Readings in Indian Buddhist Texts
S ASIAN C215
288 DWINELLE
W 3-6P
4
84029
VON ROSPATT, A
In Nepal alone Indian Mahāyāna Buddhism survives in its original
South Asian setting with Sanskrit as its sacred language. In addition to
preserving and transmitting the Indian Mahāyāna literary heritage,
Nepal has also produced its own Buddhist Sanskrit literature. The focus
has been on narrative works, and among these the Svayambhūpurāna is the
most important. It dates to the late 14th or early 15th century and can
be viewed as a response to the loss of the Buddhist heartland in India
proper since the 13th century.
The class introduces to the Svayambhūpurāna and its different
versions, and will also consider the larger literary, religious and
historical contexts in which this work was initially composed and then
further developed. While we have a good unpublished edition of the
oldest and shortest version (of which two Tibetan translations are
extant), the editions of the middle length version and the principal
long version are unsatisfactory and will require that we work with
manuscripts. However, rather than getting absorbed by philological
details, the plan is to cover good ground, and to read through some of
the main narratives. Among them will be the myth of the spontaneous
manifestation (svayam-bhū) of the luminous crystalline dhamadhātu that
features in the title of this textual tradition, and, related to this,
the mythological account of the construction of the Svayambhū stupa, the
principal Buddhist shrine of Nepal, which—according to this account—
was built over the dharmadhātu so as to to encase it. We will relate
this mythological account to the historical records of medieval
renovations of the Svayambhū stūpa, and consider, more generally, how
the māhātmya-like Svayambhūpurāṇa reflects the Buddhist landscape and
ritual practices current at the time of its composition in Nepal, and
how it treats these themes—even while couching them in etiological
terms—as shaping the present in which its audience lives.
Additional materials will include detailed paintings of the
Svayambhūpurāṇa—mostly scrolls, but also the murals in the Śāntipur
shrine up at the site of Svayambhū—which, depict the narrative, scene by
scene, arranged in registers, and accompanied by captions.
