Three Buddhist Hymns from Nepal

David Gellner

Three Buddhist Hymns from Nepal

2004, Guthi (Nepal Samvat 1125)

Abstract

This short paper provides historical background to the singing of Buddhist hymns (bhajan) and translations of three popular hymns, two originally composed in Nepal Bhasa (Newari), one in Nepali.

ākṛṣṭavānasi bhavān anukampamānaḥ sūtrānubaddhaśakuni kramataḥsvayaṃmāṃ Oh so steadily, of your own accord, out of innate compassion, you draw me to yourself like a bird on a string!-Vedāntadeśika Devanāyakapañcāśat, 8 tanme samarpaya matiṃca sarasvatīṃca tvāmañjasāstutipadairyadahaṃdhinomi But give me mind and the goddess of the tongue for singing and I'll straight away delight you with words of praise!-Vedāntadeśika Varadarājapañcāśat, 4 The Poet and His God on the Road to Kāñcī It is full dark, so the story goes, on the road north to Kāñcīpuram near the river Peṇṇai. We are in the Tamil Land, in the deep south of India, sometime in the late thirteenth century. The great scholar, religious teacher, and poet, Vedāntadeśika, is on his way out of town, just a few miles down the road from the village of Tiruvahīndrapuram, the "Town of the Holy King of Serpents," near the coast. We must imagine the rest: all of a sudden, the air around him streams with light, a clear high incandescence that obliterates the darkness. Then, after this first bright explosion, a deep orange glow settles on everything. The paddy fields and crouching areca and palm groves bristle with tawny flames. And with the flames comes, impossibly, a gentle rain, sweet on the lips. A god stands before the great teacher-poet: it is Devanāyaka, "The Lord of Gods" himself, the form of the god Vishnu at Tiruvahīndrapuram, a god he has just left behind in the (p.4) village temple after evening worship. But now Devanāyaka stands on the road, a glistening black deity with his halo of burning air, his weapons shining, a monsoon cloud just before the rains. And the poet begins to weep; his hair stands on end. As he would later write of Devanāyaka: You never turn from those devotees, O Acyuta, whose minds, How is your waist still so thin, when you hold in your stomach the eggs Whatever the historical veracity of this encounter, the implications of the story's central image-the desire of a vividly embodied and beautiful god for the songs of a particular singer-devotee-is clear. The god of this poet seeks and enjoys his I will explore the many continuities between this thirteenth-to fourteenthcentury poet-philosopher and the earlier generation of Tamil poet-saints and Ācārya-poets who composed in Sanskrit; I will also discern ways in which Deśika's work represents a departure from both Āḻvārs and Ācāryas. Deśika's devotional poetry combines in a dynamic way the local/regional literary prestige of Tamil as a language of "emotions" with the pan-regional aesthetic prestige and power of Sanskrit (with Māhārāṣṭrī as Middle Indo-Āryan literary spice). Deśika's writings expand the linguistic field of South Indian devotion beyond the normative claims either of Sanskrit or Tamil devotional texts. His language passively mirroring earlier masters? 17 Ramanujan has claimed that traditional Indian commentators do not see Indian literature in historical perspective; rather they form what he calls-citing T. S. Eliot-a " 'simultaneous order,' where every new text within a series confirms yet alters the whole order ever so slightly, and not always so slightly." 18 How then does Deśika's Sanskrit and Tamil poetry "confirm yet alter" the "order" of South Indian literature, most specifically, the Tamil literature of devotion? Our A Note on Sources and Translation Stotras and Prabandhams All of the poems discussed in this book have been edited and commented upon by Śrīvaiṣṇava Ācāryas from the early years of this century, and, as far as I know, there are no significant textual variants (other than minor misreadings here and there) or textual (p.13) problems connected with any of them. Because Deśika's Sanskrit stotras have a long history of liturgical use in temples, there are many editions of the "Deśika Stotra Mālā," including little pamphlets printed for use at

This article continues a series of publications on Tibetan texts dedicated to various Buddhist deities, discovered in Khara-Khoto within a large corpus of texts from the Tangut State period (11th–13th centuries). While the main part of this corpus was brought by Petr Kozlov to Saint Petersburg in 1909, a small yet significant collection was later acquired by Aurel Stein as a result of his 1913–1915 expedition. Among Stein’s collection kept at the British Library (London) is a single manuscript folio, IOL Tib M 143, which contains what appears to be an entire text entitled Gtsug gtor rnam par rgyal ma’i bstod pa byin brlabs can (“The Hymn to Uṣṇīṣavijayā with the Blessing”), the colophon lacking any other details including the author’s name. It is one of several pieces of textual evidence highlighting the important role of the cult of the goddess Uṣṇīṣavijayā, one of the most popular long-life deities, in 12th and early 13th century Tangut Buddhism. I would date the manuscript to this period as it features some elements of old orthography. This hymn is not found in the Tibetan Buddhist canon and may have been composed by a Tibetan-speaking author. This assumption is indirectly supported by the analysis of the assonances, alliterations and sometimes even rhymes in the text, which reveal a high level of poetic craftsmanship. Such sophistication might be less expected from a translation, although this does not preclude the possibility of a translation being equally skillful. The text consists of eight stanzas of praise and two stanzas of prayer, the latter seemingly referred to as “the blessing” in the title. The praising part moves from describing Uṣṇīṣavijayā’s divine nature, merits, and main iconographic features to her spiritual and soteriological roles. The iconographic part is not very detailed, it omits attributes held by her in the eight hands or colors of her three faces. However, I provide these details in my paper for a fuller picture. The text of the manuscript is published as a diplomatic transliteration, where I attempted to address several issues with unclear places, particularly reconstructing lacunas caused by holes in the folio. I believe that, except for one or two instances, I was able to arrive at a reliable version. The full English translation of the text is also supplied. While the hymn does not explicitly provide any historical information concerning the cult of Uṣṇīṣavijayā among the Tanguts, this edition may prove useful for scholars of Tangut Buddhism. Perhaps they will be able to identify its Tangut or Chinese version among Khara-Khoto fragments.

Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahāyāna culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic Hindu-Buddhist civilization. This paper will examine how two stories, the Sṛṇgabheri Avadāna and the Siṃhalasārthabāhu Avadāna, have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. The former recounts the consecutive, linked lives of a husband and wife, in a story of karmic retribution and reunion, a narrative that has a role in contemporary Buddhist widow mourning rites at the major stūpa in Nepal, Svayambhu. The latter, among the most popular jātaka narratives in the Buddhist world, relates the fate of a group of Buddhist merchants who are shipwrecked and captured by cannibalistic demonesses; in Nepal, this story was transposed into a tale of trans-Himalayan conf lict, and its central figure is regarded as a hometown hero. Until today, a three-day festival procession of him circumnavigates the city of Kathmandu. This paper will explore these local domestications of Buddhist stories and analyze how these traditional celebrations have changed in the context of the shifting regional and political landscape of Nepal and the region. Among all the Sanskrit story narratives available in the vast archive of textual collections in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal, certain Buddhist tales among them found special provenance in the Mahāyāna culture of the Newars, the indigenous inhabitants of this surviving oasis of later Indic Hindu-Buddhist civilization. Although they speak a Tibeto-Burmese language, Newars preserve the many strands of culture characteristic of later Indic Buddhism. In a community whose living Buddhist traditions trace its origins back at least 1500 years, and where later traditions of Vajrayāna Buddhism have been woven into a rich fabric of Mahāyāna Buddhism, it is still the case today that jātaka and avadāna narratives remain central to Newar Buddhists. This paper examines the prominent stories that have been domesticated into the local religious field and adopted with special meaning for subgroups in the local society. I have defined 'domestication' as the dialectical process by which a religious tradition is adapted to a region's or ethnic group's socioeconomic and cultural life. 1 While 'Great traditions' supply a clear spiritual direction to followers who are close to the charismatic founders, including norms of orthodox adaptation and missionizing, religious traditions' historical survival is related-often paradoxically-to their being 'multivocalic' so that later devotees have a large spectrum of doctrine, situational instructions, and exemplary folktales to draw on. The study of 'religious domestication' seeks to demonstrate the underlying reasons for selectivity from the whole as the tradition evolves in specific places and times to the 'logic of the locality' (Figure 1).

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