On Indian Sanskrit literature

We come across the word itihasa in probably the oldest manuscript of southern Buddhism. In the Sutta Nipata, Sela Sutta, PTS 7, p.105, ed. 1997 we read: “Tena kho pana …. itihásapañcamámam …” : At that time a brahmin called Sela lived in Ápana. He was well versed in the three Vedas, vocabulay, prosody, rhetoric, etymology, history (itihasa), versed in metre, a grammarian, … etc.

Early May 2020 Sangham, resp. Srijan Talks uploaded a long exposé held by Mr. Bibek Debroy⁽¹⁾ on the subject of itihasa and its meaning. The subtext of this Youtube-file reads: “Itihasa has connotations of a timeless history, chronologically written description of important, special and public sector events of the person, society, country, chronological analysis of facts and events. Itihasa means ‘This is indeed what happened’. Itihasa came to be applied to the Ramāyan[a], the Mahābhārata and the Puránas which are part of our culture and history.”

In this same video Mr. Debroy explains a number of technical terms and he speaks about the Pune “critical edition” of the Rāmayāna in 80.000 slokas, and the Baroda “critical edition” of the Mahābhārata, “in size about 1/3 of the Rāmayāna”.

As far as ancient texts about legislation, jurisdiction and policy goes he explains how the Manu Sánghita “tells us about the most important 17 kinds of cases which the king should try in order of priority”. He explains how the funeral rites are given in the Garuda purána (translated by Ernest Wood and S.V. Subrahmanyam, an online file), and that “the way (hindu) temples are constructed”⁽²⁾ is given in the Matsu purána.

There is lots more of interesting information about the Sanskrit language, information that deserves a wider audience. For instance the word Padaga: tree (not in Monier-Williams) has the root “pi” (speak: “bhe”) for “drinking”. Therefore, he says, padaga has both “foot” (pada) and “pi”. Therefore the literal meaning of the word tree is “drinking with its feet”. Is this important? Yes, it reminds us of our duty to avert or overcome desertification.

Mr. Debroy furthermore explains how a certain Jayadeva has been the first poet, as to Western standards, rhyme-and-all, but that the Sanskrit poem is syllabical and has rhythm (beat) as its most important aspect.

Lastly we should know that Mr. Debroy has by now translated one⁽³⁾ of the main eighteen puránas, and plans to translate a further two. These are, or will be, the first translations by his hand into English. The above-mentioned Garuda purána is one of the other already translated texts.

(1) Bibek Debroy is an economist and was educated in Ramakrishna Mission School, Narendrapur; Presidency College, Kolkata; Delhi School of Economics and Trinity College, Cambridge. Presently, he is Chairman, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister and Member, NITI Aayog, Government of India. He has worked in Presidency College, Kolkata (1979-83), Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics, Pune (1983-87); Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, Delhi (1987-93); as the Director of a Ministry of Finance/UNDP project on legal reforms (1993-98); Department of Economic Affairs (1994-95); National Council of Applied Economic Research (1995-96); Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (1997-2005); PHD Chamber of Commerce and Industry (2005-06); and Centre for Policy Research (2007- 2015).
He has authored/edited several books, papers and popular articles and has also been a Consulting/Contributing Editor with several newspapers.

(2) Just as the staff of the East India Company called the island of Phuket “Junk Ceylon” (a junk is a particular kind of vessel, and the greenery of the island remined them of Ceylon [Sri Lanka]), so they had a joking “shaking the pagoda tree” in which sentence the “pagoda” in fact was/is the southern Indian Hindu temple.

(3) In three volumes. The puránas cover a wide range of teaching, astronomical, astrological, geographic, chronological, religious mythology and ethical discussion. One of Mr. Debroys critics deplores how the author omitted “all of the lunar dynastic lists”. Perhaps the next two translations will remedy this.

DRAVIDIAN AND ARYAN

As an introduction to Dr. Swamy’s word on Aryans and Dravidians we must repeat Prof. R. Choudhary’s remarks (“The History of Bihar”, 1958, p.15) how the clan in which the historical Buddha was born, was not of Aryan origin. Prof. Choudhary states that nor the Hindu Vedas, nor Manu (Manu smrti) mention Magadha as a nation or a people (in today’s Bihar in India). He says: “Magadha belonged to the Munda and non-Aryan group.”

This explains how Buddhists as of the coming to be of Gautama (Gotama, or Sakya-muni) Buddha did not bother with vedic (pre-Hindu) rites or Aryan cultural strictures such as not marrying “lower castes”, or not sitting down and eating with these “lower castes”, and so on.

“Aryans vs. Dravidians” is a Myth”

Conversation between Dr. Subramanian Swamy and Abhaey Singh
The Festival of Bharat, publ. July 31, 2018

Dr. Swamy:
“The other pollution in our history is these words “Dravidian” and “Aryan”. The word Dravidian was first known to be used by (the 8th cent.) Adi Shánkara. When he started what is so typically Indian: no conquest by war but by shastra, which means debate. So Buddhists had taken over (the north) and Adi Shánkara made it a mission to revive and bring back Hinduïsm.”

(In fact Adi Shánkara created “Hinduïsm” by amalgamating many though not all dharmic schools in one and starting what is now known as advaita vedánta.)

“So he (Adi Shánkara) challenged scholars of Buddhism to debate. … The Buddhist scholar was Múndara Mishra. … plus another scholar from the Úttara Mimámsa school.” (Another atheïst school.)
One of the debater’s wife, the Buddhists or the Mimamsists presided over the debate.
“She asked Adi Shánkara: “who are you?” And he said: “I’m drávida shishu.” (shíshu means child). “But what is this word “drávida“?” He said, ‘it’s a sandhi (linking) of two words: Tr[a] and vid. Tr means 3; vid means coast.’ “So where the three coasts meet
there is Drávida. So it’s a regional term. South India is Drávida.
Unfortunately the British pounced on that and made it a racial thing. …”

“The word “Aryan” doesn’t exist in Sanskrit literature. “Arya” means “a civilised person”, an accomplished person, a gentleman or a lady, that sort of thing. It (the word) was never part of the community.

(Commentary: The word “aryan” does exist in Sanskrit literature, though not in the racial sense of the word, not as the name of an ethnicity. “In later times”, says the Monier-Williams dictionary, “arya” came into use for “the first three castes” as opposed to the ‘caste’ of Shúdra, peasants, blue collar workers. Earlier the Buddhist scriptures used the word arya as in arya-púdgala (Hybr. Sanskr.) or arya-púggala (Pali): person of lofty qualities.
In the Pali Culavamsa (PTS, 1973, p.239) we find the word “arya” with reference to the Pandu (or Pandya) dynasty of Southern India.)

“So the British created a history where they said that the whole of India was full of Dravidians; then the Aryans came from Europe through Khyber Pass and beat the hell out of the Dravidians and asserted themselves. And then they provoked the South Indians to rebel against the north under the term that “this country is really yours”. And Karnátaka didn’t accept it, and Kérala didn’t accept it, and Andhra (Pradesh) didn’t accept it, but Tamil Nadu became a victim of that. And so the Dravidian movement was started. …. .

“In fact (before the British took over) they (the Tamils) used to celebrate “Raman lila” as opposed to “Ram[a] lila” (lila, also leela), because Ram[a] was “Aryan”, a northerner (and Raman was perceived as being a southerner).
Now they’ve stopped (the conflagration of Raman and Ram) and I made a contribution (to that).”

(Although even as recent as 2019 the wikipedia editor states that the demi-god Raman is in fact the Hindu demi-god Rama, who in popular parlance is referred to as Ram.
Therefore Dr. Swamy has his work cut out; wikipedia uploaders tend to be extremely stubborn.)

Thereafter Mr. Swamy relates the rather contemporary story, i.e. dating from the colonial era, that says that Raman was killed by Rama and that therefore Ram[a] ruled supreme over the south. “But the truth is that Raman was also a northerner. … He went to Manosarovar and Lord Shiva gave him this boon” (of ruling over a swath of land).

“This (perceived) division is now being exploded by DNA studies.”

Mr Swamy goes on saying that recent DNA studies revealed that there is no racial difference between south and north. All Indians of Indian stock have the same DNA. The Dravidians are not a different race; they are merely the folks that live in the south, “between the three coasts” as Adi Shánkara explained it.

The scholar Rómila Thapar established quite a theory around the word “aryan” (not arya) that she wrongly assumes to appear in the Hindu Vedas. In section 3 of a series of 5 talks on Ms Thapar the publicist Rajiv Malhotra deals with this and other questions that can be raised listening to the otherwise distinguished Ms Thapar or reading her publications on the subject.

July 2019:

The former head of the Archaeological Survey of India, B.B. Lal, shows in of his three volumes book on the Harappan Culture: “Facets of Indian Civilization –  Recent Perspectives” (Delhi 1999) how brick fragments found at both the Harappan site and that of Mohenjodaro in the Punjab show what is called the swastika. From this fact he deduces that the swastika — in the 20th Century so intrically linked with “Third Reich” Nazis and their claim to fame as descendants of Central Asian “Aryans” that swept into Western Europa as well as India to establish their culture —  is an Indian, or at least Indic symbol, and that considering this fact the “Aryan invasion-theory”, first promoted by British settlers in India, cannot hold.

At the same time we cannot overlook that the Tochars of the 5th-10th Century held the swastika as national, ethnic, or cultural symbol. Neither can we overlook the fact that we find this symbol on the glazed wall of at least one religious building in Tashkent.

While the invasion-theory seems to be lacking, or needs to be discarded, we might as well adopt a new “Aryan-theory”, or at least a “swastika-theory” and call it the “Aryan export-theory”. One has the impression that Harappan-Punjabi merchants and others who settled in western lands decorated their buildings with a sign that they considered symbolic of their ethnic or national roots: here lives a Indian.

Vasant Shinde and his team, connected with the Deccan College of Pune, published the result of a study in the DNA of skeletal remains of a group of Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) peoples who lived at a place called Rakhigarhi in Haryana, India. This group lived before 7000 BC and is now recognised as an indigenous people. The DNA study suggests “no notable migration of people and claims to have dismantled the Aryan Invasion Theory.” S. Venkat Narayan from Sri Lanka cited this result in the newspaper The Island of September 7, 2019.
The Deccan College group goes on saying that “This breakthrough research completely sets aside the Aryan migration-invasion theory. The skeleton remains found in the upper part of the Citadel area of Mohenjo Daro (now in Pakistan’s Sindh province) belonged to those who died due to floods and were not massacred by Aryans as hypothesised by British Archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler.“

Sanyassa

Especially during the lifetime of Sri Rajneesh, a Hindu guru, the word sanyassa, resp. sanyassin frequently occured in western circles where one tried to follow one or other of the Indian dharmic systems.

In the true sense of the word, someone who sees him or herself free from wordly context, free from conventions, free from rules, is called a sanyassin. This appelation solely regards the followers of the Hindu dharma. In Buddhism this total freedom of it all merely occurs in tantric practices, and in that case the person is not a sanyassin but a tantri.

Cause and effect

Creation, says Hinduïsm, is the result of a cause. That is, the highest Hindu god, by the name of Krishna, Brahman, or any other name, causes himself, or itself, to manifest in different forms. Hence Hinduïsm speaks of “result-cause“. We first see the result, and on the basis of this we infer that which caused the result: result being the manifest, and cause is he who manifests. This in contrast to the Abrahamic assumption of cause (= God) and result or effect (= the universe).

In classical Sanskrit “result-cause”, in the Vedic-Hinduistic sense is given as phalam, result, or parināma, and
adihetu, first cause, or adikārana, first cause, i.e. the divine mind.

In contrast to this Buddhism rejects the notion of causation or creation in the absolute sense of the word, whether it be in the Hinduistic sense or the Abrahamic. There is no causation-creation of the universe, no causation-creation of beings. There is an ongoing cycle of matter and time in which cycle no ultimate cause, creation, or creator can or needs to be be discerned.
Here the component hetu, as in the Sanskrit adihetu where it carries the meaning of first cause, is considered a relative designation as in the Pāli-word hetu-paccaya: cause and condition(ing) when describing the cyclical wheel of life where one link causes another to act or react. (Pratyaya in Hybrid Sanskrit)
So also the Pāli-word vipāka, product / effect, needs to be understood in the ethical sense of the word, and not as an absolute. (Vipaksa in Hybrid Sanskrit) It stands for the product of karma-producing actions, and not as the effect of ultimate causation or creation.

Ksanti / khanti

The illustration given has the Sanskrit word ksanti in classical Chinese script. Chinese Buddhism knows three forms of ksanti: ksanti that endures hatred, ksanti that endures physical hardship, and ksanti in pursuit of the Buddhist goal. We find this threefold ksanti in Soothill and Hodous’ “Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms” and they, as other Western translators, give “pursuing the Buddhist goal” as “pursuing the religious goal”. That’s how they were raised; beside religion you had the void.

Tolerance, says a 20th/21rst Cent. Indian writer, ought to be understood in its Latin form as tolerating the unavoidable, tolerating the perhaps even unwanted other.
Of course we find the word tolerance in health and medical circles as tolerance or intolerance to this or that medicine. In that case a purely physical process is meant, not a moral appreciation of the to be tolerated.

All three dictionaries, Soothill and Hodous (Chinese), Monier-Williams (classical Sanskrit), and Pāli Text Society (Pāli) mention the word “tolerance” when describing or translating the word ksanti (Sanskrit) or khanti (Pāli) — among other possible translations, that is.

The word tolerance however, does not apply. “Patient endurance” is a more common translation of ksanti/khanti but even this is not entirely satisfactory.

It is in Franklin Edgerton’s dictionary “Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit” that we find a fully satisfactory translation by the hand of the late Louis Finot, chronicler of the Societé Asiatique. Finot cites the Rāstrapālapariprcchā (RP 34,13-14) when giving the

“nāham … tesām … ānulomikām api ksāntim vadāmi, kutah punar buddhajnānam” as “I do not attribute to them even the intellectual receptivity that conforms (to continued religious development), still less Buddha-knowledge.”

In other words “patient endurance” is a satisfactory translation of the word ksanti/khanti, “receptivity” is even better. It presupposes a hearer who is prepared to listen with an open mind without preconceptions; i.e. s/he is receptive.
Even E. Buswell Jr. (trained in Korean Buddhism) and D.S. Lopez (trained in Himalayan philosophy) received ksanti from their masters as “Not to be overwhelmed by the profound nature of reality but instead to be receptive or acquiescent to it.”
Therefore, Mahāhāyanism throughout the Indian, Himalayan and Korean lands seems to be of the same opinion when it comes to the intrinsic meaning of ksanti. Moreover, they do not disagree with the Theravādan khanti as “patient endurance”.

Hinduïsm, that is, modern Hinduïsm sees (Skr.) ksanti in the yogic-meditative practice as the ability to abstraction.

Nibbuta and upekkhā/upekshā

What enlightenment is, is the most foolish question one can ask. Only the enlightened could say and s/he’s not talkative, at least not the Buddhist one.
Nevertheless, as a result of recent publications about a Tibetan master who emerged from his solitary retreat, a master who since can’t stop smiling, the question popped up again, and the concept of “being extinguished” and its accoutrements needs to be addressed.
I’m not going to analyse the master’s state of mind. That would be disrespectful. Instead I will delve a little bit in a couple of enlightenment-related words that are etymologically nearly identical in Buddhism and Hinduïsm, but cover very different contents in each of these philosophies.

“Being extinguished”, i.e. being enlightened, or having attained, is in the Pali language, the holy language of the Theravāda or Small Vehicle “aggi nibbuto“. Aggi meaning ‘fire’, nibbuto meaning ‘it is extinguished’. As far as the few texts go that Franklin Edgerton studied, of which he produced a dictionary a similar concept does not appear in Mahāyanistic Hybrid Sanskrit manuscripts. Hence the condition of being enlightened seems to be treated / appraised / analysed differently in both main streams of Buddhism. The Northern enlightened person doesn’t stop smiling – so it seems, his Southern counterpart looks content but doesn’t raise the corners of his lips or shows his teeth.

The classical Sanskrit of the Hindu and pre-Hindu philosophies has the words ‘agni‘, fire, and ‘nibbuta‘, but as far as the Monier-Williams dictionary goes there is no combining of the two, at least not in the sense of ‘being enlightened’, ‘having reached extinction’.

Nibbuta in the Buddhist sense of the word is closely related to another word: upekkhā. This word too appears in Hindu of pre-Hindu scriptures: upekshā.

Roshen Dalal in his “Hinduism: An Alphabetical Guide” states that upeksha is “the cultivation [of] indifference to the vices of others.”
The Monier-Williams dictionary has a list of possibilities; upeksha denotes a number of negative states of mind: “overlooking”, “disregarding”, and/or “indifferent”.
The first radio-speaker on Buddhism in England, a Hindu scholar, and those writers and translators who delved into the Buddhist lore used this Monier-Williams Hindu-based translation when speaking about the Buddhist concept of upekkhā. They concluded that the Buddhists too considered life full of suffering (dukkha – Pali / duhkha – Sanskrit). To alleviate this suffering, they went on, the Buddhists longed for a new life and on the way to rebirth (reïncarnation, they used the hinduïstic concept) they cultivated upekkhā, the above-mentioned negative states of mind with regard to everything worldly.

It has taken nearly 100 years before this broken pot was mended and put upright. Upekkhā in the Buddhist sense of the word means, roughly, equanimity, not indifference. Dark Dream (what’s in a name) has a very nice explanation of the constituant parts of upekkhā: “Upekkhā is formed from the prefix upa and the root ikh meaning, “to see.” The prefix upa generally means unto, to, towards, near, with; it has the notion of bringing towards or with.”
Dark Dream’s commentators generally destroy his apposition to this other word of apekhha, but I think he deserves better; those Theravādin can be so harsh and unforgiving.

To give a very nice insight into the intrinsic meaning of the Buddhist upekkhā a passage out of the (Greater) Lion’s Roar (PTS MN  I.12; 79-80), a Theravāda (or Small Vehicle) text in which Buddha reminisces on his path towards enlightenment when he was still on the path of the sadhu, the life-denying ascetic, though already possessed with fully developed loving-kindness (metta) and upekkhā:

“Then I lay down to sleep in a charnel ground (a field of bones where the dead, i.e. the sadhus and the poorest who would/could not be cremated, were abandoned), leaning on a skeleton. A bunch of cows (gomandala) having come up to me, dribbled  on me, splattered their stool on me,  showered me with dust and stuck twigs into my ears. But not by me was an evil heart created against them. This then came to be for me through abiding in upekkhā (even-mindedness, equanimity).”

9-headed naga

PART 3

The picture here is that of the “naga ramps” along the stairs at Doi Suthep, the highest hill near the Northern Thai city of Chiang Mai.

As a general introduction to the naga (pronounce: naaga) one might repeat Suhas Chatterjee’s “Indian Civilization and Culture” (Delhi 1998):

“The Naga or serpent cult had been a dominant cult all over India. The two seals of Indus valley demonstrate the serpent worship prevalent among the Mohenjodaro people. In (the vedic scriptures) Yayur Veda and Atharva Veda we get the reference of serpent worship. During the reign of Kushana king Hubiska (ruled between 111 and 180 [and must have ascended the throne as an infant]) a naga statue was installed in a tank (a water reservoir). The naga was considered the guardian of the treasures and the guiding spirit of the departed soul of the ancestors. … (Hindu god) Vishnu rests on the S(h)esa naaga, (hindu god) S(h)iva wears snake (phanibhusan). Parsvanath, the Jaïn saint has the snake symbol.”

Mr. Chatterjee’s entry says nothing about a nine-headed naga, but India Profile states that in Hindu philosophy the snake with “nine heads represents finality, unity with the forces of nature and the ideal state of spiritual liberation.”

There are some more references to nine-headed nagas in Hindu literature, but they all seem to amount to the same concepts of finality, auspiciousness, and even are seen as an avatar of god Vishnu.

One might think that the nine-headed naga is a Khmer-adaptation of the Indian Hindu lore, but Zhou Daguan, a Chinese envoy in the late 13th century, relates a legend regarding the Phimeanakas, one of the Cambodian Angkor-monuments. He says:
“Inside the palace there is a gold tower [the Phimeanakas], at the summit of which the king sleeps at night. The local people all say that in the tower lives a nine-headed snake spirit which is the lord of the earth for the entire country. Every night it appears in the form of a woman, and the king first shares his bed with her and has sex with her. […] If for a single night this spirit does not appear, the time has come for this […] king to die. If for a single night he stays away, he is bound to suffer a disaster.” (http://www.angkorguide.net/en/library/naga/naga693.html)
It is of interest to note that the Mekong river was of old called the river of nine dragons. Naga, dragon, nine, all these have been powerful symbols in Indo-China, in India, and in China.

Indo-China developed its own mythology concerning the snake that in a deïfied form appeared as naga, even a naga with multiple heads, upto nine heads.
Did the Khmer kings, or rather, did their purohita (Hindu or Brahmanical house priest) adjust the indigenous legends around the snake/naga to fit or co-embrace the Indian symbol, and was the Indian lore their only reference, or the reference that building masters-cum-artists relied on?
As we see above Chinese envoys were sent to the Angkor court, and Angkorians most certainly have travelled to China. And China too had its mythological theories about snakes and a nine-headed snake monster by the name of Xiangliu. And Chinese mythology knows Kung Kung, the serpent god with nine heads, a god of wisdom.
Furthermore, says another source, “The number nine is special in China as it is the largest possible single digit. … Nine was considered the number of the emperor.”

Hence we might conclude that the Khmer kings and their courtiers did not only amalgamate Hinduïsm, Buddhism (that knows a naga in its one-, respectively five-headed form) and the indigenous belief system, but at least it tried to please the Chinese envoys as well. By positioning nine-headed nagas at the entrance of their palatial complexes they sent the message abroad: the Chinese emperor, might he wish to visit us will be welcomed by the number nine that he alone is allowed to employ, either in artefacts or in embroideries on his costumes. And at the same time the Khmer king issued an implicit statement: me too, I’m an emperor in my own right.

In the Chinese-Tibetan southeastern region, near the town of Nyingchi, one observes a natural phenomeon where the wind causes the clouds between the slopes of the forests of Bomi, Zayu and Loyu to form fumes now called “ancient dragon spruces”. They can reach heights of over 80 metres and diameters of 2.5 metres. One must surmise that in olden days these fumes were given names like “dragon” or “naga” or anything similar in Tibetan language.

March 13, 2022: The Korean newspaper the Korea Times (https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/03/177_324712.html) uploaded a page on North- and South-Korean temples where the theme “dragon” (= naga) is used. The picture shows a panel in the South-Korean Tongdo-temple.

• The full moon day of August is for Nepalese the day on which they pay respect to the naga. The day is called “Shrawan Shukla Panchámi”. Here as elsewhere the naga (or nag) is seen as the god of rain resp. water. And rain, that is, good growing conditions for the crops bestows wealth and prosperity on those Hindus who honour the naga.