The Water Nation and the Fire Nation

I have been listening to the audiobook version of the new history, The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. This is the most important non-fiction book I have ever read. I urge everyone who has any interest in history or politics to read it. The basic argument is that human polities were much more pluralistic and changeable in the past and that the present global political monoculture of class-based hierarchies enforced by bureaucratised violence is, in fact, an oddity rather than a forgone conclusion.

In Chapter 8, the authors briefly discuss the Indus Valley Civilisation. Listening to Graeber & Wengrow describe the place of the water tank in Indus civil architecture I was struck by parallels I had seen with my own eyes in India, but also have encountered many times in ancient Indian texts. Indeed, this is one of the most iconic images associated with India: a person who walks down into the river, performs ritual ablutions and prayers, and emerges a new person. I emphasise ritual here, because waterways in India are now so filthy, fetid, and toxic that one cannot imagine emerging from immersion cleaner than before. Students of Indian history will know, however, that while water is important in Vedic culture, fire is the element they worship more than any other. Where does river worship come from? Well, there was a river based civilisation in India long before the Vedic tribes started arriving. I'm certainly not the first to observe this, but I'm riffing on an idea here and won't refer to others much.

The Water Nation

The Indus civilisation (ca 3300 – 900 BCE) sprawled over the floodplain of the Indus and Sarasvatī Rivers, which consisted of numerous settlements including some large cities. Their economy was varied. They grew numerous crops including wheat, barley, peas, and sesame—as well as raising domesticated animals such as buffalo, zebu cattle, sheep, and goats. They mass produced stone tools and items such as pottery and beads. Moreover, they traded far afield, by sea, with Indus pottery being found in Mesopotamian and Arabian archaeological sites.

The two largest cities, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, were built to a similar plan. And I say "plan", advisedly, because these cities were clearly designed. Roads were typically wide and straight and had built-in drainage. Indeed, drainage was an important feature of the cities, presumably to allow annual monsoon rain waters to escape the town (and at least in some places to channel them into storage tanks).

The cities have a raised central area that 19th Century archaeologists called "the citadel" that is surrounded by an urban sprawl of mixed-use housing and craft-based light industry (bead making, metal working, etc). Yet there are few other signs of social stratification. Finds of high status objects are evenly distributed, rather than being centered on the citadel (it was apparently not a place where material wealth accumulated). The citadels were walled, but these seem not to have been defensive walls (unlike the walled cities of the second urbanisation where warfare was a constant threat).

At the center of the big Indus cities we do find large scale public architecture: sizeable meeting halls and accommodation for the people who might meet in them, large buildings that appear to be granaries, and so on. Notably at Mohenjo-daro we find a large water tank at the centre, called "the Great Bath" by archaeologists. The water tank was constructed from well-made bricks and sealed with clay and bitumen. The tank is about 12 m x 7 m, and has a maximum depth of 2.4 m and has steps allowing access at either end.

"At Mohenjo-daro, it seems, the focus of civic life was not a palace or a cenotaph, but a public facility for purifying the body." (Graeber and Wengrow: 316).

And this is is significant to Graeber and Wengrow's argument that civilisation does not necessarily entail coercion and control. As I say, for me this evoked images and memories of watching Indian people perform their ritual ablutions in tanks built for the purpose, as well as in rivers.

I'm concerned that no parallel structures have been found elsewhere. It's a definite weak point in the thesis I'm outlining. The only consolation is that archaeology of the Indus Civilisation has barely scratched the surface.

Like the dozens of other Neolithic (recent "Stone Age") or Bronze Age settlements that mark the beginnings of civilisation, the Indus cities were sited on rivers. This is not simply to provide for potable water. In fact, each home in the Indus cities was supplied with a well for this purpose (and drains to allow waste water to escape). One of the advantages of living next to a river is that the water table around it is easy to get at. Well water is filtered through river sediments, mostly clay, and provides reliably clean water. The main advantage of riparian life, however, was transportation. Rivers were the highways of the ancient world.

It now seems very likely that before about 2000 BCE, another river paralleled the Indus but has since dried up due to a drier climate. In Sanskrit, this river is called Sarasvatī. At this time, prior to rapid weakening of the monsoon, the Yamuna flowed west into the Indus Valley and may have been a tributary to the Sarasvatī. Scientists have also made links to the Ghaggar-Hakra system which now flows into the Thar Desert and simply dries up (however, it was like this by the time of the composition of the Ṛgveda, ca 1500-1200 BCE).

We don't know, but can easily imagine that these water-loving people made gods out of the rivers that sustained their way of life. Did they worship the rivers we now call Indus and Sarasvatī? This seems highly likely to me. Michael Witzel has pointed out that, in the Ṛgveda, Sarasvatī is a river but also appears without connection to the eponymous river. At times Sarasvatī appears to represent the milky way (the galaxy that our star, Sūrya, resides in). This mixing of symbolism could be suggestive of two cultures hybridising.

Living next to a river that floods annually due to the monsoons is not always easy. I vividly recall driving over the long Mahatma Gandhi Setu (bridge) in Patna on our way to Bodhgaya. At that point in the dry season the Falgu River (the ancient Narañjana) had completely dried up. The Falgu has a bed that is over 500m across. The Ganga in Patna was about 1 km across, although the river bed is 2.5km wide at that point. The problem is that the flood plain is much wider so the bridge actually spans 5.7 km.

Alluvial soils are extremely fertile and allow for intensive agriculture. Some Indus cities had extensive earthworks designed to move water from annual monsoon floods into storage tanks (e.g. at Dholavira).

Towards the end, the Indus Culture was beset by drought as the climate changed, resulting in a weaker monsoon. If the monsoon fails, India starves. The Indus citizens moved away from cities altogether. This has been seen as a rout, with the citizens fleeing the cities and probably dying in great numbers, leaving chaos, but the Sarasvatī gradually dried up over some centuries, so this process was not sudden from the point of view of those living it. Reading Graeber and Wengrow it seems just as likely to me that, following some very disappointing results, the Indus people just decided to change the way they lived. They moved northwards towards abundant water in the river valleys closer to the Himalayas, what we now call Punjab (i.e. pañca āpas = five rivers). But they settled in village-style communities with a more distributed polity and no centralisation (which emerged later, partly in response to the challenge of Buddhism). There is now no reason to think that this was not a conscious move away from an unsustainable lifestyle towards a more sustainable one, given changing conditions over many generations.

In other words we must not think of the people who lived in massive planned cities as idiots, as naive, or as passive. These were active people, who built great cities, who tamed the monsoon floods and channeled them into agriculture. We have to assume that they discussed what was happening at length and consciously decided how to survive the extended drought and, just as when they built the cities, put a plan into action.

In any case, according to Romila Thapar "The Ṛgveda lacks a sense of civic life founded on the functioning of planned and fortified cities." (2002: 110). Nor do we see elements such as elaborate drainage systems, or the use of fired bricks. It seems clear that the authors of the Ṛgveda did not know of the urbanised Indus Culture at all. What they met in India was a culture of distributed autonomous villages. They settled in this area, which they called the "Āryavrata", the area in which Ārya customs prevail) or the Kurukṣetra (Field of the Kuru), the Kuru being one main faction of the myths in the Mahābhārata, the other being the Paṇḍava.

The Fire Nation

During this same period we have another culture emerging on the other side of the Hindu Kush. Archaeologists have called this the Bactria–Margiana Archaeological Complex (or BMAC) or Oxus Civilization, since it is associated with the Amu Darya (which imperialists named the Oxus River following Greek historians) which flows north into the Aral Sea. Recent work dates occupation of the area to c. 2250–1700 BC.

Goods found in the archaeology tell us that the two cultures were aware of each other and trade between them took place. But they were genetically distinct with little sexual mixing between cultures.

This civilisation spoke an Indo-European language, and is possibly the place where Indo-Iranian split off and became a distinct branch of the family tree, though evidence for language in the ancient world is very limited. Archaeologists believe that the BMAC culture was the forerunner of the so-called Āryans, who split off from the general Indo-Iranian culture ca 1900-1700 BCE and eventually introduced their language and culture into India. While Indo-European languages came to dominate India, genetics tells us that in fact the Āryans were few and mainly men. Max Müller's "Āryan invasion", in which the Āryans were a large invading army, has long been deprecated, though the idea continues to exercise nationalists in India. Still, Indo-European influences were absent from India until the people who spoke Vedic arrived.

Incidentally, the story of the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain has gone the same way: there was migration, but not enough to overwhelm the local population. Most white British people have a genome that is predominantly of the same stock as Celtic peoples in Britain and Europe. What differentiates them is that, following the departure of the Romans after almost 400 years of occupation, the thoroughly Romanised British adopted the language (Old English) and customs of a minority group of immigrants from Northern Germany. Europeans have been coming and going from the British Isles since they could walk across Dogger Bank (end of the last ice age) because the land here is extremely fertile, and the winters are much warmer than in Europe because of the gulf stream.

The BMAC culture had domesticated horses from the steppes and wheeled carts. Most strikingly for us the BMCA architecture is built around temples in which fire was either worshipped or was a ritual medium for the expression of religious ideas. Background fire worship in Iran was absorbed into and became a feature of Zoroastrianism:

The Greeks, too, had a cult of the hearth fire, and although Herodotus (3.16) mentions the great veneration in which the Persians held fire, he does not single them out as being in any remarkable way “fire-worshippers,” nor does he know of temples of any kind among them (1 .131). A Zoroastrian temple cult of fire seems to have been first instituted in the later Achaemenid period [4th century BCE], being probably established by the orthodox as a counter-move to the innovation of a temple-cult, with statues of “Anāhīt.” (Encyclopedia Iranica)

Keep in mind that Herodotus (484 – 425 BCE) was reliable enough that later historian, Plutarch (46 – 119 CE), dubbed him "the father of lies". Since the yasna rituals "are essentially those of the Brahmanic yajña [i.e. fire-based ritual], the yasna evidently goes back to the proto-Indo-Iranian times." (Boyce 1997: 12)

Zoroastrianism also had a tradition of itinerant priests known as aθauruuan or āθravan (Old Iranian θ approximates Old Indic th). The similarity of Avestan āθravan and Sanskrit atharvan is striking. Strabo uses the term āθravan to refer to "fire keepers". The Atharvans (Pāḷi ātabbaṇa) seem to be distinct from the Brahmins and had their own sacred text, the Atharvaveda (though it has considerable crossover with the Ṛgveda). But the Atharvans are seen quite negatively; for example, early Buddhist texts paint them as evil and depraved magicians. Herodotus also mentions the Magi ("may guy"), one of six Iranian tribes, who "specialized in hereditary priestly duties and who assumed the duties of the athravan." (Zoroastrian heritage). My suspicion is that the Atharvans were the Āθravan.

The dates of Zarathustra are uncertain but likely to be around 1000 BCE ± 200 years. Records of the Zoroastrian religion are preserved in the ancient Avesta, which must have been roughly contemporaneous with the Ṛgveda (ca.1500 – 1200 BCE), which just fits within one end of the proposed date range for Zarathustra. Meanwhile, in India, fire worship morphed into Brahmanism and gave rise to the Ṛgveda. It appears that the ṛk "verses" were composed by men sitting around a fire taking a psychoactive compound that made them feel imaginative and heroic (the most likely candidate being an extract of Ephedra sinica), telling fantastic stories in metred verse about the Gods, especially Indra, Varuṇa, and Mitra (Avestan Miθra). The central concern of this stories is the maintenance of ṛta conceived of as a kind of cosmic harmony or balance operated by the gods who could be compelled by ritual to tip things in favour of "us" (whoever "us" might be). This theme of cosmic harmony is notably absent from European myth though it is present in Chinese myth (I make no claim here, I merely note the similarity of ṛta and dào 道).

In Parthian Iran (247 BCE – 224 CE), fire temples were constructed with a square base surmounted by a dome, the result looks uncannily like an old Buddhist stupa.

Bazeh Khur Fire Temple, Khorasan
Parthian era 247 BCE-224 CE.

Buddhist Stupa
Swat Valley, 1st-2nd Century CE.

A Confluence of Cultures

It is quite clear that the slow end of the Indus Civilisation was not the end of the Indus people, per se. They had a radical change of lifestyle and they did move upriver, but they persisted, with worship of rivers and daily ablutions forming a central part of their culture. It seems very likely, almost incontrovertible, that these were the people living in Panjab when Indo-Europeans started settling in the region.

As already noted, an influx of settlers does not constitute an "invasion", nor does the influx have to become a majority in order to effect massive social and political changes. The Romanised Celts of Britain voluntarily adopted the language and culture of a Germanic minority. Nor does it mean that the locals are hapless victims. Trade goods have been moving in both directions along the Khyber Pass for millennia, with trade connections as far afield as the Arabian peninsula. As with early Britain, people moved around a lot more during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages. Still, there are no signs of large scale migrations in the region. There was a small influx of (mainly male) Indo-European genes into India from Iran during the Bronze Age and a century or two later the resulting hybrid culture produced the Ṛgveda.

Analysis of the language of the Ṛgveda suggests early contact with a culture that spoke a language related to Muṇḍa, a branch of the Austro-Asiatic family of languages that includes modern Vietnamese, Khmer, and Mon. Michael Witzel (1999) has suggested that the source of Muṇḍa loan words was the remnant population from the collapse of the Indus cities, which seems entirely plausible to me. There are also Dravidian loan words, but Witzel argues that pattern of loanwords in Ṛgveda points towards initial contact with Muṇḍa and only later with Dravidian.

Linguistic features such as retroflex consonants, absent from Indo-European languages generally, appear in Vedic from our earliest records. Madhav Deshpande has referred to these as "regional" features, that is features of the subcontinent, rather than any particular culture. Indeed, they appear to increase in frequency from the older books of Ṛgveda to the younger.

Despite absorbing external influences, the Ṛgveda is still recognisably Indo-European and Vedic is obviously very closely related to Avestan and other Indo-European languages of the day. It seems that an existing culture was impressed enough by the Vedic-speakers to have adopted their language and customs creating a hybrid. We have to assume, following Graeber and Wengrow, and as appears to have happened, that this was a conscious decision.

The confluence of the water nation and the fire nation gave rise to a unique culture. the mature form of which is associated with Painted Grey Ware pottery in the late Iron Age (1200 - 600 BCE). The PGW culture produced a distinctive grey pottery and is associated with permanent village settlements, domesticated horses, and metallurgy (gold, silver, copper, iron). Note that Atharvaveda mentions iron, but Ṛgveda does not (and we need to be wary of arguments from absence as they are often weak unless there is an overriding expectation of presence).

We should also note that as far as Buddhist texts were concerned there were two main kinds of Brahmins: householder Brahmins who often attracted large groups of followers; and ascetic Brahmins, who often adopted jaṭila or dreadlocks (as they still do). Pāli suttas record kings granting land to Brahmins, whole villages it seems, which suggest that they were actively recruiting Brahmins to migrate to their kingdoms. Brahmins were often valued political advisors and royal ritualists (purohita). In particular, Brahmins had a panoply of lavish large-scale public rituals aimed at legitimising the power of the king (and all rulers who wield power over other humans need some justification for doing so, because we all instinctively hate being given orders).

Signe Cohen has conjectured that part of what drove the composition of the Upaniṣads was a conflict between conservative Brahmins from the Āryavrata and progressive Brahmins who had begun migrating east (into the world of the early Buddhists). The word āryavrata can be compared to the term Danelaw, it is the region where the customs (vrata) of the Ārya are upheld. Brahmins consciously referred to themselves as ārya (a word cognate with modern name for Persia, i.e. Iran or Īrān).

We tend to massively over simplify Indian history because we have just two literary sources: Vedic and Buddhist. Jains have been around as long, but their extant literary tradition dates from a later period. Jain tradition says that the first generation of texts was lost. Loads of other people were around, they just left no literature. We have to look to the archaeology and what it can tell us about this period.

Archaeology and linguistic evidence point to multiple communities speaking languages from at least three distinct language families: Muṇḍa, Dravidian, Vedic, along with an unknown number of minority languages. Note that some tribes in central India, until recently living a hunter gatherer lifestyle, speak in languages unrelated to any known language. This suggests a deep antiquity for these cultures, perhaps on the the scale of Australian Aboriginals, i.e. tens of thousands of years.

The hegemonic Vedic culture in India is clearly an amalgam of Indo-European and indigenous influences. A mix of Water Nation and Fire Nation.

~~oOo~~~

Bibliography

Attwood, J. (2015) "Who Were the Artharvans?" Jayarava's Raves 10 July 2015.

Boyce , M. (1997). "" In Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy, edited by Brian Carr and Indira Mahalingam, 4-20.

Clift, P. D., Carter, A., Giosan, L et al. (2012) "U-Pb zircon dating evidence for a Pleistocene Sarasvati River and capture of the Yamuna River." Geology 40 (3): 211–214. doi: https://doi.org/10.1130/G32840.1

Graeber, D. & Wengrow, D. (2012) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. UK: Allen Lane.

Khonde, N., Singh, S.K., Maurya, D.M. et al. (2017) "Tracing the Vedic Saraswati River in the Great Rann of Kachchh". Nature: Scientific Reports 7, 5476 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-05745-8

Mahoney, William K. (1998). The Artful Universe: An Introduction to the Vedic Religious Imagination. State University of New York Press.

Thapar, Romila. (2002). The Penguin History of Early India: From Origins to AD 1300. Penguin Books.

Witzel, Michael. (1999) Substrate Languages in Old Indo-Aryan (Ṛgvedic, Middle and Late Vedic). Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies (EJVS) 5(1): 1–67.

Did The Heart Sutra Ever Go To India?

For the longest time it was assumed that the Heart Sutra was composed in India, a product of the larger Prajñāpāramitā movement. The conventional wisdom was that Buddhism flowed in only one direction along the Silk Road, from India to China. Edward Conze placed the composition of the Heart Sutra in about the 4th Century, along with the Diamond Sutra, as part of a trend of abbreviation. This picture has completely fallen apart. Every detail of it has been contradicted by subsequent research.

Rather, the Heart Sutra is a Chinese text, composed, in the mid seventh century, mainly of passages copied from Kumārajīva's Large Sutra translation, with a spell from the Dhāraṇīsamucaya. Importantly, it now seems certain that the Heart Sutra was composed after Xuanzang returned from his pilgrimage so, whatever his involvement, he could not have spread the text to India. So the questions of who did spread the text and when remains open. There is also the question of who added the opening and closing passages of the extended text.

I'd been wondering about what evidence there was of the Heart Sutra in India. To the best of my knowledge, the oldest "Indian" document is the Nepalese hooked-script palm-leaf manuscript (Cambridge ADD 1680) dated on paleographical grounds to the 13th Century. The evidence for the text in India prior to this turns out to be preserved only in Tibetan, in the form of a translation of the extended text attributed to Vimalamitra (pictured above) and several commentaries that are attributed to Indians who travelled to Tibet.

The Indo-Tibetan Commentaries

In 1988, Donald Lopez published The Heart Sūtra Explained, a study of seven Heart Sutra commentaries preserved in Tibetan. These were composed by authors with Indian names or whose biographies refer to them as Indian. They are:

• Kamalaśīla. (c 740-795). Visited Tibet.
• Vimalamitra. Travelled to Tibet late 8th C. 
• Atīśa. (ca. 982-1054). Visited Tibet 1042 CE. 
• Vajrapāṇi. 11th C. Lived in Nepal and later Tibet.
• Mahājana. Little is known. Visited Tibet 11th C.
• Praśāstrasena. Nothing is known. 
• Jñānamitra. Nothing is known.  

Lopez's later book, Elaborations on Emptiness (1996) adds another "Indian" commentary, by Śrīsiṃha, but the author was in fact Chinese born and educated. For my purposes this is not an "Indian" commentary.

Of Praśāstrasena and Jñānamitra we know nothing at all besides being attributed as commentators on the Heart Sutra and, in Jñānamitra's case, one other commentary extant in Tibetan. Lopez (1988: 8-13) considers that neither went to Tibet, but his reason for saying so is an argument from absence, i.e. there is no extant record of their presence in Tibet. Of course this does make it less likely that they went to Tibet, but arguments from absence are weak. The men who were recorded got swept up in Tibetan politics, so perhaps the others simply kept a low profile. 

The rest—Vimalamitra, Vajrapāṇi, Kamalaśīla, Atīśa, Mahājana—are all recorded as having visited Tibet although such traditions may date from centuries after the events. Of these, Vimalamitra and Kamalaśīla are considerably earlier than the others, both men having lived in the 8th Century. The Tibetan Kanjur credits the translation of the Heart Sutra to Vimalamitra and it is to him that I now want to turn.

Vimalamitra

Joel Gruber, whose doctoral dissertation was on the biography of Vimalamitra (2016) outlines the salient facts for a website called The Treasury of Lives. However, "biography" is a term that can only be used loosely in this context. The story of Vimalamitra is a hagiography, a religious legend rather than a reliable historical account. Such stories were never intended as history. Rather, they celebrate religious values, or they reinforce the perceived exceptionalism of particular forms of Buddhism (in this case, Dzogchen), or they serve a political purpose such as linking a figure to a lineage as part of a legitimation strategy. Gruber likens biographies of Buddhist saints to modern day superhero movies, except that secular leaders do not claim to have superman in their lineage.

These "Lives" play the role of what Joseph Bulbulia has called “charismatic signalling.” The primary purpose of charismatic signalling is to provide a way to “align prosocial motivations” in large religious movements: “Charismatic culture supports cooperative outcomes by aligning powerful emotions, motivations, and intentions among potentially anonymous partners, toward collective goals” (Attwood 2019). The goals of communities vary and, in Tibet, local cultural norms were every bit as influential as introduced Buddhist (specifically Tantric, and Dzogchen) norms.

Because each community reworked the story to suit their needs, there is a great deal of variety in the details of the hagiographies. And some of the stories were only codified centuries after the putative events of the putative characters' lives. So we have to use these stories judiciously. As Gruber notes of Vimalamitra, who is thought to have been active in the 8th Century:

"Vimalamitra’s biography began to take shape in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, during the formative years of a distinctly emerging Nyingma tradition." The Treasury of Lives. 

Despite his apparently important role in early Tibetan Buddhism, Vimalamitra is not written about for 400 years. Two commentarial texts are widely accepted as attributable to Vimalamitra:

"Despite these concerns, the legitimacy of two of Vimalamitra’s works found in the early imperial catalogues of texts, The Extensive Commentary to the Heart Sūtra (shes rab snying po’i rgya cher 'grel pa) and The Commentary to the Seven Hundred Stanza Prajñāpāramitā (shes rab kyi pha rol du phyin pa bdun brgya pa'i 'grel pa), remains near certain."

That is to say, his role as Indian saint and magical progenitor of Dzogchen is primary for those who wrote his biography, but Gruber infers a kernel of historical fact. On the other hand:

"We know that texts were attributed to Vimalamitra to establish the Indic pedigree of Nyingma texts that were labeled either too Tibetan or Chinese" (Gruber 2016: 98)

As flawed as Reggie Ray's Buddhist Saints in India is, the basic of idea of the life of a saint following a template is correct. It's just that each religious community seemed to work from a slightly different version of the template. Unfortunately, this means that the undisputed facts are slim. And I say, unfortunately, only because the point of his essay is historical and the ahistorical hagiographical stories are the only sources we have.

Life

According to the medieval Tibetan sources, Vimalamitra was an Indian Buddhist born in Western India who studied Tantric Buddhism in Bodhagāyā (which is in Eastern India). Gruber notes that Chinese sources on Vimalamitra contradict this and refer to Vimalamitra as Tibetan, but the Chinese stories were every bit as ahistorical.

A relatively late detail makes him a student of the foremost Tantric exegete of the day, Buddhaguhya (also roughly 8th Century), but this seems to have been interpolated to boost his credentials. Vimalamitra excelled in his studies along with his Dharma brother Jñānasūtra. The two play foundational roles in the mythology of the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. One night both had a dream in which Vajrasatva directed them to travel to China to study with Śrīsiṃha (more on him below). Vimalamitra and Jñānasūtra both journey to China, but they are separated.

"While returning to India following his stay in China, [Vimalamitra] encountered his dharma brother, Jñānasūtra, to whom he revealed some of his experiences and realizations under the tutelage of Śrī Siṃha, thus persuading Jñānasūtra also to pack his bowl and seek this most profound doctrine in China." The Treasury of Lives. 

Gruber comments that "The series of events that follow mark a peculiar development that seems intended to elevate Jñānasūtra to a position of lineal authority over Vimalamitra." In other words the story is not simply a hagiography, but it also has a normative, even political agenda.

Meanwhile, Vimalamitra's hagiography now intersects with the hagiography of the first Buddhist king of Tibet, Trisong Detsen (khri srong lde btsan, c.742-c.796). The king sets out to attract Indian paṇḍitas to his kingdom and Vimalamitra is one of those who answer the call. In keeping with Tibetan myth, there is local opposition, which Vimalamitra overcomes through manifesting his magical powers (he reduces a statue to ash and then reconstitutes it).

Little is known about Srīsiṃha (Lopez 1996: 12). He is said by Tibetans to have been born in China and to have studied at Mt Wutai before travelling to Bodhgāyā in India. Srīsiṃha was a teacher to Vairocana, who was one of the first Tibetan students of Śāntarakṣita in Tibet. Kamalaśīla was an Indian student of Śāntarakṣita. He is said to have been murdered after defeating a Chinese Chan master in debate in Tibet. So these figures are all closely tied to the early dissemination of Buddhism to Tibet. Srīsiṃha seems not to have gone to Tibet himself. Vimalamitra is credited with the translation of the version of the Heart Sutra in the Kanjur. But we have no idea how legitimate this attribution is.

I now want to back-track and consider the idea that Vimalamitra went to China, since if he did visit China he could have picked up the Heart Sutra there. 

The China Connection

This detail of Vimalamitra travelling to China to study tantra should strike us as odd. Joel Gruber comments in his PhD dissertation, "As far as I am aware, there is not another instance in which an Indian Buddhist departs the birthplace of the Dharma in order to study more efficacious Buddhist meditative techniques in China" (2016: 61). So how credible is this odd detail? Dylan Esler says:

"Although Chinese sources consider Vimalamitra (Ch. P'i mo la) to be a Tibetan, his Indian origin is more likely, since most of his works are written in a distinctly Indian scholastic style, and his association with the tantric movement is sufficient to explain his attraction to the simultaneous approach without making him a proponent of Ch'an." (37)

It's not entirely clear which Chinese sources Esler is referring to. We do know that Xuanzang refers to a man whose name is transliterated as Pímòluó-mìduōluó 毘末羅蜜多羅 and means "Stainless-friend (Wúgòu yǒu 無垢友) which is what vimala-mitra means (Records of the Western Region. T 2087, 51: 892b4). However,

"Xuanzang’s Vimalamitra was the circa seventh-century Kaśmīri scholar accused of being a proponent of the Hīnayāna and an enemy of the Mahāyāna. The Vimalamitra who wrote the Commentary to the Seven Hundred Stanzas and Commentary to the Heart Sūtra was clearly an advocate of the Mahāyāna. (Gruber 2016: 102-3)

Clearly more than one person was called Vimalamitra. There seem to have been two distinct individuals:

1. Vimalamitra (I) was a Kashmiri Ābhidharmika whom Xuanzang might have met in India. 
2. Vimalamitra (II) an early Dzogchen practitioner later associated with Nyingma and Śrīsiṃha.

Gruber notes that Giuseppe Tucci and Paul Demiéville tried to link the two but they lived a century apart and this is not credible. We know from my previous research that the Heart Sutra was composed after Xuanzang's return to China and after 654 when Atikūṭa translated the Dhāraṇīsamuccaya. Vimalamitra's commentary is largely concerned with the bodhisatva-yāna but he does cite the Vairocanābhisaṃbodhi aka the Mahāvairocana Abhisaṃbodhi Tantra, the earliest systematic tantra that Stephen Hodge dates to ca 640 or a little earlier (2003: 11). Vimalamitra's visit to Tibet seems to be in the 790s.

The connection of Vimalamitra (II) to China turns out to be a late, and highly improbable, attempt to connect him with Śrīsiṃha for the purposes of strengthening the particular Dzogchen lineage he had become associated with. And this seems to be the main purpose of the Vimalamitra (II) character. Gruber continues:

"A majority of Vimalamitra’s earliest biographies, dating from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries... make no mention of the trip to China featured within the Great History. In response to [the Nyingtik tantras] low profile in India, the Great History informs the reader that the only copies of the Dzokchen tantras,which originated in India, were in China with Śrī Siṃha." (Gruber 2016: 99). 

I recently discovered the late John McRae's (2003) Rules of Zen Studies, the third of which is Precision implies inaccuracy. In this view, numbers, dates, and details are literary tropes. Details supplied are a function of temporal distance from the events. This rule clearly applies also to this Dzogchen lineage and to the Heart Sutra in general. Over time, Buddhists add details, clarify vagueness, specify relationships, and smooth over contradictions. Later stories are full of the kinds of details that lull historians into a false sense of security, while the earlier stories, though more accurate, are so imprecise as to be useless for the purposes of historiography. This detail of this trip to China is not credible. This is unfortunate because, at least in China, Vimalamitra stood a chance of finding a copy of the Heart Sutra.

The Extended Heart Sutra

To the best of my knowledge no comparative study have been made of the extended version of the Heart Sutra. Thus we don't as yet know if the extra parts of the text were composed in Sanskrit or in Chinese. We don't know if the origins of it are discernable. This is yet another basic research task that the Buddhist Studies community has neglected. The overall research program is completely haphazard. 

Perhaps the strangest part of the Heart Sutra story is not that a Chinese non-sūtra was accepted as an Indian sūtra by 661 CE through the production of a forged Sanskrit text and the attribution of the "translation" to Xuanzang. The strangest part is that anyone would take this version of the Heart Sutra that is accepted as a sūtra and make the effort to turn it into a sūtra by adding the missing parts that Chinese Buddhists were willing to overlook. Thus it is often assumed that the nidāna, etc, must have been added for the Indian market if not by an actual Indian.

We just keep assuming that the text has a connection with India. Chinese Buddhists accepted that the Heart Sutra was Indian despite the fact that the text fails the basic test of sutrahood - does not start evaṃ maya srotraṃ, doesn't specify the occasion, does not feature the Buddha speaking or endorsing the speech of another, and does not feature the audience venerating the teaching. Of course this did strike 19th Century Western scholars as odd but Asian Buddhists seemed very certain about it. We can now see that the Chinese Buddhist community were duped into believing the Heart Sutra to be Indian by the forgery of the Sanskrit text (I presume a physical document was produced) and the attribution of the "translation" to Xuanzang who had been to India.

Because the standard text does lack the basic features of a sūtra no one is surprised to find a version of the text in which these missing features have been supplied. It is assumed, again that these details were supplied in India. One argument would be that it is not surprising that the Chinese would not add these details because they accepted the standard text as authentic. But one could equally argue that the discomfort with the lack lingered. We have noted that Chinese Buddhists continued to add details to the Heart Sutra myth, including a forged "earlier" translation by Kumārajīva that is first mentioned in 730 CE. The tension caused by this pseudo-sūtra seems to have taken some time to wear off.

No one seems to have considered that another place where the tension of the missing details would have been strongly felt was Tibet. And, unlike India, Tibet shares a border with China. After the An Lushan Rebellion (755-763) Tibetans occupied Dunhuang and remained in power there until 848. Note that this period covers the presumed time-frame of Vimalamitra (And Kamalaśīla). As a consequence, many Tibetan texts were found in the library cave at Dunhuang. We've known for at least 35 years that copies of the standard Heart Sutra text in Tibetan exist amongst the Dunhuang cache of texts (Zwalf 1985. See also the transcription of British Library Or.8212/77 by Joy Vriens). Tibetan versions of the standard text were not included in the Tibetan Canon. Also found at Dunhuang are a variety of versions of the extended text as well as texts that are hybrids of two.

Perhaps a Tibetan added the missing details? And when the Indians went to Tibet they encountered the new text there.

Is there any evidence linking the Heart Sutra to India?

Indian Evidence

We have all taken the Tibetan versions of the "Indian" commentaries as evidence for the Heart Sutra in India in the 8th Century. Where we know anything at all about the men involved, we know that they went to Tibet and little more. What does this tell us about India? We are assuming that they all encountered the text in India but there is no documentary evidence of the text in India at any date. The oldest Nepalese manuscript of the extended Heart Sutra is Cambridge ADD 1680 dated to the 13th Century on paleographical grounds.

The earliest dated Chinese translation of the extended version is credited to an Indian monk whose name has been reconstructed as Dharmacandra (T252). The Zhēnyuán Catalogue published ca 800 CE records that Dharmacandra (法月, 653–743) was from Magadha and travelled to China via Kucha arriving in Chang'an in 732 (T. 2157; 878b12–879a5). He is said to have translated the extended Heart Sutra ca 741 CE, the same year he left China for Khotan/Kashgar (where he died in 743). Khotan is on the northern border of Tibet. Although he is said to have arrived in China with texts, he was only able to translate them with the help of his local disciple Lìyán (利言). Who is to say that he did not encounter the text in Central Asia or China? 

In fact, the nidāna of T 252 is very different from the other Chinese translations, the extant Sanskrit, and the Tibetan recensions. They all mention a bodhisatvasaṃgha (an unusual term) but T 252 also uniquely gives the numbers of bhikṣus (100,000) and bodhisatvas (77,000) present. Dharmacandra's final passage is also much shorter and different in structure to all the other versions. So at least two recensions of the extended Heart Sutra exist, not counting the hybrid texts from Dunhuang. It is possible that the missing details were supplied more than once, but that one version became the standard.

Donald Lopez says:

"Among the esoteric teachings given by Śrīsiṃha to Vairocana, which he in turn gave to [King Trisong Detsen], is [his] tantric commentary on the Heart Sutra, further testifying to its wide appeal in Pāla India, even among tantric yogins" (1996: 13).

If I am right, then this story is the only reference to the Heart Sutra in India, since of the other commentators only Śrīsiṃha did not go to Tibet. On the other hand, Ṣrīsiṃha was in fact Chinese and studied Buddhism in China, and we now know the Heart Sutra was Chinese. And this is a precise detail that implies temporal distance and inaccuracy! Contra Lopez, we know that the text was popular in Pāla-era Tibet but we have no historical evidence whatever of the text in Pāla India whether amongst yogins or anyone. 

There's a special form of bias called the street light effect. In the old story, a man is looking for his keys under the street light. It turns out that he probably dropped his keys elsewhere but he is looking under the street light because that is where the light is. Dunhuang is where the light is. Not only was it an important centre of Buddhism and textual copying during the Tang and Song, but the dry desert environment ensured the survival of artefacts. A large collection of extant documents draws our attention, especially when there is a distinct lacks of texts from India because of the disappearance of Buddhism from India coinciding with the decline and fall of the Pāla Dynasty and the rise of Muslim rulers in Northern India in the 12th Century. 

Still, it is important to consider that, during the very period that Buddhism was being spread to Tibet, Tibetans occupied Dunhuang and much of Gansu, keeping the Chinese out of Central Asia for around 80 years. During the occupation, Tibetans were not only interested the Heart Sutra, as we can see from the many copies they made, but they also tinkered with the text, producing new versions of it. The so-called Indian commentaries are attributed to people who are either unknown to us for any other reason and about whom we literally know nothing, or they are figures whose biographies have been elaborated long after the time when they were supposed to have lived. There is, in fact, no direct evidence of the Heart Sutra from India itself.

Conclusions

Long habit has us associate the Heart Sutra with India. After many years studying the text I'm confident that most of this story is fallacious. The Heart Sutra was composed in China and the Sanskrit text is a forgery. The details of the myth of the Heart Sutra were added later. McRae's third rule of studying Zen—Precision implies inaccuracy—applies.

The "Indian" evidence turns out to be Tibetan evidence. The largely mythical character of Vimalamitra is said to have translated the Heart Sutra and composed a commentary on it. But we know nothing about Vimalamitra with any certainty. His historicity is based on the attribution of these texts to him, so we cannot turn this around and rely on his historicity to authenticate the texts. The attributions are facts but they may not be factual. The texts do exist, but the case of the Heart Sutra is instructive. The Xīnjīng is traditionally thought to be a translation of a Sanskrit text by Xuanzang, but it is not. Xuanzang was probably involved in composing the text, but it was no translation. 

Cambridge manuscript ADD 1680 is dated to the 13th Century, but this is some 500 years after the events which we are seeking to clarify. It doesn't tell us anything. The Dunhuang collections are interesting but under-studied, so it is difficult to draw conclusions. Even so, Dunhuang is nowhere near India and no Sanskrit manuscripts were included in the cache. At the time Vimalamitra was active, Dunhuang was occupied by Tibetans, providing a direct route for the Heart Sutra from China to Tibet.

The historicity of the "Indian" text is rather doubtful. It is certainly not based on any direct evidence. The whole idea of the Heart Sutra in India is really just a series of assumptions. This is not an ontological argument that those assumptions are wrong. Rather, it is an epistemological argument about how we claim to know what we know. Conclusions in the absence of evidence are fatuous. Such evidence as we have has to be interpreted just right in order to support the idea that the text was known in India. And this is not the parsimonious approach. Buddhist Studies is far too reliant on these kinds of assumptions. 

Religious histories and biographies are not objective or neutral. We really need to take a step back and think carefully about the kind of evidence we have available to us on anything related to Buddhism in antiquity. Physical artefacts are few and far between before ca 200-300 CE.  

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Bulbulia, J. “Charismatic Signalling.” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 3, no.4 (2009): 518-551.

Campany, Robert F. 1991. “Notes in the Devotional Uses and Symbolic Functions of Sūtra Texts as Depicted in Early Chinese Buddhist Miracle Tales and Hagiographies.” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 14(1): 28-72.

Esler, Dylan. 2005. "The Origins and Early History of rDzogs chen." The Tibet Journal 30(3): 33-62.

Gruber, Joel. 2016a. Vimalamitra: The Legend of an Indian Saint and His Tibetan Emanations. PhD Dissertation, UC Santa Barbara.

Gruber, Joel. 2016b. "Becoming Vimalamitra: Manufacturing the Supernatural in Tibetan Buddhism." In Religion: Super Religion, ed. Jeffrey J. Kripal. New York: Macmillan education handbook series.

Gruber, Joel, 2020 "Vimalamitra," Treasury of Lives, accessed May 16, 2020, http://treasuryoflives.org/biographies/view/Vimalamitra/9985.

Hodge, Stephen. The Māhvairocana-Ambhisaṃbodhi Tantra: With Buddhaguhya's Commentary. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003.

Lopez, Donald S. 1988. The Heart Sūtra Explained: Indian and Tibetan Commentaries. State University of New York Press.

Lopez, Donald S. 1996. Elaborations on Emptiness: Uses of the Heart Sutra. Princeton University press.

McRae, John R. 2003. Seeing Through Zen. University of California Press.

Sacco, Antonio Maria. 1988. "Biographic Notes on Vimalamitra." The Tibet Journal 13(4): 13-20

Zwalf, W. 1985. Buddhism, Art and Faith. London: British Museum.

On the Pronunciation of Jña

One of the pleasures of learning Sanskrit for an English speaker is that it is written almost exactly as it is pronounced. I say almost, because there are one or two irregularities. The most striking irregularity is probably the consonant cluster in jña. This comes out variously as gya, gnya, dya, dnya, and nya and, at face value, there is no rime or reason for this. However, it turns out to be a regional feature influenced by how languages deal with Sanskrit loan words.

In a Buddhist context the word jñā is fairly common as it occurs in technical terms like vijñāna, saṃjñā, and prajñā as well as more general terms like jñāna and jñātavyam. Prajñāpāramitā texts use words deriving from the root √jñā very often. The meaning of jñā is relatively straight forward; it means: "knowledge" (noun) and "to know" (verb). But when one interacts with Sanskritists, one realises that jña is pronounced in a number of more or less counter-intuitive ways, none of which reflect the written word. 

In this essay I will try to explain where these differences come from and try to identify how jña should be pronounced. I will argue that it should, like the rest of the language, be pronounced as written. My evidence will come from two main sources the reconstructed historical phonology of Sanskrit and the historical writing of Sanskrit.

We know that Sanskrit is part of the Indo-European family, an idea first proposed by William Jones in his famous address to the Royal Asiatic Society in 1786:

"The Sanskrit language whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philosopher could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists."

Note that the relationship is primarily based on similarities of grammar (the conjugations of the verbs and declensions of nouns), but one may also see it in cognate words, such as English know, Greek γνῶσις (gnōsis), Avestan: zan- (v. to know), and so on. Comparative linguistics allows us to compare existing languages and reconstruct the mother tongue of both. In the case of Sanskrit we can trace it back to a common root with Iranian languages, called Proto-Indo-Iranian (PII) , and then one step further to the common root Indo-Iranian and European languages called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The reconstructed phonology has a logic to it and is internally consistent but no recordings or documents of any kind exist. All that exists are daughter languages.

Phonology

Articulation

We think we have a fairly accurate idea of the phonology of attested ancient languages in the region of Iran and North Western India: Vedic, Old Persian, and Avestan. And we can match this to information about articulation - the physical motions and points of contact of the tongue, mouth, and throat that produce vocal sounds. We can also determine qualities such as whether the motion stopped the air flow completely (if briefly) or only partially. A consonantal stop or affricate requires the tongue to completely block the air flow momentarily, i.e. Sanskrit k g ṭ ḍ t d. A fricative does not completely block the air, i.e. Sanskrit j c v ś ṣ s h and creates a turbulent air flow that changes the timbre of the sound. There is also an approximant which constricts the airflow but not enough to create turbulence.

In addition, a vocal sound may be accompanied by vibrations of the vocal cords or not, which we call voiced (Skt: g j ḍ d b) and unvoiced (Skt: k c ṭ t p). Or the sound may resonate mainly in the nasal cavity which we call nasal (Skt: ṅ ñ ṇ n m).

The /j/ and /ñ/ sounds of Sanskrit are made with the blade of the tongue pressed against the hard palate and are thus called palatal (Skt: c ch j jh ñ). Further forward is the alveolar region which is where the palate merges into the gums. English speakers pronounce /t/ and /d/ by contact of the tip of the tongue on the alveolar. Sanskrit distinguishes a true dental, i.e. tongue touches the teeth (t th d dh n) and a retroflex, i.e. tongue curls back so the tip touches the edge of the hard palate (Skt: ṭ ṭh ḍ ḍha ṇ). Indians tend to hear our English alveolar consonants as retroflex. So "doctor" becomes डक्टर् ḍakṭar. When the back of the tongue contacts the soft palate we call these sound velar region (Skt: k kh g gh ṅ). 

Historical Phonology

The reconstructed articulation of PIE is largely settled, though there are some controversial aspects to it. Fortunately, we don't need to consider the controversial parts. In order to explain the palatal consonants in Vedic, Old Persian, and Avestan languages we need to postulate three palatals in PIE that in fact were pronounced somewhere between the palatal and velar: (1) an unvoiced palatovelar affricate, /k̂/ (2) a voiced palatovelar affricate, /ĝ/ and (3) an aspirated voiced palatovelar affricate /ĝʰ/ (Burrow 1973). This notation is indicative of articulation rather than sound. As I understand it we cannot give precise pronunciations of these using the International Phonetic alphabet (I've found no sources that use IPA to notate PIE phonology).

To get to Sanskrit these sounds underwent two parallel processes of "palatalisation". In most cases these consonants drifted towards the front of the mouth slightly and became fricative. In the first palatalisation (using the notation from Burrow 1973) PIE: k̂ ĝ ĝʰ first became Proto-Indo-Iranian: ć ȷ́ ȷ́ʰ and then ś ź źʰ. At this point the PII language family started to break up.

In the Avestan form of Old Iranian these sounds became s z z. In the Persian form of Old Iranian ś and źʰ became θ and z, while from the earlier form ȷ́ we get (directly) d. Similarly in Vedic ś and źʰ become ś and h, while from ȷ́ we get j. We also see j deriving another way, which is evident in some sandhi differences, but exploring this would take me too far from my aim to explore jñā. The j in jñā derived this way.

Sanskrit jñā is cognate with Avestan zan- and Old Persian dān-. Note the insertion of a vowel between the initial consonant and the nasal. This is something we also see in practice in Sanskrit. The verbal form of the root jñā is jānāti, though we also see jñāta, jñātum, jñātva, and jñāyate.

We can now start to put some more precise values on these sounds using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA is conventionally put in square brackets). The "palatals" in Sanskrit are c ch j jh ñ, but in IPA notation are actually alveolo-palatal and in IPA are written: [tɕ] [tɕʰ] [dʑ] [dʑʱ] [ɲ]

If you want to know how these sound, cut and paste the symbol into a search on YouTube. Each one is demonstrated in a short video

Here we are focused on the voiced palatals.

[ʒ] voiced post-alveolar fricative
[dʒ] voiced post-alveolar affricate
[dʑ] voiced alveolo-palatal affricate
[dʑʱ] breathy voiced alveolo-palatal affricate
[j]   voiced palatal approximant
[ɟ]   voiced palatal affricate
[ɲ]  voiced palatal nasal
[nʲ] or [ɲ̟] voiced palatised nasal

We would expect jña to be pronounced [dʑɲɐ] or [ɟɲɐ] (most sources seem to prefer the latter). As noted above, jña is almost never pronounced this way. Ashok Aklujkar points out, in his Sanskrit textbook, that this is partly due to regional variations in India and partly due to Anglisation. Other authors point out that words like jñāna were taken into modern languages as loan words and that this is the source of regional variants.

In the yellow and orange coloured regions, and in Panjab, the pronunciation is /gya/. In the green and red regions and Sindh, it is /dnya/, although in Gujarat it is /gnya/. South India has a mixture. English speakers often opt for /nya/. We can organise these variants: 

IAST
jña	→ g ña (gnya)	→ gya
	→ d ña (dnya)	→ dya
	→ ña (nya)
IPA
[ɟɲɐ]	→ [g nʲɐ]	→ [gʲɐ]
	→ [d nʲɐ]	→ [dʲɐ]
	→ [nʲɐ]

The change from [ɟ] → [g] is a move back in the mouth towards the velar articulation while the change from [ɟ] → [d] is a move forward towards the alveolar. These are clearly different processes and one could not lead to the other. However, with the shift in the initial consonant, the nasal changes from the plain palatal nasal [ɲ] to the voiced palatised nasal [nʲ]. This is why we see it written as "nya". In fact, what happens is the tongue makes contact at the alveolar ridge and rolls back along the palate. In Sanskrit we'd say it was ī blending into a (or a backwards diphthong ai). Phonetically we'd write the vowel change as [ɨ] → [ɐ]. In a sense, then, [nʲɐ]  sounds like [ɲɨɐ].

We can infer that gya [gʲɐ] could be a simplified version of gnya [g nʲɐ]. Thus the Gujaratis who pronounce jñā as gnya [g nʲɐ] are probably conservative with respect to the northern and eastern Indians who have reduced this to gya. Since English speakers have difficulty with [ɟɲə] they simply reduced it to [nʲə]. Pāli generally reduced conjunct consonants to geminate consonants thus jña becomes ñña. But the ñ is pronounced by English speakers as a palatalised nasal not as patal, i.e. as [nʲə] rather than [ɲə], hence names like Nyanaponika (Ñāṇapoṇika) and Nyanamoli (Ñāṇamoḷi).

Since old Persian contains the regular change [dʒ] →  [d] we might suspect from Persian influence on the modern regional pronunciation in parts of India most influenced by the later Persians. However, this does not quite add up since Persian speaking Mughals also ruled in Delhi where /gya/ is standard.

One thing to keep in mind is that in Latin -gn- was pronounced [ŋn], i.e. they did not pronounced gnōsis as /g-nosis/ but as /no-sis/ (like Skt ṅosis). However, the sandhi rules of Sanskrit tend to rule out this possibility.

Sandhi

All spoken languages exhibit changes in pronunciation as words and sounds run together. Some of the languages that use a phonetic writing system notate them and some don't. Sanskrit does and there are a set of rules called sandhi (joining). In classical Sanskrit the rules are compulsory and applied uniformly, but in vernacular languages they became more optional. Madhav Deshpande pointed out to me (in an email) that certain sandhi involving j make it clear that it was heard as [ɟ] even in the conjunct jñ.

The Sanskrit Heart Sutra gives us an excellent example. Towards the end it says "therefore it should be known", in Sanskrit without sandhi: tasmāt jñātavyam; with sandhi tasmāj jñātavyam. The rule is t followed by t becomes j. Similarly in the Mahābharata (179.1) we see  tasmāj jīvo nirarthakaḥ "Therefore this life is useless", and in the Bhagavatā Purāṇa (11.19.5) we see tasmāj jñānena "therefore by this knowledge",

The rules are very specific and became part of the language long before they were codified by Pāṇini ca 4th Century BCE. This tells us that the j in jña was being heard as [ɟ] in Sanskrit when the rule was made or else an exception would be noted.

Chinese

Another potential source of information is Chinese transliterations. Prajñā, for example, was a word that was generally transliterated rather than translated. The transliteration was established early on, by Lokakṣema ca 179 CE, as 般若; however, this was based on Gāndhārī texts. In modern Buddhist circles this is pronounced bōrě although the standard Pinyin transliteration is bānruò. The Middle Chinese reconstruction is complex. There are multiple choices and multiple encoding systems.

• 般 has been reconstructed as /puɑn/ or /pʷɑn/ or /pan/ or /pɐn/.
• 若 has been reconstructed as /ȵɨɐk̚/. The symbol ȵ is mainly used in Sinological circles and represents the alveolo-palatal nasal, i.e. [nʲ].

The Gāndhāri spelling of prajñā was praṃña or praña (c.f. Pāḷi paññā) And thus we can see that the standard Chinese transliteration presents a Prakrit pronunciation without the conjunct. Unfortunately, it was never updated to reflect the Sanskrit pronunciation when Sanskrit texts started to appear. And thus we cannot use the Chinese to reconstruct the received pronunciation at any later period.

Writing

Since Sanskrit is usually pronounced as written we can also look at historical writing to see what it tells us. In modern Devanāgarī the akṣaras for ja and ña combine to form a special sign for the conjunct jña, i.e. ज् + ञ > ज्ञ. Hiralal Rasikdas Kapadia (1936: 289), an expert on Jaina literature, points out that there are two types of Devanāgarī and the Jaina variant as another way of writing jña. In the Jaina variant we get more of a sense of the conjunct. This becomes clearer in old Indian scripts.

Older scripts make a clear distinction between the j and the ña when writing jñā. A good point of reference for us is the Hōryūji manuscript which probably dates from the 9th Century. This manuscript contains a syllabary. The image on the right shows the palatals: ca cha ja jha ña.

We can also isolate the akṣara jñā from this manuscript and see that it has two quite distinct ligatures and is thus written as a conjunction of j and ñā. Note that when written as a ligature the shape of ña is quite different. Also, the scribe has adapted the the basic ja shape in order to indicate the long vowel ā. I will provide some handwritten examples that make the process clearer.

In the collection of akṣaras below I try to show the evolution of ja from Brahmī which gives us two distinct forms of ja, one of which informs the Devanāgarī script and one of which is preserved in Japanese Siddham.

Left to right: Brahmī, Gupta, Siddham (Hōryūji ms.);
upper: Siddham and alternate; jñā (Hōryūji);
lower: Nāgarī, Devanāgarī.

In the formal Siddham script of medieval Japan, the ñā ligature is often written vertically, but this makes for a very tall character. The Hōryūji scribe turns the ligature through 90°. Here are some original and copied examples of jña and jñā. In modern Siddham we often see jña written for jñā.

Some of this is superfluous detail, but it makes the point that until the invention of the (non-Jaina) Devanāgarī script jñā was written as a standard conjunct made of ja and ña. Had the Sanskrit pronunciation been meant to be something else, then the scribes would have used another akṣara.

Note: 18 March 2020. The Creation and Spread of Scripts in Ancient India. Harry Falk

Conclusion

On the grounds of historical phonology, sandhi, and graphology we can say that jña was intended to be pronounced [ɟɲɐ]. The sandhi rule for tasmāt jñātavyam makes it clear that at some point this was the pronunciation and there was no parallel of the Latin pronunciation of [ŋn] for gn. The regional pronunciations are logical developments from an original [ɟɲɐ] and influenced by the use of Sanskrit loan words. However, we don't really know why the pronunciation changed, only that it did. 

For Indian pandits and academic Sanskritists alike, the pronunciation they learned from their teachers will likely be the way they keep pronouncing it. Furthermore, the sound combination [ɟɲɐ] is difficult for English-speakers and they will inevitably tend to drop the [ɟ] and end up with [ɲɐ] or [nʲɐ]. So probably few will follow me in adopting [ɟɲɐ]. And thus all this is for nought. But I find it fascinating and it has kept me amused for a week. It was nice to get my calligraphy pens out again after a long break. In these difficult times, that's not a bad thing, eh? 

~~oOo~~

Bibliography

Burrow, T. (1973). The Sanskrit Language (3rd edition). London: Faber and Faber.

Kapadia, H. R. (1936). 'A Note on Kṣa and Jña.' Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute. 17(3), 1935-36: 289-296.

Writing in India

For some time I have wanted to write a review of an article by Johannes Bronkhorst, now almost 30 years old.[1] The title is unprepossessing - "Some observations on the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda" - but the conclusions are interesting. The first part of his article recaps an earlier article that discusses the relative ages of the two forms of the Ṛgveda text. These two forms are Saṃhitāpāṭha and Padapāṭha. The Saṃhitāpāṭha (Sp) is the text as it is spoken. Sanskrit writing very early on recorded a great deal more of the spoken language than does our English script. Particularly as we run words together in spoken language we change the sounds subtly. In Vedic these changes - known as sandhi 'junctures' - are meticulously notated in the written text. By contrast the Padapāṭha (Pp) is more like English writing in that it records only the words themselves. The Pp is generally supposed to have been composed as an aide de memoir to help keep the oral tradition accurate. The extant Pp is attributed to Śākalya who's dates are uncertain.

I cannot reproduce Bronkhorst's complex arguments for the relative dating of Sp and Pp, but he concludes that the recension of the Pp that has come down to us is older than the recension of the Sp. Bronkhorst, as is his way, tells us his conclusion at the beginning: "I know of one plausible explanation: the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda was written down from its beginning" (p.184); and then offers his evidence.

The first evidence I have already mentioned: that the way we speak English is like the Sp, and the way we write it is like the Pp. He is suggesting that the relationship between Sp and Pp is just like the relationship between spoken and written English. The second is that the Pp contains some signs such as the daṇḍa (punctuation mark) and avagraha (similar to an apostrophe for noting elisions: like n't for not) which only really make sense in writing - they have no phonetic value of their own, and do not affect pronunciation generally. Like English punctuation they make reading easier. Bronkhorst also mentions a rule in Pāṇini's grammar which relates to the use of iti in more or less the same way as Western scholars use sic. He says:

"Pāṇini puzzles over the question of how the [manuscript] of the Ṛgveda (= Padapāṭha) must be read such that a correct recitation (= Saṃhitāpāṭha) is the result." (p.185)

This suggests that Pāṇini is likely to have been working with a written text.

As Bronkhorst himself says, there is no unanimity on the date for the beginning of writing in India. Bronkhorst himself opts for the case made by Bühler [2] who places the date at about 800 BCE.

"If we accept Bühler's ideas, and estimate that it took the Brahmans about a century to adopt the alphabet and adjust it to their needs, the earliest possible date for [the written text] becomes 700 [BCE]. A later date must however be prepared." (p.186)

Perhaps Bronkhorst reflects the state of knowledge at the time he was writing, though it is hard to imagine 78 years having passed with no contribution. In any case the subject has definitely moved on since Bronkhorst's article. Compare Richard Salomon in Indian Epigraphy [3]:

Bühler's suggestion of an early date of ca. 800 BC, or possibly earlier, for the 'introduction of prototypes of the Brāhma letters' in India is hardly plausible in light of modern knowledge, but more cautious estimates such as that of A. B Kieth [4] that 'the real development of writing belongs in all likelihood to the fifth century' are not unreasonable. (p.13)

Salomon points out that both the literary and epigraphical evidence is "vague or inconclusive" (p.12). It is rather more conventional to date writing in Indian to the 4th century BCE because this is the earliest date that can be confirmed by inscriptions minus a century. [5] (This practice of adding or subtracting a century to allow things to develop is pretty standard for scholars, though I sometimes wonder how justified it is!). However Salomon (p. 12) notes that pottery shards with Brahmī script writing found in Sri Lanka in the 1990's are variously dated to the 6th-4th century BCE, with most recent articles opting for the later end of the spectrum (i.e. towards the 4th century). [6]

Writing did not develop spontaneously in India, but was adapted from outside models. There is ample evidence for contact between India and the rest of the world. Already by the time the Buddha was born (ca 480 BCE) the Achaemanids were exacting tribute from the north-west of India (as far as the Indus River), and possibly were a substantial presence. As proof of contact Bronkhorst cites the Biblical mention of aloe-wood in Numbers (xxiv.6) which may date from between 900-722 BCE. Unfortunately the materials used for writing in India were not always durable, and stone inscriptions were not widely used until the reign of Aśoka (who may well have been imitating the Persian kings in his inscriptions).

The earliest form of writing we know about is the Kharoṣṭhī script which is clearly modelled on the Aramaic script used by Achaemanid Persian administrators. The Brahmī script is less clearly modelled on an outside script, but most scholars still see a relationship to Aramaic. I accept the arguments of Steve Farmer and Michael Witzel that the Indus Valley script is a form of graphic communication, but does not represent language - i.e. it is not writing, but similar to graphic signs in Sumeria about the same time.[7]

The received tradition is that (religious) Indians were not interested in writing because sacred texts were memorised and passed on orally. Though of course this does not explain why merchants and administrators would not use it, especially when they were in direct contact with cultures that did use writing much earlier. Although the evidence for an absolute date for writing in India, after more than a century of study is, in Salomon's words "disappointingly inconclusive"; and although Bronkhorst cannot establish a relative date for the Ṛgveda Padapāṭha, except in relation to the Saṃhitāpāṭha, we see in his article a contradiction of the old chestnut that ancient Indians were not interested in writing. The Ṛgveda was written down early on, probably by the time of Pāṇini, which suggests that writing may well have been in use during the life time of the Buddha, or not so very long afterwards. The writing down of the Buddhist canon in the 1st century BCE, therefore, was not the radical innovation that it is sometimes portrayed as. As the recent discovery tells us, writing may have been in use in Sri Lanka for 3 or 4 centuries by that time.

What Bronkhorst shows is that the relationship to writing may have been more complex, both at any give time and across time, than we generally think.

~~0~~

Notes

1. Bronkhorst, Johannes. 1982. "Some observations on the Padapāṭha of the Ṛgveda." Indo-Iranian Journal. 24: 181-189.
2. Bühler, Johan Georg. Indian Paleography, edited by John Faithful Fleet. Bombay: Bombay Education Society's Press, 1904. (Reprinted by Oriental Books Reprint Copr. 1980)
   
3. Salomon, Richard. Indian Epigraphy: a guide to the study of inscriptions in Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the other Indo-Aryan languages. Oxford University Press, 1998. [This is an excellent and authoritative guide to the history of writing in India]
   
4. Salomon is citing from E.J. Rapson (ed.) 1922. Cambridge History of India, vol. 1 'Ancient India'. Cambridge University Press, p.126.
   
5. e.g. A. L. Basham. The Wonder that was India. 3rd revised edition. Rupa & Co. 1967. Writing is down played to the extent of not being mentioned in many histories of India, e.g. Stein, Burton. A History of India. Blackwell,1998; Thapar, Romila. The Penguin History of Early India : from Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002.
6. I've seen the 6th century figure seized upon and used as evidence of Brahmī being invented in Sri Lanka.
   
7. A good place to start is Farmer, Steve. A One-Sentence Refutation of the Indus-Script Myth. 2005-2008; also excellent is Steve Farmer, Richard Sproat, and Michael Witzel, The collapse of the Indus-script thesis: The myth of a literate Harappan civilization. Electronic Journal of Vedic Studies 11-2 (13 Dec. 2004): 19-57.

image: Ṛgveda Saṃhitāpāṭha 1.1-2.

The Stream of Life

I was reading through Rune Johansson's Pāli Buddhist Texts and came across this little verse [1].

accayanti ahorattā
jīvatam uparujjhati
āyu khīyati maccānam
kunnadīnam va odakaṃ

Days and nights elapse
Vitality declines
Mortal life is exhausted
Like water in streams

We are used to using rivers as metaphors. We understand the idea of the ever changing stream of the river, flowing from head waters to the sea, especially if we come from moist temperate climates. But in North India there is another phenomena which may not be so familiar.

In Feb 2009 I was in Bodhgaya for the convention of the Triratna Buddhist Order. One day I took the time to walk a little out of town to cross the long bridge over the River Falgu (called the Nirañjana in the Buddha's day) to the little village of Senani (also called Sujata in association with the young women who is said to have offered the Bodhisatta some milk-rice after he gave up self-torture). In Senani the farmers still pull a wooden plough behind bullocks despite the fact the iron age began about three millennia ago and resulted in the original clearing of this land. However the fields looked green and productive on this side of the river, where there was only brown dry fields around Bodhgaya. On the edge of the village is a stūpa which was built to commemorate Sujata.

The accompanying image from Google earth [2] shows Bodhgaya and the Falgu/Narañjana, the Mahabodhi Temple complex, the bridge and Suajata's stūpa. Although the bridge is about 600 meters wide, as I walked accompanied by one of the ubiquitous 'school children' [3] of Bodhgaya, I saw only sand. The mighty river had completely dried up, and this was not even the hot season, this was during the coolish winter. This is what this image shows - the brown colour is sand, not water. At higher magnifications one can see the patterns and cart tracks in the sand, as well as the little hut next to the bridge that Śaiva sadhus occupy when it is dry. Pulling back even more one sees that the river peters out in both directions, though I think it probably forms a tributary of the Ganges during the monsoon. There is even a word for this phenomena in Sanskrit: vārṣikodaka 'having water only during the rainy season [varṣa]'.

Certainly I am not used to such contrasts. It occurred to me that the verse above had to be understood in this context - this cyclic flooding and then complete drying up of even substantial rivers. I could not have imagined life becoming exhausted like a small stream because I've (more or less) always lived on islands with abundant rainfall all year round. But in this region when even a large river can completely dry up, what chance does a small stream have? And the verse is saying that life is like a small stream in this region - it may flood, but soon is will disappear. The verse is much more compelling when seen in this context.

The use of the word jīvata is interesting. It begins as a past-participle of jīvati and therefore means 'lived', but comes to mean the life-span, or 'vitality' (itself from Latin vita 'life' and probably cognate with jīvata). The noun jīva is an important technical term in Jainism where it denotes a kind of soul which moves from life to life. The verse makes a contrast by choosing another word for life: ayu (Sanskrit āyus). We find this word in āyurveda which means something like the 'knowledge of life' i.e. a literal rending in English would be biology (though they do not quite mean the same thing!). Āyus is related to the Greek word æon, and to English 'eternal, always'. So buried in the history of these words is the notion of eternity, the belief or wish that life will go on and on.

The Canon records that these words were spoken to Māra in the Squirrel Sanctuary near Rājagaha in the heart land of the samaṇa movement. I've noted before that Johannes Bronkhorst has argued that the idea of rebirth came from this region from amongst the samaṇa groups of whom the Jains were pre-eminent in the Buddha's time [Rethinking Indian History]. Māra here argues that the jīvata rolls along like the chariot's wheel, he literally denies that days and nights pass and that life ends. The verse above is the Buddha's rely. The status of Māra is a long story - was he 'real', allegorical, metaphorical? One way we could take this story is as a psychodrama with Māra representing that part of our psyche which coined these words for life which has 'eternal' as a connotation. Māra is our refusal to face up to our own impending death. The refusal to face death is quite a common theme and I have dealth with it at least once before in my essay: From the Beloved.

However we read the verses I find it very helpful to have walked in that landscape when trying to get into the mindset I find in the Pāli texts.


References

1. The reference is Saṃyutta Nikāya i.109 - pg 201-202 of the single vol ed. of Bhikkhu Bodhi's translation. [I'm tempted to offer a prize for anyone who knows what a 'felly' is without looking it up!]
   
2. If you want a closer look at Bodhgaya on Google then the coordinates are: Latitude: N 24° 41.75, Longitude: E 84° 59.49
   
3. The 'students' scam money out of tourists and pilgrims by asking them to buy school books for them, which they immediately sell back to the shop. This scam has a second level in which the dupe is invited to visit the school where the headmaster informs them that the child is out of school because they haven't paid their fees, which the generous dupe pays for them - 0nly to see them on the street again the next day. (It happened to a friend of mine!)