Naga Queen Cosmogenesis

A gracefully uplifting Nâga figure extracted from the famous tomb-chortens of Densatil
HAR 32071, from a private collection

out of the becoming that was not-at-all-becoming...

out of the duration that was in the nature of a void...

a void space came.

As even the tiniest part of the becoming that would emerge

had not yet become, there is no way to say

that anything existed or did not exist.

From the space of moist bliss

something like a rainbow came.

And that something like a rainbow,

in order to be pleasing to look at took on color.

Something that could not be an object of perception came.

But still, that something was as-if an external object.

Out of the shining colors, a vital essence came.

Out of the vital essence, something the size of a sesame came.

That sesame-sized something broke itself open

and from the vital essence it contained came

a pregnant woman with a full belly.

From the full belly of that pregnant woman

was born one with thick limbs.

One with a mouth uttering various sounds was born.

One whose body completely embraced miracles of Great Compassion,

whose mind embraced the universe comprised of a thousand universes each

comprised of a thousand universes was born.

To her a name was given,

in Zhangzhung language Sangkaraste Kutukhyab.

In Sumpa language, Molgazhi Kunkhyab.

In Tibetan, the Naga-queen-who-gave-order-to-becoming.

From the vapor issuing from the top of her head

the turquoise blue sky became.

From the vapor, becoming took shape.

But while it could be seen it was not an external object

and there was no thing whatsoever that was not covered by that sky.

In Zhangzhung language it was called Tongpa Kuntukheb, Void-covering-everything.

In Sumpa language, Khebdal.

In Tibetan and the language of Eternal Bon, Nam meaning ‘sky.’

°

It continues with sun and moon, planets and so on all emerging from parts of her body.

I've always loved cosmogonical accounts of every kind, and this appreciation in no way depends on believing them in their entirety or not. You can think about this what you want, I just point out that modern physics professors were not the first ones to think they might try to comprehend the time-space singularity that came before anything did. And this despite the impossibility. Notice, as well, that this Bon cosmogony recognizes the mind-boggling multiplicity of worlds. And do I even need to point out to a careful reader such as yourself that the primordial evolution of everything was entirely due to a female who gave of Herself to make our world what it is? 

This female Nâga cosmogenesis may be regarded as an example of a ‘dismemberment’ cosmogony, a typological category developed by moderns.* It may lend an impression of primitivity and sacrifice, but it also sets up a sophisticated set of macrocosm-microcosm correspondences such as might be found for example in the Body Mandala of Vajra Vehicle Buddhism, a model of consummate insight backed by considerable theoretical sophistication.

(*Other commonly mentioned types are the emergence, earth-diver, egg and ex nihilo cosmogonies. These were identified by comparative folklorists of the last century or two. They are not set in stone, and often elements of one are found in another. Technically the label 'dismemberment' is not applicable to our particular example, since there is no subject performing it on an object.)

I thought I would type out the Tibetan text for those who might find use for it, but I couldn’t get very far into it before irritating malfunctions got in my way (these seem to be happening more and more as time goes by), so I guess I'll link you to a scanned version of it instead:

གཙང་མ་ཀླུ་འབུམ་ཆེན་མོ། ཀླུ་འབུམ་ཁྲ་བོ།

འདི་ནས་མར་ནི།

ཀླུའི་རྒྱལ་མོ་གཞུང་སྟོན་ཏེ།

དང་པོ་སྲིད་པ་ཅི་ཡང་མི་སྲིད་པ་ལས།

སྟོང་པའི་རང་བཞིན་དུ་གནས་པ་ལས།

དེ་ལས་སྟོང་པའི་ངད་དེ་ལས།

སྲིད་པ་སླངས་པ་ཆ་ཕྲ་མོ་ཙམ་ཅིག་མི་སྲིད་དེ་ཡོད་པར་བྱེད་མེད་པར་ཡང་མི་བྱེད།

རླན་བདེ་བའི་ངང་ལས། འཇའ་ཚོན་འདྲ་བ་ཅིག་... ... ...

One curious thing, the Sumpa and Zhangzhung language terms are actually supplied here in Tibetan language forms. It’s as if they were translated for the benefit of Tibetan speakers, with the original foreign-language terms omitted. In Chinese, the Sumpa were called Supi (Supiya) and were regarded as Qiang people, a very vague and not very illuminating category. The nature of the Sumpa language in those days seems to be unknown even if most likely Tibeto-Burman. In fact Sumpa is mentioned a lot more than is normal in Bon texts, and one suspects therefore that the Klu-'bum, regarded as one of the earliest excavated treasure texts of Bon sometime around 900 CE, may have emerged from the direction of the northeastern part of the Plateau. But the tradition is that its treasure site was in Pu-hrang, which means western Tibet, a part of what was once Zhangzhung. You would need seven leagues boots to take such massively giant steps across the Himalayan ranges.

For the rest of the text, go to Gtsang ma klu 'bum chen mo, a Reproduction of a Manuscript Copy Based upon the Târanâtha Tradition of the Famed Bonpo Recitational Classic, Volume II: Klu 'bum khra bo, Tibetan Bonpo Monastic Centre (Dolanji 1977), at vol. 2, pp. 44 ff. It just keeps going and going, like the universe itself, and I can’t tell you where it ends. Nobody can. Any more than they can tell you how it was when it began.

... ... ...

A Short Reading List

Agata Bareja-Starzynska, “A Bonpo Text on the Propitiation of Serpent Deities (Klu ’bum dkar po) in Mongolian,” contained in: Charles Ramble & Hanna Havnevik, eds., From Bhakti to Bon: Festschrift for Per Kvaerne, The Institute for Comparative Human Culture, Novus Forlag (Oslo 2015), pp. 39-52. There were, about a hundred years ago, several studies on Klu-'bum by Lalou, Laufer, and Schiefner, but I won't list them all here.

Bernard F. Batto, In the Beginning: Essays on Creation Motifs in the Ancient Near East and the Bible, Eisenbrauns (Winona Lake 2013). The most interesting is the first chapter that surveys various ideas about the beginnings of things in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Canaan and so on. The Egyptians had a number of world-initiating scenarios, including most remarkably and uniquely, the idea that the creator impregnated himself by an act of onanism (p. 13) that started the gestation of the world. As with a number of known Tibetan cosmogonies, very often the first beginnings of things require one major further step, putting things into a kind of 'primitive' order, assigning things to their place. In Egypt this role is likely to be assigned to the goddess Maat.

Lawrence Parmly Brown, “The Cosmic Man and Homo Signorum,” Open Court, issue 1, article 2 of 1921. Find a PDF here. Since the same author wrote a book called The Cosmic Teeth, we may safely assume that he belonged to a prominent family of New England dentists. Which reminds me, I'm very late for my cleaning. For more on those teeth, keep reading.

Helmut Hoffmann, Tibet, a Handbook, Indiana University Publications (Bloomington 1973), p. 108:

“...another ancient tradition of the origin of the world should be adduced, according to which the world originates from the death or division of a primordial being. This myth was held by several of the peoples of antiquity, for example, the Iranian myth of the Primordial Man, Gayômard. One Bon-po scripture, The Hundred Thousand Water Spirits, states that the world originated from a primordial female water spirit, a kLu-mo, who is given the indicative name of ‘The kLu Queen who put the World into Order.’ From the upper part of her head sprang the sky; from her right eye, the moon; from her left, the sun; and from her upper four front teeth, the four planets. When she opened her eyes day appeared; when she closed them, night came on. From her twelve upper and lower teeth emerged the lunar mansions of the zodiac. Her voice became thunder; her tongue, lightning; her breath, clouds; and her tears, rain. Her nostrils produced wind, her blood became the five oceans of Bon-po cosmography, her veins became rivers. Her flesh was converted into earth, her bones into mountains.”

Per Kvaerne, “Tibet, la mythologie, introduction au problèm,” Dictionnaire des mythologies (Flammarion). An English translation is also available in Yves Bonnefoy, Asian Mythologies, University of Chicago Press (Chicago 1993), pp. 301-303, including a detailed bibliography. Other entries in the same publications by the same author are relevant, in particular “The Importance of Origins in Tibetan Mythology,” contained in: Yves Bonnefoy, ed., Mythologies (Chicago 1993), vol. 2, pp. 1077-1079, and especially, in the same volume, pp. 1079-1082: “Cosmogonic Myths of Tibet.”

Bruce Lincoln, “The Indo-European Myth of Creation,” chapter 15, contained in: Idem., Religion, Culture and Politics in Pre-Islamic Iran, Collected Essays, Brill (Leiden 2021), pp. 239-264.

Claudia Seele, Traditionen kosmogonischer Mythen in den Urzeitlegenden der Bönpos, M.A. thesis (Magisterarbeit), Rheinischen Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (Bonn 1995), in 178 pages. ‘Traditional cosmogonic myths in the primordial legends of the Bonpos.’ This thesis is unfortunately not made available in published form, although it ought to be.

Postscript (October 14, 2021)

With thanks to J.B. for pointing it out via email, the myth of the Naga Queen has been well studied, as part of a more general discussion of Bon Cosmogonies, in John Vincent Bellezza's book Zhang Zhung: Foundations of Civilization in Tibet, A Historical and Ethnoarchaeological Study of the Monuments, Rock Art, Texts, and Oral Tradition of the Ancient Tibetan Upland, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Vienna 2008), pp. 342-356, and more particularly pp. 343-349. This supplies a more extensive translation than the brief sample given above, and I much recommend it.

Update December 14, 2021)

I just happened to read an interesting paper about Panku, the main figure in a classic Chinese account of creation. It’s different, but in some ways similar to the Naga Queen cosmogenesis. The main similarity is that various parts of the body go into making specific parts of the world. Both myths might be misnamed by us moderns as ‘dismemberment cosmogonies’ when in fact in neither of them is there an actual sacrifice done by some type of sacrificer. The dismembered one is the agent as far as we can see. In the case of the Panku, it is almost as if the huge proto-cosmic being dies body part by body part, and in the process things in the universe come in to take their places. In other words, the death process is simultaneous with the creation process, each stage in the dissolution resulting in the creative generation of this thing or that, whther it be sun, moon, trees or humans. Everything comes from something. Unless, of course, you buy that ex nihilo argument.

Gábor Kósa, “Pangu’s Birth and Death as Recorded in a Tang Dynasty Buddhist Source,” Oriental Archive, vol. 77 (2009), pp. 169-192.

Doughballs

Scapegoat - Photo by Natesh Ramasamy

TODAY’S BLOG is about how I found, to my amazement, a very clear and specific ritual practice shared by ancient Mesopotamia and Tibet until modern times. Looking back on it, I shouldn’t have been so surprised since it fits into a tight semantic circle of Tibeto-Mesopotamian word-connections earlier defined as “Bricks, Brilliance and Baking.” But I’m convinced there is one thing that makes this new revelation special: It not only connects a discrete ritual practice in both localities done with closely identical motives, it also goes along with a striking word borrowing. This co-incidence goes far toward confirming a transmission from Iraq to Tibet that may otherwise seem too far fetched to consider.

One Losar (“New Year”) I was celebrating at the home of a Tibetan friend, a layman who was not all that religious, perhaps even borderline agnostic. Still, he served us the Guthuk Soup and “most importantly” (his words) he took our sins outside. ‘How did he do that?’ you may well be thinking. He gave us each a small ball of dough which we rubbed on our necks to pick up some of the filth that does tend to accumulate there and then we handed them back to him. He took them with a small tray holding a rudely fashioned dough figure outside, and even if I didn’t see it done this time, he should have taken the whole lot to a crossroad and set it on fire. I hoped he wouldn’t get caught doing it. It wasn’t exactly a Tibetan cultural crossroad we were living in, after all. People would have looked askance, to say the least, at any bonfires blazing up at a busy traffic interchange.

The scapegoat complex came up in a recent blog, in the comments section, and I may not even need to point out that placing your sins (ethical impurities, pollutions, ills) onto something else that will take it away from you is very much along the lines of what we mean by a scapegoat ritual. The original (?) scapegoat ritual may have involved an actual goat for all we know, but we do use the term for a wider range of ritual actions that work analogously, with or without the goat. Indeed, in the contemporary language of corporate blame assessment, the word scapegoat is used quite a lot... Really, far too much.

Of course, the very term scapegoat puts us to thinking about the Middle East where such complexes are still common enough, and where we popularly imagine it all originated. So I shouldn’t have been too surprised to come across doughballs there. Here is how it happened.

I was reading a chapter from the Cambridge Histories Online, in a volume entitled The Cambridge History of Magic and Witchcraft in the West from Antiquity to the Present, the first chapter entitled “The Ancient Near East” composed by Daniel Schwemer. Schwemer distinguishes two types of rituals, the first one, ‘witch purifications’ that involves incinerating an effigy of the witch made of clay and wax. This kind of ritual is called maqlû. But the one that concerns us more at this moment is the other, different but related, type of ritual called šurpu. Let me quote p. 35, in the general context of undoing curses by ritual means: 

“Whereas the burning of the witches’ figurines dominates the proceedings of maqlû, the ritual šurpu aims at removing the patient’s impurity that has been caused by his or her own transgressions. It is not figurines representing the patient’s enemies, but the consequences of his or her own actions that have to be eliminated and are destroyed by fire. Thus, the performance of šurpu includes the burning of dough that is applied to and wiped off of the patient’s body. The patient throws various items representing his or her crimes into the fire, among them garlic peels.” [The added emphasis is my own.]

As if the identity of ritual actions, objects and objectives weren’t enough, Tibetan has borrowed this very word šurpu from Akkadian, and it fits into another (similar yet not identical) ritual context done with a different motive — food offerings to hungry ghosts and the spirits of the departed — in which barley flour (perhaps mixed with butter and/or other food substances to make a dough) is singed rather than incinerated.

The Tibetan word (or words) that means to singe or scorch in that ritual by the same name is bshur-ba, with imperative form shur-cig! And it obviously belongs to the same verb group as another verb with similar meaning gsur-ba. I won't bother you with the lexicons and what they say, but save the philological exercises for another time. The gsur ritual itself involves burning grain, but the motive is feeding hungry spirits. It was long ago described by Panglung Rinpoche in a short essay on the subject.

So to sum up, here is why I think here we have an excellent case for Mesopotamia-Tibet transmission. First, an identical object, the doughball, is made use of in closely identical ritual actions, the rubbing and the burning. Secondly, both rites are done out of the same motives, to purify the person of sin and similar blights. Third, we see that a different Tibetan grain burning rite, one with a different aim, bears the name of the very Mesopotamian rite that involves the rubbing and burning of the doughball. And the final blow to skepticism, I think, is the fact that this word that means ‘burning’ in Akkadian and ‘scorching, singeing’ in Tibetan fits seamlessly inside of an already-identified semantic circle of apparent borrowings that include words for blazing (bar|’bar) and brilliance (zil|zil).

§   §   §

Further ruminations, a little bibliography, and a few significant links

Sometimes, in order to switch gears and get a fresh start, we need to clean up some of the messes from the past. Rituals — as well as confession, restitution and reconciliation not accompanied by rituals — can certainly help. Notice how Leviticus 5 is immediately followed by a chapter on actual (not just ritual) restitution.* Apologies done, regrets expressed, while giving people back what is rightfully theirs usually must precede other efforts to smoothe things over between us.

(*The actual annual scapegoat ritual that used a real goat, intended for collective iniquity, is not all that relevant for us right now. For it, see Leviticus 16.)

To see how the very important Bon monastery known as Menri (སྨན་རི་) celebrates New Year, look here. Here they use strings instead of doughballs, but I do remember participating in a community ritual at Dolanji many years ago (not at New Year, n.b.) in which both strings and doughballs were used (everyone holds the same string, which is then cut so that each person is left holding a piece of it).

You can find other elaborate accounts of New Year rituals, including more than one way of using the doughballs, here.

With Rosh Ha-Shana upon us, to some of us it will be of special interest that the traditions of making challah bread for ritual purposes include a step in which a small doughball is taken from the large one and purposely burned. It’s this small doughball that the word challah properly refers to. This post-temple practice is consciously connected with a temple practice of daily incinerating doughballs on the fire altar.

As part of the sin purifying atonement practices leading up to Rosh Ha-Shana, many have the practice of throwing small crumbs of bread into a stream of flowing water while reciting confessional prayers. For more, try Schmoogling for "Tashlich" (send off, dispatch) or have a quick look at this news story. And if you have a little more time a particularly well done essay is this one. It’s a popular practice, and as such it doesn’t receive blanket approval from all religious authorities. It’s interesting how it uses the element of water, not fire, and crumbs instead of dough or grain, but anyway, I think you can sense a connection.

Tibetan names for dough are zan and spag. Uses include as a kind of cotton ball for spreading oil on babies, or animals, especially horses to make their fur coats shine. Also, for divination (or drawing of names from a hat). “Aleuromancy” is a word I wanted to slip into the discussion somewhere, so this is as good a chance as any. It’s supposed to be a type of divination done by slipping inscribed slips of paper into doughballs, kind of like the fortune cookies distributed after meals at Chinese restaurants in the U.S. The Guthuk dumplings of Tibetan New Year have objects, not inscriptions, placed in them.

John V. Bellezza, “Zenpar: Tibetan Wooden Moulds for the Creation of Dough Figures in Esoteric Rituals,” Collector's World. Color illustrations of zan-par. I believe this was also published in Arts of Asia, vol. 47, no. 5 (September 2017), p. 132. There is a bibliography on the subject here: http://www.francobellino.com/?p=2338.

Isabel Cranz, Atonement and Purification: Priestly and Assyro-Babylonian Perspectives on Sin and Its Consequences, Mohr Siebeck (Tübingen 2017). I’d like to say I’ve read this book, since it is precisely on topic, but anyway I hope I can read it soon and get back with you.

Zara Fleming, “An Introduction to Zan par (Tibetan wooden moulds),” Tibet Journal, vol. 27, nos. 1-2 (Spring 2002), pp. 197-216.

Zara Fleming, “The Ritual Significance of Zan-par,” contained in: Erberto F. Lo Bue, ed., Art in Tibet: Issues in Traditional Tibetan Art from the Seventh to the Twentieth Century, Brill (Leiden 2011), pp. 161-170. I’m not sure how these stamped dough figures figure into our discussion, but I imagine they ought to, somehow, if not now, some other time.

Jampa L. Panglung, “On the Origin of the Tsha-gsur Ceremony,” contained in: Barbara N. Aziz and Matthew Kapstein, eds., Soundings in Tibetan Civilization, Manohar (Delhi 1985), pp. 268-271. There is a Tibetan controversy within the Gelugpa school about whether “Hot Sur” (or as Panglung suggests, perhaps “Burnt Food”) ritual offering is Buddhist in its origins or not, with the Fifth Dalai Lama saying it’s not justifiable in Buddhist scripture, while the later Bstan-dar Lha-rams-pa argues it is. The brief essay ends with notice of a Dunhuang text nicely demonstrating that the word and its associated context goes back at least to the Tibetan imperial era.

Erica Reiner, Šurpu: A Collection of Sumerian and Akkadian Incantations, Weidner (Graz 1958). This includes English translations.

Francis James Michael Simons, Burn Your Way to Success; Studies in the Mesopotamian Ritual and Incantation Series Śurpu, doctoral dissertation, University of Birmingham (2017). I list this because of its useful survey of the literature. It doesn’t seem to have anything else specifically relevant for us at the moment. Tibetanists will find instruction in Mesopotamian use of juniper as an incense or fumigant for purifying large areas, just as Tibetans do in bsangs burning rites. The Mesopotamians even had a way of blessing the juniper for use in ritual. This study emphasizes juniper and cedar use for controlling and repelling insects, although this has never, as far as I know, featured in discussions about the Tibetan practice.

Wikipedia has a worthy entry on the Mesopotamian rite that you can see here.

Alexandra Witze, “Barley Fueled Farmers’ Spread onto Tibetan Plateau: Cold-Tolerant Crop enabled High-Altitude Agriculture some 3,600 Years ago,” Nature News, an internet journal. Try this link. Well, I for one regard the knowledge of just when barley cultivation started in Tibet as key to the issue of when grain baking, toasting, barley beer making and the like could have also had their start. I doubt this article will have the final word on the subject, but it does give us food to think about.

The Tibetan conversant can benefit from this video that depicts and interviews people about several of the dough-related parts of Tibetan New Year rituals. Go ahead and click on it:

 

བོད་ཆོལ་ཁ་གསུམ་གྱི་དགུ་གཏོར་ངོ་སྤྲོད།

This video of Gutor (Torma Rite of the Twenty-Ninth Day, just before New Year) shows outstandingly astounding cham dances, but you have to wait to the very last minute to see the torma burning.

+   +   +

Particularly for people who are not confirmed Bible-lovers I recommend, as a friend already recommended to me, to go read Leviticus chapter 5 carefully. There you will see that its sin-dispelling practice had both a bloody meat aspect and a bread-dough/grain aspect. This dyad of red and white elements, the blood and the grain, the wine and the bread, can be traced back to the original sacrifices of Cain and Abel in Bereshit, with Cain representing the preoccupation with field agriculture, and Abel the animal husbandry. There is a lot to puzzle over regardless of your beliefs, but I suggest putting on alien binoculars for a change before switching back to normal setting.

And finally, especially for the Tibeto-theoreticians, I’d like them to observe something. We’ve probably become too comfortable in our view that the ancient blood sacrifices were (entirely or largely) ‘replaced’ by grain and dough sacrifices as time went on, particularly the dough figures of animals and so on that we often see in Tibetan rituals. Even if there may be grains of truth in this common idea, we should permit ourselves to be bewildered by the simultaneous presence of dough and blood sacrifice that we see in Leviticus 5. I mean, the doughballs and dough figures could have been there all along, am I right? One didn’t have to replace or substitute for the other.

PS: These days I have so much tedious work to do I don’t have time to read books much, but before I go to sleep at night I read some pages of two very different books about Genesis: Gary A. Anderson’s The Genesis of Perfection and Catherine L. McDowell’s The Image of God in the Garden of Eden. I’ve already found dozens of subjects for a Tibeto-logician to blog about, but if I don’t promise to write them, I won’t commit any sin if I don’t, will I? Each of the two books is mind-altering in its own way. I’ve always been intrigued by the creation account, so much that I have trouble reaching other parts of the Hebrew scriptures. It doesn’t matter if you think it presents a true history of things, to me it’s more about how it provokes a lot of questions and presents a number of puzzles. Even if you were to read it as the opening of a best-selling novel.

That’s Not the Shape of my Ark

Quite frankly I resent

people who give vent 

to their loquacity by extraneous bombastic circumlocution.

—Monty Python

I’m not suggesting there was a lot of talking around the point, let alone expressions of the egregiously self-aggrandizing types that would deserve the label of bombast, but not so many months ago I returned home thoroughly hungover after a stiff weeklong dose of academic papers, and thought to myself, ‘Never again.’ True, there were a few more bows to French brainiacs Foucault & Co. than has been usual in these gatherings in the past, but many of us were young and in Paris after all, so it ought to be excused just this once. It’s only that it was all so overwhelming for my more easily tired mind and body now that I’m supposed to be retired. A week was far too short to fit in so many papers of such sterling qualities. One mind is not enough to take it all in, and really, just one of those 600 papers was enough to touch off this foray into the realm of possible knowables.

Letter mysticism arises out of the needs of people who have life-long concentrated devotion to the written scriptures of their religion. It gets further compounded with the needs of exegetes, who after much labor and disputation find meaning in every jot and tittle. Their deep, wide-ranging and hyper-vigilant scriptural interpretation in itself becomes high art and extreme sport rolled into one. Sometimes we have to stand back and look on in awe.

So let’s eschew circumlocutions as well as bombast and other obscure words and get straight to the point I want to make, which is: The first letter of every Buddhist scripture is the e in the Sanskrit word evaṃ. That means thus or just so. This connects in a remarkably direct and unexpected way with the letter e used in some ancient Mesopotamian sources. Read and observe and then if you feel so inclined, reflect.

‘Albatross!’ you might be thinking... Well, if so, fine with me. I’ll volunteer to wear it around my neck for the duration of this brief blogging voyage until I can bring you around. Well no, it’s no violation of my vow. That was not an obscure, let alone pedantic word to the Pythonists out there. I know who you are, and I know you know your way around an allusion.

It may not be sufficiently recognized by the world at large that Buddhism is a religion of the book every bit as as much as Judaism, Christianity and Islam. One relatively minor difference is that Buddhists have a lot more books of the scriptural types that they can aim their devotion towards. If I could be so bold I would like to put forward my presuppositions, as a person who has spent his whole life thinking and acting in and among several religions (and not just studying them in school, although I did that, too). I assume that every religion with an esoteric dimension achieved it through deepened devotional practices and prayer. That goes especially for Islam and its Sufi schools, for Judaism and its Kabbalah, and for Mahâyâna Buddhism and its Vajrayâna.* Evolution out of Buddhism’s own inner fabrics explains much more about Vajrayâna than anything outside. For now let’s narrow down to something more manageable and agree to stay, more or less, within the bounds of two religions: Judaism and Buddhism.

(*I know I left off Christianity, Hinduism and Daoism, among other classical religions, but identifying a single discrete esoteric trend for each of these or for each of their sub-groupings is a little more problematic. I'd say for Hinduism, it would be some combination of yoga and Vedanta metaphysics [or tantra, if I can invoke that problem word], while for Christianity I'll go with the kind of spiritual alchemy often known as hermeticism and/or masonic temple mysticism and/or perhaps the grail traditions and related eucharistic mysteries. The unusual thing about Kabbalah and Vajrayâna is that they have, in some major sections of their religions, approached or achieved mainstream status. We could say that at least one of its aspects is flowing in every vein. Esoteric trends in other religions are more likely to be pushed and kept off center, in a side-stream at best. It might be argued we ought to talk about and include Christianity because it shares some of the same scriptures with Judaism. But I’m a little concerned about so-called “Christian kabbalah” that has for centuries used letter mysticism as a covert tool to undermine Judaism by, for instance, locating an encoded Jesus in the first words of the Tanakh, the very part that concern us here. A look at the internet in search of interpretations of the first words of Bereshit finds that English-language sites are almost entirely dominated by the idea that the first letters of Genesis somehow, through some form of gematria, justify Jesus as the Messiah. And these are not New Age or occultist sites, but oddly enough largely Evangelical Christian. By their own lights, they are the last people who ought to be dabbling in such mystic arts. It seems they believe that people must by all means be converted from their errors, even if it means making use of those errors... A kind of skilful means, if we are allowed to put a kinder spin on it.)

Read closely and with care this passage from the late 13th-century Long Deyu history:

The substance of Dharma in the sense of scriptural authority is like this. The natures of method and insight are symbolized by the two letters.[1] The word scriptural authority used here forms a member of the triad of scriptural authority, reasoning, and practical guidance. One scriptural authority, the Questions of Devendra Sūtra, says,  

The Dharma aggregates adding up
to eighty-four thousand correctly teach
that the universal basis, the parents,
cause, and substance as well,
are identical to the two letters, 
meaning the E and the Vaṃ.
The letter E serves as the mother,
while the Vaṃ serves as the father.
The bindu dot is known to mean the union of the two.
This union is such an amazing thing...[2]  

The E and the Vaṃ, the two together, are posited as the cause of the Dharma or, alternatively, its substance. In terms of reasoning, all visuals and audials have arisen through the paired nature of method and insight. Here, too, the vowels and consonants are the source of the 84,000 Dharma aggregates and so on, so it is reasonable that the substance of vowels and consonants would be identical to the Evaṃ. In terms of practical directions, there are two types of Evaṃ, the Evaṃ of sound being the one that is simply pronounced and the Evaṃ of form being the one that is written. The spoken sound is in Indian language evaṃ maya.[3] When translated into Tibetan it turns into ’di skad bdag gis. This comes at the head of all sūtras and tantras, and from it emerged their actual texts. 

In its written shape, the E is a triangle that stands for insight and void. It symbolizes the womb, the bhaga, of the mother. The Vaṃ is round. It corresponds to method and compassion, so it symbolizes the bulge of the vajra of the father. Just as seed or offspring emerge from the union of these two, all Dharma emerges from the union of method and insight. “The substance of Dharma is condensed in the two different letters.”[4] 

Now that we've heard this testimony on the scriptural grounding for Tibetan Buddhist letter mysticism, let’s agree to shift to another part of the world, and an age a few centuries short of 4,000 years ago. Written in the Semitic tongue of southern Iraq we know as Akkadian, is a small palm-sized tablet of clay with many lines of writing made up of wedge-shaped lines. It isn’t our only cuneiform source for the story of the world Flood best known to the world in the book of Genesis, the story of Noah. In the Ark Tablet, it isn’t Noah, but Atra-hasis in the role of main hero. And this, very likely our oldest source of the story, much older than Genesis, surprises us with new and unexpected information that the Ark was, by divine fiat, made on a round plan, a kind of very large coracle boat,* such as have been used in Iraq until modern times, made with woven reeds and pitch. That at least partially rectangular plan of the gopher-wood ark seen in millennia of European art has been so thoroughly engrained, we are practically unable to imagine it otherwise.

(*Tibet, too, used what we call coracle boats (in Tibetan, ko-gru), but with rounded rectangular shape and made with skin stretched over frames. So we see how that single English word can be used for very different kinds of boats. Finkel made a great video about a project carried out in India, in which a round ark was actually constructed to demonstrate its possibility. I’ll give you the link to it if I don't forget.)

Let’s get to the point I want to make. When the Mesopotamian pre-Noah was commanded by his god: “Destroy your house, build a boat!”* the word here used for house in Sumerian is “É,” while its equivalent word in Akkadian, showing its Semitic family connections, is bītam (Hebrew bayit, Arabic beit).

(*See Finkel's book, p. 107, for the context.)

Conclusion

So let me summarize this strange but true fact, a connection that, even if it may prove inexplicable, is yet undeniably there to be explained one way or another. A very ancient Mesopotamian word for house is e. The Hebrew Bible's creation account begins with ‘B’, the letter known by the name beth, which after all means ‘in’ and is interpreted by kabbalists as meaning bayit, or house. One may well wonder, and indeed there are many marvelous discussions, why the first letter of scripture and its creation account has to be the 2nd letter of the alphabet, rather than aleph, the first.

Hold that information in your mind as we leave the early Middle East (and North Africa and Andalusia) behind and head off to India. Here we see that the first syllable of practically all Buddhist scriptures is the letter e in evaṃ. This letter comes to mean the place where an enlightened Teacher teaches Dharma, or to put it a different way it's the complete array of dharmas, all possible knowables, that gives the Enlightened One a suitably enlightened context. The e and the vaṃ, the Place and the Teacher, is central to a lot of Vajrayâna meditation practices, and related physical-metaphysical speculations. (Place after all represents both environment and space, while Time is yet another of the five Perfect Unities — ཕུན་སུམ་ཚོགས་པ་ལྔ་)

It may not be surprising to find general resemblances between the so-designated ‘religions of the book,’ the Abrahamic religions, in their letter mysticisms. After all, they do grow out of the scriptural resources in part held in common. But to find such close correspondences between Genesis and Tibetan Buddhist exegesis around the meanings of the initial letter of their respective scriptures representing a dwelling place is something that is bound to continue to astound anyone paying attention. It’s there, deal with it. Go find you own ways to account for it. Something that makes sense to you. No reason to passively hope for somebody else’s ready-made answer, is there?

But allow me to throw some of my own thoughts out there in one final paragraph: The geometry of it — whether it’s a circle, or a triangle, or interlocking triangles — and the particular type of architecture — whether it's a boat, a house, a temple, or a divine palace mandala — isn’t really what matters.* The cultural uses of the ‘E’ and ‘B’ syllables have in common their references to the Place where both family resemblances and distinctive qualities emerge. It’s about the classifications we make and transmit in our cultural institutions and enshrine in our languages, the building blocks of what we think we know when we make use of our sensory abilities, abilities made or developed to suit our human needs and desires. If anything, it is logical-constructionist rationality that is the epiphenomenon here. I’m not just playing a game or performing an academic exercise based in current theoretical trends. The academy is full of dreadful social pressures, it’s true, but I have nothing to gain or lose, and say what I really think in the best way I know how. I say throw out the borrowed thoughts, or as the Sufi saying goes, Throw away all the books! That’s why I no longer regard myself as an academic. I hardly ever identified as one. I probably never was a traditionalist of the kind that seeks ready-made eternal truths, I was always too skeptical for that. I don’t know what I am anymore. Still, I might be a perennial-ist in one way or another. I’ll get back with you when I get a better sense of it, maybe after the shrill polemics have died down sometime in 2021. I might also be a snowflake or a social justice advocate. So what’s it to you if I am? Categories, categories... those constantly clashing and reactive categories!

(*It may be significant that some kind of structure capable of weathering the elements be put in place, so I wouldn’t say that the art of architecture isn’t implicated in all of this...)

---

[1] As we find clarified somewhat in the quote that follows, the two letters here are the syllables E and Vaṃ of the word Evaṃ that opens practically every Buddhist scriptural text. Some see them as not in themselves Buddha Word, but the words of the scripture reciters, the Dharmabhāṇaka, or Chos Smra-ba-po, who thereby guarantee the ultimate source of the words they had memorized. These opening syllables have been the subject of a very rich traditional vein of symbolic commentary, in part likely based on the shapes of the letters in an Indic script from older times when they actually appeared rather like two triangles, one pointing downward and the other upward (see Kölver). Placed one on top of the other they would then form what is commonly known as a Seal of Solomon, in Buddhist contexts known as the Dharma Origin. The two syllables are said to give birth to the Dharma and dharmas.

[2] Not to insist on this subtle point too strongly, but here we have the two polarities joining into a couple and not necessarily or explicitly becoming an androgyne in line with Platonic or Eliadeian conceptions. This Questions of Devendra (Devendraparipṛcchā Sūtra) is actually a tantra, as we ought to know from the content of the quotation itself. Although a larger passage that includes our quotation existed in Sanskrit, nothing seems to be known about the Sūtra’s current existence in that language, and it appears it was never translated into Tibetan. For a discussion on this point, see Wayman, Yoga of the Guhyasamāja, pp. 181-182, where the entire surviving passage from the scripture is supplied in Sanskrit and translated into English. Part of our quote has been translated, together with parallel ideas found in yet other tantras, in Dasgupta, Introduction to Tantric Buddhism, p. 110.

[3] Our text supplies no length marks here, but the correct reading ought to be mayā, meaning by me, although in some etymological speculations it is interpreted to mean māyā, or illusion.

[4] I believe this is a line from The Text, the lines of poetry to which the Deyu is a commentary. Its reading in the small Lde’u, p. 53, looks like this: ngo bo bsdud pas yi ge rnam pa gnyis.

 

• I must apologize for an anachronism here and there. Bear in mind that this blog was incubating in the drafts folder for over a year. Go ahead, if you can, and imagine anyone in the world going to a conference not skyped or zoomed here in the year 2020! I have to say, I had bigger hopes for this blog than what you see here. I have long loved and cherished the relative freedom of expression afforded by the blog genre. Blogs were originally meant to be personal weblogs, a kind of diary written up for friends and family. Be that as it may... everyone, myself included, curates their own truth by deciding what goes on display. And they do it on the basis of what they think other people, their potential readers, would like to see. Unfiltered honesty is a genuine challenge. Try it and you will know that it is true.

 

I’m not sure if this particular blog entry fulfills its promise, it doesn’t go far enough to communicate what I was aiming for, it doesn’t quite put the pieces together into a coherent picture, so it doesn’t show me in my best light. I put it out there anyway — nothing ventured nothing gained — thinking it could provoke one or two of my friends to reflect further and come up with more interesting and intellectually satisfying ideas. If that works, it’s enough, I suppose. And it’s alright if it’s not all right.

 

The frontispiece is a detail from an early 13th-century wall mosaic of the Basilica of San Marco, Venice. For more context, try this link. 

Simchat Torah and the Tibetan holiday of  Ongkor (འོང་སྐོར་) have more striking structural parallels that I may go into another time. They do similar things with scriptures at similarly harvest-related events in the autumn.

For the Bibliophage — Readings on Creation and Species Propagation in Religion, with Side Issues that May be Intertangled if Not Integral

Olaf Breidbach and Michael T. Ghiselin, “Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) on Noah's Ark: Baroque ’Intelligent Design’ Theory,” Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences, 4th series vol. 57, no. 36 (2006), pp. 991-2001. You may be able to download a PDF at this URL.

Roelof van den Broek, “Sexuality and Sexual Symbolism in Hermetic and Gnostic Thought and Practice (Second-Fourth Centuries),” contained in: Wouter Hanegraaff & Jeffrey Kripal, eds., Hidden Intercourse: Eros and Sexuality in the History of Western Esotericism, Brill (Leiden 2008), pp. 1-21.

Juan R.I. Cole, “The World as Text: Cosmologies of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsa'i,” Studia Islamica, vol. 80 (1994), pp. 145-163.

Irving Finkel, The Ark before Noah: Decoding The Story of the Flood, Doubleday (New York 2014).

If you are short on reading time or can’t remember where you last saw your reading glasses, you can watch a big-screen video of Finkel's lecture on the same subject here that I can warmly recommend. His lectures are even ever so slightly more amusing and informative than his books.

Christian Frevel, “Semper aliquid haeret! The Accusation of Fornication and of Sexualized Cults as a Means of Demarcation in the Hebrew Bible,” contained in: Alexandra Cuffel, Ana Echevaria & Georgios T. Halkias, Religious Boundaries for Sex, Gender, and Corporeality, Routledge (London 2019), pp. 11-32.  Our opponents, or let’s just say our competitors, are people who engage in the most hideous perversions, or so we say... or so we want to imagine.

Minoru Hara, “Divine Procreation,” Indo-Iranian Journal, vol. 52 (2009), pp. 217-249. Some gods do no more than share a glance and are finished. Others might go so far as to hold hands...

Nathan Katz, “Buddhist-Jewish Relations throughout the Ages and in the Future,” Journal of Indo-Judaic Studies, no. 10 (Summer 2009), pp. 7-23.

Bernhard Kölver, “Das Symbol evam,” Studien zur Indologie und Iranistik, vols. 16-17 (1992), pp. 101-108. We may need to have it pointed out to us that the shapes of the letters ‘e’ and ‘va’ in Indic scripts have changed over time.

Anatoly Liberman, From Ship to Boat. Posted on October 5, 2011. Have you ever let your mind wander and wondered how English boat and Semitic words for house might both have to do with the Sanskrit root √bhed, to split or cleave in two? If that's too crazy for you to think about, just forget about it and find another spot to dock your houseboat.

Shaul Magid, “Conjugal Union, Mourning and Talmud Torah in R. Isaac Luria's Tikkun Hazot,” Daat: Journal of Jewish Philosophy and Kabbalah, no. 36 (1996), pp. xvii-xlv.

Charles Mopsik, “Union and Unity in the Kabbala,” tr. from French by Sunthar Visuvalingam, contained in: Hananya Goodman, ed., Between Jerusalem and Benares, SUNY Press (Albany 1994), pp. 223-242.

Sergio La Porta and David Shulman, eds., The Poetics of Grammar and the Metaphysics of Sound and Sign, Brill (Leiden 2007).

Vanessa R. Sasson, Review of Emily Sigalow, American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change, Journal of Global Buddhism, vol. 21 (2020), pp. 93-95. I haven't read the book, but this brief review raises some interesting points. It considers not only why American liberal Judaism feels drawn toward Buddhism, but why Buddhism doesn’t evince much interest in Judaism. We might add that, odd as this may seem to some, there has been a clearly observable trend in the last decade to translate Chinese philo-Semitic literature into Tibetan, with several such books surfacing (I've collected a few of them, and can supply references if required), but it is important to note that the supposed ‘love’ is largely based on anti-Semitic stereotypes of the wealthy Jew. This racialist image is held up as model for financial success to be emulated. Even religious Judaism is only considered of interest as a site to uncover hidden secrets for obtaining wealth. That, unfortunately, is just about all Judaism is good for in the PRC these days. Well, that’s definitely the overrriding impression to be gained from those just-mentioned Tibetan translations of Chinese books.

Daniel Sperber, “On the AUM and the Tetragrammaton,” contained in: Ithamar Theodor & Yudit Kornberg Greenberg, eds., Dharma and Halacha: Comparative Studies in Hindu-Jewish Philosophy and Religion, Lexington Books (Lanham 2018), pp. 203-209. An interestingly different way of approaching comparative letter/phoneme mysticism.

Vesna A. Wallace, “Authenticating the Tradition through Linguistic Arguments,” contained in: Manel Herat, ed., Buddhism and Linguistics: Theory and Philosophy, Palgrave MacMillan (NY 2018), pp. 101-122, at p. 107, a passage in the original commentary on the Kâlacakra that I’ve summarized in these two equations:

E = mystery, lotus, source of phenomena, space element, the abode of sublime bliss, lion's throne, vulva, and secret.

VAM = sublime bliss, sublime attachment, the innate, the supreme imperishable, drop, reality, gnosis, and purified mind. 

F.A. Wilford, “Embryological Analogies in Empedocles' Cosmogony,” Phronesis, vol. 13, no. 2 (1968), pp. 108-118. Since Empedocles there have been no significant improvements in humanities theory. I said it and meant it.

Oded Yisraeli, “Honoring Father and Mother in Early Kabbalah: From Ethos to Mythos,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. 99, no. 3 (Summer 2009), pp. 396-415.

Shlomo Zarchi, “Why the Torah Begins with a Bet instead of Aleph, and the One Time It Didn’t.” There are perfect passages in the Zohar that could help us here, but I don't have any easy reference to them, and they were left out of the Littmann Library version translated by David Goldstein, which is an anthology after all, and the only one in my library. The 12-volume Pritzker is the first ever complete translation.

Divisions within the Ark, Athanasius Kircher:
is it just classification in little boxes 
or a useful mnemonic system?

Web sightings

At Ørigin of Alphabet (www.originofalphabet.com), you can find fascinating pages on how the triangle served in cuneiform as a written character meaning female. For our purposes I highly recommend this page, and this one. I guarantee you that 'v's and 'b's and triangles will take on new yet oddly familiar meanings. According to Jennifer, 

“Female mammals are the basis of written language.”

Also, have a look at Beyond Babylonia (www.beyondbabylonia.com) and particularly at this page. It clarifies in delightful graphics how 'b' is the enclosed domestic space / house, while 'a' is the domesticated animal (the farmyard outside the house). The original shape of the 'a' was an ox with two horns, as you probably know.

Postscript (Oct. 14, 2020):

Although I knew of his 1989 article on the subject, just today I learned that Jonathan Silk is writing an entire book on the first words that appear in almost every Buddhist scripture. See his newly available article, “A Trust Rooted in Ignorance: Why Ānanda's Lack of Understanding Makes Him a Reliable Witness to the Buddha's Teachings,” contained in: At the Shores of the Sky: Asian Studies for Albert Hoffstädt, Brill (Leiden 2020). The entire volume is made available for open access at this link.

§  §  §

The Babylonian predecessor of Noah, as he is readying himself to be sealed inside the boat he made, speaks,

“As for me there was no word in my heart, and / xxx my heart / xxx my xxx / xxx of my xxx / xxx of my lips / xxx I slept with difficulty.”

—Irving Finkel, The Ark before Noah, p. 110.

§  §  §

When you speak every
vowel is an opening,
every consonant a closure,
my heart keeps a count
of each syllable as it beats,
my mind lets the sweet sound
fade into its own background,
and left open is only the
sky above us
in this house with no real doors. 

There is nothing between us.

Life itself has a sound. 

.