Search Results (98)

In the history of Buddhist literature, there have been two texts sharing the title Jātakastava (Birth Stories Hymn), one in Khotanese and the other in Sanskrit and Tibetan. These two texts exhibit similarities in genre, framework structure, thematic selection, and narrative logic, while diverging in the arrangement of specific materials, textual length, authorship, dissemination regions, and translation approaches. This study examines the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual Jātakastava—a text that has received limited scholarly attention—and undertakes a comparative analysis with the Khotanese Jātakastava to reassess the relationship between these two texts bearing the same title, as well as their associated authors and translators. Through the inclusion of stories such as the Elephant King Leaping off a Cliff and King Maitrībala sacrificing his flesh to feed the rākṣasas, the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual Jātakastava reinforces the sequence of the six perfections (pāramitās) and exhibits a more pronounced thematic progression in its arrangement, thus representing a concise model of classical Sanskrit hymns. The Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual text is attributed to Jñānayaśas, who may be associated with the Northern Zhou translator Shénà Yēshě 闍那耶舍. The text was translated into Tibetan by the scholar Chos skyong bzang po of the Zhwa lu school, whose word-for-word rendering style possibly reflects a grammatical and commentarial approach characteristic of the Zhwa lu school’s linguistic studies. The Khotanese Jātakastava may be seen as an expanded recension of this Buddhist hymn tradition as it existed in Dunhuang around the tenth century, while the Sanskrit–Tibetan bilingual version represents an abridged form that reached Tibet in the fifteenth century. The similarities and differences between the two texts reveal the inherent tension between localized dissemination and standardized compilation in the transmission of Jātaka narratives. Full article

This paper analyses the ‘grammar’, or rules, of meditation practice in the c. 5th-century Qizil Yoga Manual (QYM). The QYM was found in Kucha, a significant location in the Silk Road trade network. Meditation in this text means visual recollection, and the practices are largely structured around Buddhist Sarvāstivāda sequences with some hints of Mahāyāna or Tantric themes). As with certain Mahāyāna ontologies, the Qizil Yoga Manual meditations emphasize an expansive spatiality, employing a densely populated mental landscape in which images abound. Since visualization requires blank space for projection/construction (whether mental space or the space of the cave), one result is the spatialisation of time. Nonetheless, the QYM is not a text in which temporality is dispensed with, and the meditation formulas also retain a more restrained Sarvāstivāda manual emphasis on visual elements arising and disappearing in temporal sequence—such as we find in the Abhidharmakośabhāṣya or early Sarvāstivāda layers of the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra, such as the ‘Śrāvakabhūmi’. To address the interplay of image proliferation and temporal sequence in the text, this paper engages semiotics, or the study of sign systems. Drawing on both linguistic and visual approaches, a ‘semiotic triangle’ is proposed to acknowledge how ‘mental imagery’ is produced triadically by text, cave and body. Since the primary surviving manuscript of the Qizil Yoga Manual is fragmentary, its meaning can be hard to discern, made doubly so by the distinct cultural character of this Central Asian Buddhist Sanskrit text. Moreover, only when the material context of the manuscript is highlighted, taking into account embodied cave meditation, can the ‘readerly blanks’ be filled in. The goals of this paper are to deepen an ontological understanding of the practices in the Qizil Yoga Manual, and to show how historical textual research in religious studies can be underpinned by methods that are bolder in their theoretical scope, moving beyond the remit of translation projects. Full article

Focusing on a pivotal yet underexplored syntactic phenomenon, this study demonstrates that the prepositional construction chu (除), essential for marking exception and inclusion, not only finds its earliest documented origins exclusively within translated Buddhist scriptures of the Eastern Han-Sui period, but also reveals within them a tripartite system of grammatical meanings: (1) an exclusive usage, highlighting element B in contrast to A; (2) an additive usage, supplementing A with B; and (3) a conditional–exceptive usage, expressing “only if A, then B”. To account for this novel system, this study employs a contrastive analysis of parallel texts, meticulously comparing the Chinese translations with their Sanskrit originals. The analysis reveals that chu (除) served as a systematic calque, corresponding to a defined set of Sanskrit morphosyntactic forms: the absolute participles (sthāpayitvā, sthāpetv, vinirmucya) and the past passive participle virahita (all conveying exception); the adverb api (expressing inclusion); and the indeclinable anyatra (meaning “except”). Integrating evidence from historical Chinese corpora with Sino-Sanskrit comparative data, this study establishes that the tripartite semantic system of the prepositional construction chu (除) constitutes a syntactic calque on Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit, rather than an endogenous development. This finding provides a robust case of contact-induced grammatical replication, thereby illuminating the profound and specific impact of Sanskrit-to-Chinese translation on the trajectory of Chinese syntactic history. Full article

In Indian religious traditions, pātāla denotes a seven-layered subterranean realm beneath the earth, a composite space that combines cosmological stability with mythic expressiveness. It serves as the dwelling of nāgas and asuras and connects with the human world through rivers and caves. Although Buddhist literature retains narratives about these beings and their splendid abodes, it never accepted pātāla as an independent cosmological unit. This article examines Pāli, Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit Buddhist sources in comparison with Hindu epic and Purāṇic literature and analyzes the translation of pātāla in Chinese versions. It argues that Buddhism engaged in selective restructuring by de-emphasizing pātāla’s cosmological hierarchy and subordinating it to the Mount Sumeru framework, while transforming it in esoteric ritual literature into a liminal field of practice accessible through mantra, mudrā, and specific practices. Utilizing Arnold van Gennep’s liminality theory, the study shows that these spaces serve as an intermediary ritual field in Buddhist practice. Through ritual separation, liminal experience, and reintegration, practitioners acquire extended lifespan and merit that support the Mahāyāna goal of perfecting the two accumulations and attaining Buddhahood. The findings suggest that religious concepts cross traditions through disassembly, detachment, and functional reconfiguration rather than wholesale transplantation. Full article

The tale commonly known as “Hunter Catches Birds” circulates widely across South Asia, the Islamicate world, and insular Southeast Asia. Despite linguistic, religious, and cultural differences, the narrative architecture of the Hunter Catches Birds tale displays remarkable continuities across Buddhist, Persian, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese traditions. Its persistence across radically different religious and cultural settings raises a broader question of how narrative meaning remains recognizable through continual reinterpretation. In early Malay renderings, particularly within the Hikayat Bayan Budiman tradition, oral materials are reorganized into framed and nested literary structures. These forms enable both textual and visual interplay while supporting ethical instruction alongside aesthetic elaboration. Frequently positioned as an introductory episode in parrot-cycle literature, the story integrates motifs such as collective escape, feigned death, interspecies conflict, and the tension between loyalty and betrayal. These narrative elements remain open to reinterpretation in different moral and cultural settings. Drawing upon Sanskrit, Persian, Uyghur, Malay, Indonesian, and Javanese materials, this study examines how the tale moved across oral, manuscript, and visual traditions. Rather than treating the narrative as a fixed folktale type, the article approaches it as a flexible modular structure whose ethical meanings were continually reshaped across changing religious and social environments. These interactions generate layered systems of meaning in which image and text jointly shape narrative tension, vulnerability, and strategic judgment. In Persian miniature traditions, scenes of entrapment, sacrifice, and escape are organized through sequential composition and spatial tension, allowing conflict, vulnerability, and narrative causality to be experienced visually as well as textually. By tracing these transformations, this study argues that the enduring vitality of the Hunter Catches Birds tradition may lie less in narrative stability than in the sustained reinterpretation of repeated narrative structures across textual and visual cultures. Full article

The translation of Buddhist scriptures from ancient India into Chinese involved more than the transmission of religious doctrine. It also required the negotiation of fundamentally different systems of quantification, valuation, and material understanding. Taking the expression jia zhi bai qian liang jin 價直百千兩金 (“worth one hundred thousand taels of gold”) in the Dunhuang manuscript Qiyan lu 啟顏錄 as its point of departure, this article examines how Sanskrit numerical and value expressions were reconstructed in Chinese Buddhist translation. It asks how the Sanskrit expression śata-sahasra/śatasahasramūlyaṃ was rendered in Chinese, why translators adopted the calque baiqian 百千 rather than the more idiomatic native term shiwan 十萬, and why the Chinese expression further introduced the weight unit liang 兩 (tael) and the material term jin 金 (gold). Drawing on Sanskrit-Chinese comparison, historical-linguistic analysis, and the comparative history of monetary and metrological systems in India and China, the study argues that Chinese Buddhist translators frequently preserved the internal morphology of the Sanskrit original through the literal form baiqian, while also localizing the expression by adding liang jin 兩金 in order to make a counting-based notion of value intelligible within Chinese habits of weighing precious metal. The Qiyan lu anecdote further shows how this translational formula could be received and reinterpreted in a vernacular setting. Full article

Common sense tells us that feeling love involves loving another as another and is not merely an accident of self-love, while the Sanskrit theory of rasa aesthetics tells us that genuine love must be returned. God’s love for humanity would not require these distinctions, however, if it exists at all, and Benedictus de Spinoza (1632–1677) claims that it does not. Rather, he finds that God’s love is not a philosophical problem because the very idea of God experiencing pleasure or pain as a result of desire for another (which constitutes common transactional conceptions of love) is irrational. This philosophical problem is compounded by the intrinsic value of loving without reciprocity, the follies of delusion, and the complicated—if not implicit—demands of reciprocity. Although Spinoza teaches a devotional path to liberation based on a logic of emotion in his Ethics, it is in the Bhagavadgītā’s twenty verses on “Bhaktiyoga” that a philosophy of devotion extends to a practice for the sake of love in moral action. This virtue-theoretic approach to emotion responses yields yoga-classed results such that the characteristic traits of love are dedicated to humanity and productive actions are offered to God. This study reconciles the complex challenge of achieving adequate moral knowledge with Spinoza’s claims that the path is rare, not difficult. If knowledge of what to do can be united with how to serve, divine love may be theoretically realised. The conclusion is that one may conduct ordinary secular transactions without contradiction yet generate a kind of affective currency as a channel for experiencing embodied liberation in a virtuous friendship with humanity via God. Full article

This is a preliminary report on a study of Indic precedents for Pure Land traditions. It contests anglophone scholarship that find those traditions to be predominantly East Asian constructions in discontinuity with Indian Buddhism. The first part, related to previously unpublished research, disputes a common leading point of such arguments that the expression pure land, jingtu, has no Sanskrit antecedents. The article will show that Sanskrit antecedents for jingtu are in fact abundant. The second part summarizes previously published work showing that the cosmology, soteriology, and buddhology of buddhakṣetras have explicit foundations among the heavens and devas. The third part forecasts research for Kenneth Tanaka’s “Other Power” project. ‘Other-power’ has been seen as discordant with Indian traditions, when even abhidharma sources state that, through ‘a single mind of faith in Buddha to the marrow of one’s bones, one can overcome infinite bad karma.’ The salvific power of the names of buddhas is a common concept in Indian Buddhism, declared even by Nāgārjuna. Not discounting Chinese and Japanese creative contributions and acculturation, Pure Land traditions are in strong natural continuity with Indian Buddhist thought. Full article

A writing system $\mathfrak{W}$ on an alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is a tuple $(\mathfrak{R},\mathfrak{M})$, where $\mathfrak{R}$ is a finite set of text formation rules and $\mathfrak{M}$ is a finite rule application mechanism that generates texts on $\mathcal{A}$. A natural writing system forms natural language texts on an alphabet such as Sanskrit on Devanagari. An artificial writing system generates formal language texts on an alphabet such as Lisp on Unicode. Let $\mathbb{N}=\{0,1,2,\dots \}$ be the set of natural numbers. A function on natural numbers $f:{\mathbb{N}}^k\mapsto \mathbb{N}$, $0<k\in \mathbb{N}$, is nameable by a writing system on an alphabet if, and only if, the system can generate a text on the alphabet that names f and no other function. We show that there exist functions on natural numbers unnameable in principle in that they cannot be named by any writing system on any alphabet. Our results imply the following computability-theoretic hierarchy of functions on natural numbers: $\mathrm{computable}⊊\mathrm{partially}\mathrm{computable}⊊\mathrm{nameable}⊊\mathfrak{F}$, where $\mathfrak{F}$ is the set of functions on $\mathbb{N}$. Full article

The literature of the Malay world, profoundly influenced by Indian traditions, frequently adheres to the narrative patterns found in Indian literature. With the rise of Islam, literary works in the Parrot Story collection were used to propagate Islamic teachings, while subsequent adaptations and reinterpretations have led to relatively independent content. Within the framework of Sanskrit culture, the Jātaka Tales have also exerted a significant influence. Before the widespread adoption of written texts, these tales were transmitted orally and gradually evolved into written literature as local languages developed. Traveling along maritime trade routes, these tales were adapted through the use of indigenous vocabulary, reinterpretation of plots, and structural imitation in the Malay world. While grounded in Buddhist thought, these tales also reflect the social and cultural realities of the Malay world. The dissemination of Jātaka Tales across Southeast Asia underscores the broader religious and cultural diffusion patterns facilitated by maritime networks. This paper situates Jātaka literature within a broader context of religious and cultural exchange throughout the Asian maritime realm, examining the intersection of Jātaka Tales with early Malay regional narrative traditions and Indian literature. Specifically, it compares several parallel Jātaka stories in parrot stories such as the Persian version Tūtī Nāmah and its Malay translation Hikayat Bayan Budiman, demonstrating their transformation across various languages and cultures, revealing a complex process of cultural negotiation. In addition to Indic influences, the Malay literary tradition was shaped through interactions with Sinitic religious and artistic currents, fostering a syncretic environment where Hindu, Buddhist, and later, Islamic elements coexisted and merged, illuminating the dynamic interplay of Indic and Sinitic influences on the development of Malay literary traditions. Full article

This paper critically explores Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam, a Sanskrit ritual dance-theater tradition from Kerala, as a product of socio-political and religious transformations in early modern South India. Conceived in the mid-17th century by the Zamorin King Mānavēda, author of the Sanskrit text Kṛṣṇagīti, Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam was both a devotional offering to Lord Kṛṣṇa and a strategic expression of ritual sovereignty. Rooted in Kṛṣṇa bhakti (devotion), the tradition reflects how religious performance was mobilized to assert political legitimacy, particularly amid rivalry with regional powers such as Travancore. The Guruvayur Sri Krishna Temple, situated in the Malabar region of northern Kerala and central to the performance of Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam, emerged as a vital sacred space where royal patronage, ritual authority, and caste hierarchy intersected. The performance’s exclusivity restricted to Hindu audiences within temple premises reinforced patterns of spatial control and caste-based exclusion. Institutional support codified the tradition, sustaining it across generations within a narrow sociocultural framework. With the decline of Zamorin rule and the onset of colonialism, Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam faced structural disruptions. Colonial interventions in temple administration, landholding, and religious patronage weakened its ritual foundations. Guruvayur’s transformation into a public devotional center reflected wider shifts in ritual ecology and sacred geography under colonial modernity. In both the colonial and postcolonial periods, Kṛṣṇanāṭṭam struggled to survive, nearly facing extinction before its revival under the Guruvayur temple’s custodianship. By examining Kṛṣṇa devotion, royal ambition, caste dynamics, and colonial transformation, this paper offers a critical lens on Kerala’s evolving religious and cultural landscapes. Full article

This article traces the long transformation of liuli 琉璃 (Sanskrit vaiḍūrya) in China—from imported blue-green gemstones (typified by beryl) to man-made glass and, after the Song, to glazed architectural ceramics. Combining archaeological finds, textual and Buddhist sources, and mineralogical data, it argues that: (1) the wide circulation of Roman–South Asian glass imitations drove a dual shift in China, moving liuli from a natural gem to artificial glass; (2) Buddhist ritual and donation practices “sacralized” glass, integrating it into jewelry, vessels, and sacred spaces; and (3) this shift profoundly reshaped Chinese decorative arts, recasting color-and-light aesthetics and the material toolkit—from Han–Jin beadwork and containers, through Sui–Tang elite display, to the post-Song architectural palette epitomized by liuli tiles. The millennial journey of liuli shows how materials acquire new meanings through global exchange and local reinterpretation, and how man-made glass helped redefine Chinese decorative practice over the course of two thousand years. Full article

Southeast Asia has historically been shaped by the Indian subcontinent, China and the Middle East, due to civilizational contact. For several centuries, current-day Indonesia and the Malay world experienced extended periods of Hinduization and Indianization. The once-thriving Hinduism/Buddhism-dominated culture gradually gave way to Islam when the area became Islamized. Indonesia now is believed to have the largest number of Muslims in the world. While the Islamic aspects of Indonesia are well-documented in recent scholarship, the country’s Hindu/Buddhist past remains significantly under-explored, especially as far as the linguistic and semiotic landscape is concerned. Conceptualizing linguistic/semiotic landscape as a polyphonic site and a ‘palimpsest’ that is often historically (re)written and constantly updated, this interdisciplinary study documents and reveals the concrete material traces of Hinduism/Indianness evidenced in Jakarta’s linguistic and semiotic landscape at different levels (e.g., various Sanskrit/Hinduism-related place names, slogans and mottos, portrayals of Vishnu, Garuda, Hanuman, Ganesha and depictions of scenes from Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharata). Aiming to explore how elements of Hinduism/Indianness may manifest in Indonesia in such cross-region linguistic and religious (re)contextualization across time and space, this study contributes to linguistic and semiotic landscape research, sociolinguistics, Indonesia and Malay studies, Hindu studies, religious studies, Southeast Asia studies and beyond: Full article

This paper examines the compound brāhmaṇasacca in several Buddhist texts from the Pāli Canon, as well as in their Sanskrit and Chinese adaptations. This paper challenges previous analyses of this term, arguing that the Buddha may have reinterpreted its meaning as a metaphor. However, his followers, influenced by Brahminical orthodoxy, understood and transmitted it as a genitive tatpuruṣa: ‘the truth of the (authentic) Brahmin’—the Buddha. The philological analysis presented in this paper shows that the metaphor of the Buddha’s teachings as brāhmaṇasacca not only reflects his pragmatic approach to affirming the value of embracing the truth over identifying with a religious tradition, but also his followers’ desire to praise him as the supreme Brahmin. Commentators of the Canon described the Buddha as someone who had a complete understanding of ultimate reality (paramatthasacca). Consequently, he was considered the ultimate Brahmin authority, defined as omniscient, representing the ultimate truth for Brahmins. The Chinese versions of brāhmaṇasacca recall the Buddha’s teachings and present them as his Indian followers assumed them to be, as part of his realization of the ultimate truth, even when the cultural baggage of describing the Buddha as the supreme Brahmin decreased. This study reveals the intended meaning of the compound brāhmaṇasacca (AN ii 176) and how the Buddha’s metaphor was transmitted under the influence of Brahmanical religious culture over time. Full article

Om-nāma is a poem written in India in the 17th century. Its author was Banwalidas Wali, a protégé of the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh. It is a free adaptation of the much older Sanskrit treatise Yogavāsiṣṭha. However, while deeply rooted in the Indic tradition, Om-nāma extensively uses Islamicate imagery, especially from the realm of Sufism. In this article, we will analyze the terminology of Indic origin in Om-nāma, focusing on forms that interact ininterestingly with Islamicate (Perso-Arabic) vocabulary. Full article