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Nepal in Pāla Buddhism

Historical considerations

4.2 Nepal in Pāla Buddhism

Nepal was not a passive recipient of the high culture of Pāla Buddhism. Rather, lay and renunciant religious from Nepal played a vital rôle in the constitution of Indian Vajrayāna, and the Nepalese together with the Kashmirians were the crucial intermediaries in its transmission to Tibet. Nonetheless, certain characteristic features of Nepalese Buddhism appear never to have been absorbed into Pāla Buddhism, nor to have been transmitted to Tibet. Similarly, there are elements of Indian Vajrayāna which, although they developed in Nepal, appear not to have found a place within Nepalese Vajrayāna. Thus we can speak of the Nepalese contribution to Pāla Buddhism as well as a distinctly Nepalese flavour of Buddhism which evolved through the Pāla period and beyond.

By Pāla Buddhism I mean the evolved form of Vajrayāna Buddhism which had Sanskrit as its canonical language; which was centred around a heartland of Magadha, Bihar and Bengal but reached as far as Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Kashmir and Tibet; and which, under the patronage of the Pāla dynasty (750–1150CE), supported a series of large monastic universities with formal Buddhist curricula. In fact, ‘Pāla Buddhism’ developed and prospered across a far larger cultural area than the Pālas ever controlled, and it continued for several decades after the Pālas were supplanted by the Senas. Pāla Buddhism may be said to end around 1200, when the great monastery founded by Dharmapāla, Vikramaśīla, was destroyed by Turkic-speaking mercenaries; Somapura, Odantipura and Nālandā all closed at about the same time, either as a result of raids by

Historical considerations 123

treasure-seeking mercenaries working for the Ghaznavids or Khaljis, or through neglect.14

For Nepal’s Buddhist community, the political collapse of the core patronage region of Indian Buddhism in the late 12th century led to a great refugee influx from the lowlands, and especially from those great East Indian monastic universities. The effect on the historical evidence is rather like the distinct narrow strata found in the geological record which mark vast cataclysms. Several beautiful manuscripts have been found in Nepalese monasteries which were produced outside the valley for non-Nepalese patrons before 1200, all of which suggests that they came into the valley along with their wealthy refugee owners. Tibetan biographies from the period, notably that of Dharmasvāmin, clearly record the desolate state of the Indian monastic universities and the dangerous conditions for travel in Magadha and Bihar.

Nepalese inscriptions throughout the mediæval period locate Nepāladeśa, Nepal, within Bhārata, India; from the mediæval Nepalese perspective they were not marginal or exterior to the larger cultural area, and the categories Nepalese and Indian were not mutually exclusive. Neither should we wheel in the somewhat rusty instruments of Sanskritization or the ‘Great’ and ‘Little’ traditions and a notion of subordinate inclusion;

for Vajrayānist Nepalese were already experts in producing and maintaining the intellectual products of the greater cultural region. This was most apparent from the outside: monasteries in Nepal were a training ground for Tibetans wishing to learn Sanskrit and the other languages they would need to participate in the academic life of Vikramaśīla, Somapura, or the other great monastic universities.

4.2.1 Nepal as a source of Pāla Buddhism

The Nepalese contribution to Pāla Buddhism has been documented with increasing clarity over the past decades, and indeed, the claim to a share of the responsibility for Indian Vajrayāna is popular among modern Newar Buddhists. In Naresh Man Bajracharya’s traditional history of Nepalese Buddhism (1998) we find a long list of Nepalese Buddhist scholars. From the careful study of Tibetan sources in Lo Bue (1997), however, emerges a clearer picture of the contribution Nepalese scholars and monks made to ‘high’ Pāla Buddhism in the tenth to twelfth centuries, and its transmission to Tibet. Although the emphasis in this article is on the rôle Nepalese played in transmitting Buddhism to Tibet, it can equally well be read for evidence of the contribution Newar scholars made to Indian Vajrayāna. Tibetan chronicles, which do provide a wealth of information on the movement of scholars and lineages, do not in general go back far enough to illuminate the formative period of Indic Vajrayāna. It is clear, however, both from material evidence and from the surviving ritual praxis, that Newar Vajrayāna predates its Tibetan cousin considerably. The Tibetan sources, which usually locate Nepal at the near edge of a Pāla Buddhism centred on Indian universities and pilgrimage sites, do not illuminate the tenacity of the Nepalese tradition.

Art historical evidence gathered by Huntington and Bangdel (2001) has led them to suggest that the Nepalese contribution to Pāla Buddhism was both earlier and more important than even the Newars usually claim. In particular, the iconography for the cult of Vajrasattva, which is fundamental to Indo-Tibetan Vajrayāna, can be tightly linked to that which appears in early Gaur sculpture. Elements of Vajrayāna iconography are found

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in Nepalese sculpture from at least the sixth century. While Huntington and Bangdel carefully refuse to propose a genetic relationship between the Gaur sculpture and the Nepalese material, we can at least say that the Nepalese Vajrasattva is as old as the oldest evidence we possess. It is, they say, quite possibly as important a site for the development of Buddhism as and Kashmir.15

I proposed above to distinguish between features of Nepalese Buddhism which were and remained local; features arising in Nepal which contributed to the development of later Indo-Tibetan Vajrayāna without becoming important in Nepalese Buddhism; and features which were acquired from the broader Indian (perhaps we should say

‘bhāratīya’) tradition. Let me offer an example of each before moving on to a longer discussion:

Characteristic cults (such as that of Mhaipi Ajimā), ritual or doctrinal systems (such as the mini-canon called the navadharma discussed at 3.1.1 on page 95 and 4.3.3 on page 144) and architectural types (the distinctive monastic architecture) appear to have developed and perdured in Nepal without a great deal of transformation through the Pāla period and afterwards.

The systematic cult of Vajrakīla had its genesis in the 9th century in Pharping, an outlying settlement on the rim of the Kathmandu Valley, and one of the three key figures was a Newar; yet the cult of Vajrakīla, systematized in Sanskrit, never took off within Nepal as it did among the Tibetans.16

Although the monasteries of Nepal did support active scholarly communities, the great monastic universities of the Pāla age were all in Bengal, Bihar and Magadha. These universities supported hundreds or thousands of students, as the great Tibetan monastic universities did. Thus the intellectual and material achievements of that great university culture—destroyed just as the great Western European universities were developing—flowed into Nepal, lending Nepalese Vajrayāna its doctrines, iconographies and ritual procedures. Even if some of the greatest scholars in those universities were Nepalese (e.g., Ratnakīrti), the work had to be done outside Nepal.

4.2.2 Persistent features

It is tempting at this point to launch into an exhaustive history of Nepalese Buddhism in the Pāla period. Recent research into Nepalese sources, such as that by Dhanavajra Vajrācārya or Kashinath Tamot, or that of Alexander von Rospatt and Erberto Lo Bue, which draws on a wide range of Nepalese, Tibetan and Indian sources, has revealed ever more historical detail, especially from 900CE onwards. For the purposes of this book, however, it is enough to establish that there was a distinctive identity to Nepalese Buddhism which contributed to the formation of Pāla Buddhism, and which formed the basis for the essentially conservative reinvention of Nepalese Buddhism in the 15th century. To be more precise, specific socio-religious structures, many of them closely tied to elements of the landscape, endured from the Pāla period in Nepal to the 15th

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century, and it is to these, rather than the lost pan-Indian tradition, that the composers of the Garland literature turned when they established sūtras for the Nepalese Buddhist community

Pilgrimage sites

Were we able to interrogate a Bengali, Konkani or Tibetan Buddhist of the Pāla period about Nepal, it is likely that they would name the great pilgrimage sites of

Mahācaitya and the Red Lokeśvara of Bũgama. Fixed within the Nepalese landscape, these great pilgrimage sites are the pegs on which much of Newar mythology and practical religion is hung, and the most durable symbols of Nepalese Buddhism in the wider Asian context. They are recorded in Chinese, Tibetan and Indian sources, as well as standing at the head of Nepalese origin stories for culture and religion. Both

and are identified in illustrations found in two 11th-century manuscripts. These manuscripts of the Prajñāpāramitā17 appear to constitute a sort of armchair pilgrim’s guide to the known Buddhist world. Between them they list sites as far off as Wu tai Shan in China, Śrīvijaya and Although both manuscripts are Nepalese in origin, they do not appear to unduly favour local attractions;

among the dozens of sites listed only these two are in Nepal, and there are no sites from elsewhere in the Himalayas or Tibet.18 Tibetan pilgrimage guides and biographies19 similarly identify these two sites. We know, too, that wealthy Indians were involved in a late 12th-century restoration of (Erhard 1991; von Rospatt 2000); and

and were the objects of pilgrimage for the Western Malla kings in the 13th century (Douglas 2003). Atīśa is recorded as visiting in 1041, the year he renovated and expanded Thã Bahi (Locke 1985:410–1).20

I know of no Indian sources that mention or before 1000CE. There are good reasons to date Svayambhū back at least to 400CE and to the 9th century, but we can say little about their fame beyond the bounds of before the later Pāla period. Lévi, reviewing the evidence from Chinese sources in the 7th century, believed there was a reference to in a fragment preserved from the account of Wang Hiuen-ts’e (1905: vol. I p. 159 n. 1), but the autobiography which would preserve full details of his three visits to Nepal is sadly lost. From the time of Atīśa’s visit to the present, though, we have ample evidence of pilgrimages to and from South and Central Asia. The social institutions that accompany these sites are equally durable. Each site has its special clergy, distinct from anything else in the Kathmandu Valley: has his Pañjus and its Buddhācāryas. While their specific origins are, for the moment, obscure, we know of at least one Pañju who was an active scholar in the late Pāla period, the White Pañju.21 Lo Bue (1997), who discusses the origins of du dKar po at some length, decides that he must be an Indian who settled in the Valley, thus ‘becoming’ a Newar. This is possible for other ācāryas, but not for a Pañju, which even then would almost certainly have been a closely guarded hereditary position.22. The distinct

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nomenclature of these ancient groups of professional religious, tied as they are to these two famous sites, may be a sign of their ability to attract pilgrimage from outside the valley. The consequent responsibility would of course be vestigial or completely lost now, but there may have been traces of this social structure still visible in the early decades of the Shah dynasty.

Teaching lineages

We know from Tibetan sources that there were teaching lineages which extended across the entire Buddhist world—indeed, much of the work of certain Tibetan texts is simply to document the teaching and initiation lineages which stand behind an individual or institution. There is at least one instance of a Nepalese manuscript (the RAS Vasantatilakā) which lists the Bengali pandit Vanaratna’s own lineage in its colophon, as well as one (Śāstrī 1917:144) which carefully notes that its sponsor,

was a student of Vanaratna.23 Such local teaching lineages which cross the boundaries between monasteries are known in Nepal, but there may have been teaching lineages which had a broader scope while retaining a regional basis.

The -śrīmitra lineage (already mooted at 2.1.8 on page 54), for example, appears to be a lineage of scholar-monks who train at Nālandā and Vikramaśīla with a significant Nepalese component. Evidence for this lineage comes from a variety of sources, but the crucial piece of evidence is an inscription from Nālandā described by Majumdar (1907).

It is undated, and records a teaching lineage of four scholars:

Maitrīśrīmitra, Aśokaśrīmitra and Vipulaśrīmitra. What is extraordinary about this inscription is that it allows us to recognize members of this lineage by their names;

Vipulaśrīmitra, who is commemorated in the inscription, erected a monastery for the Mitras. The composer of the inscription signs himself Kanakaśrī; presumably he is Vipulaśrīmitra’s student and actually Kanakaśrīmitra.24 We know a Kanakaśrī from Tibetan sources (Lo Bue 1997:653) who was a Newar incomer, born in Magadha and working at Vikramaśīla between 1038 and 1055, which agrees with the possible dates for this inscription. Although we know that the first person mentioned,

was resident at Somapura, his origins and those of most of the others in this inscription remain a mystery. Perhaps the most famous teacher with this name-element is Mañjuśrīmitra,25 one of own teachers. In this case, however, the name divides into Mañjuśrī+mitra, denying us the possibility of claiming an illustrious ancestor for this lineage. We do find a Buddhaśrīmitra, identified by Tārānātha as Nepalese—indeed, he is described as the leader of the at Vikramaśīla.26 However Naudou (1968:200) is unsure of either his name or his origins.

Tārānātha (1983:66) also mentions a Jñānaśrīmitra, a teacher of Atīśa. Skilling (1987) has written a useful study of a śāstra by one Dasabalaśrīmitra. He argues that Dasabalaśrīmitra is an Indian rather than Nepalese member of the same lineage, but follows Majumder in restricting the lineage to Nālandā.27 He also notes an inscription (Skilling 1987:14 and n 18) which identifies the rājaguru of Jayacandra, a

king (r. 1170-) as a Śrīmitra; this may or may not be Dasabalaśrīmitra. There is one Śrīmitra, however, for whom we have useful biographical information.28 In the sixth chapter of the SvP as well as in Wright’s chronicle we find the story of Dharmaśrīmitra.

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He is a Vikramaśīla pandit, specializing in the (MNS), who travelled through Nepal on his way to the mountain of Mañjuśrī—Wutai Shan in China or, in some versions, itself—to ask Mañjuśrī the meaning of the 12 āli in the MNS. Mañjuśrī, who has heard of his quest, comes to meet him in Nepal, disguised as a person plowing a field with a tiger and a lion.29 Mañjuśrī explains the secret syllables to Dharmaśrīmitra and chides the pandit for not recognizing the true identity of his teacher. In at least one version (Wright), Mañjuśrī magically manifests Thã Bahi (also known as Vikramaśīla Mahāvihāra) in order that they should have a place for teaching. According to von Rospatt (1999), the story is included in the SvP in order to establish the link between the caitya, the MNS and Mañjuśrī himself; the chapter explains why is a Dharmadhātu Vagīśvarakīrti

However, it may also preserve some historical details of the -śrīmitra lineage, as it links a -śrīmitra monk, Mañjuśrī, the Indian Vikramaśīla monastery, the Newar Vikramaśīla and

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