion begin-
ning with vākye forms an independent sentence describing the nature of an un-
compounded expression. Although na is missing in the Moggallānapañcikā, ac-
cording to Saṅgharakkhita, na vākye is rather implied by the particle eva used
earlier in the sentence. He further explains vyapekkhā and bhedādilakkhaṇā as
two separate words, where the latter is explained as a bahuvrīhi compound qual-
ifying the former. It is very likely that due to the missing na in the manuscript of
the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā used by Moggallāna, he was forced to separate
vyapekkhā from the rest of the compound and also to convert the locative
bhedādilakṣaṇe in Sanskrit into a nominative bhedādilakkhaṇā in Pali. With re-
spect to this adaptation, one may further ask whether these changes are sensible,
and whether Moggallāna’s modified text is in agreement with the understanding
of this issue in the overall tradition of Sanskrit grammar.
In this regard it is worthwhile to examine other similar passages in the San-
skrit grammatical works. A careful survey of the commentarial literature of the
Pāṇinian and the Kātantra systems reveals that Jinendrabuddhi’s Nyāsa on the
Kāśikāvṛtti and the Durgaṭīkā on the Durgavṛtti on the Kātantravyākaraṇa have a
close affinity with our present passage of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. Before
turning to the parallel passages in the Nyāsa and the Durgaṭīkā, let us first exam-
ine the text of the Mahābhāṣya, which is the primary source of this entire discus-
sion. In the Mahābhāṣya, the concerned discussion begins with the definition of
sāmarthya in the sense of ekārthībhāva proposed by Kātyāyana in his Vārttika.
Here, the text reads as follows:
pṛthagarthānām ekārthībhāvaḥ samarthavacanam | pṛthagarthānām ekārthībhāvaḥ sa-
martham ity ucyate | kva punaḥ pṛthagarthāni kva ekārthāni | vākye pṛthagarthāni | rājñaḥ
puruṣaḥ iti | samāse punar ekārthāni rājapuruṣa iti | (Joshi 1968, 9, nos 42–44)
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 709
Samartha is said to be the formation of a single integrated meaning out of [words having]
separate meanings [of their own]. [When] we say samartha [it means] formation of a single
integrated meaning out of [words having] separate meanings [of their own]. But where [do
words] have separate meanings [of their own], [and] where [do they] have a single inte-
grated meaning? In an uncompounded expression [words] have separate meanings [of their
own], like in rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ (‘king’s servant’). But in a compound, [words] have a single
integrated meaning, like in rājapuruṣaḥ (‘royal servant’).21
This explanation of sāmarthya has been accepted by later grammarians of the
Paṇinian, the Kātantra, and the Cāndra schools alike.22 Further, in the
Mahābhāṣya, Patañjali defines vṛtti as parārthābhidhānaṃ vṛttiḥ.23 This definition
presupposes the view that the compounded word-formation is derived from its
components (kāryaśabdikapakṣa).24 He then brings up a discussion on the prob-
able difficulties in accepting either the jahatsvārthā or the ajahatsvārthā types of
vṛtti, and possible solutions thereby. He first talks about problems posed by the
jahatsvārthāvṛtti, and then provides three different solutions to them. The discus-
sion of the first two solutions goes as follows:
yadi jahatsvārthā vṛttiḥ rājapuruṣam ānayety ukte puruṣamātrasyānayanaṃ prāpnoti | au-
pagavam ānayety ukte apatyamātrasyeti | ... evaṃ hi dṛśyate loke puruṣo ’yaṃ parakarmaṇi
pravartamānaḥ svakarma jahāti | tadyathā | takṣā rājakarmaṇi pravartamānaḥ svaṃ
takṣakarma jahāti | evaṃ yuktaṃ tad yad rājā puruṣārthe vartamānaḥ svam arthaṃ jahyāt |
upaguś cāpatyārthe vartamānaḥ svam arthaṃ jahyāt |
nanu coktam – rājapuruṣam ānayety ukte puruṣamātrasyānayanaṃ prāpnoti | aupagavam
ānayety ukte apatyamātrasyeti | naiṣa doṣaḥ | jahad api asau svārthaṃ nātyantāya jahāti |
||
21 All the translations of the quoted passages of the Mahābhāṣya are based on Joshi (1968) and
are modified by me for the sake of consistency with the translation of parallel passages from
other grammatical works quoted in this paper. — Based on Joshi 1968, 50–52.
22 Cf. the Nyāsa on the Kāśikā on A. II.1.1: ekārthībhāvaś ca pṛthagavasthitānāṃ bhinnārthānāṃ
padānāṃ samāse sādhāraṇārthatā nāma avasthāviśeṣaḥ |, and the Durgaṭīkā on the Durgavṛtti
on Kt 2.5.1: pṛthagarthānām ekārthībhāvaḥ samāso bhavati |
23 Kaiyaṭa in his Bhāṣyapradīpa (p. 328) explains it in the following terms: parasya śabdasya yo
’rthas tasyābhidhānaṃ śabdāntareṇa yatra sā vṛttir ity arthaḥ | yathā rājapuruṣa ity atra rājaśab-
dena vākyāvasthāyām anuktaḥ puruṣārtho ’bhidhīyate | ‘Where the meaning of one word (viz. the
main member of the compound) is conveyed by another word (viz. the subordinate member),
that is compounded word-formation, such is the meaning of the passage. Just as in the word
rājapuruṣaḥ (“royal servant”) the word rāja- conveys the meaning of (the word) puruṣa, which is
not (so) expressed in the stage of the uncompounded expression.’ (Joshi 1968, 75)
24 Cf. Kaiyaṭa’s Bhāṣyapradīpa (p. 328): kāryaśabdikā vākyād eva vikalpena vṛttiṃ niṣpādyāṃ
manyamānāḥ kiṃ vṛtter lakṣaṇaṃ kurvantīti praśnaḥ || ‘How do those grammarians, who hold
the view that words are to be produced, (i.e. words are not eternal), and who consider the vṛtti
as something created out of an uncompounded expression, define vṛtti? This is the question.’
(Joshi 1968, 74)
710 | Mahesh A. Deokar
yaḥ parārthavirodhī svārthas taṃ jahāti | tadyathā | takṣā rājakarmaṇi pravartamānaḥ svaṃ
takṣakarma jahāti na tu hikkitahasitakaṇḍūyitādi | na ca ayam arthaḥ parārthavirodhi-
viśeṣaṇaṃ nāma | tasmāt tan na hāsyati | athavā anvayād viśeṣaṇaṃ bhavati | tadyathā ... |
yathā tarhi mallikāpuṭaś campakapuṭaś ceti | niṣkīrṇāsv api sumanaḥsu anvayād viśeṣaṇaṃ
bhavati | ayaṃ mallikāpuṭaḥ, ayaṃ campakapuṭaḥ iti | (Joshi 1968, 13–14, nos 75, 78, 80–81, 83)
If [we take the view of] jahatsvārthā vṛttiḥ, [then,] when we say rājapuruṣam ānaya (‘bring
the royal servant’), [the result is that] any man might be brought [and,] when we say au-
pagavam ānaya (‘bring the offspring of Upagu’), [the result is that] any offspring might be
brought. ... For thus we observe in daily life: the man when he takes on a job [assigned to
him] by somebody else, abandons his own work. Take an example: a carpenter, when he
takes on a job [assigned to him] by a king, abandons his own carpenter’s job. In the same
way, it is proper that [the word] rājan (‘king’), when it is used in the sense of puruṣa (‘serv-
ant’), should abandon its own meaning. And [the proper name] Upagu, when used in the
sense of ‘offspring’, should abandon its own meaning [too].
But still, was it not pointed out that, when we say rājapuruṣam ānaya (‘bring the royal serv-
ant’), [the result is that] any man might be brought? And when we say aupagavam ānaya
(‘bring the offspring of Upagu’) [the result is that] any offspring [might be brought]? No dif-
ficulty here. Although this [i.e. the subordinate member] gives up its own meaning, it does
not do so entirely. That meaning of its own, which is incompatible with the meaning of the
other [word, i.e. the main member] is abandoned. Take an example: a carpenter, when tak-
ing on a job [assigned to him] by a king, abandons his own carpenter’s job, but he does not
stop hiccupping, laughing, and scratching. And this [subordinate] meaning, which, in fact,
acts as a qualifier, is not incompatible with the meaning of the other [i.e. main word]. There-
fore, it will not abandon that [i.e. its own meaning]. Or rather, it [i.e. rāja- in rājapuruṣa] will
act as a differentiating [word], because of [its] connection [with the following member
puruṣa]. Take an example ... Then take this example: jasmine- [or] campaka- flower
wrapped up in leaves. Even when the flowers are scattered from [the wrappers], [still] they
act as differentiating, because of their [former] connection [with jasmine- or campaka-
scent]: ‘this is the jasmine- wrapper’, ‘that is the campaka-wrapper’. (Based on Joshi 1968,
74–80)
It can be observed that just as the above-mentioned definition, these solutions
have also been accepted by Patañjali’s successors in the Kātantra and the Cāndra
grammatical schools. While providing the third alternative solution to the prob-
lem caused by the acceptance of the jahatsvārthā vṛtti, Patañjali says:
athavā samarthādhikāro ’yaṃ vṛttau kriyate | sāmarthyaṃ nāma bhedaḥ saṃsargo vā | apara
āha – bhedasaṃsargau vā sāmarthyam iti | kaḥ punar bhedaḥ saṃsargo vā ? iha rājña ity
ukte sarvaṃ svaṃ prasaktam, puruṣa ity ukte sarvaḥ svāmī prasaktaḥ | ihedānīṃ rāja-
puruṣam ānayety25 ukte rājā puruṣaṃ nivartayati anyebhyaḥ svāmibhyaḥ, puruṣo ’pi rājānam
||
25 rājapuruṣa ity ukte Kielhorn
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 711
anyebhyaḥ svebhyaḥ | evam etasminn ubhayato vyavacchinne yadi svārthaṃ jahāti26 kāmaṃ
jahātu, na jātu cid puruṣamātrasyānayanaṃ bhaviṣyati | (Joshi 1968, 14–15, no. 84)
Or rather, this adhikāra-rule: samartha etc. is framed with regard to compounded word-
formation. Semantic connection means [either] differentiation or association. Some other
[grammarian] says: semantic connection means both differentiation and association. But
what [do you mean by] differentiation or association? When we say rājñaḥ (‘king’s’) any
[word denoting a] thing owned has a chance to be supplied here [in connection with the
word rājñaḥ]. When we say puruṣaḥ (‘servant’), any [word denoting] owner has a chance to
be supplied [in connection with the word puruṣaḥ]. When we say now: rājapuruṣam ānaya
(‘Bring the royal servant’) then, [the word] rājan keeps the servant away from other owners
[and the word] puruṣaḥ on its part, keeps the king away from other things owned. When
delimitation is made in this way on both sides, if that [word rājan] gives up its own meaning,
let it do so. In no case whatsoever will just any servant [without relation to a king] be
brought. (Based on Joshi 1968, 80)
It is noteworthy that here Patañjali talks of sāmarthya in the context of com-
pound-formation (vṛtti). According to him, when sāmarthya in the sense of differ-
entiation (bheda) and association (saṃsarga) is there between the constituents
of a compound, then it does not really matter whether such well-defined constit-
uents abandon their meanings or not. Further in the text, Patañjali explains
sāmarthya in the sense of mutual expectancy among word-meanings (vyapekṣā),
as follows:
parasparavyapekṣāṃ sāmarthyam eke | parasparavyapekṣāṃ sāmarthyam eke icchanti |
kā punaḥ śabdayor vyapekṣā ? na brūmaḥ śabdayor iti | kiṃ tarhi | arthayoḥ | iha rājñaḥ
puruṣaḥ ity ukte rājā puruṣam apekṣate mamāyam iti puruṣo ’pi rājānam apekṣate aham asy-
eti | (Joshi 1968, 16, no. 98)
Some [say that] semantic connection [is] mutual expectancy. Some prefer [to take that] se-
mantic connection as mutual expectancy. But what [do you mean by] expectancy between
two words? We do not say: ‘between two words’. What then? Between two meanings. When
we say rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ (‘king’s servant’), [the meaning] rājan (‘king’) expects [the meaning]
puruṣa (‘servant’), saying: ‘he (i.e. servant) is mine (i.e. king’s)’. [The meaning] puruṣa also
expects [the meaning] rājan, saying: ‘I (i.e. servant) am his (i.e. king’s).’ (Based on Joshi
1968, 87).
One can easily notice that the material from these last two passages of the
Mahābhāṣya forms the basis of Ratnamati’s discussion of the three-fold vākyār-
tha. In order to understand the transmission of these ideas, and their adaptation
in the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, let us now turn to the parallel portions found in
||
26 jahāti Kielhorn ] jahātu Joshi, which does not make a good sense.
712 | Mahesh A. Deokar
the Nyāsa. The Nyāsa brings up the said discussion, while explaining the two al-
ternative definitions of sāmarthya given in the Kāśikāvṛtti, which reads as fol-
lows:
samarthaḥ śaktaḥ. vigrahavākyārthābhidhāne yaḥ śaktaḥ sa samartho veditavyaḥ. athavā
samarthapadāśrayatvāt samarthaḥ. samarthānāṃ padānāṃ saṃbaddhārthānāṃ saṃsṛṣṭā-
rthānāṃ vidhir veditavyaḥ.
Samartha means able. That which is able to denote the meaning of the hypothetical word-
structure at the base of the compounded expression should be known as samartha. Alter-
natively, [a grammatical operation concerning padas is called] samartha, since [that gram-
matical operation] depends on the padas, which are syntactically connected. [Samarthaḥ
padavidhiḥ] should be understood to be a grammatical operation involving those padas,
which are syntactically connected, that is to say, which have related or composite meaning.
Thus, out of the two definitions of the word samartha, the first is based on the
primary (mukhya) or the conventional (rūḍha) meaning of the word samartha,
whereas the second relies on its figurative (upacarita) or etymological (yaugika)
meaning. In the context of the first definition, the Nyāsa understands the vigra-
havākya as an uncompounded word-structure underlying a compounded word-
formation (vṛttyarthaṃ yad vākyam upādīyate …). It further elaborates the three-
fold meaning of the vigrahavākya as follows:
sa punar arthaḥ saṃsargaḥ bhedaś ca bhedasaṃsargau vā. tatra svaviśeṣasya svāmi-
viśeṣeṇa svāmiviśeṣasya ca svaviśeṣeṇa yaḥ saṃbandhaḥ sa saṃsarga ākhyāyate. svān-
tarasya svāmyantarebhyaḥ svāmyantarasya svāntarebhyaḥ vyāvṛttiḥ bheda ākhyāyate. tatra
saṃsargavādino mate saṃsarga eva śabdārthaḥ. vyāvṛttis tu arthasaṃgṛhītā. na hy
avyāvarttyamānayoḥ svasvāminoḥ saṃbandhyantarebhyaḥ saṃsarga upapadyate. Bheda-
vādinas tu vyāvṛttir eva padārthaḥ, saṃsargo ’rthasaṃgṛhītaḥ, na hi vyāvarttyamānasya
saṃbandhyantareṇāsaṃbaddhasya svāmyāder avasthānam asti. ubhayavādinas tu ubhaya
eva śabdārthaḥ. (Vol. II, p. 5)
Further, that meaning [of an uncompounded expression] is association, differentiation or
both association and differentiation. Among these, whatever relation is there between a
particular servant and a particular master, or between a particular master and a particular
servant, that is called an association. The distinction of other servants from other masters,
and of other masters from other servants is called differentiation. Here, in the opinion of the
proponents of association, association alone is denoted by the word, whereas the distinc-
tion [of both a king and a servant from other similar objects] is discerned by reasoning. Be-
cause the association [between these objects] cannot take place unless both the owned and
the owner are being distinguished from other related objects. On the other hand, for the
proponents of differentiation, distinction alone is the meaning of the word, [whereas,] the
association [between the two] is discerned by reasoning. Because the words master etc. can-
not be so distinguished, if they are unrelated to other related words. For the proponents of
both [association and differentiation,] both are denoted by the word.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 713
It may be noted that in the Nyāsa, views regarding the vākyārtha are discussed in
the context of vigrahavākya, and are presented in the order: saṃsarga, bheda,
and both. However, it is not the same order that we find in the Mahābhāṣya or in
the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. Moreover, the Nyāsa passage also differs from the
latter in the structure of its presentation of the three views. Jinendrabuddhi fur-
ther elaborates upon the second definition of samartha given in the Kāśikā in the
following words:
samarthānām ity anena vākye vyapekṣālakṣaṇaṃ sāmarthyam āha. tathā hi rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ
ity atra vākye rājā puruṣam apekṣate mamāyam iti puruṣo ’pi rājānam apekṣate aham asyeti.
saṃsṛṣṭārthānām ity anena samāse padānām ekārthībhāvalakṣaṇaṃ sāmarthyaṃ
darśayati. (Vol. II, p. 6–7)
By the expression ‘of the syntactically connected [words]’, [the Vṛttikāra] denotes the syn-
tactic connection characterised by mutual expectancy among the word-meanings in an un-
compounded expression. For instance, when we say rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ (‘king’s servant’), [the
meaning] rājan (‘king’) expects [the meaning] puruṣa (‘servant’), saying: ‘he (i.e. servant) is
mine (i.e. of the king)’. [The meaning] puruṣa also expects [the meaning] rājan, saying: ‘I
(i.e. servant) am his (i.e. of the king). By the expression ‘of the [words] having a composite
meaning’, [the Vṛttikāra] points out the syntactic connection characterised by the formation
of the single integrated meaning of the constituent words in a compound.
Thus, according to the Nyāsa, the two secondary meanings of the word samartha,
namely, saṃbaddhārtha and saṃsṛṣṭārtha signify mutual relation among word-
meanings (vyapekṣā) and formation of the single integrated meaning
(ekārthībhāva) respectively. Out of these two, the former is available in an un-
compounded expression, whereas the latter is present in a compound. It is suffi-
ciently clear that the above discussion has a direct impact on our concerned pas-
sage in the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. As shown by Dimitrov (2016: 650–659),
Jinendrabuddhi’s Nyāsa is the immediate reference point of the Pāṇinian gram-
matical tradition for Ratnamati. The latter heavily draws upon the Nyāsa, and at
times even criticizes it. The Nyāsa has also been used by Ānandadatta and
Saṅgharakkhita in their commentaries.
If we turn to the two sentences before our problematic line in the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā, we can clearly see that this portion is Ratnamati’s refutation
of the Paṇinian paribhāṣā samarthaḥ padavidhiḥ, and the position of the Kāśikā
and the Nyāsa thereupon. According to Ratnamati, in the Cāndravyākaraṇa the
word samartha is not required to govern the compound-formation, since the ex-
pected relation (saṃbandha) between the constituent members of a compound
can take care of sāmarthya in the sense of vyapekṣā, and the word ekārtham (‘sin-
gle integrated meaning’) in the Cāndrasūtra can very well denote the
714 | Mahesh A. Deokar
ekārthībhāvasāmarthya. In the following sentence, Ratnamati concludes this ar-
gument by saying that ekārthībhāva is there only in vṛtti, whereas vyapekṣā as
well as bheda etc. are available in a vākya.
Ānandadatta treats this concluding remark of Ratnamati to be a refutation of
the first definition of sāmarthya mentioned in the Kāśikā.27 According to him, by
this statement Ratnamati distinguishes vṛtti from vākya, and since both are dis-
tinct entities, the view that a vākya turns in to a samāsa is rejected.28 Here, Ānan-
dadatta interprets the word vṛtti as an imaginary linguistic structure presupposed
for the formation of a compound, which is equivalent to vigrahavākya.29 He fur-
ther differentiates this imaginary linguistic structure, which he refers to as a
samāsavākya (= vṛttivākya) from a conventional sentence (vyavahāravākya),30
and rejects the view of the Kāśikā that a compound has a capacity to denote the
meaning of an uncompounded expression. Ānandadatta’s interpretation of the
word vṛtti is unique, and does not agree with its explanation found in the works
of Patañjali, Kaiyaṭa, etc. (ref. above). It may be noted that Saṅgharakkhita in his
ṭīkā attributes the meaning vigrahavākya to the word vākya instead of vutti in a
manner similar to that of the Nyāsa.
Immediately after the concerned sentence, Ratnamati proceeds to discuss the
three views about the meaning of an uncompounded expression (vākyārtha) in
the following order: bheda, saṃsarga, and both bheda and saṃsarga together. As
indicated above, this particular sequence is certainly contrary to the one pro-
posed by Ānandadatta in his explanation of the compound vyapekṣābhedādil-
akṣaṇe. According to his explanation, the word vyapekṣā in the compound signi-
fies saṃsarga (‘association’), with which the list of the three views begins. Thus,
according to Ānandadatta in the sequence of these views, saṃsarga precedes
||
27 vigrahavākyārthābhidhānaśaktilakṣaṇasya tṛtīyasya sāmarthyasya kā vārtety āha: tena ityādi. (Di-
mitrov 2016, 656) ‘As for the question “what about the third meaning of the word sāmarthya, which is
defined as an ability to denote the meaning of the hypothetical word-structure at the base of the com-
pounded expression?” [Ratnamati] says: ‘tena (“therefore”), and so on.”’
28 anena vākyam eva samāsībhavatīti pakṣaṃ nirasyati, anayor atyantabhedāt | (Dimitrov 2016,
656) ‘By this [statement,] [Ratnamati] rejects the view that the uncompounded expression itself
turns into a compound, because there is an absolute difference between the two.’
29 yaṃ tūpakalpitaṃ vṛttyai vṛttivākyaṃ tad īṣyate | viśeṣagrahahetutvāt vigraho ’pi nirucyate ||
(Ratnamatipaddhati as quoted in Dimitrov 2016, 653) ‘Moreover, a linguistic structure underly-
ing a compounded word formation (vṛttivākya) is accepted to be that which is imagined for the
sake of forming a compounded expression. The same is also explained (etymologically) as
vigraha on account of being a cause of special knowledge.’
30 … anyad dhi samāsavākyam anyac ca vyavahāravākyam | (Dimitrov 2016, 654) ‘Because a lin-
guistic structure underlying a compound (samāsavākya) is different from a conventional sen-
tence (vyavahāravākya).’
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 715
bheda and both bheda and saṃsarga together. This is the same sequence, which
we find in Jinendrabuddhi’s Nyāsa. Here, Ānandadatta’s interpretation of the
compound vyapekṣābhedādilakṣaṇe in general and that of the word vyapekṣā in
particular seems to have been misled by this very sequence found in the Nyāsa.
Moggallāna’s text, on the other hand, is consistent with the order of the three
views as found in Ratnamati’s Pañjikā and Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya.
It is interesting to note that in the Durgaṭīkā, the views on vākyārtha occur
exactly in the same order as that of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā in almost iden-
tical words. The text of the Durgaṭīkā reads:
idam api prakriyājālaṃ. ‘rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ’ iti vākye rājā svāmyantarād vyavacchidyate
puruṣaś ca svāntarād iti bhedaḥ. saṃsargo vātrārthagṛhītaḥ31. na hi vyāvṛttasya
saṃbandhyantareṇāsaṃbaddhasya svāmyāder avasthānam iti. yadā rājā mamāyam ity
apekṣate, puruṣo ’py aham asyeti, tadā saṃsargaḥ, vyāvṛttir arthagṛhītā.32na hi avyāvṛttya-
mānayoḥ saṃbandhyantarebhyaḥ saṃsarga iti. yadā tūbhayam api prādhānyenocyate,
tadobhayabhedasaṃsargo vākyārtha iti | idaṃ darśanam āśrityāha - abhidhānāt kvacid
vikalpa ityādi. (Durgaṭīkā on Kt II.5.1, Dwivedi II.2, p. 257)
In the Durgaṭīkā, one finds a discussion only of the first two solutions to the prob-
lems arising from accepting the jahatsvārthā vṛtti on the lines of the Mahābhāṣya.
Thereafter, it deals with the problem of the ajahatsvārthā vṛtti, and then proceeds
with the above-cited explanation of the three positions on the meaning of an un-
compounded expression (vākya). However, it is not clear as to why here this po-
sition is singled out from the other two positions regarding the jahatsvārthā vṛtti.
It is interesting that the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā also singles out the explanation
about the three views on vākyārtha from the rest of the discussion about the ja-
hatsvārthā vṛtti, and uses it to describe the nature of vākya. Although we do not
know much about the exact chronology of the Durgaṭīkā and the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā, their relationship is beyond doubt.
Scholars like Haldar, Keith, and Dwivedi believed that the Durgaṭīkā was also
written by the same Durgasiṃha who composed the Vṛtti on the Kātantrasūtras.
However, Yudhiṣṭhir Mīmāṃsak in his Saṃskṛt vyākaraṇaśāstra kā itihās argued
against these scholars. In the ṭīkā on the opening verse of the Durgavṛtti, the
Ṭīkākāra refers to the Vṛttikāra as bhagavān.33 On this basis, Mīmāṃsak estab-
||
31 vātrārthagṛhītaḥ em. ] vātrānugṛhītaḥ Dwivedi II.2, p. 257
32 saṃsargaḥ, vyāvṛttir arthagṛhītā em. ] saṃsargavyāvṛttir anugṛhītā Dwivedi II.2, p. 257
33 tatra śāstraprastāvād vācanika eva namaskāro nyāyya iti bhagavān vṛttikāraḥ ślokam ekaṃ
kṛtavān – ‘devadevam’ ityādi | (Kt. vol. 1, p. 1)
716 | Mahesh A. Deokar
lished that the author of the Durgavṛtti and that of the Durgaṭīkā are different per-
sons. Based on a reference to Śrutapāla, a commentator of the Dhātupāṭha com-
posed by Devanandin and a citation from the Bhaṭṭikāvya found in the Durgaṭīkā,
Mīmāṃsak proposed the 9th century CE as a probable date of its author (1994:
I.653–654). D. G. Koparkar (1952: Intro. p. ix) in the introduction to Durgasiṃha’s
Liṅgānuśāsana also considered the author of the Durgavṛtti and that of the Ṭīkā
as two different persons and assigned to the latter a date between 700 and 950
CE. He fixed this lower limit for the Ṭīkā on the basis of Ugrabhūti’s (about 1000
CE.) Śiṣyahitānyāsa, which is a commentary on the Durgaṭīkā. According to
Koparkar, Alberūni in 1030 CE. knew Ugrabhūti’s commentary by the name
Śiṣyahitāvṛtti.
Besides the passage cited above, there are other parallel passages, which not
only speak in favour of the relationship between the Durgaṭīkā and the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā, but also suggest the posteriority of the former to the latter. I
shall now cite two parallel passages from the Durgaṭīkā in support of this assump-
tion. The first such passage occurs, when, while explaining the aphorism
nāmnāṃ samāso yuktārthaḥ (Kt 2.5.1), the ṭīkākāra interprets the word yuktārtha
as signifying the vyapekṣā type of syntactic relation. According to him, in this
sense, the word yuktārtha is redundant, since the said meaning can be indicated
well enough by the expected relation between the constituent members of a com-
pound. The Durgaṭīkā reads:
athavā nāmnāṃ samāsaḥ saṃkṣepo bhavati | yuktārtha iha saṃbandhārtho
viśeṣaṇaviśeṣyabhāvalakṣaṇa ucyate | yukto ’rtho yeṣāṃ padānāṃ tāni yuktārthāni | yuk-
tārthāśrayatvād yuktārthaḥ samāsa ucyate | tadā tu yuktārthagrahaṇaṃ sukhārtham eva |
yasmāt sāmānyoktāv api yasya yena saṃbandhas tasya tena saha samāso bhavatīty arthād
evāvasīyate | yathā mātari pravartitavyam, pitari śuśrūṣitavyam | na cocyate svasyāṃ svas-
minn iti | yasya yā mātā yasya yaḥ piteti gamyate | tathehāpīti | (Durgaṭīkā on Kt 2.5.1,
Dwivedi II.2, p. 255)
As mentioned above, the first two solutions to the problem arising from the ac-
ceptance of the jahatsvārthā vṛtti are discussed in the Durgaṭīkā on the line of the
Mahābhāṣya. However, the affinity of this portion with the one in the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā is indeed worth noting. The text of the Durgaṭīkā reads:
parārthābhidhānaṃ vṛttir iti | parasyānātmīyasyārthasya yad upasarjanapadenābhi-
dhānaṃ sā vṛttir ity arthaḥ | tatra parārthābhidhāne kalpanāmātrakṛtānām upasarjana-
padānāṃ svārthatyāgena jahatsvārthavṛttir bhavati prakriyāvāde | yathā takṣā rāja-
karmaṇi pravartamānaḥ svaṃ takṣakarma rājakarmavirodhi jahāti na tu viśeṣaṇam | athavā
anvayād rājaviśiṣṭasya grahaṇam | yathā campakapuṭo mallikāpuṭa iti niṣṭhyūteṣv api
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 717
nistṛteṣv api34 puṣpeṣv anvayād viśeṣaṇaṃ bhavatīti | tena rājaviśiṣṭasyānayanaṃ na tu
puruṣamātrasya | (Durgaṭīkā on Kt 2.5.1, Dwivedi II.2, p. 256)
Thus, the three passages in the two texts cited above exhibit striking similarities.
In Ratnamati’s Pañjikā, these portions occur as parts of systematically formulated
arguments and hence appear to be organic elements of the text. However, the
passages in the Durgaṭīkā seem to be sporadic, and often give an impression of
being borrowed from some other sources, and somehow put together to suit the
context. For instance, in the Durgaṭīkā the three views about vākyārtha are pre-
sented without their proper context. Ratnamati uses the argument ‘sāmānyoktāv
api, and so on’ to justify the lack of use of the word samartha to signify vyapekṣā
in the Cāndrasūtra. However, in the Durgaṭīkā it is put forth simply to indicate
futility of the word yuktārtha in an alternative explanation of the Kātantrasūtra.
Furthermore, just as Patañjali, Ratnamati first presents the difficulty in accepting
the jahatsvārthā vṛtti, and then offers its solution. But, in the Durgaṭīkā, these
solutions are provided without mentioning the problem. Moreover, in this com-
mentary, one can witness a conscious attempt to alter the original text, either by
abridging it or by replacing its vocabulary with different words. For example, in
the third passage cited above, the sentence from the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā,
namely, tad yathā: takṣā rājakarmaṇi pravartamānaḥ svaṃ takṣakarma
rājakarmavirodhi jahāti, nāviruddhaṃ hasitakaṇḍūyitādi is abridged as yathā
takṣā rājakarmaṇi pravartamānaḥ svaṃ takṣakarma rājakarmavirodhi jahāti na
tu viśeṣaṇam. Similarly, words from the Pañjikā, namely, bhedakaḥ and su-
manaḥsu are replaced with vyavacchidyate and puṣpeṣu. Finally, the phrase iti
darśanam āśrityāha, which occurs at the end of the afore-mentioned first passage
of the Durgaṭīkā, is a clear testimony to the fact that here the Ṭīkākāra is quoting
an opinion of some former authority. Although, the first known occurrence of the
three views regarding vākyārtha can be traced back to the Mahābhāṣya and then
its more systematic formulation in the Nyāsa, the exact wording of their presen-
tation matches with Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. On the basis of this
evidence it is justified to believe that the author of the Durgaṭīkā has borrowed
these passages from the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā with some deliberate modifica-
tions, unless the manuscript of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā available to the
Ṭīkākāra read slightly differently from the Cambridge manuscript. There is also a
possibility that some corruptions have occurred later in the transmission of the
Durgaṭīkā resulting in minor deviations. Since Ratnamati flourished in the 10th
||
34 The use of these two synonymic expressions is puzzling. The editor does not make it clear
whether one of them is a variant.
718 | Mahesh A. Deokar
century CE (cf. Dimitrov 2016, 745), it would be safe to place the anonymous au-
thor of the Durgaṭīkā in the eleventh century or later.
I shall conclude the present discussion by pointing out that in the problem-
atic sentence under discussion, Moggallāna in all probability had a faulty reading
of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā, which he wisely emended to suit the context in
the light of the entire tradition of the Sanskrit grammar. Although both Ānan-
dadatta and Saṅgharakkhita do not agree with each other in their own explana-
tions, there is no doubt that Moggallāna has maintained the spirit of Ratnamati’s
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā in his own work. Thus, the above discussion makes it
clear that the parallel study of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā and the Moggallāna-
pañcikā is not only useful, but is rather mandatory for ensuring more reliable re-
sults.
Besides its importance for text-critical purposes, a comparative study of such
passages is also interesting from the point of view of the transmission and recep-
tion of ideas. Śrī Rāhula in his Buddhippasādinī mentions a number of grammat-
ical works that Moggallāna either studied or memorized. These works include,
apart from the Pali grammatical treatises in the Kaccāyana tradition, the texts be-
longing to the Pāṇinian, the Cāndra, and the Kātantra schools along with the
grammars of Āpiśali and Śākaṭāyana.35 How far Moggallāna used these grammat-
ical works as his source material and how he adopted, modified or rejected the
grammatical ideologies from these texts could be known only through a serious
comparative study of Moggallāna’s grammar and these works. For instance, the
passages under consideration reveal that Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā
was the exact source of Moggallāna’s discussion, and that he has adopted the
Cāndra ideology without alteration. Furthermore, Moggallāna’s adherence to the
Cāndra tradition can, in turn, be looked upon as one of the many instances of his
rupture from the Kaccāyana school. This ideological shift in Moggallāna’s gram-
mar can be explained as follows:
Pāṇini’s metarule (paribhāṣā) samarthaḥ padavidhiḥ (A. 2.1.1) states that a
grammatical operation concerning a pada takes effect only when there is a se-
mantic and syntactic coherence and compatibility in the meaning (samarthaḥ).36
It regulates grammatical operations such as compounding, formations of second-
ary derivatives etc. Patañjali has discussed this paribhāṣā in detail in the Samar-
thāhnika section of his Mahābhāṣya. According to him, sāmarthya, that is to say,
semantic and syntactic coherence or compatibility of meaning is a precondition
||
35 Padasādhanaṭīkā 1908, 6, 13–14 as quoted in Gornall 2013, 53, n. 109.
36 This is my own modified translation of the rule based on Katre 1987.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 719
for compounding. Patañjali emphasizes the inevitable role of this paribhāṣā in
regulating the compound formation.
As shown above, the Cāndra grammatical school argues that if the rule defin-
ing the compound formation is modified as sup supaikārtham, one can do away
with this paribhāṣā, since the word ekārtham captures the sense of the word
sāmarthya in an appropriate manner. The said idea, which is implicit in the Cān-
drasūtra and in the Vṛtti thereupon, is made explicit in the Cāndravyākaraṇa-
pañjikā and the Ratnamatipaddhati. The Cāndra grammarians hold that since the
compounded and uncompounded expressions are principally two distinct enti-
ties, the view that the uncompounded expression is transferred into a compound
is untenable.37 According to this school, only sāmarthya in the sense of the for-
mation of a single integrated meaning (ekārthibhāva) is relevant to compound-
ing, but not the one in the sense of mutual expectancy among word-meanings
(vyapekṣā), and since sāmarthya in the sense of the formation of a single inte-
grated meaning is already denoted by the word ekārthaṃ, the meta-rule samar-
thaḥ padavidhiḥ is not necessary to regulate the compound-formation.
In this particular case, Moggallāna incorporates the entire discussion availa-
ble in the Cāndra tradition in his Sutta, Vutti, and Pañcikā. Although he has not
contributed anything new to the ideological standpoint of the Cāndra school, his
non-acceptance of the position of the Kaccāyanavyākaraṇa and, through it, of the
Kātantra certainly marks an ideological shift in the context of the Pali grammati-
cal tradition. The position of the Kaccāyana and the Kātantra schools can be elu-
cidated as follows: as is well-known, Kaccāyana’s Kaccāyanavyākaraṇa, which is
modeled after the Sanskrit grammar Kātantra, is the earliest available text on Pali
grammar composed in the 6th or the 7th century. The Kaccāyanavyākaraṇa and the
Vutti explain the compound formation on the same lines as that of the Kātantra
and the Durgavṛtti. Kaccāyana defines a compound as:
nāmānaṃ samāso yuttattho. (318)
||
37 Cf. the following verses quoted in the Ratnamatipaddhati: padāntareṇa saṃbandho
vyavadhānaṃ viparyayaḥ | saṃkhyā vyaktiś cayogaś ca vākye syān naiva vṛttiṣu || ata evānayor
bhedāt saṃsargādyarthabhedataḥ | vākyam eva samāsīsyād ity ayuktam pracakṣate || (Dimitrov
2016, 653) ‘Relation with another word [outside the compound], intervention [of another word],
change in the sequence [of words], [comprehension of specific] number, clear manifestation [of
meaning], and the use of the particle ca are possible in an uncompounded expression, but never
in those that are compounded. Therefore, since there is a difference between the two on the basis
of a difference in the meanings such as association etc., [the view that] an uncompounded ex-
pression turns into a compound is declared to be unreasonable.’
720 | Mahesh A. Deokar
A conjoined meaning of nouns is called a compound (samāsa).
The Vutti explains it in the following words:
tesaṃ nāmānaṃ payujjamānapadatthānaṃ yo yuttattho so samāsasañño hoti.
A conjoined meaning of those nouns, that is to say, the word meanings that are being used,
is called a compound (samāsa).
Cf. Kātantra (2.5.1): nāmnāṃ samāso yuktārthaḥ.
Durgasiṃha, in his Vṛtti, explains the said aphorism as follows:
vastuvācīni nāmāni, militaṃ yuktam ucyate. nāmnāṃ yuktārthaḥ samāsasaṃjño bhavati.
Nouns are the words that denote a thing. The word ‘conjoined’ (yukta) means ‘combined’.
The conjoined meaning of nouns [denoting things] is designated as ‘compound’.
The Kātantra school favours the nityapakṣa, that is to say, the position that words
are eternal and not created (kārya) by a speaker.38 According to this position, a
compound is an ever-existing indivisible word and not something that is created
by combining constituent words. In other words, a compound word like rāja-
puruṣaḥ and its parallel uncompounded expression, namely, rājñaḥ puruṣaḥ are
two independent entities. According to the Pāṇinian position expressed in the
Mahābhāṣya and the Kāśikāvṛtti, the compound primarily appears to be kārya,
that is to say, it is formed by putting together the constituent words.
It is Bhartṛhari, who in his Vākyapadīya, explicitly advances the nityapakṣa
in the context of compound. He says:
abudhān praty upāyāś ca vicitrāḥ pratipattaye |
śabdāntaratvād atyantabhedo vākyasamāsayoḥ || (3.14.50)
Many methods are adopted in order to make the ignorant understand. Being different sets
of words, the sentence and the compound are quite different from each other. (Iyer 1969,
148)
upāyamātraṃ nānātvaṃ samūhas tv eka eva saḥ |vikalpābhyuccayābhyāṃ vā bhedasaṃsar-
gakalpanā || (3.14.97)
The splitting-up is only a means, the compound is one whole. Difference and connection
can be understood either as alternatives or together. (Iyer 1969, 170)
||
38 Cf. Trilocanadāsaʼs Kātantravṛttipañjikā and Suṣeṇaśarman’s Kalāpacandra on Kātantra
2.5.1.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 721
vṛttiṃ vartayatām evam abudhapratipattaye |
bhinnāḥ saṃbodhanopāyāḥ puruṣeṣv anavasthitāḥ || (3.14.98)
Those who explain complex formations in order to instruct the ignorant adopt different and
variable methods of explanations. (Iyer 1969, 171)
This position of Bhartṛhari has been accepted by both the Kātantra as well as the
Cāndra schools. The above-mentioned verses from the Vākyapadīya are quoted
in the Durgaṭīkā on Kātantra 2.5.1 in support of the nityapakṣa (Dwivedi II.2, p.
255). Thus, as per the primary position of the Kātantra school, the rule nāmnāṃ
samāso yuktārthaḥ is a saṃjñā-sūtra, which simply describes the nature of a com-
pound word and does not teach its formation.39 Hence, the school does not re-
quire the meta-rule samarthaḥ padavidhiḥ like the Pāṇinians. However, accord-
ing to the Durgavṛtti, as an alternative explanation, it is possible to say that the
term samāsa in the said sūtra implies its formation even in this grammar. While
commenting on it, the Durgaṭīkā maintains that this alternative favours the view
that an uncompounded expression turns into a compound.
Moggallāna distances himself from both the ideological positions, namely,
that of the Pāṇinians and of the Kātantra school by incorporating the ideas from
the Cāndra system, particularly from Ratnamati’s Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. By
taking such a stand, he suggests his departure from the Kaccāyana school, and
his adherence to a new grammatical ideology.
Apart from this, the value of a comparison of the Moggallānavyākaraṇa with
the Cāndra grammatical works could even be judged from its utility in under-
standing the methodology adopted by Moggallāna for translating the scholastic
Sanskrit parlance into Pali. As shown by Gornall (2013, 90), such adaptations of
the Sanskrit material could give us much deeper insights into the processes of
familiarization with a foreign literature by restructuring its strangeness in order
to establish a dialogue between the two different traditions. I will now analyse
the above two passages in order to highlight the peculiarities of Moggallāna’s Pali
rendering of the Sanskrit text.
The passage from the Moggallānapañcikā quoted above is, to use Dimitrov’s
words (2016, 622), ‘nothing less than a very precise translation’ of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā with some modifications wherever necessary. The first major
modification is seen in the non-use of abbreviated terms (pratyāhāras). Like
Pāṇini, Candragomin makes use of pratyāhāras in his grammar. In this particular
instance, there is the pratyāhāra sup, which denotes all the nominal case end-
ings. Unlike Candragomin, Moggallāna avoids the use of pratyāhāras. In this
||
39 Cf. the Durgaṭīkā on Kātantra 2.5.1.
722 | Mahesh A. Deokar
case, he follows his predecessor Kaccāyana and uses the term syādi to represent
all the nominal endings. Thus, Ratnamati’s comment on the Cāndravṛtti begins
with the explanation of the pratyāhāra sup, whereas Moggallāna starts his
Pañcikā with the elaboration of the word syādi:
si ādi yassa so syādi – si yo aṃ yo nā hi sa naṃ smā hi sa naṃ smiṃ su ti idaṃ vidhig-
gahaṇañāyena tadantaggahaṇam icc āha: syādyantam iccādi.
Syādi means the set of nominal case endings, which begins with si, that is to say, si, yo, aṃ,
yo, nā, hi, sa, naṃ, smā, hi, sa, naṃ, smiṃ, and su.
The second type of modification can be observed in Moggallāna’s Pali rendering
of Sanskrit vocabulary. He occasionally replaces unfamiliar Sanskrit expressions
by relatively better known Pali words, for example, nāśritam is replaced by na
kataṃ, śrīyamāṇāyāṃ is replaced by upādiyamānāyaṃ, iṣyate by abhimata-, and
sumana by kusuma.
Similarly, when the compounded Sanskrit form could not be rendered con-
veniently in Pali, Moggallāna prefers to use an uncompounded expression, for
example, the compound sāmānyoktau is rendered into Pali as sāmaññena vutte.
Barring these few cases, Moggallāna generally sticks to the hardcore technical
terminology of the Sanskrit grammar and uses mere Pali versions of the same, for
example, ekārthībhāva is rendered as ekatthībhāva, vyapekṣā as vyapekkhā, and
saṃsarga as saṃsagga. At places, Moggallāna’s Pali rendering, although close to
the Sanskrit, hints at a different underlying form. For example, upapadyate (upa
+ pad) is rendered as uppajjate (u = ut + pad), which, in spite of being a synonym,
differs in its derivation.
Sometimes Moggallāna is not consistent in his Pali rendering of the Sanskrit.
Three instances may be cited in this connection:
1) The word pṛthagartha occurs once in the Cāndravṛtti and twice in the
corresponding passage of the Pañjikā. Moggallāna in his Vutti renders it
as bhinnattha. However, in the Pañcikā, the word pṛthagartha has been
translated as puthagattha. Out of the two occurrences of puthagattha, on
the second occasion it is paraphrased as bhinnattha on the line of the
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā. It is puzzling, since Moggallāna has in fact
used the word bhinnattha in the Vutti, which he is expected to para-
phrase in the Pañcikā. It seems that Moggallāna’s use of bhinnattha in
the Vutti instead of puthagattha is inspired by a similar usage found in
Buddhapiyaʼs Rūpasiddhi:
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 723
etena saṅgatatthena yuttatthavacanena bhinnatthānaṃ ekatthabhāvo samāsa-
lakkhaṇan ti vuttaṃ hoti. (Rūpasiddhi as quoted by Tiwari and Sharma 1989, 150)
This expression yuttattha- (‘conjoined meaning’) in the sense of coherent meaning
implies that a formation of a single integrated meaning out of the [words having]
separate meanings [of their own] is the characteristic of a compound.
This refers back to the Vārttika quoted in Patañjali’s Mahābhāṣya
mentioned above:
pṛthagarthānām ekārthībhāvaḥ samarthavacanam |
However, the more direct source of Buddhapiya’s explanation seems to
be either our current passage of the Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā or its par-
allel found in the Durgaṭīkā:
pṛthagarthānām ekārthībhāvaḥ samāso bhavati pūrvottarapadayor arthasya
saṃsṛṣṭarūpasya pratīteḥ |
The compound is a formation of a single integrated meaning out of the [words
having] separate meanings [of their own], since one observes [from it] a united
form of meaning out of [the two, namely,] initial and final words.
2) Similarly, there is no consistency in the usage of the verbal form hoti.
Although in the Vutti, we find the use of hoti as a usual parallel form for
Sanskrit bhavati used in the Cāndravṛtti, in the Pañcikā Moggallāna uses
bhavati in the expression sāmaññena vutte pi ... tena saha tad ekatthaṃ
bhavatīti ... exactly in the same manner as that of the Cāndra-
vyākaraṇapañjikā.
3) The third inconsistency is found in Moggallāna’s Pali rendering of the
Sanskrit word takṣan in the sentence takṣā rājakarmaṇi... Here it is ren-
dered in Pali as ṭhapati, which Saṅgharakkhita glosses as vaḍḍhakī ‘a
carpenter’. Surprisingly, later in the same sentence, Moggallāna retains
the word taccha- in tacchakammaṃ, which, otherwise, could have been
easily translated into Pali as ṭhapatikammaṃ.
Another peculiarity of Moggallāna’s translation is his free use of Sanskritisms,
that is to say, forms that are akin to Sanskrit. Examples of such Sanskritisms in
our passage are vyavahārattho and anvākhyānāya. A comparison of the current
passages from the Moggallānavutti and the Pañcikā shows that the tendency to
use Sanskritisms is greater in the latter than in the former. Moreover, given the
724 | Mahesh A. Deokar
fact that both works are composed by the same author, one does not find deliber-
ate efforts to standardise the Pali vocabulary for rendering the Sanskrit equiva-
lents. One more instance of Moggallāna’s use of peculiar Pali expressions is the
rendering of niṣkrāntāsv api sumanaḥsu by niṭṭhitesu pi kusumesu. Here, it is clear
that niṭṭhita is in no way parallel to niṣkrānta. Furthermore, Moggallāna has ren-
dered sumana into equally less familiar kusuma instead of the more known pup-
pha. It is interesting to know that the parallel expression in the Mahābhāṣya
reads niṣkīrṇāsv api sumanaḥsu, whereas in the Durgaṭīkā it reads niṣṭhyūteṣv api
nistṛteṣv api puṣpeṣu. It is difficult to point out with any certainty the exact moti-
vation behind Moggallāna’s peculiar Pali rendering of the concerned Sanskrit
phrase. These observations are mere glimpses into Moggallāna’s project of intro-
ducing scholarly material available in Sanskrit to his Sinhalese audience in Pali.
A further comparison between Moggallāna’s grammatical works and the treatises
in the Cāndra grammatical tradition can provide us substantial data to under-
stand more precisely Moggallāna’s methodology of translating Sanskrit material
into Pali.
The above discussion illustrates in unambiguous terms the role of the
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā as an important tool to study the Moggallāna-
vyākaraṇa. I fully agree with Dimitrov’s suggestion (2016, 622) that ‘due to its spe-
cific dependency, Moggallāna’s work should be studied along with Ratna’s orig-
inal which will certainly prove helpful, not least when preparing a new critical
edition of the Pali text.’ Apart from facilitating critical editions of both the texts,
a comparative study of these works can prove important from the point of know-
ing the exact relation of Moggallāna’s grammar to the Cāndra tradition in terms
of transmission of grammatical ideas and methodology. Moreover, such a study
can provide valuable information on the technique used by Pali scholars to trans-
late and adapt śāstric literature in Sanskrit, and can thereby improve our under-
standing of larger issues concerning the new era of the Pali literature based on
the Sanskritic models.
The Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā: Tool for the Study of the Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā | 725
References
Primary sources
Aṣṭādhyāyī of Pāṇini in Roman Transliteration. By Sumitra M. Katre. University of Texas Press,
Austin, 1987.
Bhartṛharis Vākyapadīya. von Wilhelm Rau. Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft. Wiesba-
den. 1977.
Cāndra-Vyākaraṇa. Die Grammatik des Candragomin. Sūtra, Uṇādi, Dhātupāṭha. Herausgege-
ben von Bruno Liebich. Leipzig 1902. (Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes. XI.
Band, No. 4.)
Chaṭṭha Saṅgāyana Tipiṭaka 4.0 [digital edition]. See www.tipitaka.org/cst4.
Liṅgānuśāsana of Durgasiṁha, Edited by D. G. Koparkar. Deccan College Post Graduate and
Research Institute, Poona, 1952.
Kaccāyana and Kaccāyanavutti. Edited by Ole Holten Pind. The Pali Text Society, Bristol 2013.
Kaccāyana Vyākaraṇa. Critically Edited, Translated and Annotated with Notes & Indices by Lak-
shmi Narayana Tiwari and Birbal Sharma. Tara Book Agency. Varanasi. 1959.
The Kasika Vivarana Panjika (The Nyāsa). A Commentary on Vamana-Jayaditya’s Kasika by
Jinendra Buddhi. Edited with Introduction and Occasional Notes by Srish Chandra
Chakravarti. Rajshahi 1913-25.
Kātantravyākaraṇa of Ācārya Śarvavarmā, [Part-Two] [Volume-2] with four Commentaries ‘Vṛtti’
and ‘Ṭ̄īkā’ By Śrī Durga Singh, ‘Kātantravṛttipañjikā’ by Śrī Trilocanadāsa, ‘Kalāpacandra’
by Kavirāja Suṣeṇaśarmā. Edited by Jānakīprasāda Dwivedī. Sampurnanand Sanskrit Uni-
versity, Varanasi 1999.
Moggallāna Pañcikā with Sutta Vutti by the Venerable Moggallāna Mahā Sāmi. Revised and
edited by Sri Dharmānanda Nāyaka Sthavira. Wirahena 1931.
Moggallān pañcikā aphvạṅ Sāratthavilāsinī maññ so Moggallān pañcikā ṭīkā kui Abhayārāma
charā tō Arhaṅ Aggadhammābhivaṃsa mahāther mrat cī raṅ saññ. Pāḷi charā Charā Taṅ,
Charā Pu, Kui Kyō Ññvạn tuị krīḥ krap praṅ chaṅ saññ. Rankun 1955.
Moggallāyanavyākaraṇaṃ vuttisametaṃ ācariyena mahāveyyākaraṇena Moggallānattherena
racitaṃ. H. Devamitta. Laṅkābhinava Vissuta Printing Press, Colombo 1890/2434.
The Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya of Patañjali. Edited by F. Kielhorn. Volume I. Government Central
Book Depot. Bombay 1892. (Second edition revised).
Secondary sources
Deokar, Lata Mahesh (2014), Subhūticandra’s Kavikāmadhenu on Amarakośa 1.1.1-1.4.8: To-
gether with Si tu Paṇ chen's Tibetan Translation, Marburg: Indica et Tibetica Verlag.
Deokar, Mahesh A (2008), Technical Terms and Techniques of the Pali and Sanskrit Grammars,
Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, Sarnath, Varanasi.
Deokar, Mahesh A (2009), ‘The Treatment of Compounds in the Moggallānavyākaraṇa vis-à-vis
Cāndravyākaraṇa’, in Satyaprakāśa Śarmā(ed.), Ocean of Buddhist Wisdom, Vol. 4, Delhi:
New Bharatiya Book Corporation.
726 | Mahesh A. Deokar
Dimitrov, Dragomir (2016), The Legacy of the Jewel Mind. On the Sanskrit, Pali, and Sinhalese
Works by Ratnamati. A Philological Chronicle (Phullalocanavaṃsa). Napoli (Università de-
gli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Dipartimento Asia Africa e Mediterraneo, Series Minor,
LXXXII).
Franke, R. Otto (1903), ‘Moggallāna’s Saddalakkhaṇa und das Cāndra-vyākaraṇa’, in Journal of
the Pali Text Society, 1902–1903. London, 70–95.
Gornall, Alastair (2013), Buddhism and Grammar: The Scholarly Cultivation of Pāli in Medieval
Laṅkā, An unpublished Ph.D. Thesis submitted to the University of Cambridge.
Iyer, K. A. Subramania (1969), The Vākyapadīya of Bhartṛhari. Chapter III, part 2. English Trans-
lation with Exegetical Notes. Poona: Deccan College.
Joshi, S[hivaram] D[attatray] (1968), Patañjali’s Vyākaraṇa-Mahābhāṣya. Samarthāhnika (P.
2.1.1). with Translation and Explanatory Notes. Poona: University of Poona. (Publications
of the Centre of Advanced Study in Sanskrit, Class C, No. 3).
Oberlies, Thomas (1989), Studie zum Cāndravyākaraṇa. Eine kritische Bearbeitung von Candra
IV.4.52-148 und V.2, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
Oberlies, Thomas (1996), ‘Das zeitliche und ideengeschichtliche Verhältnis der Cāndra-Vṛtti zu
anderen V(ai)yākaraṇas (Studien zum Cāndravyākaraṇa III)’, in Festschrift Paul Thieme,
Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik, 20, 265–317.
Pannasara, Dehigaspe (1958),
Sanskrit Literature Extant Among the Sinhalese and the Influ-
ence of Sanskrit on Sinhalese (Ph.D. thesis). Colombo.
Vergiani, Vincenzo (2009), ‘A Quotation from the Mahābhāṣyadīpikā of Bhartṛhari in the
Pratyāhāra Section of the Kāśikāvṛtti’, in Pascale Haag and Vincenzo Vergiani (eds), Stud-
ies in the Kāśikāvṛtti. The Section on Pratyāhāras: Critical Edition, Translation and Other
Contributions, Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina.
Hugo David
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s
‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya: a
Preliminary Report based on two Cambridge
Manuscripts
Abstract: This article presents a fresh assessment of evidence for the existence of
Śaṅkara’s ‘longer’ commentary on the Aitareyopaniṣad, a sub-section of the Aitar-
eyāraṇyaka (AiĀ). While most printed editions of the Bhāṣya consider that it covers
only three adhyāyas of the Āraṇyaka (AiĀ 2.4-6/7), a much more comprehensive
work, bearing on the whole of AiĀ 2 and 3, is preserved in manuscripts. In the first
part of the article, I argue that the ascription of this ‘longer’ gloss to Śaṅkara is likely
to be justified, building on previous scholarship (A.B. Keith, S.K. Belvalkar) as well
as on my own inspection of two manuscripts of the work, newly identified in the
Cambridge University Library. Questions are also raised as to the constitution of the
Upaniṣadic canon(s) and the role of commentaries in that process. The second part
of the essay provides a comprehensive survey of the material (manuscript and
print) available for a first critical edition of this important, though mostly neglected
work by the great Vedāntin.
||
Research for the present study was started during my stint in Cambridge in 2013–14, for which I
benefitted of the generous support of the British Royal Society (Newton International Fellow-
ship), and during which I had the privilege to participate as a regular external collaborator in the
Sanskrit Manuscripts Project. I thank the three editors of this volume for facilitating me access
to the Cambridge collection in innumerable ways, for sharing their knowledge and expertise of
Sanskrit manuscripts, and for allowing me to take part in their endeavour. I am also grateful to
Andrew Ollett for providing the copy of a rare document kept in Harvard, to the authorities of the
Vadakke Madham Brahmaswam in Thrissur (especially Mr. P. Parameswaran) for opening me the
doors to their precious collection of manuscripts, as well as to the following public libraries for
their kind cooperation: the Government Oriental Manuscripts Library in Chennai and the Oriental
Research Institute and Manuscripts Library in Trivandrum (Kariavattom).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110543100-022, © 2017 H. David, published by De Gruyter.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
728 | Hugo David
1 Introduction
In an article published in 1930 in the Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal
Asiatic Society, the great Maharashtrian Indologist S.K. Belvalkar drew the atten-
tion of scholars to what he called ‘an authentic, but unpublished work of Śaṅka-
rācārya.’ That work was a commentary (Bhāṣya) by the great Advaita Vedāntin
Śaṅkara(-ācārya), the author of the Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, on the Aitareyopaniṣad
(AiU), a portion of the Aitareyāraṇyaka (AiĀ).1 Of course, Belvalkar was well
aware that a commentary by Śaṅkara on the Upaniṣad bearing that name had
been published as early as 1850 by Edward Röer together with Ānandagiri’s gloss
(Calcutta, Bibliotheca Indica 6), and again in 1889 by the paṇḍits of the Pune
Ānandāśrama with the same sub-commentary (Ānandāśramasaṃskṛta-
granthāvaliḥ 11).2 Yet the work he was describing was very different in extent and
character. The AiU is usually thought to be a work in three sections (adhyāya),
corresponding to adhyāyas 4–6/73 of the second book (also called āraṇyaka) of
the AiĀ, which is made of five āraṇyakas altogether. These three adhyāyas are
again divided into six sub-sections (khaṇḍa), hence the name Ātmaṣaṭka (‘Hex-
ade on the Self’) often used to refer to that Upaniṣad.4 Śaṅkara, in turn, is gener-
ally believed to have commented only on these three adhyāyas, ‘the Upaniṣad
properly so-called’ to use F. Max Müller’s phrase.5 The three manuscripts dis-
cussed by Belvalkar, however, all kept in British and German libraries,6 contained
||
1 As is well-known, the Aitareya-upaniṣad and °āraṇyaka belong to the Ṛgveda-tradition, where
they are closely related to the Āśvalāyana school. See Renou 1947, 25–26.
2 This is to name only the two most important editions of the text, i.e. those that are surely based
on manuscripts. Karl H. Potter, in his Bibliography of Indian Philosophies (online version, last
consulted on 10th April, 2017), counts no less than fourteen editions of the AiUBh before 1930, in
various Indian scripts (including Tamil, Telugu, etc.), as well as two translations of the text into
English and one into Tamil. See https://faculty.washington.edu/kpotter/ckeyt/txt2.htm. The
NCC 3 (p. 86) also lists early translations into Bengali (Calcutta, 1881) and Marathi (Pune, 1892).
3 The seventh and last adhyāya of the second āraṇyaka consists only of a brief invocation (śānti-
pāṭha). Standard editions of the AiĀ give it as a seventh adhyāya, but it is usually found in
printed editions of the AiU as a mere appendix to the third section of the Upaniṣad, not as a
separate section. The AiU is therefore generally considered to be a work in three adhyāyas.
4 This is what we find, for instance, in the standard edition of eighteen ‘principal’ Upaniṣads by
V.P. Limaye and R.D. Vadekar (Pune 1958, 62–67). For an overview of the contents of these three
adhyāyas, see Schneider 1963.
5 See Müller 1879, xcvii.
6 For more details on these manuscripts, see below, Section 2. Although Belvalkar refers to three
manuscripts in his article (London, Oxford and Berlin), he could examine only one of them,
namely the one kept in London. See Belvalkar 1930, 243–244.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 729
a commentary also ascribed to Śaṅkara, but on a considerably larger amount of
text (partly redundant with the other, shorter, commentary), namely the totality
of āraṇyakas 2 and 3 (eight adhyāyas in total, nine if we include the śāntipāṭha,
on which Śaṅkara did not comment). A similar work had been briefly described
twenty years earlier by A.B. Keith (1909, 11) in his monumental study of the
Āraṇyaka, using the same manuscripts. A lithograph of the work, apparently un-
known to Keith and Belvalkar, had also been produced in Benares as early as 1884
on the basis of one or several North Indian manuscript(s), of which it scrupu-
lously imitates the layout.7 This commentary, which both Keith and Belvalkar
considered without hesitation to be the work of Śaṅkara, is two or three times as
bulky as the published versions of the AiUBh, and deals with a much wider range
of topics, including speculations on elements of the ritual akin to what we find in
the first books of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka° and Chāndogyopaniṣads. For easy refer-
ence, I will speak here of the ‘shorter’ and ‘longer’ versions of the Aitareyo-
paniṣadbhāṣya (AiUBh–S and AiUBh–L).
Given the extreme popularity and historical importance of Śaṅkara’s Upani-
ṣadic commentaries, one would expect that Belvalkar’s ‘(re-)discovery’ would
have attracted massive attention from Indologists and specialists of Vedānta, and
would at least have motivated a first publication of the text on the basis of man-
uscripts in the following years. This is especially true in India, where the article
was published in a well-known periodical, and where Śaṅkara is still revered as
a major religious figure among Hindus. This, however, was not the case: count-
less new editions of Śaṅkara’s ‘shorter’ Bhāṣya were printed in the last ninety
years – including many reprints of the two 19th-century editions mentioned above
(when at all they mention their sources) –, but the only version of his ‘longer’
gloss available in print today remains the 1884 Benares lithograph, the text of
which was reprinted by Laxmanshastri Joshi in vol. 2.2 (pp. 525–626) of his Dhar-
makośa (Upaniṣatkāṇḍa), published in Wai in 1949. As far as I can see, both pub-
lications remained practically unnoticed by scholars of Vedānta.
||
7 To the best of my knowledge, the only surviving copy of that lithograph, which also includes
Ānandagiri’s commentary for the Upaniṣad ‘proper,’ is found in the Harvard University Library.
I was able to secure a scanned copy of this valuable document through the kind efforts of my
colleague Andrew Ollett, to whom I am especially grateful. The only other copy I know of is the
one that was used in the 1940s by Laxmanshastri Joshi while compiling the Dharmakośa, which
he says he obtained from his teacher, the famous Mīmāṃsaka Kevalānanda Sarasvatī (vol. 2.2 p.
525). For a more precise description, see below, Section 2.
730 | Hugo David
This is surprising indeed, as this commentary is not only a presumably major
work by one of the most famous ancient Indian writers, but it also raises interesting
questions as to the nature of the AiU itself. Already F. Max Müller, in the introduc-
tion to his English translation of the Āraṇyaka, felt the necessity to distinguish the
AiU from what he named the ‘Mahaitareya-upanishad, also called by a more gen-
eral name Bahvrika-upanishad, which comprises the whole of the second and third
Âranyakas’ (1879, xcvii).8 And in fact, some authors in the Śaṅkaran tradition seem
to consider that the Upaniṣad consists of the whole of āraṇyakas 2 and 3, not only
the small portion usually found in printed editions (especially when they include
Śaṅkara’s commentary).9 It should also be noted that Madhva (12th c.), the founder
of the dualist Vedāntic tradition bearing his name, commented on the ‘longer’ ver-
sion of the Upaniṣad,10 and that the 17th-century Persian translation of the same in-
cluded most of the second āraṇyaka.11 It is therefore unclear whether there existed
one AiU (then again, in three or nine adhyāyas?), two (the ‘larger’ encompassing
the ‘shorter’, or the Bahvṛca° and Saṃhitopaniṣad?), three (as F. Max Müller seems
to suggest), or if asking such a question is even legitimate without further specifi-
cation (for whom, for what tradition, in what period, etc.?); yet it is easy to see that
answering this question has considerable bearing on the comprehension of the
Upaniṣad, as well as on the chronology of the older, ‘Vedic’ Upaniṣads.12
||
8 In his earlier History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (1859), Müller already distinguished be-
tween the shorter Aitareyopaniṣad (AiĀ 2.4–7) and the larger Bahvṛcopaniṣad (AiĀ 2–3). The
name Bahvṛca-[brāhmaṇa-]upaniṣad, ‘the Upaniṣad of the Brāhmaṇa belonging to the Bahvṛca
(= the Veda ‘of many hymns,’ a common designation of the Ṛgveda),’ is found in Śaṅkara’s com-
mentary on AiĀ 2.1 (see below, Section 1), to which Müller may have had access through manu-
scripts. The title Mahaitareyopaniṣad, ‘The Greater Aitareyopaniṣad,’ taken up by Keith (1909,
11), is found in the colophon of some manuscripts, though this is by no means the rule and may
be limited to works in the Mādhva tradition (as suggested by K.S. Narayanacharya [1997, iii]).
See for instance Keith & Winternitz, Bodleian No. 1011 (p. 77), a Mādhva sub-commentary on the
‘longer’ AiU by Viśveśvaratīrtha (see also below, n. 56). Earlier in his introduction (p. xciii), Mül-
ler spoke of three Upaniṣads, the ‘first Upaniṣad’ corresponding to AiĀ 2.1–3, the second to what
is generally known as the AiU (AiĀ 2.4–6/7), and the third being the Saṃhitopaniṣad (AiĀ 3). In
fact, the colophons of some manuscripts differentiate between the Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣad
(corresponding to the whole of AiĀ 2) and the Saṃhitopaniṣad, a distinction which finds some
support in Śaṅkara’s commentary (see below, Section 1). On this problem, see also the discussion
by Keith (1909, 39), who rightly concludes that ‘the nomenclature was not definitely fixed’ even
in the late medieval period. Max Müller’s divisions of the Aitareya-corpus are taken up in the clas-
sical monograph by Renou (1947, 45), as well as in the recent study of older Upaniṣads by S. Cohen
(2008, see especially p. 133).
9 Consider for instance the following statement by Sāyaṇa, the famous 14th-century commen-
tator on the Veda, in the introductory verses to his commentary on AiĀ 2 (verse 4): āraṇyakaṃ
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 731
My interest in Śaṅkara’s text was awakened by the identification, in 2013, of a
complete manuscript of Śaṅkara’s ‘longer’ commentary unknown to Keith and Bel-
valkar in the Cambridge University Library (UL Add.2092).13 This was immediately
followed by the discovery, in 2014, of a second complete manuscript of the text (UL
||
dvitīyaṃ ca tṛtīyaṃ ca tadātmakam | jñānakāṇḍaṃ tataḥ sopaniṣad ity abhidhīyate ||; ‘The second
and third āraṇyakas [of the AiĀ], since they consist in [knowledge], are the ‘section on
knowledge’ (jñānakāṇḍa); this is why they are called an ‘Upaniṣad’ (p. 81 – quoted by Belvalkar
[1930, 243–244] and Laxmanshastri Joshi [Dharmakośa – Upaniṣatkāṇḍa vol. 2.2, p. 525]). The
‘etymological’ link between jñāna and upaniṣad is directly inspired from Śaṅkara’s commentary
(see below, Section 1). The 18th-century commentary on AiU by the Advaitin Upaniṣadbrahmayo-
gin, first published in 1935 in Madras (Adyar Library and Research Centre; second edition
Madras, 1984), also deals with the whole of āraṇyaka 2. The editor of the text, C. Kunhan Raja,
remarks that ‘[it] follows more or less the Bhāṣya of Śaṃkarācārya’ (preface p. vii).
10 See the short notice by B.N.K. Sharma (2000, 168–170); remarkably, the great historian of the
Dvaita school acknowledges the existence of Śaṅkara’s ‘longer’ commentary, which he still con-
siders unpublished, and takes it as an argument against the common view that Madhva, by com-
menting on the whole AiĀ 2–3, would have departed from earlier commentarial tradition. The
Viśiṣtādvaita tradition of Upaniṣadic commentary is relatively late as far as the AiU is concerned.
The oldest commentary available in print, by Raṅgarāmānuja (around 1630 according to Potter,
see https://faculty.washington.edu/kpotter/ckeyt/txt4.htm), was published in 1951 in Tirupati
(reprint: Madras, 1973) and deals with the ‘shorter’ version of the Upaniṣad. The same holds for
all four commentaries in that tradition (including that by Raṅgarāmānuja) published in 1997 by
the Academy of Sanskrit Research in Melkote.
11 According to F. Max Müller (1879, xcvii), the translation made in the mid-17th century for Dārā
Shikoh, that would be the basis for Anquetil Duperron’s translation into Latin in the early 19th
century, covers AiĀ 2.1.1–2.3.4 and 2.4–2.7, equivalent to the whole second āraṇyaka with the
exception of AiĀ 2.3.5–8. On this translation, see also Keith 1909, 14.
12 The question whether or not to include the beginning of AiĀ 2 into the text of the Upaniṣad
is considered in detail by A.B. Keith (1909), who concludes after a lengthy discussion (pp. 40–
43) that AiĀ 2.1–3 may well be ‘the oldest longer Upaniṣad,’ while AiĀ 2.4–6/7 would represent
a further development. On this point, see also the critical remarks by E.J. Rapson (1910, 894–
895), who mentions the opposite views of Deussen. It is not my purpose to engage here in a full
discussion of Keith’s arguments, mainly based on the evolution of doctrine. I find it surprising,
though, that recent studies of Upaniṣadic literature, like that by S. Cohen (2008), do not even
take this possibility into account. While Cohen rightly claims that ‘chronological considerations
are necessary in order to analyse the text of the Upaniṣads’ (p. 1) and that ‘the philosophical
discussions in the Upaniṣads can[not] be fully understood without a chronological perspective,’
Chapter 5 of the book, devoted to the AiU, still takes as a matter of fact that ‘the Aitareya
Upaniṣad is a short prose text in three chapters (…) commonly regarded as one of the oldest
Upaniṣads, though younger than the Bṛhadāraṇyaka or the Chāndogya Upaniṣads’ (p. 133). Un-
surprisingly, Cohen’s linguistic and doctrinal analysis of the ‘short’ Upaniṣad (pp. 133–137) con-
firms this common view, without however raising at any moment the issue of its inscription into
the AiĀ–corpus, or even mentioning Keith’s views on the subject.
13 Online description (with images): https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-ADD-02092/1.
732 | Hugo David
Or.2400) by Elisa Ganser, who was then cataloguing a group of palm-leaf manu-
scripts from Kerala acquired in the 1990s by the UL.14 The fact that the Cambridge
University Library alone possessed two hitherto unknown manuscripts of the work,
bought in very different circumstances and clearly unrelated (one a late 16th-cen-
tury copy from Benares, the other a modern South Indian manuscript), made me
think that it may be more diffused than originally thought by Belvalkar, and that
the latter’s claim that ‘there does not exist [...] even a single manuscript of the work
in India’15 might not be entirely true. Regular visits to South Indian libraries follow-
ing my affiliation to the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient
(EFEO) in 2016 confirmed this intuition, leading to the identification of three more
manuscripts, one incomplete (Madras, GOML D–331 / SD 183), the other two com-
plete, kept in the Vadakke Madham in Thrissur and in the ORIML in Trivandrum
(No. 6312), the last two either uncatalogued or wrongly catalogued (see below, Sec-
tion 2). The material collected so far, for the most part in the form of digital images,
includes eight manuscripts in four different scripts (Devanāgarī, Telugu, Grantha
and Malayalam),16 and points to a fairly large diffusion (though without compari-
son with that of the ‘shorter’ version17) in a wide geographical area, predominantly
Benares and the far South (including the Andhra region); I have no doubt that more
research in Indian collections will lead to the discovery of further copies of the text.
The purpose of this essay is to present a temporary state of the art on Śaṅkara’s
‘longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya, based on past scholarship as well as on my own
cursory inspection of the two Cambridge manuscripts and the two editions of the
text. This is meant as a preliminary to its complete critical edition, which I plan to
achieve in the next few years in collaboration with other researchers of the Pondi-
cherry EFEO Centre. The article is divided in two parts: first of all, I will address the
issue of the ‘authenticity’ of the ‘longer’ Bhāṣya, and the (very limited) debate to
which it gave rise among Indian scholars. Having concluded that the ascription of
the text to Śaṅkara is likely to be justified, I will then survey the material so far
available for the study of this important, though badly neglected piece of Indian
traditional scholarship.
||
14 Online description: https://cudl.lib.cam.ac.uk/view/MS-OR-02400/1.
15 Belvalkar 1930, 242.
16 Unless the Benares lithograph was based on the Cambridge manuscript, and was realised
before its acquisition by the UL – which remains possible – it is unlikely that any of these man-
uscripts has been used to establish the text of Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya.
17 The NCC 3 (p. 88) lists about a hundred manuscripts of Śaṅkara’s ‘shorter’ Bhāṣya. It is, of
course, by no means excluded that some of the records actually ‘hide’ the long version of his com-
mentary, as was the case with the Trivandrum manuscript of AiUBh–L (see below, Section 2).
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 733
2 On the authenticity of Śaṅkara’s ‘longer’
Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya
The question of authenticity is almost inevitably raised while speaking of a work
attributed to Śaṅkara, to whom hundreds of Sanskrit texts (philosophical treatises,
stotras, etc.) have been ascribed over the centuries. This is even more the case for a
text like the ‘longer’ AiUBh, which goes against a long, well-established tradition.
In this first section, I will summarize the debate as it now stands, and argue that,
until otherwise proved, the text under consideration should be regarded as a work
by the great Advaitin, indeed as a more complete version of his commentary on the
AiU, of which AiUBh–S is just a fragment, or, possibly, as the conflation of two sep-
arate commentaries on AiĀ 2 and 3.18
The authenticity of AiUBh–L has rarely been put into question, mostly be-
cause so few scholars seem to have been aware of its existence. In a Sanskrit note
to his recent edition of Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣyas (Upaniṣadbhāṣyam vol. 1, p. 630, n. 1),
S. Subrahmaṇya Shastri nevertheless challenges the attribution to Śaṅkara of
AiUBh–L, which he knows only from its reprint in the Dharmakośa. As he rightly
observes, the prose introduction of the text contains an extensive discussion on the
relation (saṃbandha) of the Upaniṣad – the ‘section on knowledge’ (jñānakāṇḍa)
– with the ‘section on rites’ (karmakāṇḍa) of the Veda, which exactly matches that
||
18 The question of the ‘authenticity’ of works ascribed to Śaṅkara is complex, and has been the
subject of a number of studies in the past. An argument generally considered decisive in favour of
the authenticity of Upaniṣadic commentaries ascribed to Śaṅkara is the existence of an old sub-
commentary, like the Vārttikas by Sureśvara, which is missing in the present case. Most discussions
of disputed works are otherwise based on their comparison with Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya,
considered the cornerstone of any further attribution, especially on the use of certain concepts like
māyā, avidyā and the like. See for instance the discussion of the two versions of the Keno-
paniṣadbhāṣya by S. Mayeda (1968), who concludes on this basis that both commentaries should
rightly be ascribed to the great Advaitin. My purpose here will be more limited, as I temporarily take
the authenticity of the commentary on AiU for granted. Given that this text has been transmitted in
two versions (the ‘longer’ and the ‘shorter’), the only purpose of the present enquiry is to decide
whether the ‘longer’ version, relatively marginal in the transmission, is the result of later accretions,
or whether it is rather the ‘shorter’ version, normally found in printed editions, which is incomplete.
This, of course, does not exclude further investigations on the concepts used by the author of this
commentary while dealing with the Aitareya-corpus. It is my hope, however, that these preliminary
remarks will help us doing so on a more solid textual basis.
734 | Hugo David
found at the beginning of Śaṅkara’s Bṛhadāraṇakopaniṣadbhāṣya.19 This redun-
dancy leads him to doubt the attribution of the text to Śaṅkara: ‘of course’, he says,
‘it is not proper [for Śaṅkara] to say the same thing here as well, for we see that [he]
writes different introductions for different Upaniṣads.’ Such a weak argument, es-
pecially when coming from a renowned Indian paṇḍit, mainly proves, in my opin-
ion, the tenacity of reading habits when a text has become ‘well-known everywhere
in India’ (sarvatra bhāratadeśe prasiddhaḥ), that is, after one has become accus-
tomed to seeing it printed in books. Repetition of the same passage in various works
of the same author is a daily observation in Sanskrit scholastic literature, and
Śaṅkara’s writings are no exception to that rule, as can easily be seen from his other
Upaniṣadic Bhāṣyas. The parallel pointed out by Subrahmaṇya Shastri could there-
fore be used to prove exactly the contrary, namely that both introductions were
written by one and the same person.
In fact, the proximity between the introduction to AiUBh–L and other reput-
edly authentic Upaniṣadic commentaries by Śaṅkara is striking. As Belvalkar al-
ready noted, the ‘vulgate’ version of AiUBh starts ‘abruptly’ with the statement
parisamāptaṃ karma sahāparabrahmaviṣayavijñānena; ‘The [discussion of the]
rite (karman) is [now] over, as well as the [discussion of] the knowledge of the infe-
rior Brahman.’ Other Upaniṣadic commentaries ascribed to Śaṅkara, on the other
hand, usually start with a rather stereotyped introduction including typical ele-
ments such as the first words of the Upaniṣad,20 the title of the work commented (or
an indication of the corpus to which it belongs),21 a statement of the author’s inten-
tion to write something ‘brief’ (saṃkṣepataḥ, alpagrantha, etc.),22 a semantic anal-
ysis (nirvacana) of the word upaniṣad,23 and a general discussion of the relation
||
19 See Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya p. 2sq. I refer, throughout this article, to the text of
Śaṅkara’s Upaniṣadic Bhāṣyas as it is printed in the three volumes entitled Upaniṣadbhāṣyam,
edited by S. Subrahmaṇya Shastri and published together with Ānandagiri’s sub-commentaries
by the Mahesh Research Institute in Benares.
20 Together with the discussion of saṃbandha, this is perhaps the most stable feature of the
introductions to Śaṅkara’s Upaniṣadic commentaries; it is found at the beginning of his Bhāṣyas
on BĀU, ChU, ĪśāU, KeU, MuU and MāU. The only exceptions to this rule are the Bhāṣyas on KāU
and PraU, as well as that on TaiU, which starts in a very unusual way with a maṅgala, followed
by the discussion of saṃbandha.
21 Bhāṣyas on BĀU (vājasaneyibrāhmaṇopaniṣad), ChU (aṣṭādhyāyī chāndogyopaniṣad), TaiU
(taittirīyakasāra), KāU (kāṭhakopaniṣadvallī) and MāU (ātharvaṇopaniṣad).
22 Bhāṣyas on BĀU (alpagranthā vṛttir ārabhyate), ChU (saṃkṣepato ’rthajijñāsubhyo vivaraṇam
alpagrantham ārabhyate), KāU (sukhārthaprabodhanārtham alpagranthā vṛttir ārabhyate).
23 Bhāṣyas on BĀU, TaiU and KāU (where this nirvacana is dealt with in great detail; see below);
the absence of this element in ChUBh is indeed remarkable.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 735
(saṃbandha) of the Upaniṣad with the ‘section on rites’ (karmakāṇḍa).24 This is ex-
actly what we find at the beginning of the introduction of AiUBh–L.25 Let us quote
only its initial part, which precedes the long discussion of saṃbandha26:
eṣa panthā ityādyā bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣat | tasyā idaṃ vivaraṇam alpagranthaṃ su-
khāvabodhārthama ārabhyateb | upaniṣad ity upanipūrvasya sadeḥ kvibantasya viśaraṇagatya-
vasādanārthasya rūpam ācakṣate | viśeṣeṇa copaniṣacchabdavācyātmavidyāc | tādarthyād
grantho ’py upaniṣat | ye hy asyām ātmavidyāyāṃ tātparyeṇopātmatayā vartante ātmavidyā-
niṣṭhās teṣām avidyādisaṃsārabījadoṣamd avasādayati vināśayati | paraṃ cātmānaṃ nigama-
yaty avabodhayati | garbhajanmajarārogādīṃś ca niśātayatie | ata iyamf ātmavidyopaniṣat |
tadupakārakatvāt prāṇādividyānām apy upaniṣattvam | so ’yam ātmavidyāviṣkaraṇāyaiṣa
panthā ityādigrantho vyācikhyāsitaḥ |
a
°avabodha° C Ed1 Ed2: °bodha° CM
b
ārabhyate C Ed1 Ed2: ārabhate CM
c
ca C Ed1 Ed2: Ø CM
d
°bījadoṣam C CM: °bījam Ed1 Ed2
e
niśātayati Ed1 Ed2 CM: niśādayati C
f
iyam C Ed1 Ed2: idam CM
With the words eṣa panthāḥ (‘This is the path’) begins the Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣad. We
[now] undertake [to compose] a gloss (vivaraṇa) of it, in few words (alpagrantham), for an easy
understanding. They say that upaniṣad is a form of the root √sad, which has the sense of either
dissolution (viśaraṇa), motion/intellection (gati) or perishing (avasādana),27 preceded by [the
preverbs] upa and ni and followed by [the zero kṛt-affix] kvip (A 3.2.61). Specifically, what is
referred to by the word upaniṣad is the knowledge of the Self (ātmavidyā). A text that has [such
a knowledge] as its [main] topic is therefore also called [an Upaniṣad]. To explain: for those
who only aim at this knowledge of the Self, for whom it has become a second nature
(upātmatā), who are abiding in the knowledge of the Self, it [i.e., the upaniṣad] annihilates
(ava-√sadcaus), [which means that it] destroys (=vi-√naścaus) the defect that is the seed of
saṃsāra, [namely] nescience and the like. Moreover, such a [text] transmits scripturally (ni-
√gamcaus) the supreme Self, [which means that] it makes it known (= ava-√budhcaus). Finally, it
lays to rest (niśātay-) the birth into a womb, old age, illness, and the like. Therefore, this
knowledge of the Self is [literally] upaniṣad. Since they assist it, knowledge (vidyā) about the
breath (prāṇa), etc. are also upaniṣad.28 It is to reveal this knowledge of the Self that [we] in-
tend to comment on the text beginning with [the words] eṣa panthāḥ.
||
24 Bhāṣyas on BĀU, ChU, TaiU, ĪsāU and KeU.
25 The beginning of the text could not be examined by Belvalkar, as it was missing in the only
manuscript to which he had access. Our observations, however, essentially confirm his conclusions.
26 For a precise correspondence of sigla, see the table at the end of the article.
27 Cf. Dhātupāṭha 1.907 / 6.133: ṣad(lṛ) viśaraṇagatyavasādaneṣu (see Böhtlingk 1998).
28 This may be a reference to the AiĀ 2.2, which extensively deals with the doctrine of prāṇa, or
to the whole of AiĀ 2.1–3, where prāṇa plays a prominent role.
736 | Hugo David
A strikingly close parallel to this introduction is found in Śaṅkara’s commentary on
BĀU, which contains essentially the same items29:
uṣā vā aśvasya ityevamādyā vājasaneyibrāhmaṇopaniṣat | tasyā iyam alpagranthā vṛttir ārab-
hyate saṃsāravyāvivṛtsubhyaḥ saṃsārahetunivṛttisādhanabrahmātmaikatvavidyāprati-
pattaye | seyaṃ brahmavidyopaniṣacchabdavācyā, tatparāṇāṃ sahetoḥ saṃsāra-
syātyantāvasādanāt, upanipūrvasya sadeḥ tadarthatvāt | tādarthyād grantho ’py upaniṣad
ucyate |
With the words uṣā vā aśvasya (‘Dawn, to speak the truth, is [the head] of the horse [of the
sacrifice]’) begins the Vājasaneyibrāhmaṇopaniṣad. We [now] undertake [to compose] a gloss
(vṛtti) of it, in few words, in order to convey the unity of the Self with Brahman, which leads to
the cessation of saṃsāra and its cause, for the sake of those who wish saṃsāra to come to an
end. This knowledge of the Brahman is what is referred to by the word upaniṣad, for saṃsāra
together with its causes is annihilated (ava-√sad/caus.) for those who only aim at this
[knowledge of the Self], and such is the meaning of the root √sad, which [in that case] is pre-
ceded by [the preverbs] upa and ni. A text that has [such a knowledge] as its [main] topic is
therefore also called an Upaniṣad.
Impressive similarities with the introduction to Śaṅkara’s other Upaniṣadic
Bhāṣyas could be shown for any of the typical elements enumerated above. Con-
sider, for instance, the analysis of the term upaniṣad found in his commentaries on
KāU and TaiU:
Bhāṣya on KāU30
sader dhātor viśaraṇagatyavasādanārthasyopanipūrvasya kvippratyayāntasya rūpam
upaniṣad iti | upaniṣacchabdena ca vyācikhyāsitagranthapratipādyavedyavastuviṣayā vidyocy-
ate | kena punar arthayogenopaniṣacchabdena vidyocyata iti | ucyate | ye mumukṣavo
dṛṣṭānuśravikaviṣayavitṛṣṇāḥ santa upaniṣacchabdavācyāṃ vakṣyamāṇalakṣaṇāṃ vidyām
upasadyopagamya tanniṣṭhatayā niścayena śīlayanti, teṣām avidyādeḥ saṃsārabījasya
viśaraṇād dhiṃsanād vināśanād ity anenārthayogena vidyopaniṣad ity ucyate |
[The word] upaniṣad is a form of the root √sad, which has the sense of either dissolution
(viśaraṇa), motion/intellection (gati) or perishing (avasādana), preceded by [the preverbs] upa
and ni and followed by [the zero kṛt-]affix kvip. What is referred to by the word upaniṣad is the
knowledge of that object [= the Self], worthy to be known, which is conveyed by the text that
[we] are about to explain. [One may ask:] by which semantic connection (arthayoga) does the
word upaniṣad refer to ‘knowledge’ (vidyā)? The answer is [as follows: this is because,] con-
sidering those [people] who, desirous of liberation, do not crave for objects which are either
seen or heard of [in Scriptures], come near (upa-√sad), i.e. approach (upa-√gam) that
knowledge which is referred to by [the word] upaniṣad, the characters of which we are about
to explain, [and having done that] cultivate it decidedly (niścayena śīlayanti) by abiding in it
||
29 Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya pp. 1–2.
30 Kāṭhakopaniṣadbhāṣya pp. 55–57.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 737
(tanniṣṭhatayā), for them the seed of saṃsāra, [namely] nescience and the like, gets dissolved,
[in other words it] gets killed (hiṃsana), destroyed (vināśana); such is the semantic connection
by which ‘knowledge’ is called upaniṣad.
Bhāṣya on TaiU31
upaniṣad iti vidyocyate, tacchīlināṃ garbhajanmajarādiniśātanāt, tadavasādanād vā, brah-
maṇo vopanigamayitṛtvāt, upaniṣaṇṇaṃ vāsyāṃ paraṃ śreya iti | tadarthatvād grantho ’py
upaniṣat |
The word upaniṣad means knowledge (vidyā), for those who cultivate it lay to rest (niśātay-)
the birth into a womb, old age, etc., or because it annihilates [these ills] (ava-√sad/caus.), be-
cause it leads to the knowledge (upani-√gam) of Brahman, or because the Supreme Good is
residing (upaniṣaṇṇa) in it. A text that has [such a knowledge] as its [main] topic is therefore
also called an Upaniṣad.
External evidence also points in the direction of Śaṅkara’s authorship of AiUBh-L.
Two sources need to be taken into account here: the testimony of Sāyaṇa (14th c.),
and the paratextual elements found in editions and manuscripts of AiUBh–L.
In the opening verses of his commentary on AiĀ 2, Sāyaṇa states that he com-
posed his work ‘following the path [laid down by] Śaṅkarācārya’ (śaṅkarācārya-
vartmanā).32 And in fact, his Bhāṣya on AiĀ 2.1–3, at least, shows evident debt to
the commentary attributed to the great Vedāntin. This is not only true of the long
‘philosophical’ introduction on saṃbandha, where Sāyaṇa follows Śaṅkara at
every step (beginning with the gloss of the word upaniṣad found at the very start of
his commentary33)34. He is also indebted to the 8th-century Advaitin in the detail of
||
31 Taittirīyopaniṣadbhāṣya p. 371, l. 3–4.
32 Sāyaṇa’s Bhāṣya on AiĀ 2 (introductory verse 5ab): karomy upaniṣadvyākhyāṃ śaṅkarācārya-
vartmanā |; ‘I compose this commentary on the Upaniṣad, following the path of Śaṅkarācārya’ (p.
81). This fact was already noted by Belvalkar (1930, 244). Recall that by ‘the Upaniṣad’ Sāyaṇa
means the whole of āraṇyakas 2 and 3, not only the ‘shorter’ AiU (see above, n. 9).
33 See Sāyaṇa’s Bhāṣya on AiĀ 2.1.1: upaniṣacchabdo brahmavidyām ācaṣṭe | sā hi vivitsuṃ
puruṣam upetya nitarām avidyāṃ sīdati viśīrṇāṃ karoti, yad vā brahmatāṃ gamayati, atha vā
rāgadveṣāv avasādayati śithilīkaroti | tataḥ ‘ṣaḍlṛ viśaraṇagatyavasādaneṣu’ iti proktaṃ dhātor
arthatrayaṃ tasminn upaniṣacchabde <em: °chabdo ed.> vidyate. tathāvidhāyā brahmavidyāyā
utpādakatvād grantho ’py upaniṣad ity ucyate |; ‘The word upaniṣad expresses the knowledge of
Brahman. For [such a knowledge], having approached a person desirous to know, exhausts
(√sad), i.e. dissolves (viśīrṇāṃ karoti) nescience; or, it leads (gamay-) [that person] to the state
of Brahman; or [finally] it causes passion and aversion to perish (ava-√sadcaus), i.e. it loosens
their ties. Therefore, the three meanings spoken of [in the Dhātupāṭha when it says] ‘the root
√sad [is used in the sense of] dissolution, motion and perishing’ are present in the word
upaniṣad. Since it generates such a knowledge of Brahman, the [corresponding] text is also
called an ‘Upaniṣad’ (p. 81, l. 11–15).
738 | Hugo David
his explanation of the Āraṇyaka. Consider, for instance, the two commentators’ ex-
34
planation of the beginning AiĀ 2.1.1:
AiĀ 2.1.135
eṣa panthā etat karmaitad brahmaitat satyam | tasmān na pramādyet tan nātīyāt | na hy
atyāyan pūrve, ye ’tyāyaṃs te parābabhūvuḥ |
This is the path, this is the sacrifice, this is Brahman, this is truth. Let no man diverge from it;
let no man transgress it; of old, they did not transgress it; those that did transgress it were
overcome.36
Śaṅkara
[...] tasmād asmād ātmajñānamārgāna na pramādyet pramādo na kartavyaḥ | pramādas
tadatikramaḥ | atas taṃ nab kuryād ity arthaḥ37 | pramādyataḥc kiṃ syād ity ucyate | taṃ
panthānaṃ nātīyān nātigacchet | tadatigamanaṃd ca doṣaḥ | tasmāt taṃe na kuryāt, yasmād
dhi pūrve ’tikrāntā brāhmaṇā na hi taṃ mārgam atyāyanf nātigatavanta ity arthaḥ | ye
’smān mārgād bhraṣṭā atyāyaṃs teg parābabhūvuḥ parābhūtāḥ karmajñānānuṣṭhānaṃ
praty ayogyāḥ saṃvṛttā ity arthaḥ |
a
ātmajñāna° C CM: ātmaviṣayajñāna° Ed1 Ed2
b
taṃ na Cpc CM Ed1: tan naṃ Cac: tan na Ed2
c
pramādyataḥ C Ed1 Ed2: pramādayataḥ CM
d
°atigamanaṃ C CM: °atigamane Ed1 Ed2
e
taṃ C CM: Ø Ed1 Ed2
f
atyāyan CM Keith: atītyāyan C Ed1 Ed2
g
atyāyaṃs te CM Ed1 Ed2: atyāyaṃs tye C
Let no man diverge; [this means:] one should have (√kṛ) no divergence from it, i.e. from
that path [leading to] the knowledge of the Self. ‘Divergence’ (pramāda) means stepping
beyond (atikrama) the [path]. One should not undertake (√kṛ) to [step beyond] the [path];
this is the meaning.38 [If one asks] what will happen to those who diverge from it, the answer
||
34 Keith (1909, 199, n. 1) notes a similar proximity between Sāyaṇa’s introduction and Śaṅkara’s
Taittirīyopaniṣadbhāṣya (ad TaiU 1.12).
35 The text of the Āraṇyaka is given in accordance with its critical edition by A.B. Keith (1909).
36 I slightly modify the translation by Keith (1909, 199), reading pūrve with atyāyan as Śaṅkara
and Sāyaṇa recommend; Keith’s choice to read it with what follows is, of course, also possible. I
also suppress ‘therefore’ in order to avoid a double use of tasmād.
37 The whole gloss following na pramādyet in C and the editions, namely pramādo na kartavyaḥ
| pramādas tadatikramaḥ | atas taṃ na kuryād ity arthaḥ | is entirely missing in CM. Instead, after
na pramādyet we find the simple addition of the phrase tasmāt pathaḥ. This does not seem to be
explicable by a simple slip of the pen.
38 Although this might not be entirely clear from my translation, Śaṅkara’s main intention here
is to gloss the rather vague term pramāda (‘divergence’ in Keith’s translation, or simply ‘erring’)
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 739
is that no man should transgress, i.e. go beyond (ati-√gam) that path, and that going be-
yond [that path] is a fault. One should not do that, because it is well known that of old, the
ancient Brahmins did not transgress it, i.e. they did not go beyond it; this is the meaning.
Those that, fallen down (bhraṣṭa) from that path, did transgress it were overcome, they
have been overcome, that is, they became unable to perform either the rites or [salvific]
knowledge39; this is the meaning.
Sāyaṇa40
tasmād ubhayavidhād āmnāyamārgāt pramādaṃ na kuryāt | karmānuṣṭhānabrahma-
jñānayor asaṃpādanaṃ pramādaḥ | nātīyāt [...] nātikrāmet | [...] pūrve maharṣayo vyāsava-
siṣṭhādayas tam uktaṃ panthānaṃ naivātyāyan nātyakrāman | ye tu nāstikā atyakrāmaṃs
te parābabhūvuḥ parābhūtāḥ puruṣārthād bhraṣṭāḥ |
[Let no man diverge] from it; [this means that] one should not diverge from the two-fold
path [described] in the Scriptures [i.e. the path of the rites and the path of knowledge].41
‘Divergence’ (pramāda) means the fact of not achieving (asaṃpādana) the performance of
the rites and the knowledge of Brahman. Let no man transgress [...], [this means:] let no
man step beyond (ati-√kram) [the path]. [...] Of old the great Sages like Vyāsa or Vasiṣṭha
did not transgress the mentioned path at all, i.e. they did not step beyond it. But those
heretics (nāstika) who went beyond it were overcome, they have been overcome, [that is]
they fell down (bhraṣṭa) from the goal of man.
There are no doubt minor differences between the two texts, which might as well
be significant from the point of view of the history of ideas.42 But the structure of
the explanation and the glosses of specific terms are obviously the same, and this
remark can be extended to large parts of Sāyaṇa’s commentary on AiĀ 2–3. Thus
it seems certain that Sāyaṇa was drawing his inspiration from a text he, at least,
believed to be by Śaṅkara, and that this text corresponds to the one transmitted
in our manuscripts of AiUBh–L.
||
by the more precise term atikrama (‘stepping beyond’, ‘transgression’), and also to link it syn-
tactically with the ablative tasmād, which in principle could also be interpreted as ‘therefore’,
as in Keith’s translation of the Āraṇyaka.
39 As we can see from the passage quoted below, the slight oddity in speaking of karmajñānā-
nuṣṭhānam (‘The performance of the rites and [salvific] knowledge’) is suppressed by Sāyaṇa,
who chooses to mention separately karmānuṣṭhāna (‘the performance of rites’) and brahmajñāna
(‘the knowledge of Brahman’).
40 Sāyaṇa’s Bhāṣya on AiĀ 2.1.1, p. 86, l. 26 – p. 87, l. 4.
41 Interestingly enough, the two-fold path is described in a slightly different way in Śaṅkara’s
commentary, as consisting of the path of the rites and the path of Yoga.
42 The mention of ‘heretics’ (nāstika), for instance, seems to be an addition by Sāyaṇa, who also
alludes to the typically Buddhist practice of ‘revering reliquaries’ (caityavandana – p. 86, l. 29),
thus giving to his commentary a more neatly apologetic flavour.
740 | Hugo David
In addition to Sāyaṇa’s testimony, paratextual elements found in editions
and manuscripts (title pages, rubrics, etc.) offer another kind of external evi-
dence, if not directly for Śaṅkara’s authorship,43 at least for the unity of the old
Bhāṣya on AiĀ 2–3.
The Benares 1884 lithograph mentions the work under the name Aitareyo-
paniṣadbhāṣya, found on the title page (fol. 1v) as well as in rubrics concluding
adhyāyas 1–5, which are numbered continuously.44 The rubric of the sixth
adhyāya mentions it under another title, Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣadbhāṣya, and
considers the work bearing that name to be ‘finished’ (samāpta) with that
adhyāya (recall that adhyāya 2.6 is the last commented on by Śaṅkara in the sec-
ond āraṇyaka).45 The rubric found at the close of the commentary on AiĀ 3.1 in-
troduces yet another title, Saṃhitopaniṣadbhāṣya, thus speaking of ‘the first book
of the Saṃhitopaniṣadbhāṣya, [which is part] of the Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇa46 [corre-
sponding to] the third āraṇyaka’ (bahvṛcabrāhmaṇe saṃhitopaniṣadbhāṣye
tṛtīyāraṇyake prathamo ’dhyāyaḥ – fol. 64v1). The final rubric of the work wrongly
numbers the second adhyāya ‘third,’ but is otherwise quite similar to the preced-
ing one, except that it calls the brāhmaṇa Aitareya°, not Bahvṛca° (the two terms
may be synonym in that context).47 To summarise, the first ‘edition’ of the text
(which, as we shall see, is little more than the printed copy of a North Indian
||
43 It is remarkable, still, that all consulted sources agree in attributing the work to ‘Śaṅkara Bha-
gava(n)t,’ the disciple of ‘Govinda Pūjyapāda.’ This, according to P. Hacker (1995, 41–56), is one of
the decisive criteria in favour of the authorship of a given work by Śaṅkara. For a more precise for-
mulation of Hacker’s criteria, leading to the same conclusion, see Harimoto (2014, 242–243).
44 The rubric that concludes the commentary on AiĀ 2.1 reads as follows: iti śrīgoviṃdabhaga-
vatpūjyapādaśiṣyaparamahaṃsaparivrājakācāryaśrīmacchaṃkarabhagavataḥ kṛtāv aitareyo-
paniṣadbhāṣye prathamo ’dhyāyaḥ (fol. 10v12–13). Similar rubrics are found with minor varia-
tions on fol. 14r7–11 (no mention of Govinda) and fol. 22v12 (abbreviated, no title given). The
rubric closing the fourth adhyāya gives a different title, Aitareyabhāṣya (without °upaniṣad°),
but does not break the continuity in the count of adhyāyas: ity aitareyabhāṣye dvitīyāraṇyake
caturtho ’dhyāyaḥ (fol. 42v8–10). The rubric following the fifth adhyāya (fol. 52v11–12) is identi-
cal in structure, but has the ‘full’ title Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya (instead of Aitareyabhāṣya).
45 The full rubric reads as follows: iti śrīmatparamahaṃsaparivrājakācāryaśrīgoviṃdabhaga-
vatpādapūjya[sic]śiṣyaśrīmacchaṃkarācāryabhagavataḥ kṛtau bavṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣad-
bhāṣyaṃ samāptam (fol. 57v7–10).
46 It is not impossible that the expressions Aitareyabrāhmaṇa and Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇa should be
understood as abbreviations of Aitareya°/Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇa-upaniṣad. The Saṃhitopaniṣad
would then be the last part of that Upaniṣad in the mind of the editor.
47 AiUBh–L (Ed1) fol. 70v14–15, iti śrīgoviṃdabhagavatpūjyapādaśiṣyaparamahaṃsa-
parivrājakācāryasya śrīmacchaṃkarabhagavataḥ kṛtāv aitareyabrāhmaṇe saṃhitopaniṣad-
bhāṣye tṛtīyo’dhyāyaḥ. samāptā ceyaṃ bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣat.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 741
manuscript) provides us with three titles – Aitareya[-upaniṣad]-bhāṣya, Bahvṛco-
paniṣadbhāṣya and Saṃhitopaniṣadbhāṣya – applied without consistency to
parts of the work and (with the exception of the last) also to the whole. Given this
confusing situation, it is quite understandable that Laxmanshastri Joshi, in the
1949 reprint of the editio princeps, felt the need to ‘normalise’ the rubrics by uni-
formly speaking of ‘the Bhāṣya on the second / third āraṇyaka of the Aitareya[-
āraṇyaka]’ (aitareya-dvitīya°/ tṛtīyāraṇyakabhāṣya), still numbering the
adhyāyas continuously from 1 to 6 (for AiĀ 2), then from 1 to 2 (for AiĀ 3). What is
clear, in any case, is that the first editor of the work, no doubt relying on manu-
script evidence, did not consider AiĀ 2.4–6 to be a separate work, distinct from
AiĀ 2.1–3. His main hesitation is whether the title Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣad-
bhāṣya, taken up from Śaṅkara’s introduction (see above), applies to the whole
work or only to the second āraṇyaka.
This globally corresponds to the information provided in manuscripts. The
older of the two Cambridge manuscripts, Add.2092, also numbers adhyāyas con-
tinuously from 1 to 6, without break with adhyāya 4, and marks the end of the
first five with the brief mention aitareyopaniṣadi prathamo [, dvitīyo…, pañcamo]
’dhyāyaḥ (fol. 16v5; fol. 21v5; fol. 34v6; fol. 43v8; fol. 48v5̄). AiĀ 2.6 has a more
elaborate rubric, which closely corresponds to that found in the Benares litho-
graph, especially because it also mentions the text under the title Bahvṛca-
brāhmaṇopaniṣadbhāṣya.48 Leaving aside the brief Śāntipāṭha, on which Śaṅkara
did not comment, the following adhyāyas clearly mark a rupture; the indication
at the end of the commentary on AiĀ 3.1 looks corrupt (aiṃtasyopaniṣadi [?]
prathamo ’dhyāyaḥ), but the commentary on AiĀ 3.2 ends with a rubric very sim-
ilar to that on AiĀ 2.6, where the work is named, however, Saṃhitopaniṣad-
vivaraṇa.49 Thus it seems that the author of the Cambridge manuscript, unlike
that of the Benares lithograph, considered that the text consisted of two partly
independent works called Bahvṛcopaniṣadbhāṣya (ad AiĀ 2.1–6) and Saṃhito-
paniṣadvivaraṇa (ad AiĀ 3.1–2), nevertheless integrated enough to form a single,
||
48 AiUBh–L (C) fol. 50v10 – fol. 51r1: śrīmadgoviṃdabhagavatpūjyapādaśiṣyaparamahaṃsa-
parivrājakācāryasya śaṃkarabhagavataḥ kṛtau bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣadbhāṣya[ṃ]
samāpta[m]. I emend the aberrant reading °bhāṣyataḥ samāptā of the manuscript.
49 See AiUBh–L (C) fol. 70r5–6: śrīgoviṃdabhagavatpūjyapādaśiṣyaparamahaṃsapari-
vrājakācāryasya śrīmacchaṃkarabhagavataḥ kṛtau saṃhitopaniṣadvivaraṇaṃ samāptaṃ |
742 | Hugo David
continuous gloss on AiĀ 2–3.50 If some manuscripts confirm this view,51 others
lead us to think that the title Bahvṛca[-brāhmaṇa-]upaniṣadbhāṣya/°vivaraṇa ra-
ther applies to the whole work, not a part of it, and come closer to the Benares
print.52
It seems to me that the main reason for such hesitations lies nowhere but in
Śaṅkara’s text itself. We have already seen that the title Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇo-
paniṣadvivaraṇa is given, following Śaṅkara’s well-established habit, in the in-
troduction to his ‘longer’ Bhāṣya. What is more surprising is to find the same kind
of typically Śaṅkaran introduction, including the mention of a different title and
the familiar etymological digression on the word upaniṣad, at the beginning of
his commentary on AiĀ 3.153:
athātaḥ saṃhitāyā upaniṣad ityādyā saṃhitopaniṣad | asyāḥa saṃkṣepato vivaraṇaṃ kari-
ṣyāmo mandamadhyamabuddhīnām api tadarthābhivyaktiḥ syādb iti | [...] upanipūrvasya
sader viśaraṇagatyavasādanārthasya kvibantasya rūpam upaniṣad iti | upaniṣadvijñānaṃ
cedaṃ tātparyeṇa | upaniṣannā ye, teṣāṃ vākkāyamanobhir buddherc anarthapratipattihe-
tubhūtāyā viśaraṇād upaniṣat | vakṣyamāṇaphalaprāpayitṛtvāc copaniṣat |
saṃsārabījāvidyāvasādanāc copaniṣat |
a
asyāḥ C CM Ed1: tasyāḥ Ed2
b
°abhivyaktiḥ syād Ed1 Ed2: °abhivyakti syād (!) C CM
c
°manobhir buddher C Ed1 Ed2: °manobuddher CM
With the words athātaḥ saṃhitāyā upaniṣad (‘Now begins the Upaniṣad of the saṃhitā’)
begins the Saṃhitopaniṣad. We [now undertake] to compose a gloss (vivaraṇa) of it, in a
||
50 Since all these titles are likely to be directly extracted from the text of Śaṅkara itself (see
below), I do not think much weight should be given to the variations between the titles bhāṣya,
vivaraṇa (the word used in both cases by Śaṅkara), and ṭīkā.
51 The colophons of the London manuscript described by Winternitz (Asiatic Society No. 158 [p.
216–217]) also distinguish between a Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣaṭṭīkā (ad AiĀ 2.1–6) and a Saṃhito-
paniṣadvivaraṇa (ad AiĀ 3).
52 This is what we find, for instance in the GOML manuscript described in MD 1.3 under No. 331
(pp. 315–317). From its description in the catalogue, it appears that the manuscript numbers
adhyāyas continuously and names the work Aitareyopaniṣadvivaraṇa in the rubrics (examples
are given for adhyāyas 3 and 4), except for the final rubric of adhyāya 6, where it is named Bah-
vṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣadbhāṣya; this last rubric is almost identical to that of the Cambridge manu-
script (see above, n. 48), with mention of Govinda and ‘Śaṃkarabhagava(n)t’, but a slightly dif-
ferent conclusive formula (bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣadbhāṣye dvitīyāraṇyakaṃ samāptam – p. 317),
which leaves the possibility that āraṇyaka 2 could be a part of the Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇo-
paniṣadbhāṣya, not the whole of it.
53 The passage is found on fol. 59r1–7 in Ed1, on p. 597 in Ed2, on fol. 51v9 – 52r6 in C and on fol. 111v8
– 112v5 in CM.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 743
concise way (saṃkṣepataḥ), so that its meaning becomes fully manifest even to people with
a weak or average understanding. [...] [The word] upaniṣad is a form of the root √sad, which
has the sense of either dissolution (viśaraṇa), motion/intellection (gati) or perishing (ava-
sādana), preceded by [the preverbs] upa and ni and followed by [the zero kṛt-affix] kvip. But
essentially (tātparyeṇa), it is the knowledge [consisting in] upaniṣad. Considering those
who have come near (upaniṣanna) [that knowledge], their soul (buddhi), which is the cause
for apprehending what is unwished, together with their speech, body and mind, is subject
to dissolution (viśaraṇa), so [for them there is] upaniṣad. [That knowledge] is also upaniṣad
because it leads (prāpay-) to the [expected] result we are about to explain. Finally, it is
upaniṣad because nescience, which is the seed of saṃsāra, is annihilated (avasādana).
In view of this, there is indeed ground for hesitating whether to regard the Bah-
vṛca[-brāhmaṇa-]° and Saṃhitopaniṣad (and the corresponding vivaraṇas) as dis-
tinct texts, or the latter as just a sub-section of the former. I find it significant,
though, that such a problem does not arise for the Bhāṣya on AiĀ 2.4–6 (the ‘vul-
gate’ Upaniṣad), which our sources unanimously consider to be part of the larger
commentary on AiĀ 2.
Now, there is no doubt some logic in considering that the ‘shorter’ version is
the only one authentic. Śaṅkara’s statement that a given Upaniṣad begins only
after the investigation of rites (karman) and inferior Brahman (aparabrahma) has
been completed (parisamāpta), quoted in the beginning of this section, inevita-
bly recalls the opening portion of other Upaniṣadic commentaries by the great
Advaitin, beginning with that on the Chāndogya°, where we find the same sen-
tence almost word for word.54 One could also argue that the portions of AiĀ 2–3
which are generally not considered part of the AiU found their way into Śaṅkara’s
Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, but in very limited proportions.55 This is surprising if the AiU
is to be included in the group of older, major Upaniṣads, which are otherwise
quoted by Śaṅkara at every page. A further argument is that no sub-commentary
has so far been discovered on the ‘longer’ version of the Bhāṣya,56 and that
||
54 Chāndogyopaniṣadbhāṣya (introduction): samastaṃ karmādhigataṃ prāṇādidevatāvijñāna-
sahitam; ‘The rite (karman) has been entirely dealt with, together with the knowledge of deities
such as the breath (prāṇa), etc.’ (p. 2).
55 The fairly exhaustive index of quotes found at the end of Anantakrishna Shastri and Vasudev
Laxman Shastri Pansikar’s edition of Śaṅkara’s Brahmasūtrabhāṣya (p. 1035–1061 in the 2000
reprint) records only five quotes of AiĀ 2.1–3 and AiĀ 3: AiĀ 2.1.2 (two quotes), 2.1.3, 2.3.3 and
3.2.3. Adding quotes from the Upaniṣad ‘proper’ (AiĀ 2.4–6/7), we reach a total of about twenty
quotations. This is certainly not negligible, but still without any comparison with, for instance, the
hundreds of quotes from the ChU and BĀU found in Śaṅkara’s opus magnum.
56 In their 1905 catalogue of the Bodleian manuscripts (Bodleian No. 1011.3 – p. 77), Keith & Win-
ternitz mention a potentially significant manuscript (Wilson collection No. 401.3), which they de-
744 | Hugo David
Ānandagiri’s standard gloss, as we find it in many printed editions (including the
Benares 1884 lithograph) only extends to adhyāyas 4–6.57 Similarly, one cannot
overlook the fact that the manuscript tradition of AiUBh–S is absolutely over-
whelming.58
Thus, although I remain convinced by the evidence presented above that the
‘longer’ version is the only one representing the complete work of Śaṅkara, I also
think it would be misleading to interpret the spread of AiUBh-S only in terms of
an editorial ‘error’ or of a mistaken reading habit. It may rather be the case that
both versions of the text were transmitted simultaneously, possibly for different
purposes and audiences, and not unlikely in a community of readers who were
conscious of their coexistence.59 The task of a critical edition of the ‘longer’ Aitar-
eyopaniṣadbhāṣya will of course be, first of all, to recover an almost forgotten
||
scribe as ‘Viśveśvaratīrtha’s commentary on Ānandatīrtha’s commentary on Śaṅkara’s commen-
tary on the second and third āraṇyakas of the Aitareyāraṇyaka.’ Although I have not seen the man-
uscript, this identification seems clearly erroneous to me, and in any event is directly contradicted
by the authors’ subsequent affirmation that ‘this Ms. contains from the first adhyāya of the second
praghaṭṭaka to the second adhyāya of the third praghaṭṭaka of Ānandatīrtha’s Mahaitareyopaniṣad-
bhāṣya.’ Though the name ‘Ānandatīrtha’ is sometimes used to refer to Ānandagiri, it certainly re-
fers here to Madhva, an assumption confirmed by the use of the word praghaṭṭaka, which is not
common in the Advaita tradition. The same confusion is made again by Keith in his 1909 book,
where he maintains that the commentator on Śaṅkara and the dualist Vaiṣṇava thinker both known
by the name ‘Ānandatīrtha’ are one and the same person (Keith 1909, 11–12). On this confusion, see
inter alia the remarks by B.N.K. Sharma (2000, 168–169, n. 3). To go back to the Bodleian manu-
script, the colophon quoted in the catalogue speaks of a commentary (vivaraṇa) on ‘the Bhāṣya [...]
composed by the Revered Master Ānandatīrtha Bhagavatpāda’ (śrīmadānaṃdatīrthabhagavat-
pādācāryaviracita[…]bhāṣya), which excludes any relation to Śaṅkara. The authors of the cata-
logue might have been misled by the fact that the same bundle contains commentaries by Śaṅkara
on two other ancient Upaniṣads (Kena° and Chāndogya°).
57 It is nevertheless remarkable (though, of course, not necessarily significant) that Ānanda-
giri’s gloss on Śaṅkara’s AiUBh–S starts without a maṅgala-verse. The only similar case I know
of among Ānandagiri’s Śaṅkaran commentaries is his gloss on Śaṅkara’s Praśnopaniṣadbhāṣya,
which directly starts with a prose explanation. All his other sub-commentaries start with a
maṅgala: that on BĀU has four verses, those on ChU and MāU two verses, while those on ĪśāU,
KeU, KāU, MuU and TaiU have only one auspicious verse.
58 If we rely on catalogues and what has been discovered so far, the ratio between manuscripts
transmitting the ‘longer’ and ‘shorter’ versions of AiUBh is approximately from one to ten.
59 We may imagine, for instance, that a commentary on the Ātmaṣaṭka alone would better serve
the needs of a popular or ‘ecumenical’ diffusion of Advaita doctrines, while a more extensive com-
mentary on the Āraṇyaka would be more suited for scholars specifically devoted to the study of the
Vedas, or specialized in the recitation and interpretation of the Ṛgveda.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 745
piece of early medieval exegesis, but also better to understand the historical vi-
cissitudes that lie behind this remarkable divergence in the way the Śaṅkaran
Advaita tradition dealt with the Aitareya-corpus.
3 A preliminary survey of available editions and
manuscripts
Previous scholarship on AiUBh–L, which generally ignores the existence of two
editions of the text,60 knows mainly of two manuscripts of the work, for which I will
use the sigla O (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mill Collection No. 120) and L (London,
Whish Collection No. 164̄).61 Manuscript O, a paper Devanāgarī manuscript (40
fols), undated but maybe produced in the 18th century, is briefly described by Keith
& Winternitz (Bodleian No. 1014.1 – p. 79);62 it contains Śaṅkara’s Bhāṣya on AiĀ
2.1–3 and a fragment of his commentary on AiĀ 2.4; according to the authors of the
catalogue, it is ‘inaccurate and carelessly written.’ Manuscript L is described in
more detail by Winternitz (Asiatic Society No. 158 – pp. 216–217);63 it is in Malayalam
script (150 fols), possibly copied in the 17th century, and contains the whole of
Śaṅkara’s commentary on AiĀ 2–3 with the exception of the beginning of 2.1 (2 fo-
lios are missing at the start of the bundle). This is the manuscript examined in 1930
by S.K. Belvalkar, who reproduces a limited number of passages and adds a few
elements of description (pp. 244–245). This document was already ‘in very bad con-
dition’ (Winternitz), ‘much damaged’ (Keith) or at least ‘somewhat damaged’ (Bel-
valkar) in the beginning of the last century. To this we must add one more recent
Devanāgarī copy (69 fols) kept in Berlin (= B), unknown to Keith but pointed out by
Belvalkar (1930, 246) following its brief description by A. Weber (Verzeichniss No.
90 – p. 21). According to the latter’s record, it contains a complete commentary by
Śaṅkara on AiĀ 2–3, but this information is judged ‘doubtful’ by Belvalkar (1930,
246), who therefore considers that ‘there is extant only one complete manuscript of
[the] commentary by Śaṅkarācārya on Aitareya Āraṇyaka II and III,’ namely L.
||
60 The only exceptions I know of are the brief reference to the Dharmakośa-reprint by S. Subrah-
maṇya Shastri (discussed above, Section 1), and of course, Laxmanshastri Joshi’s work itself, alone
in acknowledging the existence of the 1884 Benares lithograph.
61 I have not been able to consult directly these two manuscripts so far, nor the Berlin copy men-
tioned below. This paragraph is thus entirely based on catalogues and secondary literature.
62 It is also mentioned by Keith (1909, 5) and Belvalkar (1930, 245), who do not add any particular
information.
63 See also Keith 1909, 8.
746 | Hugo David
In addition to these three manuscripts, we now have at our disposal a fairly
considerable number of other sources, including two editions of the text (Ed1 and
Ed2) – the second a mere reprint of the first – and five newly identified manuscripts,
here labelled C (Cambridge, UL Add. 2092), CM (Cambridge, UL Or. 2400), M (Chen-
nai, GOML D 331 / SD 183),64 T (Trivandrum, ORIML No. 6312) and V (Thrissur, Va-
dakke Madham Brahmaswam, uncatalogued). Adding these documents to those
discussed by our predecessors, available sources can be roughly divided into two
groups: a ‘Northern’ group possibly centred on Benares, including paper De-
vanāgarī manuscripts, the 1884 lithograph and its reprint (Ed1, Ed2, C, possibly O
and B), and a ‘Southern’ group composed exclusively of palm-leaf manuscripts
written in various South Indian scripts (L, CM, M, T and V).
The first edition of the text (Ed1) is in itself a remarkable document, that some-
what blurs the frontier between ‘manuscript’ and ‘printed edition.’ The only reason
why I use the latter term is because the lithography-technique by which it was pro-
duced (named śilākṣara, ‘stone-letters’ in the colophon) allows (in theory, at least)
the existence of several rigorously identical copies, even though in the present case
only one could be located.65 The presentation of the book is otherwise exactly sim-
ilar to that of a Northern paper pothi, with initial invocation (śrī gaṇeśāya namaḥ –
fol. 1r, l. 1), rubrics and a colophon in Sanskrit and Hindī. It is in scriptio continua
with the root-text (mūlagrantha) in the middle of the page, surrounded by Śaṅkara’s
commentary artificially divided into two halves. For the section of the work repro-
ducing also Ānandagiri’s sub-commentary, the page is sometimes divided into five
parts, with the root-text (mūlagrantha) in the centre, encircled by the commentary
and sub-commentary, each split into two halves written in letters of decreasing
size.66 The book is arranged in 70 folios written on both sides, continuously num-
bered on the verso (1–70). The recto of the first folio bears the ‘title’ atha pūrvottarā-
ruṇabhāṣyasahitaṃ saṭīkaṃ aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣyaṃ prārabhyate. Sections
(khaṇḍa) within each adhyāya are numbered in the mūla-part and marked in the
gloss by a brief rubric (iti prathamaḥ khaṇḍaḥ, etc.). Rubrics are found at the end of
each adhyāya both in the mūla and the Bhāṣya (see above, Section 1). The book is
||
64 This manuscript had already been described in vol. 1.3 of the Descriptive Catalogue published
by the GOML in 1905 (MD 1.3), but this description has apparently remained unnoticed.
65 See above n. 7.
66 The text of Ānandagiri’s gloss starts on fol. 22v12. It is graphically undistinguishable from the
preceding Bhāṣya, and immediately follows the final rubric of the third adhyāya (iti śrīmac-
chaṃkarabhagavatpādakṛt[au] […] tṛtīyo ’dhyāyaḥ). The text of the Bhāṣya continues in the cen-
tre of the same page (l. 8) with the initial rubric athaitareyaṣaṭkabhāṣyaprārambhaḥ, ‘Here be-
gins the Bhāṣya on the Aitareya-hexade.’ The ‘five-fold’ layout is found on fols 31r–58v.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 747
concluded by an elaborate colophon, including the following Sanskrit stanza (fol.
70v16):
vārāṇasīprasādasya niyogena tu yatnataḥ |
kāśīsaṃskṛtamudrāyām aṃkito ’yaṃ śilākṣaraiḥ ||
This [text] was printed with care on the order of Vārāṇasī Prasād(a), using lithography, in the
Kāśī Sanskrit Press.
The Hindī colophon that follows (l. 16–17) confirms the name of the person who
ordered the copy, Vārāṇasī Prasād(a), and also indicates the place where the book
can be bought, the shop of a certain Pratāp Singh (pratāpasiṃha jī ke dukān) situ-
ated in Caurī Galī in Kāśī (= Benares); it gives the date of printing as 1941 Vikrama
(= 1884 CE). The second edition of the Bhāṣya (Ed2), as part as of vol. 2.2 of Lax-
manshastri Joshi’s Dharmakośa (Upaniṣatkāṇḍa), merely reproduces the text of the
first in a more ‘edited’ form, and does not constitute an independent source. It is
mostly aimed at making the text accessible to a wide audience of scholars, ‘as it has
become difficult to access in manuscript or print’ (asya durlabhatvāl likhitasya
mudritasya vā).67 In accordance with the encyclopaedic mind that pervades the en-
terprise of the Dharmakośa, Śaṅkara’s text is printed there along with Madhva’s
commentary, a welcome initiative that greatly facilitates comparison between the
two major Bhāṣyas on the ‘longer’ Upaniṣad.
The first Cambridge manuscript (C) is also quite exceptional. Probably pro-
duced in a Jain scriptorium, it is dated 1650 Vikrama (= 1593–94 CE), which makes
it presumably the oldest surviving manuscript of the text, and no doubt one of the
most valuable. Being a manuscript of Śaṅkara’s text alone, which it transmits in its
entirety, it does not present the same confusion in rubrics and layout as Ed1. Thus,
although both documents were produced in Benares, and even though chronology
allows it,68 I find it unlikely that this manuscript served as the basis for the editio
princeps. It is in excellent state of conservation, and the text is copied in a clear
writing with relatively few scribal errors. A detailed description of the manuscript
is now available online, which I will not reproduce here.69
If we now turn to our second group of sources, we see that they testify to a large
diffusion of the text in the far South in the last centuries, spanning from the
Śaṅkaran institutions of central Kerala to Andhra Pradesh, through Tamil-speaking
||
67 Laxmanshastri Joshi’s note on p. 525 of his edition.
68 The manuscript was bought in Benares by Cecil Bendall for the Cambridge University Library
in 1885, thus possibly the year after Ed1 was produced in the same city.
69 See above n. 13.
748 | Hugo David
regions where Grantha script is used. The GOML Manuscript (M) has been de-
scribed in some detail in MD 1.3 under No. 331 (pp. 315–317); it is written on palm
leaf in Telugu script (58 fols), and contains Śaṅkara’s complete commentary on AiĀ
2.70 It starts directly with the beginning of the ‘longer’ Bhāṣya, only preceded by a
brief invocation (oṃ). For the seventh adhyāya, which has not been commented on
by Śaṅkara, the later commentary by Sāyaṇa has been tacitly introduced, following
what seems to be a well-spread practice.71 The manuscript is complete, ending with
what appears to be a date, which I have unfortunately been unable to decipher so
far. In any case, it bears no sign that it ever contained a commentary on the third
āraṇyaka.72 The Cambridge palm-leaf manuscript of AiUBh–L (CM), on the other
hand, transmits Śaṅkara’s full commentary on AiĀ 2–3. Written on palm leaf in
Malayalam script (150 fols), it is the work of a man named Govinda, otherwise un-
known, and appears to have been copied in the 19th or early 20th century. A detailed
description of the manuscript has been made by Elisa Ganser and myself, which is
now available online.73 The last two manuscripts (T and V) have been identified
only recently, and deserve a few more words.
Manuscript T is listed under No. 2912 in the first volume (A–Na) of the Trivan-
drum Alphabetical Index (p. 115), under the title Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣyam by
Śaṅkarācārya. The information provided by the catalogue, however, does not allow
to differentiate it from a group of three manuscripts of AiUBh–S listed just above
(Nos 2909–2911), and to identify it as a copy of the ‘longer’ Bhāṣya; in particular,
the given extent of the bundle (550 granthas) is clearly erroneous, and was probably
copied from the preceding line. The identification of the manuscript was only pos-
sible through the inspection of the whole group of Bhāṣyas, a time-consuming pro-
cedure, but likely to bear fruit in other Indian libraries as well. The manuscript is
on palm leaf, written in Grantha script (53 fols recently numbered on each page
from 1 to 106; the original numeration is not readable on my copy of the manu-
script), and transmits the complete text of Śaṅkara’s commentary on AiĀ 2–3. The
text of the ‘longer’ Bhāṣya begins directly on the top of the first folio, after a brief
auspicious invocation (oṃ śrīgaṇeśāya namaḥ), and ends on p. 106 with the usual
||
70 The indication, found in the catalogue, that the manuscript contains 115 pages applies to the
whole bundle, which also contains other Vedāntic texts. The leaves in that bundle have been
numbered in modern times using Arabic numerals from 1 to 114 (no number on the last folio).
Following this numeration, AiUBh–L starts on the top of fol. 55r and ends on the bottom of fol.
112r (the verso is blank). The folios containing Śaṅkara’s text are numbered from 1 to 58, using
Telugu numerals.
71 The Benares lithograph, for instance, also introduces Sāyaṇa’s commentary at that point.
72 I thank S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma for his assistance while examining this manuscript.
73 See above n. 14.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 749
rubric marking the end of the ‘Saṃhitopaniṣadvivaraṇa’.74 The bundle is still in rel-
atively good shape, but many folios are damaged or worm-eaten, a situation that
calls for urgent measures of conservation.75
Manuscript V, on the contrary, is in a perfect state of preservation, and also has
the complete ‘longer’ commentary by Śaṅkara. It is kept in the library of the main
hall (locally known as the ‘Auditorium’) of the Vadakke Madham Brahmaswam in
Thrissur (Central Kerala), where it was kindly made available to me for consultation
and photograph in July, 2016. The Vadakke (‘Northern’) Madham is a well-known
Keralan institution devoted to the teaching of the Vedas, and is also one of the three
remaining ‘monasteries’ (Sk. maṭha, Mal. Madham) of the Thrissur Śaṅkaran tradi-
tion, together with the neighbouring Thekke and Naḍuvil Madhams. Its library
gathers manuscripts that once belonged to all four Thrissur Madhams, and may
contain today around 800 bundles of palm leaves.76 The library does not have a
proper ‘catalogue’ so far, but several hand-lists have been produced in the last cen-
tury (some of them have been used in the compilation of the NCC), and a new list
has recently been started by students of the University of Kalady.77 The copy of
Śaṅkara’s ‘longer’ Bhāṣya could be identified with the help of this list, where it is
found under No. 119 under the title ‘Balavṛca Brāhmaṇopaniṣadvivaraṇam’ by
‘Śaṅkaran’. The manuscript is on palm leaf, in Malayalam script (166 fols, preceded
by a blank folio and followed by a stray leaf), and was probably copied in the 19th
or early 20th century. In that, and in many other aspects, it is very similar to CM, the
Keralan manuscript of AiUBh–L kept in Cambridge. A few pages are left blank (fols
79v, 148v, 152v, as well as the verso of fols 159–161), but this does not correspond to
divisions in the text itself, and may rather reflect peculiarities of the manuscript
from which V was copied. The text starts directly on the top of fol. 1r, after a brief
invocation (hariḥ, śrīgaṇapataye namaḥ, mahāgaṇapataye namaḥ, oṃ), and ends
||
74 See fol. 53v2–3 : iti śrīgovindabhagavatpūjyapādaśiṣyasya paramahaṃsaparivrāja-
kācāryasya śrīśaṅkarabhagavataḥ kṛtau saṃhitopaniṣadvivaraṇaṃ samāptam.
75 During my visit to Trivandrum in July, 2016, I was allowed to see the manuscript, but not to
take photographs. The present description is therefore based on my notes, as well as on the black
and white photocopies provided by the library in the following weeks. Unfortunately, only a few
folios of the bundle are actually legible with the help of these photocopies. I hope the authorities
of the ORIML will allow the EFEO to take digital pictures of the document in the near future, as
this would allow both a better conservation of the material (avoiding further damage by opera-
tions of photocopying) and a greater accessibility to scholars.
76 The manuscripts are currently piled up in two large cupboards, which are literally packed
with bundles, so that it is extremely difficult to estimate their exact number.
77 I thank Mr Murali Krishnan, one of the compilers of the new list, as well as the authorities of
the Brahmaswam Madham, for granting me access to two versions of the list, as well as to other
important documents related to this collection.
750 | Hugo David
on the recto of fol. 166 with the final rubric concluding the commentary (vivaraṇa)
on the Saṃhitopaniṣad, followed by a brief homage to the gurus.78
The results of this preliminary survey are summarised in the following chart,
which lists, for the various sources, adhyāyas which are transmitted (yellow), in-
completely transmitted (light grey) or not transmitted (dark grey); the thick line dif-
ferentiates sources that were known to Keith and Belvalkar (upper half) from those
that were discovered more recently (lower half):
2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.2
‘Vulgate’ edi-
tions of AiUBh
O
L
B
Ed1
Ed2
C
CM
M
T
V
In view of this, it is clear that Belvalkar’s statement that ‘a satisfactory edition of
the work cannot be issued unless more manuscript material becomes available’
(1930, 246) does not really hold anymore. It is thus high time for researchers and
scholars of Vedānta to make this valuable work accessible again to its readers in
an edition worth the name, and to investigate what seems to have been an unex-
pected turn of events in the history of the non-dualistic tradition of commentary
on the Aitareyopaniṣad.79
||
78 See fol. 166r5–6: iti śrīgovindabhagavatpūjyapādaśiṣyasya paramahaṃsaparivrājakācārya-
śaṃkarabhagavataḥ kṛtau saṃhitopaniṣadvivaraṇaṃ samāptam, hariḥ, śrīgurubhyo namaḥ.
79 This article was already in proof stage when I came to know of one more edition of Śaṅkara’s
commentary on AiĀ 2.1-3, published in 2008 by the Adhyatma Prakasha Karyalaya in Holenara-
sipur (ed. M.R. Keśavaḥ Avadhānī - I thank S.L.P. Anjaneya Sarma and Pt. Mani Dravid for draw-
ing my attention to that edition). The book is in two parts, the first one comprising the text of
AiUBh-L up to 2.3, the second reproducing the text of AiUBh-S as it is found in the Ānandāśrama
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 751
4 Table of sigla
4.1 Manuscripts of AiUBh–L
B = Berlin, No. 90 in Weber’s Verzeichniss.
C = Cambridge, UL No. Add. 2092.
CM = Cambridge, UL No. Or. 2400.
L = London, Whish Collection No. 164.
M = Madras (Chennai), GOML No. D–331 /SD 183.
O = Oxford, Bodleian Library, Mill Collection No. 120.
T = Trivandrum, ORIML No. 6312.
V = Manuscript of AiUBh–L kept in the Vadakke Madham Brahmaswam, Thrissur.
4.2 Other sigla
AiĀ = Aitareyāraṇyaka
AiU = Aitareyopaniṣad
AiUBh = Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya (Śaṅkara)
AiUBh–L = ‘longer’ version of the Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya
AiUBh–S = ‘shorter’ version of the Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya
BĀU = Bṛhadāraṇyokopaniṣad
ChUBh = Chāndogyopaniṣadbhāṣya (Śaṅkara)
ChU = Chāndogyopaniṣad
UL = Cambridge University Library
GOML = Government Oriental Manuscripts Library (Chennai)
ĪśāU = Īśāvāsyopaniṣad
KeU = Kenopaniṣad
KāU = Kāṭhakopaniṣad
MāU = Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad
MuU = Muṇḍakopaniṣad
ORIML = Oriental Research Institute and Manuscripts Library (Trivandrum)
PraU = Praśnopaniṣad
TaiU = Taittirīyopaniṣad
||
edition, with emendations and notes. The manuscript used as a basis for the first part is descri-
bed in the English introduction in very generic terms as ‘a hand written manuscript titled “Sri
Shankaracharya Krita Bhashyam,” comprising a Bhashya on all the six chapters’ (p. iii). More
research will be needed to determine if this manuscript corresponds or not to any of those de-
scribed in this section. In any case, the editor does not show any awareness of further manu-
scripts or earlier editions of Śaṅkara's commentary on AiĀ 2.1-3, nor does he seem to know the
existence of his commentary on AiĀ 3.
752 | Hugo David
References
Primary sources
Main editions of the ‘shorter’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya
The Taittirīya and Aitareya Upanishads with the Commentary of Śaṅkara Āchārya, and the gloss
of Ānanda Giri, and the Swetāswatara Upanishad with the Commentary of Śaṅkara
Āchārya, E. Röer (ed.), Calcutta, Baptist Mission Press, 1850 (Bibliotheca Indica 6).
Aitareyopaniṣat saṭīkaśāṅkarabhāṣyopetā tathā ca vidyāraṇyakṛtā aitareyopaniṣaddīpikā,
edited by the Ānandāśrama paṇḍits, Pune (Puṇyapattana), Ānandāśramamudraṇālaya,
1889 (Ānandāśramasaṃskṛtagranthāvaliḥ 11).
Editions of the ‘longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya
Ed1 = [The long Aitareya Upaniṣad, or adhyāyas 2 and 3 of the Aitareya Āraṇyaka, also called
Bahvṛca or Mahaitareya Upaniṣad. With the commentaries of Śaṁkara Ācārya and
Ānandagiri. Edited by Babu Vārāṇasī Prasāda. Benares, 1884]. Copy kept in the Harvard
University Library – Widener Library (Ind L 3117.56 F).80
Ed2 = Dharmakośa – Upaniṣaṭkāṇḍa vol. II, Part II, ed. Laxmanshastri Joshi, Wai (Satara),
Prājña Pāṭhaśālā Maṇḍala, 1949 (the text of the Bhāṣya is found on pp. 525–626).
Other Sanskrit sources
Aṣṭādaśopaniṣadaḥ (‘Eighteen Principal Upaniṣads’), vol. 1, V.P. Limaye & R.D. Vadekar (eds),
Poona, Vaidika Saṃśodhana Maṇḍala, 1958 (Gandhi Memorial Edition).
Upaniṣadbhāṣyam, 3 vol., ed. S. Subrahmaṇya Shastri, Benares (Varanasi) / Mount Abu,
Mahesh Research Institute (Advaita Grantha Ratna Manjusha 21, 24 & 28), 19821 (vol. 2),
19861 (vol. 3), 20042 (vol. 1; revised by Mani Dravid).
Vol. 1: Bhāṣyas on ĪśāU, KeU, KāU, MuU, PraU, MāU, TaiU and AiU.
Vol. 2: Bhāṣya on ChU.
Vol. 3: Bhāṣya on BĀU.
Aitareyāraṇyaka (with Sāyaṇa’s commentary) = Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇāntargataṃ Aitareyā-
raṇyakam śrīmatsāyaṇācāryaviracitabhāṣyasametam, 2nd edition (without editor’s name),
Pune, Ānandāśrama, 1992 (Ānandāśramasaṃskṛtagranthāvaliḥ 38).
Aitareyopaniṣat with four commentaries (critical edition), M.A.S. Rajan & M.A. Lakshmi-
tatacharyar (eds), Melkote, Academy of Sanskrit Research, 1997 (Academy of Sanskrit
Research Series 33).
||
80 As the edition does not have a title page, I reproduce here, for easy reference, the information
found in the Harvard library catalogue.
Towards a Critical Edition of Śaṅkara’s ‘Longer’ Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya | 753
Taittirīya-Aitareya-Chāndogyopaniṣadbhāṣyam Śrīraṅgarāmānujamuniviracitam (no editor’s
name), Madras, 19732 (first edition: Tirupati, 1951).
Daśopaniṣad-s, with the Commentary of Śrī Upaniṣadbrahmayogin, Part 1 (Īśā to Aitareya),
edited by the paṇḍits of the Adyar Library under the supervision of C. Kunhan Raja,
revised by A. A. Ramanathan, Madras, 19842 (first, unrevised edition: Madras, 1935).
Brahmasūtrabhāṣya = Brahmasūtraśāṅkarabhāṣyam, Anantakrishna Shastri & Vasudeva
Laxman Shastri Pansikar (eds), Benares (Varanasi), Krishnadas Academy, 2000
(Krishnadas Sanskrit Series 25).
Secondary sources
Belvalkar, S.K. (1930), ‘An authentic but unpublished work of Śaṅkarācārya’, in Journal of the
Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (New Series), 6: 241–246.
Böhtlingk, Otto (1998), Pāṇini’s Grammatik. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass (Indian reprint; first
edition: Leipzig, 1887).
Cohen, Signe (2008), Text and Authority in the Older Upaniṣads (Brill’s Indological Library 30),
Leiden–Boston: Brill.
Hacker, Paul (1995), ‘Śaṅkarācārya and Śaṅkarabhagavatpāda: Preliminary Remarks
concerning the Authorship Problem’, in W. Halbfass (ed.), Philology and Confrontation.
Paul Hacker on Traditional and Modern Vedānta, Albany: State University of New York
Press, 41–56.
Harimoto, Kengo (2014), God, Reason, and Yoga. A Critical Edition and Translation of the Com-
mentary Ascribed to Śaṅkara on Pātañjalayogaśāstra 1.23–28 (Indian and Tibetan Studies 1),
Hamburg: Department of Indian and Tibetan Studies, Universität Hamburg.
Keith, Arthur Berriedale (1909), The Aitareya Āraṇyaka, edited from the Manuscripts in the In-
dia Office and the Library of the Royal Asiatic Society with Introduction, Translation, Notes,
Indexes and an Appendix containing the portion hitherto unpublished of the Śāṅkhāyana
Āraṇyaka, Oxford, Clarendon Press (reprint: Delhi, Eastern Book Linkers, 2005).
Mayeda, Sengaku (1968), ‘On Śaṅkara’s authorship of the Kenopaniṣadbhāṣya’, in Indo-
Iranian Journal, 10.1: 33–55.
Müller, Friedrich Max (1859), A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature so far as it illustrates the
Primitive Religion of the Brahmans, London: Williams & Norgate.
Müller, Friedrich Max (1879), ‘Introduction to the Upanishads’; pp. lvii–ci in The Upanishads,
(Sacred Books of the East 1), Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Narayanacharya, K.S. (1997), ‘Introduction’; pp. i–xx in Aitareyopaniṣat with four
commentaries (see under that title).
Rapson, Edward J. (1910), Review of Keith 1909, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great
Britain and Ireland (July 1910): 892–899.
Renou, Louis (1947), Les écoles védiques et la formation du Veda (Cahiers de la Société
Asiatique 9), Paris: Imprimerie Nationale.
Schneider, Ulrich (1963), ‘Die Komposition der Aitareya-Upaniṣad’; in Indo-Iranian Journal, 7:
58–69.
Sharma, B.N.K. (2000), History of the Dvaita School of Vedānta and its Literature, from the
earliest beginnings to our times, Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass (3rd revised edition; 1st
edition: Bombay, 1961).
754 | Hugo David
Catalogues of manuscripts
Alphabetical Index (Trivandrum) = Alphabetical Index of the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the
University Manuscripts Library, Trivandrum, vol. 1 (A to NA), edited and published by
Suranad Kunjan Pillai, Trivandrum, The Alliance Printing Works, 1957.
Keith & Winternitz, Bodleian = Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library
– vol. II, begun by Moriz Winternitz, continued and completed by Arthur Berriedale Keith,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1905.
MD 1.3 = A Descriptive Catalogue of the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Oriental
Manuscripts Library, Madras by M. Seshagiri Sastri and M. Rangacharya, vol. 1 (Vedic
Literature), part 3. Madras, Government Press, 1905.
NCC 3 = New Catalogus Catalogorum. An Alphabetical Register of Sanskrit and Allied Works
and Authors. Volume three. V. Raghavan and K. Kunjunni Raja (eds). Madras, University of
Madras, 1967 (Madras University Sanskrit Series 28).
Weber, Verzeichniss = Verzeichniss der Sanskrit-Handschriften, von Albrecht Friedrich Weber,
Berlin, Verlag der Nicolai’schen Buchhandlung, 1853 (Die Handschriften-Verzeichnisse
der Königlichen Bibliothek 1).
Winternitz, Asiatic Society = A Catalogue of South Indian Sanskrit Manuscripts (especially
those of the Whish Collection) belonging to the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and
Ireland, compiled by M. Winternitz with an appendix by F.W. Thomas, London, The Royal
Asiatic Society, 1902.
List of Contributors
Nalini Balbir is professor in Indology at University of Paris-3 Sorbonne Nouvelle and at Ecole Pra-
tique des Hautes Etudes (Section Sciences historiques et philologiques), where she teaches
Sanskrit and Middle-Indian languages. She is a member of the research unit UMR 7528 Mondes
iranien et indien (CNRS – Paris-3 – EPHE – INALCO). Her fields of research are primarily Jainism,
Theravada Buddhism, as well as Pali and Prakrit languages and literature. In recent years she has
been engaged in cataloguing Jain manuscripts in various European countries, which has led her
to focus on the modes of interrelations between Europeans and Jains in the search for manu-
scripts from Western India at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.
Giovanni Ciotti is research assistant at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (University
of Hamburg). His main area of interest are: Phonological aspects of Sanskrit and Tamil grammati-
cal traditions and their reception in the West; Late Tamil Manipravalam; Tamil and Grantha codi-
cology; Manuscript studies.
Michela Clemente is an affiliated researcher at Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit and a mem-
ber of Clare Hall, University of Cambridge. She worked as collaborator at the Tucci Tibetan Collec-
tion of the IsIAO Library (Rome) between 1998 and 2011. In 2009 she obtained her PhD at “La Sa-
pienza” University of Rome. In 2010 she started collaborating with the University of Cambridge in
the AHRC project Transforming Technologies and Buddhist Book Culture. In 2013 she was
awarded the Marie Skłodowska Curie Fellowship for a project entitled Tibetan Book Evolution and
Technology (TiBET). She was one of the curators of the Exhibition Buddha’s Word: The Life of
Books in Tibet and Beyond (Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, May 2014–
January 2015). Her main areas of research are Tibetan printing history and Tibetan book culture.
Daniele Cuneo is currently maître de conférences in ‘Sanskrit et civilisation indienne’ at the Uni-
versity of Paris 3 – Sorbonne nouvelle. After obtaining his Ph.D. from the University of Rome ‘La
Sapienza’ under the supervision of Raffaele Torella, he worked as a research associate in the
Nyāya project on the preparation of the critical edition of the Nyāyasūtra, led by Karin
Preisendanz, in Vienna, and in the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project in Cambridge. From 2014 to 2017,
he taught at Leiden University as ‘Lecturer of Sanskrit and Ancient Culture of South Asia’. His
main areas of expertise are Sanskrit aesthetics, philosophy of language, and juridical tradition,
but his research branches out into the epistemological and metaphysical debates among Brah-
mins, Buddhists and Jains as well as their relevance to contemporary philosophical questions.
His main publications include several articles on Sanskrit aesthetics, a co-authored Italian trans-
lation of the Mānavadharmaśāstra, and more than 500 entries in the Digital Catalogue of the San-
skrit manuscript collections of the Cambridge University Library.
Hugo David is a researcher at the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient,
which he joined in 2015. His main area of research is the history of Indian philosophical systems
and traditions of linguistic analysis, with a focus on Sanskrit grammar, poetics and Vedic exege-
sis. His doctoral thesis, submitted in 2012 at the École pratique des Hautes Études (Paris), con-
sisted of a critical edition, French translation and study of the Śābdanirṇaya (‘An Inquiry into Ver-
bal Knowledge’) by the 10th-century Advaitin Prakāśātman. Before joining the EFEO, he was active
756 | List of Contributors
at the University of Cambridge (2013–14) and at the Institute for the Intellectual and Cultural His-
tory of Asia (Austrian Academy of Sciences) in Vienna (2015).
Mahesh A. Deokar is Professor of Pali and Head of the Department of Pali of the Savitribai Phule
University in Pune, India. His main areas of research are the comparative grammars of Pali and
Sanskrit, Theravada Buddhism, and Contemporary Buddhism. His main publications include the
monograph Technical Terms and Technique of the Pali and the Sanskrit Grammars (2008), and the
edition of the Vṛttamālāstuti, in collaboration with Michael Hahn, Shrikant S. Bahulkar, and Lata
M. Deokar.
Lata Mahesh Deokar is visiting faculty at the Department of Pali of the Savitribai Phule University
of Pune, and Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellow at the Department of Indology and Tibetol-
ogy, Philipps University, Marburg, Germany. Her main research interests are Buddhist Sanskrit
literature and Sanskrit and Tibetan lexicography. She has edited Subhūticandra’s Ka-
vikāmadhenu on Amarakośa 1.1.1 – 1.4.8 (2014) and co-edited the Vṛttamālāstuti with Michael
Hahn, Shrikant Bahulkar, and Mahesh A. Deokar.
Florinda De Simini is a postdoctoral fellow at the University L’Orientale, Naples, Department for
Asian, African and Mediterranean Studies (DAAM), where she also teaches classes in Ancient and
Medieval History of India since 2013. She got a PhD in Indic and Tibetan Studies at the University
of Turin (2013), and over the years conducted research in Naples, Leiden and Hamburg, as well as
in several libraries and research centres in Europe and India. Her main fields of expertise are
South Asian manuscript cultures, the history of the Śaiva traditions, Indian epigraphy, and Dhar-
maśāstra. In 2016 she published Of Gods and Books. Ritual and Knowledge Transmission in the
Manuscript Cultures of Premodern India, which appeared in the series Studies in Manuscript Cul-
tures (De Gruyter).
Camillo A. Formigatti is currently the John Clay Sanskrit Librarian at the Bodleian Library in Ox-
ford. He studied Sanskrit and Tibetan at the Philipps-Universität in Marburg. From 2008 to 2011,
he worked as a research associate in the project In the Margins of the Text: Annotated Manu-
scripts from Northern India and Nepal at the University of Hamburg, where he also received his
PhD. He worked in the Sanskrit Manuscripts Project at the University of Cambridge from 2011 to
2014. In 2015 he collaborated with the project Transforming Tibetan and Buddhist Book Culture
based at the University of Cambridge and taught Sanskrit at SOAS, London. His main areas of re-
search are South Asian codicology and history of the book, kāvya literature, Buddhist narrative
literature, Sanskrit tradition in the Himalayan region (Kashmir and Nepal), and digital humanities.
Besides publishing several articles on these topics, he co-authored more than 500 entries in the
Sanskrit catalogue on the Cambridge University Digital Library.
Marco Franceschini is Assistant Professor at the University of Bologna, where he teaches Sanskrit
and Indology. His main research interests lie in Vedic studies, in kāvya and Buddhist literature,
and in palaeographical and paratextual studies of manuscripts written in the Grantha and Tamil
scripts. He is author of An Updated Vedic Concordance, published in two volumes in the Harvard
Oriental Series (2007), of the first complete translation (into Italian) and critical edition of Bud-
dhaghoṣa’s poem Padyacūḍāmaṇi (2010), as well as of various articles and studies. He is cur-
List of Contributors | 757
rently participating in two research projects based at the University of Hamburg, the ‘Encyclope-
dia of Manuscript Cultures in Asia and Africa’ and the ‘NETamil’ project, as well as in the European
Union funded E-QUAL project, whose objective is to enhance the quality of undergraduate educa-
tion in India.
Emmanuel Francis is research fellow at the CNRS and is affiliated to the CEIAS in Paris. He is an
historian of Tamil Nadu using inscriptions and manuscripts for his research on the social and cul-
tural history of Tamil language. He has published a two-volume study on the Pallavas of South In-
dia entitled Le discours royal dans l'Inde du Sud ancienne. Monuments et inscriptions pallava
(IVème–IXème siècles).
After studies in Oxford and in Hamburg, Dominic Goodall passed several years working in Pondi-
cherry, where he was head of the Pondicherry Centre of the École française d’Extrême-Orient from
2002 to 2011. He has published critical editions of Śaiva works (most recently, with Alexis Sand-
erson, Harunaga Isaacson, Diwakar Acharya and others, the earliest three sūtras of the Niśvāsa-
tattvasaṃhitā), and of classical Sanskrit poetry (most recently, with Csaba Dezső, the eighth-cen-
tury Kuṭṭanīmata of Dāmodaragupta). After four years in Paris, where he gave lectures on Indian
and Cambodian Sanskrit literature at the École pratique des hautes études (religious science sec-
tion), he returned once again to Pondicherry in 2015. He is working towards the publication of sev-
eral unpublished Khmer inscriptions in Sanskrit.
Jürgen Hanneder is professor of Indology in Philipps-Universität Marburg. He has studied in Mu-
nich, Bonn, Oxford and Marburg and has focussed on producing first editions of Kashmirian au-
thors, as for instance, Sāhib Kaul. His contribution to this volume is a result of his interest in the
history of Indian Textual Criticism, which is also the topic of his recent monograph ‘To Edit or Not
To Edit’ (Pune 2017).
Kengo Harimoto was born and grew up and started to study Sanskrit/Indology in Japan. He was
awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999. He worked in Groningen, the Nether-
lands, and in Hamburg, Germany, and currently works at Mahidol University in Thailand. His pu-
blications include God, Reason, and Yoga: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Commentary
Ascribed to Śaṅkara on Pātañjalayogaśāstra 1.23–28, published in 2014, and ‘In Search of the Ol-
dest Nepalese Manuscript’ in The Study of Asia between Antiquity and Modernity, Rivista degli
Studi Orientali 84 [2011].
Gergely Hidas is currently holding a postdoctoral position at the British Museum with a research
focus on Sanskrit dhāraṇī literature. His first monograph, Mahāpratisarā-Mahāvidyārājñī, The
Great Amulet, Great Queen of Spells, was published in 2012.
Filippo Lunardo received his doctoral degree in Indological and Tibetological Studies from the
University of Turin. He has worked for the Vatican Museums, and a number of organizations, as
well as teaching the History of Tibetan Art, Tibetan Buddhist Philosophy and Tibetan Language at
the University ‘Sapienza’ of Rome. His main research interests focus on Bla ma mchod pa tantric
literature and the iconography of the tshogs zhing, the Bla ma mchod pa instruction on merit
field, in the dGe lugs pa tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. He has conducted fieldwork among Tibe-
tan communities in Ladakh and elsewhere in India.
758 | List of Contributors
Nina Mirnig is a research fellow at the Institute for the Cultural and Intellectual History of Asia
(IKGA) at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Prior to her current position she completed
her studies at Oxford University and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Groningen University. Her
research interests include the development and history of early Śaivism and the tantric tradi-
tions, death rites and post-mortuary ancestor worship, as well as the cultural history of medie-
val Nepal, with special focus on Licchavi-period Sanskrit inscriptions. Among her publications
are the articles ‘Hungry Ghost or Divine Soul? Post-Mortem Initiation in Medieval Śaiva Tantric
Death Rites’ (2015), ‘Early Strata of Śaivism in the Kathmandu Valley’ (2016), as well as an edi-
ted volume on Epigraphical Evidence for the Formation and Rise of Early Śaivism (2013). Cur-
rently, she is also engaged in producing a critical edition, translation and study of the
Śivadharmaśāstra, chapters 1–5 and 9.
Cristina Scherrer-Schaub, Directeur d’Études émérite, École Pratique des hautes Études (Hist-
oire du bouddhisme indien), Paris, & Honorary Professor, Université of Lausanne (Études tibé-
taines & bouddhiques), has published in the field of Indian Buddhism and Old Tibetan studies.
Francesco Sferra is professor of Sanskrit language and literature at the University of Naples
‘L’Orientale’, where he has been teaching for the last 18 years. His primary areas of expertise
include history of religion, tantric studies, and Indian philosophy of language. His works in-
clude the critical edition and translation of the longer Ṣaḍaṅgayoga by Anupamarakṣita with
its commentary by Raviśrījñāna (2000), the Sekoddeśaṭīkā by Nāropā (2006) and (together
with H. Isaacson) the Sekanirdeśapañjikā by Rāmapāla (2014). He is founder and coeditor of
the series Manuscripta Buddhica, the first volume of which appeared in 2008.
Péter-Dániel Szántó studied Tibetology (2004) and Indology (2006) at ELTE, Budapest. He
wrote and defended his dissertation on the Catuṣpīṭha, a Buddhist tantra, at Oxford University
(2012). He is currently a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at All Souls College.
Vincenzo Vergiani is Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies, University of Cambridge. His main areas of research are the Sanskrit grammatical tra-
ditions and the history of linguistic ideas in ancient South Asia. In 2011-2014 he launched and
directed the project ‘The intellectual and religious traditions of South Asia as seen through the
Sanskrit manuscript collections of the University Library, Cambridge’ (http://san-
skrit.lib.cam.ac.uk/). He has co-edited Studies in the Kāśikāvṛtti. The section on pratyāhāras.
Critical edition, translation and other contributions (2009), and Bilingual Discourse and Cross-
Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India (2013). At present he is working on
the translation and study of the Sādhanasamuddeśa, the chapter on the factors of action in the
third book of Bhartṛhari’s Vākyapadīya.
Eva Wilden studied Indology and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, where she took a
doctorate on Vedic ritual and afterwards specialised in Classical Tamil under the guidance of
S.A. Srinivasan. Her habilitation Literary Techniques in Old Tamil Caṅkam Poetry: The Kuṟunto-
kai was published in 2006. Since 2003 she has been employed as a researcher at the École
Française d'Extrême-Orient in Pondicherry and Paris, which for a number of years gave her the
opportunity to study daily with the late lamented T.V. Gopal Iyer. She is the head of the
Caṅkam Project, which deals with the digitisation and edition of Classical Tamil manuscripts,
List of Contributors | 759
and the organiser of a yearly Classical Tamil Summer Seminar in Pondicherry. After completing
a critical edition plus translation of the Naṟṟiṇai (2008) and the Kuṟuntokai (2010) she is cur-
rently working on the Akanāṉūṟu, of which the first part is about to be published. In the frame-
work of the Hamburg Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures she has also traced the trans-
missional history of the Caṅkam corpus, a study published in 2014 under the title “Manuscript,
Print and Memory: Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu”. She has been awarded an ERC Ad-
vanced Grant for her project NETamil: ‘Going from Hand to Hand – Networks of Intellectual Ex-
change in the Tamil Learned Traditions’ (http://www.manuscript-cultures.uni-ham-
burg.de/netamil/index.html), hosted by the University of Hamburg and the Centre of the EFEO
in Pondicherry since 2014. In 2015 she received the Indian presidential award ‘Kural Peetam’
for her work on Classical Tamil. In June 2017 she has taken up a professorship for Tamilistics
and Manuscript Studies at the University of Hamburg.
Index of Persons
Abhayadeva 55, 68 Bābhravya 378 n. 3
Abhayākaragupta 438 n. 160, 489 n. 4, Bailey H.W. 9
491 Baka 560–562
Abhayamalla 459 Bali 569–570
Abhayarāja 87–88, 677 Ballālasena 116
Abhinavagupta 229 Banarsidas 66
Adam, William 195 n. 4 Barth, Auguste 132–154
Ādityarāja 231 ’Be-lo 666 n. 22
Agasti 532 n. 41 Belvalkar, S.K 727–750
Aghoraśiva 347 Bendall, Cecil IX n. 5, 6–42, 47–57, 355–
Ākṛtisvāmin 132–133 368, 487, 665, 747 n. 68
Akṣayarāja 87–88 Bergaigne, Abel 146, 154
Alberūni (Al-Bīrūnī) 716 Bhadanta Aggadhammābhivaṃsa Thera
Alexander the Great 254 704
Ali-Moḥam-mad Khan 73 Bhagadatta 564
Amaramāṇikya 66 Bhairava 494, 499, 512, 559
Amarasiṃha 194, 212, 684, 690 Bhāju Dhana 111
Amarendracandra 101 Bhaktivijayagaṇi 71
Amṛtānanda 5 Bhāmaka 279 n.103
Aṃśuvarman (or Mānadeva) 357–370, Bhānucandragaṇi 116
648 Bhānulabdhi 65
Anandabodha 42 Bharata 617
Ānandadatta 89–91, 124, 696–718 Bhāravi 23 n. 40
Ānandadeva 84 Bhartṛhari 106, 658, 720–721
Ānandagiri 728–746 Bhattacharya, Kamaleswar 137
Ānandatīrtha 744 n.56 Bhaṭṭoji Dīkṣita 108, 112
Ananta 557–559 Bhavabhūti 23 n. 40
Aṅgada 571 n.36, 572 Bhavavarman 132
Anupamarakṣita 492 Bhīma 559–564
Āpiśali 718 Bhīṣma 566, 615
Apraca (dynasty) 249 Bhojadeva 593
Arimalladeva 601 Bhṛgu 617
Aristophanes of Byzantium 262 Bhūpatīndramalla 105
Arjuna 560–564, 579, 582 Bhūvācārya 410
Āṟumukanāvalar 323–344 Billeśvara 104, 688
Āryaśūra 16 n. 23, 290 Bourdieu, Pierre 582 n. 57
Aśoka 240–262, 380 n. 9 Bradshaw, Henry 32, 552
Aśvaghoṣa 16 n. 23, 277 Brahmā 98 n.117, 424, 454, 498, 556–
Aśvatthaman 564–566 557, 616, 677
Aufrecht, Theodor 4, 9 n.8, 10, 16 n.25, ’Brom ston rGyal ba'i 'byung gnas 313–
26 n.45 314
Brough, John 27
Ba' ra ba rGyal mtshan dpal bzang (po) bSam grub seng ge 307
313–315 bSod nams 'od zer 308–309
762 | Index of Persons
bSod nams bkra shis (mkhas pa) 299– Citrakūṭaṃ Kandāḍai Śeṣādri 211 n.35
308 Citraratha 560 n.17
bSod nams dpal 312 Citsukha Muni 42
bSod nams rnam rgyal 303–311 Cœdès, George 133 n.5, 136 n.8, 137
bTsun pa Chos legs 305–312 n.9, 138–139, 139 n.11, 142, 142
Buchanan, Claudius 5 n.12–14, 146–147, 154, 154 n.28, 155,
Buddha Śākyamuni 11, 274–278, 290, 158
418–426, 476–481, 493, 500, 659– Colebrooke, Henry Thomas 75, 194
677 Cotton Mather, Robert 13 n.14
Buddhanāga 697 Cowell, Edward Byles 6, 10, 12–22, 24,
Buddhapiya 722–723 26, 31–32, 51
Buddharakṣita 108 Cūḍāmaṇi 112, 112 n.187
Buddhinātha 108 Cupparāya Tēcikar 328–329
Bühler, Georg 7, 10, 16 n.24, 24, 31, 48–
54, 356–357, 368 Dāmodara 136
Burnouf, Eugène 11–12 Dāmodara Śarmā 110
Dānaśīla 450
Cakrarāja 111 Dārā Shikoh 731 n.11
Callimachus 262 Daśabala 659
Cāminātaiyar, U.V. 168–189, 197–200 Daśaratha 559 n.15, 568
Campbell, A.D. 197 n.10 de Gubernatis, Angelo 14 n.19
Candradeva 116 de la Vallée Poussin, Louis XI n.11, 24–
Candragomin 82–122, 656, 671, 675– 26, 32–33
676, 695, 721 de Rhins, Jules-Léon Dutreuil 267–269,
Candrakīrti 411, 411 n.8 268 n.70, 273
Candrapāla 41 Deussen, Paul 14 n.19, 731 n.12
Caṇmuka Aiyar 323–329 Devakī 578 n.44, 685
Cāntaliṅkak Kavirāyar 183 Devala 531–532 n.41
Caravaṇapperumāḷ 323, 340 Devaladevī 119–120
Cāritrasāra 66 Devanandin 716
Chapaḍa 252–253, 253 n.32 Dhaṇapati 68
Chos ’phags (*Dharmodgata) 492 Dharmadāsa 82 n.12, 83, 84 n.19, 88–
Chos bzang (ltas dga') 306, 311 89, 656, 696
Chos dbang rgyal mtshan (bo dong) Dharmadeva see Fatian
300–304, 307, 309 Dharmākaraśānti 492
Chos dpal (mkhas pa) 301–302, 309, Dharmakīrti 108–110, 110–111 n.182,
311 678–679, 679 n.46, 684, 690
Chos grub see Facheng Dharmakṣema 274
Chos kyi rgyal mtshan dpal bzang po Dharmamūrti 65
666 n.19 Dharmarasika 97, 664
Chos rgyal lhun grub 315 Dharmasvāmin 133 n.2
Chos skyabs dpal bzang 304, 306–307, Dharmodgata see Chos ’phags
309, 311 Dhaumya 142, 142 n.14, 563
Chos skyong (dge bshes) 306 Dhruva 380 n.9
Chos skyong bzang po (Zhwa lu lo tsā ba) Diṅnāga 121 n.218
666 Diogenes Laertius 263
Ciman Lāl 8, 51
Index of Persons | 763
Don bzang (mkhas pa) 299–300, 305, Gnoli, Raniero 367–368
311 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 225–227
dPal chen (mkhas pa) 299–302, 311, Gonda, Jan 401 n.40
311 n.90 Gopadatta, 85
dPal ldan rgyal po (dpon yig) 306–307 Gopal Iyer, T.V. 173 n.9, 177–178, 758
dPal mgon (rtogs ldan), 308–309 Gopāla IV 488
Dpaṅ Blo-gros-brtan-pa 118 Govinda 730 n.43–44, 742 n.52, 748,
Draupadī 561–562, 560–561 n.17, 563 749 n.74, 750 n.68
n.20 Govinda Pūjyapāda 740 n.43
Dri med (mkhas pa) 299–304, 311 Grags mgon (dpon chen) 307, 309, 311
Droṇa 564–565, 564 n.22 Grags pa rgyal mtshan 118, 271
Dṛṣṭadyumna 564 Grags pa’i lha (*Kīrtideva) 492
Duḥśāsana 561, 564 Grenard, François 268, 268 n.70
Dūmgara 67 Grierson, G.A. 14 n.19
Duperron, Anquetil 731 n.11 Griffith, Ralph Thomas Hotchkin 6, 16–
Durgasiṃha 99, 103–105, 118, 126, 17, 32
715–716, 720 Groslier, Bernard Philippe 138
Duryodhana 563 n.20–21, 564–565 gTsang smyon Heruka 312–313, 318
Dwivedi, J.P. 121–122 n.221, 656–657, Gu ge Paṇ chen Grags pa rgyal mtshan
678, 688, 715 271
*Guṇabhadra see Yon tan bzaṅ po
Eggeling, J. 14 n.19 Guṇākara 697
Ellis, Francis Whyte 194 Guṇānanda 5, 8
Eucratides 257 n.42 Guṇapati 107
Guṇaprabha 277 n.97
Facheng (Chos grub) 247 Guṇaratnākara 492
Fatian (Dharmadeva) 451 Guṇavinayagaṇi 41
Finot, Louis 27, 136 n.8, 139–140 n.11, Gunawan, Aditia 156
149 n.25–26 Gyi jo zla ba’i ’od zer 409
Gadādharasiṃha 600 Hahāhuhū 531–532 n.41
Gajendra 531–532, 531–532 n.41, 532 Hāla 579 n.46
n.42, 535–536, 577–578 Hanumān 107, 563 n.20–21, 569–573,
Gaṇeśa 172, 183–186, 246, 556, 559, 570 n.34, 571–572 n.36, 617, 668
567, 677, 746, 748 Haribhadra 41, 57, 57 n.12
Gaṅgādhara 110 Haribhadra (Bhikṣu) 657, 681
Gaṅgādhara Sarasvatī 42 *Haribrahmadeva (’Phrog byed tshangs
Gardabhilla 59 pa’i lha) 490 n.6
Garuḍa 462, 465, 475, 477–478, 477 Haricandra 534–535, 537
n.374, 482, 556, 577, 577 n.41, 647 Harihara 616, 642–643, 645–646
*Gayādhara 414, 492 Harikāladeva 490 n.6
Gayāpati 103 Harisiṃha 119
Genette, Gerard 163–164, 189, 199 n.14 Harīśvara 111
Ghaṭotkaca 560 n.17, 563 n.20, 564 Harivarmadeva 490 n.6
Gnas brtan zla ba Harpocrates 254–256
(*Mahāpaṇḍitasthaviracandra) Harṣa 356
665, 665 n.18, 673, 673 n.42 Harṣā 68–69
764 | Index of Persons
Harṣa (Newar Buddhist) 88 Jayadeva (Licchavi) 367 n.15
Harṣakulagaṇi 60 Jayadeva (Malla) 86
Harṣasiṃgha 60 Jayadharmamalla 101, 102 n.145
Hemrāj Pande 71 Jayadratha 563 n.20
Heraclides Ponticus 257 n.41 Jayajyotirmalla 87, 95–97, 96 n.109,
Herakles-Vajrapāṇi 261 101–102, 664–665
Hevvara 656 Jayakaraṇa 69–70
Hiḍimba 560–562, 560–561 n.17, 561 Jayakīrtimalla 101
n.18, 565–566 Jayamuni 27, 27 n.50
Hiḍimbā 560–562, 560–561 n.17 Jayarājadeva 86 n.37, 113
Hiraṇyaruci 138–143 Jayārjunadeva 113, 113 n.191, 120
Hiraṇyavarman 132 Jayasthitirājamalla (Jayarajasthitimalla,
Hodder, Francis 7 Jayasthitimalla) 100–101, 100
Hodgson, Brian Houghton 11–13, 20, n.131, 113, 119, 120, 123
456, 676–677 Jayavarman V 136, 149–150 n.26
Honner, Augustus Cotgrave 7, 10 Jayayakṣamalla 102 n.145, 103–104,
Horace (Horatius) 227 103 n.153
Hultzsch, Eugen 19–23, 21 n.38, 23 Jetakarṇa 118, 118 n.213
n.41–42 Jinabhadragaṇi 57
Jinamitra 450
Ida Dewa Gede Catra 346 Jinavijayagaṇi (also Vijayarāja, Vijaya-
Iḷampūraṇar 173 n.9 māna, Yaśovijaya or Jasavijaya)
Indra 150, 382, 424, 454, 466, 479, 66, 66 n.26–27
562, 667 n.25 Jinendrabuddhi 105, 106 n.164, 120, 121
Indradeva 84, 84 n.20 n.218, 708, 713, 715
Indradyumna 531–532 n.41 Jitamitramalla 105 n.162
Indraji, Bhagvanlal 356–357, 368 Jitānanda 109 n.174
Indrajit 570 n.34, 571 n.36, 573 Jīvarakṣā 96
Indrānanda 8 Jīvaśarma(ṇa) 101
Indrāṇī 69 Jñānasāgarasūri 56
Indumitra 656, 656 n.4 Johnston, Edward Hamilton 13
Irāmaliṅka Aṭikaḷ 343 Jolly, Julius 14 n.19, 18–19, 18 n.32–33,
Isaacson, Harunaga X, X n.9, XIII, 409, 19 n.34
411–412 n.10, 400 n.191, 487, 588– Jonarāja 23, 228
589 n.1, 659, 667 n.25, 692, 758 Jones, William 11
Joshi, Laxmanashastri 729, 729 n.7,
Jacobi, Hermann 54 730–731 n.9, 741, 745 n.60, 747, 747
Jagāditya 107–108 n.67
Jagajjyotirmalla 678, 683
Jagatsiṃha 120 Kaccāyana 718–719, 721–722
Jambūsvāmin 61 Kaikeyī 559 n.15, 568
Janamejaya 560, 579 Kaiyaṭa 106, 709 n.23–24, 714
Jarāsandha 561 Kālaka 59
Jaṭāvarman Sundara Pāṇḍya I 135 Kalhaṇa 228
Jaṭāyu 568–569, 568 n.32 Kāliya 578 n.44
Jayabhairavamalla 95–96, 118 Kalyāṇamitra 278
Jayabrahma 101–102, 118 Kalyāṇavarman 411
Index of Persons | 765
Kamalanātha 501 n.68 Lachmann, Karl Konrad 506–507, 507
Kamalaśīla 265 n.7, 539 n.51, 540
Kaṃsa 577–578, 578 n.43–44 Lakṣmaṇa 559 n.15, 568, 570–573, 571–
Kānajī 69 572 n.36, 573 n.38, 617
Kānha 67, 67 n.31 Lakṣmīkāmadeva 92, 592–594, 593 n.7,
Karma Tshe dbang kun khyab 666 599–601
Karmavajra 451 Las kyi rdo rje (*Karmavajra) 451
Karṇa 562, 563 n.20, 564, 566 n.26 Legs pa'i shes rab 314
Kāśirāma 98, 683, 683 n.56, 678, 684 Leumann, Ernst 14 n.19, 51–52, 52 n.4,
Kātyāyana 236, 246 n.17, 347, 708 54, 56–57
Kaul, Dīlārāma 234, 236–237 lHa btsun Rin chen rnam rgyal 294–
Kaul, Saccidānanda 234 295, 295 n.8, 312–315
Kaul, Sāhib 233–234, 233 n.25, 237, Liebich, Bruno 92, 657, 699 n.13
757 Līlāvatī 579 n.46
Kaul, Sudarśana 234 Liṅgayasūrin 208
Kaurava 563, 563 n.21, 565 Lokakṣema 273
Kavirāja Svayambhūdeva 427 Lu Fayan 267
Keith, Arthur Berriedale 19, 715, 727, Lunet de Lajonquière, E. 143
729, 730 n.8, 731, 731 n.12, 738
n.34–36, 38, 743 n.56, 743–744 Macdonnell, Arthur Anthony 20
n.56, 745, 745 n.62, 750 Mādhava 92
Kevaldās, Bhagvāndās 8, 23, 40, 47–52 Madhavan, Chitra 135
Khara 66 Madhusūdana Sūri 41
Kīcaka 563 Madhva 730, 730 n.8, 731 n.10, 743–
Kielhorn, F. 14 n.19, 48, 53 744 n.56, 747
Kīkī 68–69 Magas (Māga) 262
Kirāta 562, 563 n.20 Māgha 23 n.40
*Kīrtideva see Grags pa’i lha Mahādeva 147 n.21, 642
Kiruṣṇa Ayyaṅkār, S. 203 Mahādeva (upādhyāya 111
Klong chen rab ’byams pa Dri med ’od zer Mahākāla 511 n.11, 512, 555, 566, 621
312 Mahākassapa 697
Ko brag pa bSod nams rgyal mtshan Mahāvīra 58–59, 73
312 Maheśvara (grammarian) 114
Kṛpa 564–566 Maheśvara (Jain author) 52
Kṛṣṇa 115, 560–561, 563 n.21, 564, Maheśvarānanda 342 n.25
577–578, 578 n.44, 582, 685, Mahipāla (Jain layman) 68–69
Kṛṣṇānanda 111, 111 n.185 Maitreyarakṣita 656, 671, 675
Kṛtavarman 564–566 Maḻavai Makāliṅkaiyar 340
Kṣemarāja 229–232, 230 n.20, 237 Malayagiri 55
Kṣemendra 16 n.23, 27, 667 Mallinātha Sūri 208, 212
Kṣemendra (vajrācārya) 86, 86 n.37 Mamuka 458
Kṣīrasvāmin 133 n.4 Manaharṣavarman 84
Kumāracandra 416 n.27 Maṇika 18, 18 n.32, 118 n.212, 552 n.4
Kumārajīva 273–274 Maṇika (Śrīmaṇika) 118
Kumārasvāmin 132–133 n.2 Manikarāja 87, 97, 97 n.113, 664, 664
Kumbhakarṇa 571 n.36, 572 n.13
Kuvalayapīḍa 577–578, 577 n.42 Mañju(śrī)kīrti 100 n.134, 669 n.26
766 | Index of Persons
Mañjughoṣakīrti 669 n.26 Ñi-ma-rgyal-mtshan 118
Maṅkha 227–228 Nicholson, E. W. B. 19–22
Manoharā 554, 567, 567 n.28–29, 582– Nirmalamaṇi 347
583, 585 Norman Brown, W. 53, 59
Māra 499 Norman, K.R. 279 n. 102
Mārkaṇḍeya 556
Mathuranātha 41 Oḍi-rāja (dynasty) 249
Mātṛceṭa 275 Oldenberg, H. 14 n. 19
Māyā 578 n.44 Olson, Charles 276
mChog ldan mgon po 313 Ōmi, Jishō 412
Meghū 66, 66 n.28
Mehala (Mahila) see Miles, William Pa ṇḍi ta chen po gnas brtan zla ba
Mi la ras pa 313 665, 673
Miles, William 47, 51, 71–75 Pa tshab Lo tsā ba Tshul khrims rgyal
Moggallāna 695, 697–698, 700, 704– mtshan 655
705, 707–708, 715, 718–719, 721– Paccaiyappa Perumāḷ Nāyakar 328–329
724 Padma (dpon btsun) 297–300, 308, 311
Mohinī 558 Pal, Pratapaditya 551
Monier-Williams, Monier 20, 154 Paṃ Vīravijayagaṇi 71
Mūka 562 Paṉampāraṉār 173 n. 9
Müller, Friedrich Max 16 n.25, 20–23, Pāṇḍava 142, 559 n. 16, 561–563, 565–
22 n.39, 381 n.15, 384 n.18, 386 567
n.22, 400, 400 n.39, 401 n.40, 728, Pandit Abhayaraj see Abhayarāja
730, 730 n.8, 731 n.11 Pāṇḍu 562 n. 18 , 628
Municandra 52 Pāniṇi 116, 121–123, 127, 208, 246 n.
Muniśrībhadra 411 17, 254, 381 n. 13, 656, 671, 695, 697,
Murukaṉ 319, 321–322, 330, 334–335 703, 708–709, 713, 718, 720–721
Pāṇṭiya 176, 189
Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar 173 n. 9, 174, 175 n. Parakkamabāhu I 697
11, 176–180, 188 Parbata 67
Nāgārjuna 258, 575 n. 40 Parikṣit 579
Nāgeśa 106, 112 Parimēlaḻakar 176
Nakkīraṉ 173 n. 10 Pārśva 58, 65
Nam mkha' dkon mchog (gsol dpon) Patañjali 137, 246 n. 17, 709–711, 714,
301, 306 717–719, 723
Nam mkha' dpal 'byor 308 Pērāciriyar 173 n. 9, 177–178
Nam mkha' rdo rje 293, 304, 308 Percival, Reverend P. 338 n. 23
Narahari 108 Petech, Luciano 80 n. 2, 101 n. 142
Nārāyaṇa 577 n. 41, 645, 687 phrog byed tshangs pa’i lha 490
National Archives of Kathmandu Pindar 264 n. 61
(NAK) 82 n. 8, 303, 444 Piyadassī 698
Nayak 176, 182, 186 Plato 257, 263, 264 n. 57
Nāyakadevī 120 Pound, Ezra 276
Nayapāla 488 Prabhudāsa 111
Neil, R. A. 14, 26 Ptolemy II Philadelphus 254, 256, 262
Nemi 58 Pūrṇacandra 83, 89, 92, 94, 124, 656,
Nesfield, J.C. 6, 16 n.26, 17 n.27–28 671, 696, 699
Index of Persons | 767
Puruṣottama 110, 217, 656 Ridding, Caroline Mary XI n. 11, 24, 26,
Puruṣottamadeva 110, 116, 656, 671, 32–33
674–675, 705 n. 18 Röer, Edward 728
Putanā 578 n. 44 Rost, Reinhold 20–22, 51
Ṛṣabha 58
Rab 'byams pa Byams pa phun tshogs Rudra 509–510, 512, 510–520, 523, 530
305 Rudradāsa 675
Rādhākṛṣṇa (Pandit) 4 n. 1 Rudradeva 593, 600 n. 26, 601
Raghavan, Venkataraman 3, 9, 26, 28– Rūpavijayagaṇi 71
29, 33 Ruyyaka 228
Raghuśarman 108–109
Rāja Sivaprasād 52 Sādhuratna 57
Rājalladevī 101, 120 Śākalya 378 –394
Rājaśekhara 572 n. 37 Śākaṭāyana 718
Rājendravarman 154, 156 Śākya’i blo gros 672 672 n. 38
Rāma 231 Śākyamuni 259 659 –667
Rāmacandra 109 Śākyarakṣita 491
Raman, Bhavani 196 Śambhu 636 n. 92
Ramānanda 108 Sanderson Alexis, 230 n.23, 237, 513,
Rāmanātha 108 588, 757
Rāmānuja 171, 203 Saṅgharakkhita 698, 705 –723
Rāmānujācāryyar 211 n. 35 Śaṅkara 42, 109, 727–754,
Rāmapāla 411 Śaṅkaranārāyaṇa 646
Ranbir Singh 232 Sāṅkṛtyāyana, Rāhula (Sankrityayana,
Raṅgarāmānuja 731 n. 10 Sāṅkṛtyāyana) 84 n. 20, 89 n. 62,
Ratnadatta 89, 91, 124, 696, 697 n. 8 90 n. 66, 409, 410, 411 n. 9, 663,
Ratnākaraśānti 411, 417, 436 n. 150 Śāntinātha 61
Ratnakīrti 341, 346 Saramā 570 n. 34, 572
Ratnamati (Ratnaśrījñāna) 83, 89–91, Sarasvatī 96, 108, 112, 115, 142, 143 n.
108, 117, 124, 656, 663, 671, 695– 15, 677, 687
699, 704–705, 711, 713–715, 717– Śāriputra 89, 91, 697
718, 721–722 Śarvavarman 121, 656, 675
Ratnaśekharasūri 60 Śaśideva 121 n. 221
Ratnasiṃha 600 Śāstrī, Haraprasāda 90, 679,
Ratnaśrījñāna (Ratnamati) 89 n. 63 Śāśvatavajra 491, 499 n. 51
Rāvaṇa 568, 570–574, 593, 617 Śatrughna 617
Raviśrījñāna 489–492 Satyavatī 115, 116
rDo rje mgon po 304, 309, 311 Sāyaṇa 17, 703 n. 9, 737-740, 748
rDo rje rgyal mtshan (bcu dpon) 296– Scharfe, Hartmut 199, 200, 400 n. 39,
303, 305, 308, 311 401
rDor mgon (mkhas pa) 304 Schlegel, A.W. 223
rDzong dkar chos sde (monastery) 303 Senart, Émile 14 n. 19, 244 n. 10, 268
Regmi, D. R. 80 n. 2, 93 n.90 Senavarma 251
rGod tshang ras chen 314 Seng ge (gnas brtan dge slong) 306
Rhodes Bailly, Constantina 229 Sengyou 272–273
Rhys Davids, T.W. 9–10, 11 n.12, 14 n. sGam po pa 312
19, 31
768 | Index of Persons
Shākya btsun pa Kun dga' chos Śubharāja 104
bzang 314 Subhūticandra 89, 97, 116, 655–692
Shākya ye shes 492 Sudhākara Dube 8
Shastri, Hara Prasad 677 Sudhana 551, 554, 567, 582, 583
Si tu paṇ chen 123 n. 224, 657, 661, Sudharmasvāmin 61
665–666, 673 Sugrīva 569, 617
Śikharasvāmin 133 n. 2, Sumati 83, 94, 696
Śīlānka 55 Sumatinātha 69
Singh, Pratāp 747 Sureśvara 733 n. 18,
Śiśupāla 561 Sūrya 575
Sitā 568, 570 n. 34, 571, 572, 617 Sūryarāma 105
Śiva 95, 133 n. 5, 137, 138, 178, 183, 184, Sūryaśrī 229
187, 198, 204, 228, 321, 424, 505, Sūryavarman I 148
512, 513 n. 14, 519, 520, 523, 528, Suṣeṇaśarman 720 n. 38
537, 554 n. 8, 555, 559, 562, 566, Svāmivarta 646
567, 587, 609, 616, 620–624, 629,
634, 642, 643, 646–649, 677 Takṣaka 579
Śivaharideva 103 Tāmōtaram Piḷḷai 180
Śivarāja 68, 116, Tarantino, Quentin 223
Śivavindu 148 Tathāgatavajra 491, 492
Skanda 321, 556, Tejarāma Kramācārya 96
Skilling, Peter 449, 450, 480 n. 387 Ṭhakkura Prajñāpati 99
sKyab pa (mkhas pa) 301–304, 308 Tilakācārya 56
Slusser, Mary Shepherd 84 n. 25, 86 n. Tilopa 313
38, 119 Tilottamā 616
sMan bla don grub (sman thang pa) 300 Tirutakkatēvar 177
sMon lam (mkhas pa) 301, 302 Tod, James 48 n. 1, 72
Somadeva 537 Trijaṭā 570 n. 34
Somaprabha 57 Trilocanadāsa 99, 103, 104, 720 n. 38
Somaśarman 132 n. 2, 133 n. 5,
Somatilakasūri 57 Udayaśramaṇa 104
Somasundara 42 Uddākā 457
Somendra 229 Ugrabhūti 716
Speyer, J. S. 26 Umā 422, 528, 531, 556, 587, 602, 620,
Śrī Rāhula 697 n. 10, 698, 718 622, 624, 634, 643, 649
Śrībala 459 Umāpati 347 n. 31
Śrībhānu 409–444 Upaniṣadbrahmayogin 731 n. 9
Śrīdhara 459 n. 51 Upatissa 89 n. 63
Śrījñāna 660 Utpaladeva 229–232, 237
Śrīmaṇika 118 Utsavakīrti 100, 113
Śriṉivācayyaṅkār 203
Śroṇa Koṭikarṇa (Kuṭikaṇṇa) 277 Vāgbhaṭa 442 n. 225
Srong btsan sgam po 312 Vāgīśvara 659, 688
Śrutapāla 716 Vaidyanātha Yajvan 204, 205, 214
Sthūlabhadra 59 Vaiyāpurip Piḷḷai 172 n. 8
Stolper, Robert E. 8, 26 Vajrācārya, Dhanavajra 357, 367 n. 14
Subhadra 148, 149 n. 26 Vāli 617
Index of Persons | 769
Vallabhadeva 199 n. 15 Viśvarūpa 110 n. 180
Vāmana (mythological character) 578 n. Viśvāvartta 231
44, 614 Viśveśvaratīrtha 730 n. 8, 744 n. 56
Vāmana (author) 137 Vivekaratnasūri 67
Vaṅgasena 19 Vyāsa 185, 614, 739
Varaṇu 68
Vararuci 106, 110 n. 182, 114, 656 Weber, Albrecht 4, 29, 54, 745
Vardhamāna 107 Wenzel, H. 13
Vasantarāja 114–116, 656 Whitney, William Dwight 401 n. 40
Vasiṣṭha 132 n. 2, 571, 739 Wilkins, Charles 11
Vāsudeva 107 Winternitz, Moriz 19, 390 n. 30, 401 n.
Vāsuki 479 40, 745
Velarāja 65 Wogihara, Unrai 356
Veṅkateśvara 204, 205 Wright, Daniel 5, 12, 13, 32, 51, 552
Verhagen, Pieter C. 81 n. 4, 93, 118, 123,
657, 661, 666, 673 Xenocrates 257
Vētakiri Mutaliyār 329
Vibhīṣaṇa 570 n. 34, 571, 572 Yajñavarāha 136–137, 142, 147
Vibhūticandra 490 Yaksha Malla 677
Vickery, Michael 132 n. 2 Yama 454, 479, 582, 612
Vidyujjihvā 572 Yang dgon pa rGyal mtshan dpal 313,
Vigrahapāla 42, 488 314, 315
Vigrahapāla III 488 Yaśobhadra 490, 500 n. 59, 503
Vijayadeva 369 Yaśodā 578 n. 44,
Vijayarāja 116 Yaśomitra 27
Vikramāditya 567n. 28 Yaśovarman 145–146, 153
Villiputtūrāḻvār 185 Ye śes ’od (lHa bla ma) 271
Vimalabhadra (Dri med bzaṅ po) 411, Ye shes sde 450
411 n.10 Yogīndu 65
Vimalamati 656 Yon tan bzaṅ po (*Guṇabhadra) 411–
Virāṭa 563 412, 411 n.8, 428 n.33, 438 n.66
Vīravarman 132 Yon tan rgya mtsho 666
Viṣṇu 133 n. 3, 198, 203, 423, 424, 531 Yudhiṣṭhira 564 n. 23, 566, 567 n. 27,
n. 41, 533–535, 554 n. 8, 556–559, 615, 628, 629
567, 577–578, 582, 609, 611, 614,
617, 620, 621, 628, 629, 635, 636, Zhi Qian 272–273
637, 643, 644, 646, 647, 648 Zhwa lu lo tsā ba Chos skyong bzang
Viṣṇukumāra 136, 137 po 666
Viśuddhamuni 519 Zla ba rgyal mtshan 313
Index of Places
Adyar 195, 520, 731 Bhastrāpada 512
Afghanistan 242, 245 n. 14, 248, 249, Bibliothèque nationale de France 268 n.
255 70
Agra 66 Bihar 81, 99 n. 14, 117, 195 n. 4, 196 n. 7,
Aï Khanoum 249 n. 24, 255, 256 n. 40, 378
257 Bodleian Library 4, 12, 19, 20, 26, 52,
Ajinaulīśrāma 109 234, 456, 745
Alexandria (Egypt) 239, 254, 256, 262 Brag dkar rta so 294, 295–297, 300,
Amareśvara 512, 513 n. 14 309, 310
Āmratikeśvara 512 Brahmagiri 252
Ancient India and Iran Trust (Cambridge) British Library 53, 54, 70, 244, 457, 580
9 British Museum 19, 21, 51, 54
Andhra Pradesh 747 Butkara 251, 254
Angkor 145, 150 n. 27
Annamalai 323–329 Cambay 53, 69
Āṣāḍhi 512, 513 n. 14 Cambodia 131–157
Asgiri Vihāra 704 Cambridge 3–42, 47–75, 77–127, 137,
Asiatic Society of Calcutta 511, 587, 590 163, 174, 182, 185, 186, 287, 355,
n. 3 377, 401, 409, 410, 415, 457, 487,
Athenae 263 532 n. 42, 541, 551, 552, 587, 590,
Ati sha'i chos 'khor (La 'debs Val- 593, 647, 655, 664, 678, 687, 695,
ley) 294, 309, 310 727, 731, 732, 747 n. 68, 749,
Aṭṭahāsa 512 Cāturbrahma Vihāra 95–96
Avimukta 512 Cāuṇṇitapā 107
Ayodhyā 571, 572 n. 36 Ceṉṉai 194 n. 3,
Central Asia 121 n. 219, 122, 253, 267,
Bactria 255 274, 320 n. 2, 450
Ban That 148 Chab rom phug 294, 305, 307, 309
Banepa 101 Chagalaṇḍa 512
Bangladesh 92, 490 n. 6 Charkhlik 274, 275
Banteay Srei 136, 147 Chennai 194 n. 3, 195, 324, 329, 347 n.
Begram 254, 257 31, 727,
Beijing 412 Chidambaram (Cidambaram) 135, 327
Benares 31, 41, 729, 732, 746, 747 China 242, 249 n. 24, 267, 272, 273,
Benares Sanskrit College 6, 16, 17 n. 27 412, 451,
Bengal 42, 117, 122 n. 222, 195 n. 4, 196 Chitradurga District 252
n. 7, 200 n. 16, 506 Chos sdings 308
Berlin 48, 54, 70, 745 Christ’s College (Cambridge) 9
Bhadrakarṇa 512 Cochin 5
Bhairava 512 Corpus Christi College (Cambridge) 7,
Bhaktapur (Bhatgaon) 40, 96, 105 n. 10, 32, 33, 186
162, 120, 551, 576, 580, 581
Bhārabhūti 512, 513 n. 14 Dalakaulī 107
Bharhut 251, 276 Dhauli (Puri district, Orissa) 241
Index of Places | 771
Diṇḍimuṇḍi 512, 513 n. 14 IsIAO Library 296, 297
dPal khud mtsho 308
Dpal spungs thub bstan chos ’khor gling Jalalabad Plain 249
666 Jalpa 512
Dunhuang 242, 247, 248, 250, 267, 271, Jambūdvīpa 60
272, 451 n. 11 Jammu 232
Duraṇḍa 512 Jamugāma-Brahmapura 107
Durbar Library, Nepal 15, 109 n. 172, Jatiṅga Rāmeśvara 252
677, 678, 688, 691 Jñānésvara (Gyaneshwar) (area of Kath-
mandu) 369
East India College (Hertford, UK) 194
Eastern India 91, 106, 108, 109, 111, 117, Kailāsa 616
118, 121, 450 Kālañjara 512
Egypt 254, 255 Kanakhala 512, 609
Eṇṇāyiram 135 Kanchipuram 346, 347
Ērakam 334, 335 Karnataka 197 n. 10, 198, 252, 253
Eṟṟaguḍi (Aśokan rock edict) 240 Kārohaṇa 513, 519
Kārvān 513
Fitzwilliam Museum XIV Kashmir (Kāśmīr) XVI, 9, 19, 137, 229,
Fort of St. George (Madras) 194 232, 237, 348, 490 n. 6, 506
Fort William 11 Kāṣṭhamaṇḍapanagara 110
Kathmandu 5, 11, 12, 90, 91, 93, 97 n.
Gandhamādana 572 n. 36 114, 100 n. 133, 101 n. 142, 110, 118,
Gandhāra 224, 241, 248 n. 20, 250, 251, 303, 347, 357, 367, 369, 457, 458,
254, 261, 267 459, 541, 580, 590, 593, 650
Gandhāra (city in Gujarat) 67 Kathmandu Valley 81, 84 n. 25, 94 n.
Gaṅgūla¬patana 97 93, 99, 117–123, 357, 507, 587, 609,
Gansu 242 643, 644–645, 649, 696 n. 5
Gayā 512 Kedāra 512
Glang phug (La ’de/’debs Valley) 293, Kerala XIII, 5, 344, 346, 347, 732, 747,
294, 307, 308, 309 749
gNas 294, 305 Khotan 247, 259, 267, 268, 274
Gokarṇa 512 Khyber Pass 249
Gṛdhrakūṭa 477 n. 371 Kilvelur 517
gTsang (village) 300 Kiṣkindhā 570
Gujarat 67, 69, 71, 73, 513 n. 14 Kučā 274
Gulbarga 135 Kun gsal sgang po che 294, 300, 307
Gung thang 295, 296, 300, 303, 305, Kurukṣetra 454, 512, 563, 613
308
Lahore 259
Haḍḍa 249, 261 Lakulīśvara 513 n. 14
Hariścandra 512 Lalitāpūra 109
Himachal Pradesh 259 Laṅkā 570, 571, 572 n. 36, 668, 698
Leiden University Library 517
India Office 12 lHa mdun 306
Iṅghikāyatana 477, 478 Library of Sri Nataraja Gurukkal 517
Īśānapura 138 London 19, 48, 51, 728 n. 6, 745
772 | Index of Places
lTas dga' (rTa sga) (monastery) 306 Pakistan 242, 248, 249, 254,
Lucknow 7 Palanpur (Palhanpoor) 71–75
Pāṇḍavagrāma 107
Madhyama 512 Pārācūr 203
Madras 194, 731 Paśupatinātha (Paśupati temple) 356,
Madras Presidency 20, 194, 196, 197 n. 367–370, 645, 646, 650
10 Patan 53, 86, 109 n. 174, 118, 369, 593
Magadha 461 n. 12, 657 Paṭṭikerā 490 n. 6
Mahākāla 512 Paṭṭikeraka 490 n. 6
Mahālaya 512 Phnoṃ Khna 139, 140, 141, 143
Mahendra 512 Phnom Penh 138
Maināka 667, 668 Pinākipada 138
Mākoṭa 512 Pondichéry (Pondicherry) 144, 145, 187,
Malaysia 338 201 n. 21, 323, 324, 329, 346, 517 n.
Maṇḍaleśvara 512 25, 732
Mang yul 295, 305 Prabhāsa 512, 513 n. 14
Mang yul Gung thang 267–311 Pràsàt Kôk Čak 138
Mathurā 251, 252, 278 Prayāga 609, 613
Maturai 176, 178, 179, 335 Pre Rup 154
mDzo lhas 294, 307, 308, 309 Puṣkara 512
Mithilā (Mithila) 81, 111, 112 n. 187, 116, Rājagṛha 453, 477, 478
119, 120, 122, 237 Rajasthan (Mewar) 65, 73
Mumbai (Bombay) 20, 40, 48, 49, 50, Rājputāna 7, 40, 41, 48, 50
51, 72, 348 Rajshahi 200 n. 16
Museum (Mouseïon) 254 rDzong dkar (Khyung rdzong dkar
Museum for Archaeology and Anthropo- po) 294, 295, 300, 303, 307
logy (Cambridge) 9 Royal Asiatic Society 11, 48 n. 1, 52, 73
Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal 11
Naimiśa 512 Rud (village) 307
Nairañjanā 600 Rudrakoṭi 512
Nakhala 512 Rudramahālaya 138
Nakulīśvara 512, 513 n. 14 Rudrāśrama 138
Nālandā 121 n. 218, 451 n. 12
Nepal XII, XVI, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18 n. 32, Śaṅkukarṇa 512
22, 23, 27 n. 50, 31, 40, 41, 49, 77– Sārnāth 243
128, 151, 355, 357, 361, 367, 415, 450, Shāhbāzgarhi (Aśokan rock edict) 240
506–508, 528, 529, 537, 551–584, n. 3
587–650, 655, 657, 665, 677, 679 Siddhāpura 252
Nor bu gliṅ kha 412 Siem Reap 138, 139, 140
Nub ris 306 n. 75 n. 76 Sindhu 563
Sirkap 254
Ostia 259, 260 sKyid grong 305
Oxford XII, 4, 19, 20, 21, 22, 456, 541, Société asiatique 12, 268 n. 70
553 n. 6, 590 n. 3, 745 Somapura 92
Oxus 255 Śreṣṭhapura 138
Śrī Laṅka (Sri Lanka) 80 n. 4, 90, 117,
Paharpur 92 119 n. 216, 248, 276, 695, 697
Index of Places | 773
Śrīcaraṇadhara 108 Tirupuvaṉai 135
Śrīdharmadhātu Mahāvihāra 660 Tiruvaṇṇāmalai 203
Srinagar 232, 348 Tiruvāvaṭutuṟai 176
Śrīparvata 512 Tiruvitāṃkūr 194
Śrīṣaḍakṣarīmahāvihāra 97, 664 Travancore 194
Sthaleśvara 512 Tribhuvanai 135
Sthāṇvīśvara 512 Tribhuvanasthāna 138
Sthuleśvara 512 Trinity College (Cambridge) 9
Suvarṇākṣa 512 Trivandrum 323, 346, 347, 727, 732,
Swāt 254 746, 749 n. 75
’Tsho rkyen 294, 305, 309–310
Tabo 271 Turkestan 248
Tamil Nadu XVI, 9, 193–214, 319, 321–
327, 338, 342, 506, 517 Udyāna 108
Tapa Shutur 261 Uzbekistan 242
Tarai 117
Taraunī 112 Vāgmatī 609
Taxila 251, 253, 257 Vijayanagara 176
Tebtynis 263 n. 52 Vikramaśīla 655
Thrissur 727, 732, 746, 749 Vimaleśvara 512
Tibet XVI, 12, 81 n. 4, 90 n. 66, 117, 119
n. 214, 123, 268, 287, 409, 458, 553, Xinjiang 242, 248
574, 697
Tillia tepe 245 n. 14 Yamunā 578 n. 44
Tirhut 81, 119, 120
Tirumukkūḍal 135 Źwa-lu monastery (Central Tibet) 409,
411
Index of Titles
Abhidhānacintāmaṇi 54 n.5 Aṣṭādhyāyī 82, 105, 106, 107, 111, 112,
Adbhutasāgara 116 121 n.220, 208, 246 n.17, 656, 695
Adhikārasaṃgraha 118 Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgraha 442
Advaitasiddhi 41 Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā 342 n.25,
Aintiṇai Eḻupatu 346 458 n.47, 488, 593
Aitareya Upaniṣad XVII, 728–751 Āśvamedhikaparvan 531, 628
Aitareyāraṇyaka 728 Aśvaśāstra 576, 580
Aitareyopaniṣad XVII, 728–751 Āṭānāṭika-sūtra 451 n.11
Aitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya 728–751 Āṭānāṭiya-sutta 451 n.11
Aitareyopaniṣadvivaraṇa 742 n.52 Atharvaveda 455 n.38, 477 n.374
Ākhyātaratnakośa 89, 94, 95, 118 Atharvavedapariśiṣṭa 507 n.3
Ākhyātavicāra 97 Āticcūṭi 196 n.8
Amarakośa (see Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana) Ātmasamarpaṇa 519
Amarapadakalpataru 211 n.35 Ātmaṣaṭka 728, 744 n.59
Amarapadapārijāta 208, 212 Aupapātikasūtra 55
Amarapadavivṛti 208 Avadānasārasamuccaya 27, 52 n.4
Amarapañcikā 205 Avadānaśataka 27, 477 n.371
Amarapañcikai 206 Āvaśyaka-laghuvr̥ tti 56
Amṛtadhārā 411, 412 Āvaśyaka-niryukti 56
Amṛtakaṇikā 490, 500 n.59 n.61 Āvaśyaka-saptatikā 52
Amṛtakaṇikoddyota 490 Āvaśyaka-vṛtti 52
Ānandasundarī 147 n.21
Antagaḍadasāo 55 n.8 Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣadbhāṣya 740,
Antakṛddaśā 70 741, 742 n.52
Anunyāsa 656 Bahvṛcabrāhmaṇopaniṣaṭṭīkā 742
Anuśāsanaparvan 530, 531, 606, 617, Bahvṛcopaniṣad 730 n.8, 741
624, 625, 627, 633–635, 638, 642, Bālarāmāyaṇa 572 n.37
645 Bālāvabodha 55
Apabhraṃśānuśāsana 116 Bālāvabodhana 697
Aparokṣānubhūti 41, 42 Bālavallabhāprakriyā, 97
Apohasiddhi 341, 346 bDe gshegs phag mo gru pa’i rnam
Āraṇyakaparvan 454 thar 312
Ars Poetica 227 be con chen po zhes bya ba’i gzungs, 450
Arthaśāstra 240 Bhagavadgītā, 551 n.21, 563–564, 645
Āryadaśabhūmisūtranidānabhāṣya 672 Bhāgavatapurāṇa, 532–533, 536–585,
n.38 Bhagavatīsūtra 68
Āryagayāśīrṣasūtramiśrakavyākhyā 672 Bhagavatyāsvedāyāyathālabdhatantra-
n.38 rāja 593
Āryamahāśītavanadaṇḍadhāraṇīsūtra Bhāgavṛtti 656
451 Bhāṣāvṛtti 110, 656, 671
Āryasaddharmasmṛtyupasthānasūtra Bhāṣāvṛttipañjikā 110 n.180
655 Bhāṣyapradīpa 709 n.23, n.24
Aṣṭādaśavidhāna 594 Bhaṭṭikāvya 671, 675, 716
Bhīmavinoda 41
Index of Titles | 775
(Bhū-)Padagahana 113 Ceyyuḷiyal 177
bKa' rgya / khu chos gnyis / lung bstan / Chāndogyopaniṣad 729
rdor glu / kha skong rnams, 314 Chandonuśāsana 42
blTa ba'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa 312 Chos rje dags po lha rje’i gsung / bstan
Bod kyi shing spar lag rtsal gyi byung rim chos lung gi nyid ’od 312, 315
mdor bsdus 312 Chos skyong ba'i rgyal bsrong btsan rgan
Bodhisattvabhūmi 355–376 po’i bka’ ‘bum las smad kyi cha zhal
Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā (Avadānakal- gdams kyi bskor ba 312
palatā) 16 n.23, 27, 229 Chos skyong ba'i rgyal po bsrong btsan
Book of Zambasta 274–275 rgam po'i bka' 'bum las smad kyi cha
’Bras bu'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa 412 zhal gdams kyi bskor 312
Brahmasūtrabhāṣya 728–753 Cikitsāsārasaṅgraha 19
Brahmayāmala 416 n.28, 417 n.30, 440 Cilappatikāram 173
n.199 Cīvakacintāmaṇi 175, 197 n.9
Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad 734–752
Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣadbhāṣya 734–752 Dahan lin sheng nanna tuoluoni jing 451
’Brom ston pa rgyal ba’i ’byung gnas kyi Damayantīkathāvṛtti 41
skyes rabs bka’ gdams bu chos le’u Dānadharma 530–535, 628
nyi shu pa 314 Daṇḍadhara 451, 453
bsil ba’i tshal chen mo 451 Daśaśrutaskandha 55 n.8
Buddhacarita 5, 13, 16 n.23, 667 n.25 Daśavaikālikā 42
Buddhakapāla 413–415, 487–489 Daśāvatāracarita 667
Buddhippasādinīṭīkā 698 Devīkavaca 23 n.40
Devīmāhātmya 580, 583
Candrālaṃkāra XII n.15, 41, 89, 91, 124, Devīpurāṇa 507 n.3
696–706 Devyāmata 140 n.11
Candraprajñapti 67 dGe bshes ston pas mdzad pa'i glegs bam
Cāndrasūtra 88, 696, 697, 700, 713, gyi bka' rgya 314
717, 719 Dharma Pātañjala 346
Cāndravṛtti 656, 662, 696–723 Dharmakośa 729–747
Cāndravyākaraṇa XVII, 82–124, 656– Dharmapada (Chinese) 266 n.64
671, 695–715 Dharmapada (Khotanese) 244
Cāndravyākaraṇapañjikā 83, 89–90, Dharmaputrikā 587–592
117, 656, 663, 695–724 Dhātupārāyaṇa 89–124, 696 n.4
Cāndravyākaraṇasambandhiśab- Dhātupāṭha 92–126, 656, 716, 735 n.27,
darūpāvalī 661 737 n.33
Cāndravyākaraṇavṛtti 84, 87, 88, 695– Dhātusaṃgraha 104
724 Dhātuvṛttimanoramā 105
Caṅkam 168–175, 319–322 Divyāvadāna 14, 26, 277, 477 n.371
Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manu- dPal ldan bla ma dam pa chos legs mts-
scripts in the University Library, han can gyi rnam thar yon tan 'brug
Cambridge IX n.5, 10, 355 sgra 313
Catuḥśaraṇaprakīrṇaka 53 dPal ldan bla ma dam pa mkhas grub lha
Caturakarāti 338 n.23 btsun chos kyi rgyal po'i rnam mgur
Catuṣpīṭhapañjikā 411 blo 'das chos sku'i rang gdangs
Catuṣpīṭhatantra 417 n.30, 495 314
Cauvīsadaṇḍa 71
776 | Index of Titles
dPe chos rin po che spungs pa'i 'bum 'grel Jīvājīvābhigama 63 n.21
312 Jñāpakasamuccaya 656
Durgasiṃhavṛtti 105 Jñātadharmakathā 62, 69–70
Durgaṭīkā 656, 708–723 Jo bo rin po che rje dpal ldan a ti sha rnam
Durgavṛtti 708–721 thar rgyas pa yongs grags 314
Jo bo rje'i bstod pa 'brom ston rgyal ba'i
Eḻuttatikāram 173 n.9 'byung gnas kyis mdzad pa'i phun
Eṭṭuttokai 176, 321 tshog bham ga ma 313
Jo bo yab sras kyi gsung bgros pha chos
Faju jing 272–273 rin po che'i gter mdzod / byang chub
Faust 225–226 sems dpa'i nor bu'i phreng ba rtsa
'grel sogs 314
Gaurīkantī 41
Grub thob gling ras kyi rnam mgur mthong Kaccāyanavyākaraṇa 719
ba don ldan 312 Kaivalliya Navanītam 346
Grub thob gtsang pa smyon pa'i rnam thar Kaivalyakalpadruma 42
dad pa'i spu long g.yo ba 315 Kālakācāryakathā 59
Guhyasamājatantra 410, 412, 418 Kalāpacandra 720 n.38
Guhyasamājavyākhyātantra 416 n.27 Kālāpavyākaraṇa 86 n.39, 102 n.150
Guṇabharaṇī 492 Kaḷavaḻi Nāṟpatu 346
Guṇavatī 411, 436 n.150 Kālikākulapañcaśatikā 437 n.151
gzungs chen po lnga la 450 Kalittokai 170–181
Kalpāntarvācyānī 42
Haracaritacintāmaṇi 507 n.3 Kalpasūtra 58–70
Harivaṃśapurāṇa 42 Kampa Irāmāyaṇam 196 n.8
Harṣacarita 148 n.22 Kaṇakkatikāram 346
Herukābhidhāna 491 Kaṅkhāvitaraṇī 697 n.10
Hevajratantra 410, 418, 439 n.181, 481 Kantapurāṇam 186
n.397, 490 Kārakacakra 106, 110
Hitopadeśa 13 n.14, 576–583 Kārakakaumudī 41
Homavidhinirdeśa 410, 421, 430 Kāśikavṛtti 105, 107, 108, 110, 120, 127,
137, 656, 708, 712, 720
Indranandi-saṃhitā 58 Kātantra 77–126, 656, 663, 688, 708–
Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ 173 n.10 721
Īśāvāsyopaniṣad 723 n.20, 735 n.24, Kātantrasūtra 715, 717
744 n.57 Kātantraviśeṣākhyāna 656
Kātantravṛttipañjikā 104, 720 n.38
’Jam dbyangs zhal gyi pad dkar ’dzuṃ Kātantravṛttivivaraṇapañjikā 99, 104
phye nas / lung rigs gter mdzod ze Kātantravyākaraṇa 104, 118, 121 n.220,
’bru bzheng la / blo gsal rkang drug 656, 663, 688, 708
ldan rnaṃ Kāṭhakopaniṣad 734–751
Jambūdvīpa no vicāra 71 Kāṭhakopaniṣadbhāṣya 736 n.30
Jātakamālā 16 n.23, 85 Kathākośa 52
Jātakamālā (Āryaśūra) 290 Kātyāyanaśrautasūtra 347
Jaṭāpaṭaladīpikā 17 Kavikāmadhenu XVII, 89 n.65, 116, 655–
Jingang bore boluomi jing 263–264 692, 696 n.4
Jītakalpa 57 Kenopaniṣad 733–750
Index of Titles | 777
Kenopaniṣadbhāṣya 733 n.18 Mādhavānalopākhyāna 41
Keśavīśikṣā 17 Mahā-Daṇḍadhāraṇī-Śītavatī 449–482
Khaḍgaviṣāṇasūtra 267 Mahābhārata 134–135, 184–186, 452
Khams gsum 'dran bral grub thob ko rag n.21, 454, 477 n.374, 507–537, 544–
pa'i mgur 'buṃ bzhugs / badzra dho 547, 551–585, 587–650
dza 312 Mahābhāṣya 105–106, 128, 149 n.24,
Khargaviṣaṇasutra (Gāndhārī version of 246 n.17, 656, 706–723
the Khaḍgaviṣāṇasūtra) 244, 249, Mahādaṇḍadhara 451, 455
267 Mahādaṇḍadhāraṇī see
Khasamatantra 417 Mahāśītavatīsādhananāmadhāraṇī
Kīḻkkaṇakku 170–176 Mahaitareyopaniṣadbhāṣya 744 n.56
Kirātārjunīya 23 n.40 Mahāmantrānusāriṇī 458 n.44
Kirātārjunīyaṭīkā (by Jonarāja) 23 Mahāmāyātantra 412, 436 n.150
Kṛdbhāṣya 97 Mahāmāyūrīvidyārājñī 451–455
Kriyākālaguṇottara 456 n.38, 477 n.374 Mahāparinirvāṇasūtra 277
Kriyākramadyotikā 347 Mahāpratisarā 455 n.35, 459–460, 481
Kṛṣṇayamāritantrapañjikā 416 n.27, 418 n.398
Krung bod dkar chag 491 Mahārthamañjarī 342 n.25
Kṣaṇabhaṅgasiddhi 341, 346 Mahāśītavana 449–453
Kṣetrasamāsa 57 n.12 Mahāśītavatī 449–482
Kulālikāmnāya 593 Mahāśītavatīsādhananāmadhāraṇī
Kumārasambhava 54 n.6 449–482
Kūrmapurāṇa 519 n.27 Mahāvyutpatti 244 n.10
Kuṟuntokai 177–189 Mahotsavavidhi 347 n.31
Maitrakanyakāvadāna 13
Laghukṣetrasamāsa 60 Makāvākkiyam 332
Laghuniśīthaśāstra 55 n.8 Malaipaṭukaṭām 175
Laghvamoghanandinīśikṣā 17 Mālatimādhava 23 n.40
Lakṣyalakṣaṇadurghaṭa 656 Mālavikāgnimitra 155 n.30
Lalitavistara (Śaiva text) 507, 509 n.8 , Māṇḍūkyopaniṣad 732–750
531–536, 587–650 Maṇicūḍāvadāna 27
Laṅkāvatāra 13 Mañjuśrīnāmasaṃgīti 490, 553 n.6
lHan dkar ma (catalogue) 271 Mañjuśriyamūlakalpa 451–454
Lhan kar ma 450–451 Mataṅgapārameśvaratantra 137
Līlātilakam 198 n.13 Māthurī 41
Līnārthadīpa 697 Meghadūta 41
Liṅgānuśāsana 716 Meghasūtra 14
Liṅgapurāṇa 519 n.27 Mekhalā-dhāraṇī 477 n.373
Liṅgatrayādisaṃgrahaḥ Śabdaślokaḥ Mirāt i Ahmadī 73
691 mKhas grub kun gyi gtsug rgyan / paṇ
Lomaśīśikṣā 17 chen nā ro pa’i rnam thar / ngo mts-
Lumpākamatakuṭṭana 57 har rmad 'byung 313
Lung du ston pa su ba nta zhes bya ba mKhas grub sha ra rab 'jam pa sangs
691 rgyas seng ge'i rnam thar mthong ba
Lūyipādābhisamayavṛtti 491 don ldan ngo mtshar nor bu'i phreng
ba shar 'dod yid 'phrog blo gsal mgul
brgyan 313
778 | Index of Titles
Moggallānapañcikā 695–724 Pañcarakṣā XVI, 449–482
Moggallānapañcikāpradīpaya 698 Pañcatantra 18, 580, 583
Moggallānapañcikāṭīkā 698, 706–707 Pāṇṭi Maṇṭala Catakam 174
Moggallānasutta 695–724 Pāṇṭi Nāṭu Catakam 189
Moggallānavutti 695–724 Parākhyatantra 140 n.11
Moggallānavuttivivaraṇapañcikā 695– Paramātmaprakāśa 65
724 Pārameśvaratantra 137–138, 361, 367
Moggallānavyākaraṇa 695–724 Pāratam 135, 184–186
mTshan ldan bla ma dam pa mnyam med Pārataveṇpā 183–185
chos dbang rgyal mtshan gyi rnam Paribhāṣāvṛtti 103–104, 126, 705 n.18
par thar pa / rin po che nor bu'i Paribhāṣāvṛttiṭīkā 104
phreng ba 313 Patārttakuṇa Vaittiya Cintāmaṇi 347
Mūlasarvāstivādavinaya 277–278 Pātrīkaraṇa 697
Muṇḍakopaniṣad 730–750 Pātrīkaraṇaṭīkā 697
Munipaticarita 52 Pattuppāṭṭu 170–190, 319–321
Paümacariu 427
Naiṣadhacarita (ṭīkā) 23 n.40 Pauṣkara-pārameśvara-tantra 137
Nāmaliṅgānuśāsana XV, XVII, 16 n.23, Pauṣkarasaṃhitābhāṣya 347 n.31
89 n.65, 133 n.4, 193–219, 552 n.4, Pho brang po ta la do dam khru'u rig
655, 663, 676, 684, 690, 696 n.4 dngos zhib 'jug khang 313
Nānāvidhavaidya 201 Pho brang po ta lar tshags pa'i bka'
Nandīsūtra 70 brgyud pa'i gsung 'bum dkar chag
Naṉṉul 173 n.10, 196 n.8 313
Nāradasmṛti 18 ’Phang thang ma 450–45 271
Narakhittaviyāra 57 ’Phur lding rol / legs bshad sbrang rtsi’i
Navatattva 66 dga’ ston ’gyed pa 314
Nibandha 89, 91, 124, 696–697 Phyag rgya chen po rnal 'byor bzhi'i rim
Nikaṇṭu 196 n.8 pa snying po don gyi gter mdzod
Nirvedasādhanāgītā 342 n.26 315
Niśvāsakārikā 429 n.43 Phyag rgya chen po yi ge bzhi pa'i sa bcad
Niśvāsamukhatattvasaṃhitā 143 n.15 sbas don gsal ba’i nyi ma 313
Nītisāra 201 Phyag rgya chen po'i khrid yig bzhugs /
Nyams yig ma ṇi'i lu gu rgyud 312 skal bzang gso ba'i bdud rtsi snying
Nyāsa 708–717 po bcud bsdus 314
Nyāyamakaranda 42 Phyag rgya chen po’i dka' ba'i gnas gsal
Nyāyasiddhāntamañjarī 41 byed sgron ma 312
Nyāyavikāsinī 18 Piṅgiya Sutta 276
Pīṭhādinirṇaya 491
Padagrahaṇa 113 Prabhāvyākhyā 347
Padarohaṇa 99–100, 113, 126 Pradīpa 106
Padasādhana 698 Pradīpoddyotana 410–416
Padasādhanaṭīkā 698 n.12, 718 n.35 Prādivṛtti 97–98, 125
Padyosavaṇa 42 Prajñāvistārikā 104, 688
Paḻamoḻi Viḷakkam 183–184 Prakriyākaumudī 109, 127
Pancakāraṇabolastavana 72 Prākṛtānuśāsana 116, 656
Pañcamahādhāraṇī 450 Prākṛtaprakāśa 114, 116, 656
Pañcapakṣicāstiram 187–188 Prākṛtasaṃjīvanī 115, 656
Index of Titles | 779
Pramāṇasamuccaya 121 n.218 rJe btsun mi la ras pa’i rdo rje mgur drug
Pramāṇavārttikaṭīkā 672 n.38 sogs gsung rgyun thor bu 'ga' 315
Prasādapratibhodbhava 275 rJe btsun ras chung rdo rje grags pa'i
Praśnopaniṣad 730–750 rnam thar rnam mkhyen thar lam
Pratyayaśataka 9 gsal bar ston pa'i me long ye shes kyi
Pravaraṇasūtra 247 snang ba 314
Prayogamukha 110–111, 128 rJe ras chung pa’i rnam thar mdor bsdus
Purāṇa 131, 134 312
rNal 'byor dbang phyug lha btsun chos kyi
Qieyun 267 rgyal po'i rnam thar gyi smad cha
314
Raghupañcikā 199 n.15 Rūpasādhana 677, 683
Ramakien 572 n.32 Rūpasiddhi 722–723
Rāmāyaṇa 131, 134, 551–585, 668 Rūpāvatāra 98 n.121, 108–110, 127,
Rāṣṭrapālaparipṛcchā 27 678–690
Ratnamatipaddhati 89–91, 124–125,
696–719 Śabdalakṣaṇa 695
Ratnāvalī 258 Śabdalakṣaṇavivaraṇapañjikā 83, 89,
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i dka’ ’grel 411 92, 124, 656, 696, 699
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud kyi bśad pa 411 Śabdānuśāsana 54 n.5
rDo rje bdud rtsi’i rgyud kyi rgyal po chen Śabdārthacintā 90, 697 n.10
po’i rgya cher ’grel 411 Śabdārthacintāvivṛti 117, 124
Ṛgveda XVI, 16–17, 377–403, 728, 730, Śabdasaṃgrahakāṇḍa 691
744 Saddalakkhaṇa 697
Ṛgvedaprātiśākhya 379–383, 400–401 Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra (Saddharma-
rGyal ba rdo rje ‘chang yab yum gyi rnam puṇḍarīka) 247, 274, 481 n.400,
thar 313 593
rGyal ba yang dgon chos rje'i bka' 'bum Sādhanamālā 410–444, 452 n.20, 455
yid bzhin nor bu 314 n.37, 481 n.396
rGyal ba yang dgon chos rje'i mgur 'bum Śālistambhaṭīkā 265
313 Samavāyāṅgasūtra 66
rGyal ba yang dgon pa'i thugs kyi bcud Sāmaveda 132
ngo sprod bdun gyi mgur ma 315 Samayakhettasamāsa 57
rGyud kyi dgongs pa gtsor ston pa / Sāmāyārī-vidhi 52
phyag rgya chen po yi ge bzhi pa’i Sambandhaprakaraṇa 83 n.15
‘grel bshad gnyug ma’i gter mdzod Sambandhasiddhi 106, 127
313 Saṃhitopaniṣad 730–750
Rig 'dzin sprul sku mchog ldan mgon po'i Saṃhitopaniṣadvivaraṇa 740–750
rnam thar mgur 'bum gyi smad cha Saṁskṛtabhavaprākṛtānuśāsana 656
rnams 313 Saṃvarodayā nāma Maṇḍalopāyikā 410
Rigyarallitantra (Rigyāralitantrarāja) Saṅgrahastotra 231
XVI, 487–503, Sangs rgyas thams cad kyi rnam 'phrul rje
rJe btsun 'ba' ra ba rgyal mtshan dpal btsun ti lo pa’i rnam mgur 312
bzang po'i rnam thar mgur 'bum Śāntināthacaritra 42
dang bcas pa 313 Śāntiparvan 530–546
rJe btsun mi la ras pa rnam thar rgyas par Śāradātilakatantra 429 n.41
phye pa mgur 'bum 313 Sāraṅgasāratattva 41
780 | Index of Titles
Sārasvatavyākaraṇa 112 sPrul sku rig 'dzin mchog ldan mgon po'i
Sarvabuddhasamāyogaḍākinījālaśaṃvara rnam thar mgur 'bum dad ldan spro
494–495 ba bskyed byed 313
Śatakatrayī 658 sPyod pa'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa 312
Ṣaṭkārakabālabodhinī 111, 127 Śrāvakāṇām mukhavastrikārajohāraṇavi-
Sekanirdeśapañjikā 411 cāra 42
sGom pa'i skabs rnam par bzhag pa 312 Śrīkaṇṭhacarita 227–228
sGra bsgyur mar pa lo tstsha'i mgur 'bum Śrīkaṇṭhacaritaṭīkā (by Jonarāja) 23
313 Śrīmālādevīsiṃhanādanirdeśa 245
Shā kya'i dge slong rdo rje 'dzin pa chen sTon pa sangs rgyas kyi skyes rabs brg-
po / na<m> mkha' rdo rje'i rnaṃ par yad bcu pa slob dpon dpa' bos
thar pa ngo mtshar gsal ba'i me long mdzad pa bzhugs 315
315 Subantaratnākara XVII, 87 n.41, 89, 96–
Shākya'i dge slong rdo rje 'dzin pa / nam 99, 125, 655–691
mkha' rdo rje'i mgur 'bum / yid bzhin Subantaśāstra 683
nor bu'i bang mdzod 315 Subhūtiṭīkā 678
Shijing 272 Subvidhānaśabdamālāparikrama 97,
Si la sogs pa’i mtha’i bya ba 669 n.26 125, 657, 684, 688, 690, 691
Siddhāntakaumudī 82, 111, 108, 112, Śuklakurukullāsādhana 410
127 Sumāgadhāvadāna 27
Siddhāntaleśasaṅgraha 42 Sumatipañjikā 83, 89, 93–94, 117
Siddhisāra 96 n.109 n.210, 124, 696
Śikṣāsamuccaya 14, 23 Sup mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas 657,
Śiśupālavadha 23 n.40 666, 691
Śiṣyahitānyāsa 716 Sup’i mtha’ rin chen ’byung gnas (zhes
Śiṣyahitāvṛtti 716 bya ba Supadmākaranāma) 665–
Śītavana 449–483 667
Śītavatī-stuti 452 Supprakaraṇa 678, 683
Śivadharma (corpus) XIII, XVII, 505– Suśrutasaṃhitā 357–374
547, 587–649 Sūtrapaddhati 90 n.71
Śivadharmasaṃgraha 507, 587, 591, Sutta Nipāta 276, 277 n.93
594 Suvarṇabhāsottamasūtra 274
Śivadharmaśāstra 505–547, 587–649 Svacchandatantra 429 n.44, 445
Śivadharmottara 157 n.33, 505–547, Svarūpanirṇaya 42
587–649 Svāyambhuvapañcarātra 594
Śivapurāṇa Śatarudrasaṃhitā 519 n.27 Syādyantakoṣa 100, 104, 126, 669
Sīvastotrāvalī 229–237 Syādyantakoṣasāra 104 n.157, 126
Śivopaniṣad 587–649 Syādyantaprakriyā 100 n.134, 669 n.26
Skandapurāṇa 357–373, 513–519 Śyāmāpaddhati 233
sKyes mchog 'ba' ra bas mdzad pa'i sgrub
pa nyams su blang ba'i lag len dgos Taittirīyasaṃhitā 401–402
'dod 'byung ba'i gter mdzod 314 Taittirīyopaniṣad 751
sKyes mchog 'ba' ra pas mdzad pa'i mdo Taittirīyopaniṣadbhāṣya 737 n.31, 738
sngags kyi smon lam 315 n.34
sKyes mchog gi zhus lan thugs kyi snying Tājikasāra 41
po zab mo'i gter mdzod 315 Taṇṭalaiyār Catakam 183, 190
Sphuṭārthā Abhidharmakoṣavyākhyā 27 Tantrākhyāna 18, 41
Index of Titles | 781
Tattuvakkaṭṭalai 332 Vajrāmṛtapañjikā 411, 412 n.10
Tattvacintāmaṇi 41 Vajrāmṛtatantraṭīkā 411
Tattvaviśadā 491 Vajrapadasārasaṃgraha 490
Theg pa’i mchog rin po che’i mdzod 312 Vajrāralimahātantrarāja 414–415
Thun mong ma yin pa rdo rje mgur drug Vajrāvalī 438 n.160, 455 n.37, 481 n.396
sogs / mgur ma 'ga 'yar 313 Vākyapadīya 105–106, 122, 720–721
Tiṇaimālai Nūṟṟaimpatu 347 Vākyavṛittiprakāśikā 42
Tiṅbheda 97, 125 Vāmanapurāṇa 454
Tirukkuṟaḷ 170, 176, 191, 196 n.8 Vārarucasaṃgraha 106, 110, 127
Tirumuṟai 135, 319, 321, 337 n.19 Vārttika 708, 723, 733 n.18
Tirumurukāṟṟuppaṭai 168, 175, 313–345 Vasantarājaśākuna 115–116
Tiruvaruṭpā 343 Vāyavīyasaṃhitā 519 n.27
Tiruvāymoḻi 135 Vāyupurāṇa 134, 519 n.27
Tivākaram 182, 190 Vedāntakalpataru 42
Tivyappirapantam 171, 189 n.21 Vetālapañcaviṃśati 551, 553, 567, 583,
Toḷkāppiyam 173 n.9, 175–177, 179, 189 585
n.20 Vibhaktikārikā 118, 657, 681
Triliṅgaprakaraṇa 104, 126 Villipāratam 185–186, 190
Tutur Aji Sangkya 347 Vimalaprabhā 411 n.10
Tyādyantasya Prakriyā-vicārita 118 Viṃśatyupasargavṛtti 97–98
Vīṇāśikhatantra 429 n.44
Uddyota 106 Vinaya Piṭaka 279 n.102
Umāmaheśvarasaṃvāda 505, 507–508, Vinayatthamañjūsā 697 n.10
528–547, 587, 589 n.1, 591, 594, Vinayavijaya 57
602, 606–608, 615–624, 627–637, Vinayottaragrantha 278, 279 n.102
642–645, 648 Vipākasūtra 62
Umottarasaṃvāda 533, 536, 591–592, Vīracōḻiyam 198 n.13
596–597, 602, 605 n.29, 606, 634, Viṣṇudharma 532 n.42, 594, 628
643, 648–649 Viṣṇudharmottara 532, 533 n.43
Uṇādisūtra 87, 89, 97, 125 Vivāgasuya (Vipāka-sūtra, °śruta) 61–62
Uṇādisūtravṛtti 89, 125 Vivaraṇapañjikā 103, 105
Upasargavṛtti 97, 125 Vṛṣasārasaṃgraha 587, 591–592, 594,
Ūṣmabheda 114 596
Uṣṇīṣavijayā-dhāraṇī 480 n.385 VṛttiVṛtti 82 n.12, 83–86, 88–89, 97,
Uttarādhyayanasūtra 63 n.21 103–104, 110 n.179, 117–118
Uttarakāmika 507 n.3 Vutti 695
Uttarottaramahāsaṃvāda 587, 591–592, Vuttivivaraṇapañcikā 697
543 Vyākaraṇamahābhāṣya 656, 706
Uvāsagadasāo 61, 68 Vyākhyānaprakriyā 121 n.221
Vyavahārasūtra 55 n.9
Vaiṣṇavadharmaśāstra 531, 594, 614,
627–633, 645, 648 Yang dgon pa rGyal mtshan dpal 313–
Vājasaneyibrāhmaṇopaniṣad 734 n.21, 315
736 Yāpparuṅkala Virutti 175
Vajracchedikā 264 Yatijītakalpa 57
Vajrāmṛtamahātantra 409, 411 Yid bzhin nor bu’i bstod pa’i rgya cher
Vajrāmṛtamahātantrarājaṭīkā 411 ’grel 672
782 | Index of Titles
Yogācārabhūmi 355–356 Yuqie shidi lun fenmen ji 247
Yogācārabhūmiśāstra 247
Yogavāsiṣṭha 348 Zhus lan nor bu'i phreng ba lha chos bdun
Yogimanoharā 411 ldan gyi bla ma brgyud pa rnams kyi
Yuqie lun shouji 247 rnam thar 314
Keywords
Accordion book 551–52, 554–555, 558, Devanāgarī script 48, 381, 536,
567–568, 574, 577, 580 dhāraṇī XIII, 271, 449–52, 455, 467, 477–
Advaita Vedānta 728–750 passim 480
Aitareyāraṇyaka 727–728, 744, 751 discord 456, 480
Aitareyopaniṣad 737–732, 740, 744, 748, discus 481, 561, 577,
750 disease 480, 482
Aṃśuvarman (Mānadeva) Saṃvat 367, Drawing and carving of illustrations 289,
370 299
āraṇyaka 728–731, 737, 740, 744, 748, Drawn frames 287–311
āśramas 610, 624, dvairājya 93, 101
Avadāna 26–27, 477,
Early Malla 84, 86, 537
Bhaikṣukī script XII, 41, 91 epigraphy 249, 262
bhūtasaṃkhyā 93, 96–98, 102,
bka' gdams pa school 301 fever 480
Brahmin XIII, 101, 103, 111, 118, 121, 131, fire 96, 142, 144–145, 224, 424, 456,
133, 134, 136, 178–179, 197–198, 211, 480, 560–61, 572, 635,
237, 276–277, 567, 571, 607, 609,
613–617, 629, 646, 739, grantha calculation 50, 52
Brahmin Tamil 198, 208, 211 Gujarati commentaries 55, 66
Buddhism XII, 11–12, 15, 27–28, 78, 117–
119, 123, 242, 250, 278, 455, 554, Jain Āgamas 67
Buddhist universities 91, 119, 121 Jain cosmology 71
Jain manuscripts 47–52, 56, 60, 64–65,
calligraphy 157, 223, 289 67, 70
Cāndra grammar 105, 117–118, 673, 676, jātaka 13, 26–27
719,
citrapṛṣṭhikā 62 Kālakācāryakathā 59
Colophons of Jain manuscripts 58, 64–75 Kalpasūtra 58–60, 70 n. 36,
Colophons of Nepalese manuscripts 77– Kalvippiravākam Press 329
130 passim, 409–503 passim, 655– kāppu 168 n. 4, 172, 183–187, 322, 326,
692 passim 339–340
Colophons of Tamil manuscripts 188– Kātantra grammar 99–105
190, 195, 199, 201, 203, 210 Khmer civilisation 131, 133 n. 2, 142–
Courtly culture 583 144, 146
knotted thread 455
Index of Titles | 783
Lakṣmaṇa Era 99, 107–110, 112 n. 189, rnam thar/rnam mgur 298
Libraries 3–75 passim, 131–157 passim Rupee 337–338, 342 n.26
Licchavi Inscriptions 367 n. 15
Lithograph 729, 732 n.16, 741, 744, 745 saṃbandha 700, 713, 733, 734 n.20, 735,
n.60, 746–747, 748 n. 71 737,
Saṃhitopaniṣad 730, 740 n. 46, 742–
Mahāmudrā 298, 303, 305 743, 750
Mahāsiddha(s) 554 n. 8, 574–574, 585 Sārasvatavyākaraṇa 112
Maithili script 89 n. 61, 104, 106, 108, Siddhamātṛikā 368
109, 110 n. 180, 111, 122, 659, 688 Śivadharma XVII, 505–540,
Malla dynasty 119, 123, 537 Śrīvaiṣṇavism 163–219 passim
Manipravalam 193–194, 198, 202, 206 n.
26, 208 Text-transmission 131, 146, 150, 157 n.
Mirror for princes 582 33, 163–164, 166, 168–175, 186,
multilingual manuscript 201 189–190, 208, 214, 223, 225, 233,
multilingualism 198 n. 13, 201 n. 19, 202, 241, 270, 322, 379, 449, 460, 405–
567 n. 30, 440, 589, 592, 601, 606, 621, 718,
724
Nepalese Renaissance 552 Tibetan printing history 287–315 passim
Newari language 18, 84 n.24, 86 n.39, 92 Tibetan printing houses 287–315 passim
n.83, 105, 105 n.62, 110–111, 111 Tibetan xylographs 287–315 passim
n.84, 118 n.212, 449, 552, 552 n.4, Transitional Gupta script 355–375 passim
567 n.30, 579 n.46–47,
nūl varalāṟu 319, 324, 326, 333, 337, upaniṣad 727–731, 733–737, 740, 742
339–340 upāsaka 92, 109, 272
Older Upaniṣads (chronology) 730 n.8 vajrācārya 86
vihāra 86, 95, 97, 117, 119, 251
pañcalakṣaṇa 210–213, 514 n. 16 Vikrama Era 48, 98, 104, 106
Pāṇinian grammar 78, 116, 122 vyākaraṇa XII, XV, 6, 82, 112, 117, 213,
paratext XI, XV, 79, 163–170, 188, 193, 660–61
198–201, 203, 206, 213, 244, 248,
263, 319, 339, 559, 737, 740, water 86, 96, 137, 139–140, 419, 421,
phalaśruti 170, 172, 322, 608, 622, 424, 480–81, 519, 524, 557–58, 571,
poison 155, 456, 479–481, 558, 578 n. 609, 659
44, 612 weapon 456, 479–80, 563, 573, 667,
Ringgit 337–338 writing material 28–29, 131, 250 n. 24,
258, 261 n. 48