Selected Chapters from the Tantrasadbhāva, Based on the tradition of 11th century Śaiva Sanskrit Manuscripts in Nepal

Abstract

Old Śaiva manuscripts have survived in Nepal because this area has a favorable climate in which manuscripts could be preserved in good condition, and because of the communities which have been continuously engaged in protecting and reproducing copies of the manuscripts. As for its geographical importance, Nepal functions as a central hub, linking the different cultures of adjoining regions together. This is true in the case of Śaiva traditions and other traditions as well. In particular, many old Buddhist manuscripts which were stored in India were brought to Nepal by travellers passing through the Kathmandu Valley on their way to Tibet, and they have been preserved there up to the present day. The project of my dissertation has been to focus on Śaiva Sanskrit manuscripts, particularly ones produced around the 11th century, to understand the environment surrounding the transmission of Śaiva knowledge in Nepal.

The First chapter of the present thesis deals with twenty Sanskrit manuscripts of eighteen Śaiva works which were produced around the 11th century in Nepal. These old Nepalese palm-leaf manuscripts function as a significant witness to the transmission of Śaiva literature. Based on an examination of their palaeographical, philological, and codicological features, e.g. script, layout, and final colophon — the last of which generally contains the date of its production, and the names of its scribes, owner, copying place, etc., I have attempted to delineate the details of the transmission of Śaiva knowledge at the time. A manuscript of the Tantrasadbhāva which is recorded to have been copied in the late 11th century is one of the selected manuscripts. This text has been handed down to us only through Nepalese manuscripts although this work has often been quoted by Kashmirian Śaiva authors. The extant Nepalese recension of the Tantrasadbhāva is closely related to other important Śaiva texts, e.g., the Svacchanda and the Kubjikāmata.

The introduction reviews the position of the Tantrasadbhāva in the development of Śaivism and its interactions with non-Śaiva traditions through textual analysis, i.e. passages of the Tantrasadbhāva quoted by later authors, the Tantrasadbhāva’s borrowing of passages from other sources, and its influence on later texts. And the latter part of the introduction discusses the Tantrasadbhāva’s peculiarity of language, namely the aiśa phenomena, and introduces the editorial conventions used in the present study.

Several chapters of the Tantrasadbhāva, which appear in print for the first time, are critically edited and translated in the main part of the dissertation. The contents of the selected chapters are as follows: chapter 1 introduces the essential doctrine of the Tantrasadbhāva, which was taught at the urging of Devī. Chapter 3 includes a system of encoding mantras, called the nādiphāntakrama (this is the part of this chapter that has been edited and translated here). Chapter 9 illustrates various kinds of Śaiva initiation and related rituals, and chapter 18 deals with the Śaiva code-language called chommakā. And the last chapter, 28, explicates the path of the movement of the ātman which is based on all the practices and rituals which were taught earlier in the Tantrasadbhāva. In addition, it has been necessary to consider the Nepalese recension of the Svacchandatantra, which is titled Svacchandalalitabhairava in the manuscripts, in relation with the Tantrasadbhāva. Therefore, the parallels between Svacchandalalitabhairava chapters 4 and 7 and Tantrasadbhāva chapters 1, 9, and 28 are edited in the Appendices. In addition, the ācāryābhiṣeka and sādhakābhiṣeka sections of Bhojadeva’s Siddhāntasārapaddhati, whose descriptions are identical to ones of the Tantrasadbhāva, are also critically edited here.