Slippage in Buddhist Geography, by Todd Gibson

Swat River, Pakistan - Wikicommons

“Slippage” in Buddhist Geography: 

Orissa, Bengal, Kashmir, and Nepal as Sacred Proxies

Todd Gibson

Note: Today’s blog is an original essay by Todd Gibson. It is extracted from a chapter of his forthcoming book Inner Asia and the Nyingmapa Tradition of Tibet: The Case of Shri Singha.

 

Abstract: The reconstruction of the history of Buddhism in India and Tibet is complicated by the often-haphazard approach to geography found in the Indic sources, and a changing understanding of Indian names in the Chinese material. It is becoming apparent, however, that the shifts in perception of what geographical terms referred to was not always due to a mere lack of adequate information; the article discusses four cases which demonstrate deliberate, ideologically-motivated relocation of sacred sites away from the Indian border areas in the wake of historical changes.

It has long been noticed that geographical accuracy was not a great concern for many Indian scholars of the past. In his masterly survey of esoteric Buddhism in India, Davidson notes (2002, p. 33) that “geographical terms are used in a hazy and imprecise manner” and “alternate names are encountered with alarming suddenness in epigraphs and literature”. As a result, “The problem of the relationship between designation and locale can be acute, especially in medieval Buddhist literature.” This relationship is even more tenuous in Indian accounts of the countries of the mleccha peoples, those which lay beyond the civilized area of Āryavārta.

Chinese sources dealing with Indian Buddhist history must also be used with caution. When Buddhism first began to appear in China, the Chinese had only the haziest geographical understanding of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the names of Indian locales in Chinese sources altered over time, sometimes (but not always) reflecting an improved understanding of the facts on the ground. Another factor that must be taken into account in weighing geographical references in Chinese Buddhist accounts is the veneration of central India as the holy land of Buddhism, and the increasing desire to distinguish the Buddhism of India from that of the Inner Asian peoples who were China’s neighbors, and who had an often-troubled relationship with the Chinese.[1] These factors, however, do not tell the whole story; creative geography in the service of religious legitimation that is found in some sources (both Indian and Tibetan), is a factor that has not yet been well examined. This article treats four cases in which this factor contributed to several persistent but inaccurate identifications of sacred lands.

The first of these cases is the country of Odiyana.[2] The current scholarly consensus in the West is that the name (in Sanskrit: Uḍḍyāna, Uḍḍiyāna, Oḍḍiyāṇa, Uḍyāna,[3] etc.; in Tibetan: Urgyan, Orgyan), narrowly defined, is conterminous with the region of Swat in the north of present-day Pakistan, a valley west of the Indus and separated from the Indus valley by a single range of mountains. This identification, based first on the testimony of Chinese pilgrims such as Xuanzang,[4] was accepted by early scholars such as Aurel Stein and Giuseppe Tucci,[5] and has been supported by the vast number of Buddhist archaeological data that are still coming to light.[6] Their opinion been followed by the majority of Buddhologists since (dissenting opinions will be discussed below), and can be accepted with some important qualifications.

As is the case with so many toponyms in India and elsewhere, Uḍḍiyāna has not been an entity with fixed boundaries throughout its history. Upasak (1990, pp. 20- 24) has asserted that in the early Indic sources, it designated modern eastern Afghanistan while Kapiśa meant that country’s central region, and Bālhīka its north. He cites Ptolemy as indicating that the name included the whole region to the north and west of the realm of Gandhāra, centered on what is now Jalalabad, and including the Swat valley, but adds that by the fourth or fifth century, Uḍḍiyāna sometimes meant only the eastern part of this region, up to the Indus, while the land from the Kabul River to the Khyber Pass was called Nagarahāra. In considering references to Odiyana, particularly in Chinese sources, it is often necessary to distinguish between these meanings. 

While among Buddhologists, the view now seems to be that, when discussing Buddhist esoterism, Odiyana is indeed to be located in Swat, there have been attempts to claim that the Oḍḍiyāna of the Sanskrit Buddhist sources refers not to the Eastern Afghanistan or Swat regions, but rather the area of Orissa/Odishya (Oḍra) in eastern India. Among modern Indian scholars, this may even be the majority[7] view, but some Western commentators have also thought among similar lines. Huntington (1975, p. 8 n. 12), for example, claimed that “there is substantial indication in Tāranātha’s History of Buddhism in India . . . that the Uḍḍiyana of the 8th and 9th centuries would have been in the Orissan or the Orissan-Bengal border region.” He bases this evaluation on the idea that most of the mahāsiddhas mentioned in the History were supposedly active in this area.[8] On the other hand, Tāranātha closes his book (Chimpa and Chattopadhyaya, 1970, p. 351) by saying that he was not able to include an account of how Buddhism spread to Kashmir, Odiyana (Urgyan), Tokharistan, or South India, for lack of detailed source material. This seems to argue against a location in Orissa. In any case, Tāranātha composed his work in the 17th century, and some of his Indian sources may well have placed Uḍḍiyāna in east-central India.

In his translation of the “official” biography of the master Shan wu wei, the first of the recognized patriarchs of the main East Asian Buddhist tradition, Chou (1945, p. 252 n. 4), notes that the same Chinese logograph can be used to represent Odiyana and Orissa/ Odishya, and clearly this was one of the reasons for a confusion between the two.[9] A possible example of this confusion is found in the history of a major sutra, the Avataṃsaka, in China. The first complete translation of this sutra into Chinese was carried out in 420 by Buddhabhadra, a monk from Afghanistan,[10] who had obtained his copy from the king of Karghalik, just west of Khotan (Hamar, 2013, p. 85). Similarly, another Afghan monk, Prajñā, who hailed from Kapiśa,[11] brought and translated a late version of the Gaṇḍavyūha chapter of the Avataṃsaka to China. The mainstream tradition accepts that Prajñā received the scripture from the king of Orissa, but given the history of the earlier version and Prajñā’s own provenance, it seems more likely that he obtained the scripture from a ruler of Odiyana in the larger sense (i.e. the eastern Afghanistan or Swat area). As for Shan wu wei himself, Chou assumes — for no clear reason — that he was from Orissa, but given the documented association of Odiyana with esoteric currents in Buddhism from early times[12] the subject deserves a thorough revisiting.[13]

In the present case, it is likely that the perceived connection with Orissa is not only a matter of an honest misunderstanding taken up and repeated, but also reflects certain later Buddhists’ attempts to locate all milestones of Buddhist history, especially its esoteric aspects, well within the bounds of the Indian subcontinent. This assertion is borne out by other cases in the later Tibetan (and Chinese) Buddhist literature in which sites in Inner Asia and the northwestern border areas of the Indian subcontinent have evidently been “moved” to India proper. Particularly noticeable in this regard is the case of a country called Zahor. A certain king of Zahor, Indrabhūti (also sometimes known as Tsa, or Dza in the Tibetan tradition), is regarded by the Nyingmapas, the oldest Buddhist school in Tibet, as having transmitted the tantric literature known to them as Mahāyoga. This tradition usually locates Indrabhūti’s kingdom in Odiyana, but sometimes in Zahor.[14] An Indrabhūti also appears in the historical accounts of the newer Tibetan schools as the source of their so-called Yogatantra literature, including the fundamental tantra called the Compendium of Buddhas (Sarvatathāgatatattvasaṃgraha).[15] The confusion brought about by the Tibetan attempts to make a coherent whole out of a variety of conflicting accounts of this literature’s history has resulted in various versions, in which one or two Indrabhūtis are posited, and Odiyana is considered to be either the same as or different from Zahor.[16] A few scholars (Davidson, 2002, pp. 242-245; Karmay, 2009, pp. 76-93; Van der Kuijp, 2010) have attempted to deal with this tangle of material, but it is clear that the legend is so fraught with textual corruption and so tied up with issues of religious legitimation that a definitive description of the evolution of these traditions will probably never be had. Nevertheless, from the point of view of the present work, it is significant that the Nyingmapa almost invariably locate Zahor (whether identified with Odiyana or not) in the northwest,[17] while the newer Tibetan schools in general support the idea that Zahor was in eastern India, probably Bengal (Karmay, 2009, pp. 80- 81; van der Kuijp, 2010, p. 148, citing Drigung Paldzin). Karmay has concluded from this (ibid., p. 89) that “Just as the later Tibetan tradition made the first king of Tibet an Indian, in the same way it also desired to connect king Tsa /Dza with the land which gave birth to Buddhism.”

A third case of geographical confusion or dissimulation can be seen in the region referred to in the Chinese sources as Jibin. Many or most Buddhist scholars (and some secular historians) have traditionally regarded the word as referring to Kashmir (cf. Zurcher, 2012), because the Chinese word represents an early attempt at transliteration of that name. Kuwayama, however, has noted (2006, p. 110; see also Kuwayama, 2002, pp. 142-146) that “In ancient Chinese accounts and maps Jibin’s location shifted from place to place as the Chinese geographical knowledge changed over time.”[18] Kuwayama uses the travel accounts of the Chinese Buddhist pilgrims, as well as monastic biographies of fourth- and fifth-century figures to demonstrate that for them, Jibin referred to the general area of Gandhāra, the pilgrimage region where the Buddha’s begging bowl was kept; he shows that on the routes these pilgrims took to and from China, any visit to Kashmir would have represented an extensive detour. More recently, Falk (2022-23, esp. n. 36) has also taken up the question of the Chinese pilgrimage routes, and has asserted that for Faxian, Jibin referred very specifically to the area around Hadda in present-day Afghanistan.

Kuwayama (2006, p. 108) also says that “In the Gaoseng zhuan” — a sixth-century Chinese compilation of Buddhist biographies — “Jibin surpasses any other region of India as the goal of Buddhist pilgrimage, and most of the foreign monk-translators in fourth-to-fifth century China were closely associated with Jibin, whether or not they were natives of that area.” Many celebrated teachers and translators from Inner Asia were trained in the Jibin of this era. The first of these was Fotucheng, who afterwards went to China, arriving in Luoyang in 310. Although Kuwayama believes he was a native of Gandhāra, an earlier, more detailed treatment of his career concluded he was probably originally from Kucha, and only studied in the former region.[19] His impact on Buddhism in China was considerable; he was able to increase the acceptance of Buddhism among both the upper classes and the common people mostly through practical means like rainmaking, war magic, and medicine, at a time of “chaos and misery”, as Wright puts it. This acceptance meant Fotucheng was able to lay the foundation for a future state-supported Buddhism, besides passing on his knowledge to disciples, who came to China from as far away as India and Sogdiana to study with him (Wright, 1948, p. 367).

The next illustrious alumnus of Jibin’s Buddhist schools was the great translator Kumārajīva (344-413). Like Fotucheng, he was from Kucha, and was taken as a child to be educated in Gandhāra.[20] After a few years, he returned to Kucha, but was kidnapped by an army from China and taken to Liangchou, where he remained for almost twenty years. Upon the capture of that city by the Later Qin dynasty, however, Kumārajīva was taken to Changan. Since by that time he knew not only his native Kuchean language, but also Northwestern Prakrit, Sanskrit, Chinese, and possibly Agnean and Sogdian (Hansen, 2012, p. 56), he was put to work at the head of the bureau that was rendering Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, and became the most prolific translator before Xuanzang. His renderings of many sutras remain the preferred versions up to the present, and he trained many Chinese disciples who became famous in their own right. Two other translators from Gandhāra, Buddhayaśas and Bhīmarakṣa, went to China to aid Kumārajīva in his work.

In sum, while there are some Chinese materials in which Jibin does refer to Kashmir, the identity can no longer be taken for granted, particularly in a Buddhist context.

The fourth example of this phenomenon is so well known that there can be no controversy about it. The kingdom of Khotan, stronghold of Mahāyāna Buddhism for over five hundred years, was well known to Tibet from at least the beginnings of the imperial period under the name of “the Li Country” (Li Yul), which name is found among some of the oldest surviving writings in Tibetan. Tibet conquered Khotan between 665 and 670, and solidified their rule in 675. Khotan maintained close contact with the Dunhuang area before and during the Tibetan imperial period, and many later documents in Khotan Saka were found at Dunhuang. Until the coming of Islam to Khotan in 1006, the three areas had strong cultural connections, and the religious chronicles of Khotan were translated into Tibetan. Nevertheless, by the twelfth or thirteenth century, some Tibetans had begun writing as if Li Yul referred to Nepal (in effect, to the Kathmandu Valley) (Snellgrove, 1987, pp. 366, 417; first remarked on by Brough, 1948).[21] It is possible that the relationship with Khotan had gradually been forgotten in Tibet during the institutional chaos that followed the fall of the Tibetan empire, but it is also likely that when the Tibetans began to reassemble their memories of that time, some of them had a vested interest in associating the country with India rather than the north. 

It is well known that sacred sites can “migrate” as part of either the spread or the domestication of a religion; the reduplication of sacred Indic place names throughout Southeast Asia was at least meant to establish a connection with India, and probably also served to supply surrogate pilgrimage sites to those who could not make the journey to the subcontinent. Sacred places may be also moved in the popular imagination, even to unapproachable areas, when the situation on the ground precludes their existence in their former location; the mythic land of Shambhala is probably the best-known example. However, the converse seems to be true as well. As Grenet has shown in relation to Zoroastrianism,[22] a religion may move its sacred sites geographically “inward” in order to be in harmony with changes in the prevailing politico-religious situation. In point of fact, it can hardly be coincidence that three of the four areas discussed above were “relocated” to the single area in India (Bihar-Bengal-Orissa) where Buddhism was still prospering and perhaps even predominant in the ninth century and after, following the Brahmanic Hindu resurgence and Muslim conquests elsewhere (Sanderson, 2009, p. 80). The fourth area, Kashmir, was also able to maintain the Buddhistic aspects of its culture much longer than was Gandhāra. There was probably a felt imperative to situate the holy places of Buddhism, particularly Vajrayāna Buddhism, within the small remaining Buddhist heartland on the subcontinent, and this resulted in the imaginative shift seen in later Indian accounts, in which all important developments were traced back to this area. The Tibetans, who for a variety of reasons became more and more inclined to equate scriptural authenticity with Indian origin, were for the most part happy to fall in with this reading of history.

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Notes

[1] Chinese Buddhists increasingly differentiated the people of India (fan) from those living to the west of China (hu), and only the former land was held by them to be the domain of true sages. For a treatment of this trend, see Yang, 1988.

[2] I use a phonetic representation of the name rather than the more customary Sanskrit because the earliest named people of the area, the Odis, were neither Sanskrit speakers nor culturally “Sanskritized.” Settlements in the Swat valley date back to the Chalcolithic period, obviously predating the Indo-European incursions to the Indian subcontinent. The Odis themselves first appear in the historical record as satraps of a Saka ruler. Pāṇini, who was himself from the area of modern Peshawar, knew the name as Urḍi or Aurḍayāni (Upasak, 1990, p. 20). As late as the composition of the Purāṇas and the great epic Mahābhārata, Odiyana and its northern and western neighbors were not considered part of Āryavārta (Bronkhorst, 2016, pp. 17-34, pp. 124-25). In sum, it is misleading to insist on the Sanskritized spelling.

[3] But now see Falk (2022, pp. 17-19), who rejects the reconstruction of the name as Uḍyāna.

[4] Xuanzang’s name for the region was previously reconstructed as Wu chang, but this too seems to have been a scholarly error; see Li (1996, p. 82).

[5] Tucci’s 1977 contribution was the first to point out the importance of this area in detail, and pioneered the ongoing work by the Italian, Pakistani, and Japanese archaeological expeditions that have contributed decisively to its study.

[6] Callieri (2006); Neelis (2011). Neelis (ibid., p. 245) speaks of the valley’s “especially rich archaeological, artistic, epigraphic, and literary heritage with seemingly innumerable remains of Buddhist stupas, monasteries, and rock carvings.” The earliest Buddhist site, Butkara I, dates back to the third century BCE.

[7] See Mohanti and Panigrahi (2016) for a typical presentation. As with most such claims, their assertions rely largely on very late Indian and Tibetan literary sources. Chandra (1980) even proposed Kanchipuram, in southern India, as an alternative. 

[8] While Orissa was without doubt a major Buddhist stronghold in the ninth century, Tāranātha’s evaluation of the Buddhism prevailing there at that time has been called into question (Kinnard, 1996, pp. 284-287). 

[9] The confusion is not found only in Chinese sources. Sircar (1973, pp. 12- 13) has noted that in the Kālikā Purāṇa, Oḍra is inconsistently substituted for Oḍḍiyāna as one of the four major tantric seats, but he concludes that in relation to the Hindu tantric literature, the notion that the seat in question was actually located in Orissa is “unworthy of serious consideration.” Davidson (2002, pp. 206-211) also discusses the confusion and inconsistency surrounding the location of these seats.

[10] The usual reckoning has Buddhabhadra as Kashmiri, or just “Indian”, but Kuwayama (2002, p. 146; 2006, p. 109) shows that he was from Nagarahāra, specifically the area between Jalalabad and the Khyber Pass.

[11] Copp (2011, p. 360).

[12] As has been often noted, Xuanzang recorded the emphasis that the people of Swat laid on spell literature and meditation; see Li (1996, p. 83-84). 

[13] It should be taken into account that the attempts to connect this master with a later royal family of Orissa — the so-called Bhauma-kara dynasty — are based on a reconstruction of his Sanskrit name (Śubhakarasiṃha) that can in no way be considered equivalent to Shan wu wei (Chou, ibid., p. 251 n. 3). Furthermore, Shan wu wei’s official biography was written by at least two different people (Chou, ibid., pp. 250-251), and while the first half, dealing with his purported birth and career in India, contains the usual tropes of royal descent and miraculous but otherwise unknown teachers, the second begins with his travels towards China and is supported throughout by much historically verifiable information, including the rule of a Türkic khan in Odiyana (in the expanded sense) when he passed through. 

[14] The connection between Indrabhūti and Odiyana seems to date back at least to around 800 (van der Kuijp, 2010, p. 130).

[15] Karmay (2009, p. 80-82). There is a close relationship between a collection of these tantras, which were brought to China by the Sogdian master Amoghavajra, and the tantras of the Mahāyoga, though the two collections are not identical. This was first noticed by Eastman (1981), and the similarities have more recently been taken up and analyzed by Giebel (1995) and Almogi (2014). The East Asian tradition claims that Amoghavajra’s collection was originally taken from a legendary Iron Stupa that was in South India. That the tradition does not claim a provenance in the Orissa-Bengal area might be because the legend of the Iron Stupa was already established in China before the shift in Zahor’s supposed location came about. 

[16] According to Davidson (2002, p. 244), however, the Sakyapas, oldest of the “new” schools, have a tradition of three Indrabhūtis – all from Odiyana.

[17] The Fifth Dalai Lama, who came from a Nyingmapa background, nevertheless felt compelled to invent a convoluted history of his own Zahor ancestry so that he could trace it back to Bengal (van der Kuijp, 2010, pp. 147 ff.). An interesting sidelight to this question is the fact that the traditional Tibetan account of the creation of their alphabet claims that they took the letter za from Zahor (van der Kuijp, 2010, p. 137). While this is usually understood to mean that they took the form of the letter from the alphabet used in that region (which was not the case), it might mean instead that they had to find a way to indicate the voiced sibilant /z/ which is found in Tibetan words, but not in Indic; the /z/ was a native phoneme in Northwestern Prakrit, but only used in “Iranian names and loanwords” in Sanskrit (Salomon, 1990, p. 269). This would also obviously indicate a northwestern location for Zahor.

[18] See Kuwayama (2006, p. 110 n, 14) for a discussion of various reckonings on the question. Kuwayama (2002, pp. 193-199) had earlier used the testimony of later pilgrims, as well as Chinese historical materials, to demonstrate that during the Tang, Jibin came to mean the kingdom of Kapiśa in what is now central Afghanistan. 

[19] See Wright (1948, pp. 332-335) for a discussion. Wright errs, however, in following the then-current consensus that Jibin always referred to Kashmir. Some sources claim that Fotucheng was a native of Central India and a descendant of royalty, but the trope of the royal (or high-caste) descent of prominent Buddhist figures found in Chinese biographical literature is far too commonplace to be accepted at face value, and can be seen as part of the hu vs. fan dynamic mentioned above (note 2).

[20] While McRae (2004, p. 442) continues to place Kumārajīva’s studies in Kashmir, Hansen (2012, p. 66) correctly locates them in Gandhāra. As usual, there also exist accounts that make Kumārajīva the descendent of Indian royalty (Hansen, op. cit.).

[21] Tāranātha was one Tibetan who placed Li Yul south of the Himalayas (Chimpa and Chattopadhyaya, 1970, p. 60, n. 41; see also Brough, 1947-48, p. 338).

[22] Grenet (2015, esp. p. 26) demonstrated that while the sites described in the oldest Avestan literature as being created by Ahura Mazda are all located in southern Inner Asia, Afghanistan, or western Pakistan, the later Pahlavi literature moved them to the Iranian plateau.

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