Tantric Buddhist Practice in India

Vil?savajra's commentary on the Mañju?r?-n?masa?g?ti

Anthony Tribe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138650930
• eBook ISBN: 9781317230847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Buddhism

Using a commentary on the influential text, the Mañju?r?-n?masa?g?ti, 'The Chanting of the Names of Mañju?r?', this book deals with Buddhist tantric meditation practice and its doctrinal context in early-medieval India. The commentary was written by the 8th-9th century Indian tantric scholar Vil?savajra, and the book contains a translation of the first five chapters. The translation is extensively annotated, and accompanied by introductions as well as a critical edition of the Sanskrit text based on eight Sanskrit manuscripts and two blockprint editions of the commentary's Tibetan translation.

The commentary interprets its root text within an elaborate framework of tantric visualisation and meditation that is based on an expanded form of the Buddhist Yoga Tantra mandala, the Vajradh?tu-ma??ala. At its heart is the figure of Mañju?r?, no longer the familiar bodhisattva of wisdom, but now the embodiment of the awakened non-dual gnosis that underlies all Buddhas as well their activity in the cosmos.

The book contributes to our understanding of the history of Indian tantric Buddhism in a period of significant change and innovation. With its extensively annotated translation and lengthy introductions the book is designed to appeal not only to professional scholars and research students but also to contemporary Buddhists.

Part I
Introductions

Overview

Vilāsavajra’s Nāmamantrārthāvalokinī, ‘An Explanation of the Meaning of the Name-mantras’, is a tantric Buddhist text, probably composed in northern India sometime between the latter part of the eighth century and the early-to-mid ninth century. It is an early commentary (ṭīkā) on the short and influential tantric scripture, the Mañjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti, ‘The Chanting of the Names of Mañjuśrī’. It is also the only early commentary on this work at present known to survive in its original Sanskrit. Of medium size, the prose text is equivalent to approximately 3000 anuṣṭubh verses. Its author is learned and widely read, and the commentary is notable for a wide range of textual references, quotations and incorporations.

The Nāmamantrārthāvalokinī (hereafter NMAA) interprets its root text within an elaborate framework of tantric visualisation and meditation, based on an expanded version of the Vajradhātu-maṇḍala of the Tattvasaṃgraha, the fundamental scripture of the yogatantras. The maṇḍala’s principal deity is Mahāvairocana, in whose heart Vilāsavajra has the practitioner visualise the primordial Buddha, or Ādibuddha, understood as a form of Mañjuśrī. Within the Ādibuddha’s heart in turn is visualised a mantra-bearing wheel at the centre of which is the key figure of Vilāsavajra’s exegesis, the gnosis-being Mañjuśrī (mañjuśrījñānasattva), the embodiment of non-dual gnosis (advayajñāna). Mañjuśrī thus becomes the Buddha, or the gnosis (or both), that underlies not only the Ādibuddha but also all its/his manifestations within the cosmos.

The visualisation of the NMAA progressively incorporates the text, or the ‘Names’, of the Mañjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti into the maṇḍala, its words being understood as mantras, the ‘Name-mantras’ of the commentary’s title. The NMAA also interprets the Mañjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti, and locates its tantric praxis, within Mahāyāna and Mainstream doctrinal categories, some of which are adapted to accommodate emerging tantric perspectives. Vilāsavajra’s commentary thus contributes to our understanding of the history of Indian tantric Buddhism in a period of significant change and innovation. Smṛtijñānakīrti, also a commentator on the Mañjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti, translated Vilāsavajra’s commentary into Tibetan, probably in the early eleventh century. After revision, it was included in the blockprint editions of the Tenjur (Bstan ’gyur). In the Derge (Sde dge) edition (D 2533) it takes up some eighty-seven folios.

The title of Vilāsavajra’s root text that is familiar to readers today, Mañjuśrī-nāmasaṃgīti, is in fact employed neither by the text itself nor, standardly, by the Indian commentarial tradition. The title that is used is the shorter, simpler (but perhaps more ambiguous) expression Nāmasaṃgīti (NS). This is the title generally employed in this book. The Nāmasaṃgīti comprises 167 anuṣṭubh verses, which are accompanied by a prose section that describes the Nāmasaṃgīti’s qualities as well as the benefits accruing to the person who recites and meditates on it. Its core verses for the most part consist of a series of descriptive expressions, the ‘Names’, understandable as those of the gnosis-being Mañjuśrī. Historically, the Nāmasaṃgīti’s particular combination of doctrinal, devotional and tantric elements stimulated an extensive secondary literature, and the text appears to have wielded significant appeal and influence within Indian tantric Buddhism for some four or more centuries (750–1200 CE). It continues to have an influence today in Nepalese and Tibetan Buddhism, as well as among those who practise the traditions of the Kālacakra-tantra, for whom the Nāmasaṃgīti is an important root text. Vilāsavajra’s NMAA initiated one of the distinctive traditions of Nāmasaṃgīti exegesis.

The present book is divided into three parts. Parts I and II contain, respectively, introductions and an annotated translation of the first five chapters of Vilāsavajra’s text. The introductions include an assessment of Vilāsavajra’s date with an examination of potential biographical data, as well as an extensive overview of the NMAA’s contents. The overview pays particular attention to the visualisation sādhana of the NMAA’s fourth chapter. Part III contains the critical edition of the Sanskrit text, as well as matters relating to the edition and the Sanskrit and Tibetan materials (textual notes, description of manuscripts, method of editing, stemma codicum). The edition is based on eight Nepalese manuscripts and two blockprint editions of the NMAA’s Tibetan translation.

For clarity I have adopted the convention of referring to the ‘names’ that comprise the bulk of the text of the Nāmasaṃgīti as ‘Names’, i.e. capitalising the first letter. This is not inappropriate since most of the Nāmasaṃgīti’s ‘names’ (hereafter, Names) are not names as generally understood. Additionally, it enables statements such as “most of the Names are not names” to have sense. Also, bearing in mind that the readership of this book may extend beyond the sphere of professional scholars and research students, to that of practising Buddhists, I have added more explanatory notes to the translation than would perhaps otherwise be deemed strictly necessary.

1 Contexts

1.1 Previous scholarship

The NMAA has been neither edited nor translated in its entirety.¹ In 1988 Sakurai Munenobu published an edition of chapters 3 and 4 of the Sanskrit text, accompanied by the Tibetan translation.² To my knowledge no other chapters have been edited, and no published translation of any individual chapters. Nonetheless, Vilāsavajra’s commentary has been familiar to modern scholarship since the late nineteenth century. In 1883 Cecil Bendall described a palm-leaf manuscript of the NMAA held by the University of Cambridge,³ and I. P. Minaev consulted another manuscript in the preparation of his edition of the Nāmasaṃgīti published in Russia in 1887.⁴ Minaev also quoted the NMAA in an essay published in the same year.⁵

In the early twentieth century Louis de La Vallée Poussin referred to the NMAA in his entry ‘Ādibuddha’ for James Hasting’s 1908 Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics and also quoted from it in the annotations to his translations of Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośabhāṣya and Xuanzang’s Vijñaptimātratāsiddhi.⁶ It seems that the NMAA subsequently dropped out of sight until Ronald Davidson used its Tibetan translation as one of four Nāmasaṃgīti commentaries that formed the basis for the annotations to his 1981 translation and edition of the Nāmasaṃgīti.⁷ In 1987, a year prior to his edition of chapters 3 and 4, Sakurai published two papers examining some aspects of these two chapters.⁸

More recently, and since the present edition was initially completed in 1994, Vilāsavajra’s text has received some increased attention, in good part as a result of growing interest in the development of tantric Buddhism. Elizabeth English has noted aspects of the NMAA’s visualisation in her study of Umāpatideva’s Vajravārāhī-sādhana,⁹ while Davidson cites Vilāsavajra as providing evidence of an eighth-century date for the earliest yoginītantras.¹⁰ In an exploration of Indian and Tibetan tantric doxography Jacob Dalton discusses the NMAA’s enumeration of tantra classes,¹¹ and David Gray exploits NMAA text references in attempting to establish a chronology for the Laghusaṃvara-tantra.¹²

1.2 The NMAA and early medieval Indian Buddhism

As noted, the NMAA is an early Nāmasaṃgīti commentary.¹³ I believe, as I argue in some detail below, that its composition can be dated to a period between the late eighth and the early-to-mid ninth centuries with a degree of certainty.¹⁴ If this is right, it was written at a time of rapid and significant transition in the development of tantric Buddhism. Tantric praxis – the use of mantras, maṇḍalas, rites of consecration etc. – was being related to soteriological rather than purely instrumental goals. The notion that awakening itself could be achieved through such means had been articulated in the Mahāvairocana-tantra and the Tattvasaṃgraha, and the commentaries on these that were produced in the eighth century were concerned to elaborate the liberative potential of the tantric approach. Vilāsavajra’s work falls in a period when there was a considerable literary output that embodies an impetus to encode, interpret and create tantric ritual and meditation in (at least in part) non-tantric Mahāyānist doctrinal terms. His Nāmasaṃgīti commentary strikingly exemplifies this process. It demonstrates how structures related to tantric praxis were encoded in terms of Mahāyānist doctrinal categories. At the same time, it also illustrates how such doctrinal categories may be modified to accommodate praxis related structures.¹⁵

Pressures for change during this period not only were internal – occurring from within various parts of Bu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Introductions
• Part II Vilāsavajra’s Nāmamantrārthāvalokinī: an annotated translation of chapters 1–5
• Part III Sanskrit edition
• Appendices
• Abbreviations and symbols
• Bibliography
• Index of personal names
• Index of text titles
• General index