Did you follow up on this in any other posts? The suspense is killing me! Srsly.
Your reference to Sangharakshita's observation about "partly digested Hinduism" in the form of references to Sri, Laksmi and Saraswati, is fascinating. Did you know that Ambedkar claimed that Lakshmi was *originally* a Buddhist Goddess - and that the Hindus ripped Her off?
Personally I think this goes much further than "partly digested Hinduism". When it comes to Saraswati I think it is simply a matter of Buddhists and Hindus worshipping the same Goddess (speaking broadly of Hindus and Buddhists generally - not just in terms of the Golden Light Sutra). Lakshmi (and Sri) is a more complex case - probably involving the Buddhist Goddess Tara taking on many of Lakshmi's qualities (I think I read that in Miranda Shaw's book on Buddhist Goddesses of India) - but of course Buddhist Tara is also linked to Hindu Tara - and to the Maha Devi more generally.
I also think I remember reading in Shaw's book that the real explosion of the Buddhist cult of Tara coincides closely with the rise of Goddess worship very generally in Hinduism. Which would imply that the whole concept of "the rise of Goddess worship in Hinduism" is misleading - there was actually a rise of Goddess worship, period, which was reflected in both Hinduism and Buddhism - and which spread throughout all of India, Central Asia and China. But maybe I'm getting a little carried away. But maybe not.
Hi Cornelius. Yes many of my posts since this one (as I write post no.90 is about to go live) could be considered follow-ups to this one. If you look in the labels and click on Gombrich for instance you will see that I'm still fascinated particularly by his discovery of many parallels with the Upaniṣads. Other labels such as Vedic Studies, the two posts on the Avalokiteshvara mantra continue some of these themes.
Ambedkar's claim may relate to something that Rhys Davids wrote in his book Buddhist India where he says that Sri (aka Lakṣmi) was not a Vedic goddess and appears first in early Buddhist texts (or perhaps iconography I'd have to check).
Tārā is also said to have taken attributes and names from Durga. And yes I think there is something in the idea of a pan-Indian interest in Śakti based religious practices emerging perhaps around the 10th century. However don't forget that as early as the 8000 line Perfection of Wisdom Sutra (ca 1st century bce) Prajñāpāramitā was being referred to as the Mother of all the Buddhas.
As I say in my post on Religion in India and the West it was actually the norm for religious communities to draw on outside influences in India. Because we've grown with Christian models of stamping out heresy we haven't clocked that there is another model which is to assimilate it. In that post I contrast the two approaches with the business models of Microsoft ad AT&T Bell.
Interesting post, thanks for redirecting me to it. I just wonder whether it makes sense to speak of lumps of "Hinduism", no matter how digested they might have been. Were the Buddhists who "ate" them aware of their coming from a different milieu? If not, as I am inclined to believe, could not we just speak of trends which involved all believers in India? For instance, at a certain point, the idea of a personal relationship with a compassionate Superior entity became popular. I would not say that the ones borrowed it from the others. By the way, heresy is only one of the ways Christianism dealt with other beliefs. Almost all paleo-christian churchs have been built on temples. They re-use the temples' sacred space and their architectural elements, and, more importantly, they are often dedicated to the *same deities*, with only a slightly modified name ("Saint Giovenale" instead of Giove –italian name for Juppiter– and so on).
Yes. With some hindsight I think the "lumps of undigested Hinduism" is a rather unfortunate phrase that I picked up from my Buddhist Teacher. I probably wouldn't use it now.
Clearly the Tantric phase of India religion, for example, seems to have affected everyone - even Muslims! (I know someone who does Tantric Sufi meditation practices).
I agree that early in the life of European Christianity that churches were built on the site of former temples - carrying on a tradition of the Classical Romans I believe. But how long did this period last? I think by medieval times the pattern of persecuting heresy was well established. It became one of the defining features of European Christianity.
Dear Jayarava, yes, I agree, the example of Tantra fits quite nicely in the picture. "Tantrism" seems to have been some sort of an "horizontal religious movement", cutting through all "vertical religions".
As for Christianism, I am not an expert, but I would say that inclusivism is quite alive within it. Inter-religious dialogue itself is, unfortunately, often carried out within this perspective ("we accept you, because you say what we say, although you say it only partially"…).
I follow Geoffrey Samuel and Ronald Davidson in seeing Tantra as a kind of grand synthesis, perhaps in response to the invasion of the Huns and the collapse of the Gupta Empire. The resulting crisis was not only material but spiritual.
My experience as a Buddhist is that Christian responses to other faiths is a very mixed bag. But I would argue that present day inclusiveness is a very new thing, and far from universal.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
[Image]I'm just back from a foray down to London where I picked up a copy of Alexander Studholme's book The origins of Om Manipadme Hum : a Study of the Karandavyuha Sutra. I read enough on the train coming back from Cambridge to have a major realisation.
Some time ago in pursuing my interest in mantra I began to delve into Vedanta and Veda. Buddhists seem not to write that much about mantra. Leaf through any book on Tibetan Buddhism and it will contain at most a couple of paragraphs about mantra - usually they trot out the folk etymology from the Guhyasamaja Tantra, and something about mantras being symbols of Awakening. Given that this is not really what mantras are used for, either popularly or in the Tantras themselves it has always puzzled me. Kukai, the Japanese Vajrayana master, by contrast is preoccupied with what mantra is, and how it works and is a lot more informative. In any case Vedic scholars of mantra, while not exactly abounding, outnumber the Buddhists by at least 10 to 1. I became especially interested in those linguists from the pragmatist school, and in the cognitive linguistic approach of George Lakoff.
It emerges, when one takes the time to study them, that Buddhism is rather heavily indebted to the Vedic religion. This had already begun to dawn on me when I discovered Richard Gombrich. His How Buddhism Began is misnamed but goes a lot further into this area than I had managed (it helps if you can read Sanskrit!). While attending his lecture series last year I became even more deeply acquainted with Gombrich's ideas, and with those of Joanna Jurewicz who has explored some of the same territory from the Vedic point of view. It became obvious that the Buddha knew the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, and probably the Chandogya as well. He quotes and parodies these texts, and what's more makes use of metaphors that only make sense if you know the Upanishads. It's clear that the people who wrote down the Pali Canon had already lost the sense of some important metaphors - Brahma Vihara is a stand out - by the time the Canon was finalised in about the first century BCE. Jurewicz, also a fan of Lakoff, has shown that the well know sequence known as the Nidana Chain, can be viewed as a Buddhist polemic of Vedic cosmogony. To me this is a revelation. What it says is that despite Buddhist chauvinism against Hinduism, some central features of our discourse - going for refuge for another instance - are directly traceable to the Vedic discourse current in the 5th century BCE when the Buddha was active.
In tracing the arc of mantra as it traverses the Rigvedic period and into the Vedantas there is a reasonably logical progression which relates to the abstraction of the meaning of rituals. The basic shift was from external rituals to imaginative internal rituals. To put it a little simplistically here was a movement away from the fire rituals and the development of meditation as a substitute. The connection with early Buddhism is detectable in the Paritta texts, and in certain magical rites especially the so-called Saccakiriya or Act of Truth.
However from there the trail is quite faint. Dharanis, which are not quite mantras as they appear in the Vajrayana, and yet very different from any use of words/language in early Buddhism. They begin to appear in texts such as the White Lotus, the Golden Light, the Lankavatara etc, in about the 4th or 5th century CE. You will often hear that a Dharani is a sort of aide de memoir for Dharma teachings, but I'm here to tell you that none of the Dharanis that appear in the above named sutras look like that. It is true that as early as the Lalitavistara there were "alphabets of wisdom" where the syllables of Sanskrit (more or less) were associated with aspects of Dharma teachings about the nature of phenomena. But the link between this idea, which is followed up in the Perfection of Wisdom texts and the Mahavairocana Sutra, and the actual dharanis in sutras is not credible. It has always seemed to me that the presence of those dharanis, in the absence of any exegetical tradition, must remain a mystery. I'm not so sure now.
It began to seem as though the appearance of what were called mantras in the Tantric texts came out of nowhere as far as Buddhism is concerned - and yet the obvious presence of magic speech in the Pali texts made it seem a rather unsatisfactory conclusion. Did the practices and ideas completely die out and have to be re-imported several centuries later? Or was there a link I was missing? But one more back-track. Many years ago now Sangharakshita noted, almost in passing, that the presence of the goddesses Sri (aka Laksmi) and Sarasvati in the Golden Light Sutra represented some lumps of only partly digested Hinduism. Of course we know that the Vajrayana contains a fair number of the lumps at various stages of assimilation. Studholme, in his study of the Karandavyuha Sutra seems to have caught a snap shot of the historical processes at work, and to explain how those lumps might have got their.
Early Buddhism existed in a milieu which was largely twofold, with the old Vedic religion on the one hand, and the more experimental and disparate Samanas on the other. The Pali texts are full of polemic and critique of Brahmins, Jains, Ajivakas and non-Buddhists of every sort. Brahmins and their theology get the bulk however. Five of six centuries later however a change in the religious landscape had taken place. Probably in response to the success of Buddhism in the centuries following Asoka, the Brahminical tradition began to reorient itself away from the Vedas, and towards almost equally ancient texts known as Puranas. These texts emphasise a different set of gods, so that Indra, Agni, and Brahma, give way to Vishnu. At the same time the assimilation of the tribal religion which worshipped Siva was more of less complete. Sacrifices gave way to devotional practices known as puja. This is more of less Hinduism as distinct from Vedism. Not that the Vedic tradition disappeared completely - India doesn't seem to ever completely abandon any religious idea.
So the Mahayana grew up in an entirely different milieu to early Buddhism. And what Studholme has shown is that Mahayana Buddhism was in as close a dialogue with devotional Puranic Hinduism as early Buddhism was with Vedism and Vedantism. This accounts for the apparent discontinuities which I have observed in the use of magical words. One of Studholme's main theses is that the Om Manipadme Hum mantra was part of a response to Puranic Shaivism, and bears a close relationship to the Saivite mantra Om Namah Shivaya. I haven't read far enough to know what to think of that yet, but from what I've seen it promises to be fascinating!
6 Comments
Close this window Jump to comment formDid you follow up on this in any other posts? The suspense is killing me! Srsly.
Your reference to Sangharakshita's observation about "partly digested Hinduism" in the form of references to Sri, Laksmi and Saraswati, is fascinating. Did you know that Ambedkar claimed that Lakshmi was *originally* a Buddhist Goddess - and that the Hindus ripped Her off?
Personally I think this goes much further than "partly digested Hinduism". When it comes to Saraswati I think it is simply a matter of Buddhists and Hindus worshipping the same Goddess (speaking broadly of Hindus and Buddhists generally - not just in terms of the Golden Light Sutra). Lakshmi (and Sri) is a more complex case - probably involving the Buddhist Goddess Tara taking on many of Lakshmi's qualities (I think I read that in Miranda Shaw's book on Buddhist Goddesses of India) - but of course Buddhist Tara is also linked to Hindu Tara - and to the Maha Devi more generally.
I also think I remember reading in Shaw's book that the real explosion of the Buddhist cult of Tara coincides closely with the rise of Goddess worship very generally in Hinduism. Which would imply that the whole concept of "the rise of Goddess worship in Hinduism" is misleading - there was actually a rise of Goddess worship, period, which was reflected in both Hinduism and Buddhism - and which spread throughout all of India, Central Asia and China. But maybe I'm getting a little carried away. But maybe not.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Hi Cornelius. Yes many of my posts since this one (as I write post no.90 is about to go live) could be considered follow-ups to this one. If you look in the labels and click on Gombrich for instance you will see that I'm still fascinated particularly by his discovery of many parallels with the Upaniṣads. Other labels such as Vedic Studies, the two posts on the Avalokiteshvara mantra continue some of these themes.
Ambedkar's claim may relate to something that Rhys Davids wrote in his book Buddhist India where he says that Sri (aka Lakṣmi) was not a Vedic goddess and appears first in early Buddhist texts (or perhaps iconography I'd have to check).
Tārā is also said to have taken attributes and names from Durga. And yes I think there is something in the idea of a pan-Indian interest in Śakti based religious practices emerging perhaps around the 10th century. However don't forget that as early as the 8000 line Perfection of Wisdom Sutra (ca 1st century bce) Prajñāpāramitā was being referred to as the Mother of all the Buddhas.
As I say in my post on Religion in India and the West it was actually the norm for religious communities to draw on outside influences in India. Because we've grown with Christian models of stamping out heresy we haven't clocked that there is another model which is to assimilate it. In that post I contrast the two approaches with the business models of Microsoft ad AT&T Bell.
Thanks for your comments.
Jayarava
Friday, July 18, 2008
Interesting post, thanks for redirecting me to it. I just wonder whether it makes sense to speak of lumps of "Hinduism", no matter how digested they might have been. Were the Buddhists who "ate" them aware of their coming from a different milieu? If not, as I am inclined to believe, could not we just speak of trends which involved all believers in India? For instance, at a certain point, the idea of a personal relationship with a compassionate Superior entity became popular. I would not say that the ones borrowed it from the others.
By the way, heresy is only one of the ways Christianism dealt with other beliefs. Almost all paleo-christian churchs have been built on temples. They re-use the temples' sacred space and their architectural elements, and, more importantly, they are often dedicated to the *same deities*, with only a slightly modified name ("Saint Giovenale" instead of Giove –italian name for Juppiter– and so on).
Friday, April 22, 2011
Hi Elisa
Yes. With some hindsight I think the "lumps of undigested Hinduism" is a rather unfortunate phrase that I picked up from my Buddhist Teacher. I probably wouldn't use it now.
Clearly the Tantric phase of India religion, for example, seems to have affected everyone - even Muslims! (I know someone who does Tantric Sufi meditation practices).
I agree that early in the life of European Christianity that churches were built on the site of former temples - carrying on a tradition of the Classical Romans I believe. But how long did this period last? I think by medieval times the pattern of persecuting heresy was well established. It became one of the defining features of European Christianity.
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Dear Jayarava,
yes, I agree, the example of Tantra fits quite nicely in the picture. "Tantrism" seems to have been some sort of an "horizontal religious movement", cutting through all "vertical religions".
As for Christianism, I am not an expert, but I would say that inclusivism is quite alive within it. Inter-religious dialogue itself is, unfortunately, often carried out within this perspective ("we accept you, because you say what we say, although you say it only partially"…).
Saturday, April 23, 2011
I follow Geoffrey Samuel and Ronald Davidson in seeing Tantra as a kind of grand synthesis, perhaps in response to the invasion of the Huns and the collapse of the Gupta Empire. The resulting crisis was not only material but spiritual.
My experience as a Buddhist is that Christian responses to other faiths is a very mixed bag. But I would argue that present day inclusiveness is a very new thing, and far from universal.
Saturday, April 23, 2011