Swat’s Good Feng-shui

Practically everyone in Tibetan Studies has long been convinced that the Swat Valley, in northern Pakistan, is the same as Orgyan, the birthplace of the Tibetan cultural hero Guru Rinpoché — Pemajungné, Padmasambhava, also known as Orgyan Guru.

Guru Rinpoché came to Tibet in the later decades of the 8th century, during the reign of Emperor Trisongdetsen. Although he wasn't by any means the first Indian Buddhist to make an impression on Tibet, he is still regarded as founder of Tibetan Buddhism. It is because of him that Samyé Monastery could be built and consecrated. Still, just because agreement may be boring or misplaced, it’s interesting to note that some Indian scholars and Indologists have written that his birthplace, Uddiyana,* was not in Swat, but somewhere else... in north or south India.



(*Indic equivalent of Tibetan Orgyan. Take the correct version of the name with the diacritics, Uḍḍiyāna (sometimes also Oḍiyāna). Realize that those ‘d’s with dots beneath them are retroflexes. That means you have to turn the tip of your tongue back toward your soft palate. Try pronouncing it that way and you’ll start to understand how the sound shift to ‘Orgyan’ or ‘Urgyan’ —you have both spellings in Tibetan — could have taken place.)

The reason Tibetanists believe Swat Valley is none other than Orgyan is because of the account of the Drugpa Kagyüpa teacher Orgyanpa Rinchen Pal, who went there in the 13th century. Giuseppe Tucci half a century ago published a long article tracing Orgyanpa’s itinerary. It’s very clear that some of the places mentioned by Orgyanpa in the 13th century are close matches to place names still in use in Swat. 
Of course, those prone to taking more skeptical positions could say, ‘So what? That just means that 13th-century Tibetan convinced himself he had reached the right place.’

However that may be, Ron Davidson recently — in his article listed below, basing himself on epigraphic findings by Kuwayama Shoshin — said that there is now no doubt that Swat Valley is Oddiyana, contrary to all other claims that have been made. I think he’s very likely right.

Yet I feel the need to look into it, like so many other things, more — more than I can afford to do at the moment.

A new resource with Tibetan biographies has gone up on the internet recently. You can find the biography of Orgyanpa there, with a brief account of his travels. Look here.*


(*I put a link to this new website, “The Treasury of Lives: Biographies of Himalayan Buddhist Masters,” too, up at the top of Tibeto-logic’s sidebar. It’s beta, which means ‘in process,’ but shows a great deal of promise for future perfection in my opinion.)

Another short biography of Orgyanpa, with a remarkable wall-painted icon, may be found here.

Not many other Tibetan speakers actually reached Orgyan and returned to tell the tale. The only ones I know of with certainty are Tagtsangrepa and Khyungtrul.

The first one, Tagtsangrepa Ngawang Gyatso — that's him you see here in a Hemis wallpainting — is best remembered as the founder of Hemis Monastery in Ladakh. Well, I’m not entirely certain he was the founder, but the monastery was founded somewhere close to his time, and his reincarnations have been regarded as the chief Lamas of Hemis since then.

Our second Orgyan visiter who came there from Tibetan-speaking regions, Khyungtrul, a Bönpo, went there somewhere toward the mid-20th century. He tells the story in chapter eleven of his autobiography. By some weird coincidence — or is it? — this same Khyungtrul was perhaps Tucci’s best friend among the western Tibetans. They bumped into each other not only near Kailash, but also in lushly green Kinnaur.



The original Sanskrit name of Swat — both the river and its valley — is Suvastu, and Swat is just a ‘chipped-down’ version of that. Su means ‘good’ but vastu is a little harder to put a finger on. It means a kind of essence that is more real than the thing of which it’s the essence. It might mean property or wealth or commodities... among still other meanings.

Wait... If vastu comes from a different vas root it could mean ‘dawn.’ But then again, I’m thinking it might need the length-mark on the first vowel, and vāstu means a dwelling or habitation, or a foundation for the same, and it can also mean the ‘siting’ of a dwelling within a landscape. Nowadays it’s very popular in India (simply Schmoogling will reveal that dozens of books with “vastu” in their titles have come out in recent years) to reclaim as Indian cultural property the teachings of Feng-shui. Hmm...
Does that mean Swat had good Feng-shui?

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Thanks to Tenpa of Digital Altar fame who touched off this brief fit of blogging with his comments to the blog that came before.

I may have to enter into a work mode soon that won’t leave much time or energy for this financially non-rewarding, and therefore fun, activity. We’ll see how that will work out. I enjoy this so much I'd just hate to give it up.

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Things to read or scan, as you please, in the forms of articles, books & internet links:

Lokesh Chandra, Oḍḍiyāna: A New Interpretation, contained in: Michael Aris & Aung San Suu Kyi, eds., Tibetan Studies in Honour of Hugh Richardson, Vikas Publishing (New Delhi 1980), pp. 73-78. Orgyan is located in South India, in Kañci, according to this author, who is not just an Indologist, but also has a high profile in the realm of Tibetan Studies. Other Indian scholars have located Oḍḍiyāna in Assam, in Andhra, near Delhi, etc. etc.

Ronald M. Davidson, Hidden Realms and Pure Abodes: Central Asian Buddhism as Frontier Religion in the Literature of India, Nepal and Tibet, Pacific World, 3rd series, no. 4 [Fall 2002] 154-181, at p. 160 you find the comment on Orgyan. I think you can locate the download link here.

Per Kvaerne, Khyung-sprul ’Jigs-med nam-mkha’i rdo-rje (1897-1955): An Early Twentieth-Century Pilgrim in India, contained in: Alex McKay, ed., Pilgrimage in Tibet, Curzon (Richmond 1998), pp. 71-84.

Stag-tshang-ras-pa Ngag-dbang-rgya-mtsho (1574 1651), O-rgyan mkha’-’gro’i gling-gi lam-yig thar lam bgrod-pa’i them-skas (Chemre 1968). The title can be translated “Staircase for Traveling the Path to Liberation: Itinerary to the Isle of Dakinis, Orgyan.”

Giuseppe Tucci, Travels of Tibetan Pilgrims in the Swat Valley, Greater India Society (Calcutta 1940). But the original publication is quite rare, so you are more likely to find it as reprinted here: Giuseppe Tucci, Opera Minora, Giovanni Bardi (Rome 1971), vol. 2, pp. 369-418.

This photo was evidently taken by Tucci or a member of his expedition near Mt. Kailash. If you would like to compare Li Gotami’s photograph of Khyungtrul Rinpoche, see this.

For a much more ambitious and well-written essay on Orgyan, with a lot more details than you will find here, see this anonymous work at H.H. The Karmapa’s website.

Still, if I may say so, any suggestion that there is a connection between the word (and consequently placename) udyāna (‘garden’) and Uḍḍiyāna would demonstrate a lack of familiarity with the ways Sanskrit works. I think it most likely that Uḍḍiyāna is derived from the root ḍī, which means ‘fly, soar.’ The initial two letters are a prefix (ut-), meaning ‘upward.’ It means ‘soaring upward.’ Lokesh Chandra finds that in Tamil and other South Indian languages oṭṭiyāṇa (with many alternative ways of spelling the word) is a kind of belt with metallic decorations worn by women. One explanation or the other might help explain why all the women there seem to be sky-traveling Ḍākinīs.

Enrica Garzilli’s brief blog on Tucci and the Swat Valley is here.

On the destruction done in 2007 to a rock-carved Buddha image believed to date to the time of Guru Rinpoché, look here.

This other picture shows you what it looked like in 2004, but also an impression of just how large it is.

This iconoclastic act of destruction was noticed at Digital Altar earlier this year. The world is poorer.

These are the same people who kill dancers for dancing and destroy 200 schools in the Swat Valley, most of them girls' schools.

“Pakistan Paedia” has a nice page promoting tourism in the Swat Valley. At the moment, given present conditions, I would highly dis-recommend it... It’s beautiful, OK, clearly, but don’t go there now. Hear me?

There are plenty of news stories about the activities of Taliban forces in Swat Valley in recent times. You can find them with incredible swiftness and ease with a ‘news search.’

Just last month it was announced that the Swat Museum will reopen, which could be a sign of peace in Guru Rinpoché’s valley’s future, we can hope, although I have no way of being sure if there are reasons for it (hope) or not. Here is an interesting blog about the museum, with a photo, from early this year.

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My heart has become
receptive of every form.
It is a meadow for gazelles,
a monastery for monks,
an abode for idols,
the Ka`ba of the pilgrim,
the tables of the Torah,
the Qur'an.
My religion is love —
wherever its camels turn,
Love is my belief, my faith.

— Muhyiddin Ibn `Arabi (1165-1240 CE)

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Prof. Harrison on The Diamond

If that peaked your interest, you might want to try reading Paul Harrison's long article entitled Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā: A New English Translation of the Sanskrit Text Based on Two Manuscripts from Greater Gandhāra, contained in: Jens Braarvig, general editor, Manuscripts in the Schøyen Collection: Buddhist Manuscripts Volume III, Hermes Publishing (Oslo 2006), pp. 133-159. It might take half an hour or a little longer. Depends on you.

If for some odd reason you're not willing to sacrifice the time and effort required to search out this publication in a large university research library near you, it would be worth your while to try reading this page in any case. Quicker, but not quite so rewarding.

I think it's interesting to gain some insight into what professional academic Buddhologists (if you prefer, we could call them Buddhist Studies experts) are up to. If you are young and you feel inspired to follow this career route, get started learning the languages you will need. If you were to follow my advice, you would start with Sanskrit and/or Pali. Then move to Chinese or Tibetan, in whichever order you prefer. Finally, Japanese is today the most important language for contemporary research about Buddhism. If you don't learn it you will always find reasons for regret. You might also want to seriously consider Korean or one or two of several Southeast Asian languages. Mongolian and Manchu are interesting options, since you find huge collections of Buddhist scriptures in them, also. I'm thinking it would not be good to neglect Khotanese Saka. Don't be too discouraged, though. In actual practice, there are a number of very respectable Buddhologists who do make do with fewer than all of these languages. Did I mention Apabhramsha? Guess not.



Oh, and Tangut. Don't forget Tangut.

A New Clue

I can scarcely believe my own negligence. I must apologize for it. I somehow missed these two passages, one on the monkey and the other on the turtle, the second one right after the other. And the salt or lye or caustic soda (lan-tsha) here poses a danger to the turtle itself, and not, we must note, to the monkey paw it wants to eat.

The source is in the Zhijé Collection, vol. 2, the text entitled “Expressions of Speech Taught Symbolically.” This forms part of a trilogy called “Mahåmudrå Teachings: Three Cycles of Responses Employing Symbolic Actions of Body, Speech and Mind.”

Observe, as you will, that the monkey is once again connected with the unrelaxed mind. And the turtle? Well, you’ll see.

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As a symbolic way of saying that if you haven’t turned your mind away from sangsara, there is no need to stay in a retreat [p.156]

— “If you can’t relax the monkey’s mind there is no way to make his hands and feet stay still.”[1]

As a symbolic way of saying that if you can’t get rid of desire, there is no need for doing the practices

— “Since turtles and moisture go together, what’s the use? It doesn’t recognize that the swirling water has lan-tsha in it. It has no more serious enemy than that.”

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Now possible interpretations seem to stack up on top of possible interpretations. If you’re going to ask me what it all means, I’ll just say, quoting something Padampa says in the exact same text, for my own purpose,

“I haven’t the slightest idea. Ask the turtle’s head.”[2]

Bibliography:

[B1] Phyag-rgya-chen-po Brda'i Skor Gsum, or, Brda'i Zhus-lan Skor Gsum. Vol. 2, pp. 138-178.

[B1a]Sku'i Rnam-dag Brdar Bstan-pa. Vol. 2, pp. 138-152.

[B1b]Gsung-gi Brjod-bya Brdar Bstan-pa. Vol. 2, pp. 153-164 (the pages are entirely out of order in the reprint edition, but they were put back in order on the basis of the microfilm of Trulzhik Rinpoche's manuscript).

[B1c]Thugs-kyi Dgongs-nyams Brdar Bstan-pa. Vol. 2, pp. 165-177.

I work from my own draft translation of these three texts, which form the first set of Responsa (zhu-lan) texts in the Zhijé Collection. It is very difficult to compare this to the content of Molk's translation (on his pp. 177-192), which appears to have been rearranged at will by the translator. (Of course it is possible, too, that he worked from an unpublished manuscript unknown to me.) B1c is at least partly included on his p. 188 ff., but its title seems to be missing.

The Tibetan passage starts on line 7 of p. 159, and continues on line 1 of p. 156 (trust me, it's true). I give the text in 'texto' style, with no orthographic emendations:

'khor ba las blo ma log na ri khrod du bsdad pa la dgos pa myed pa'i brda' ru / [156] spre'u 'i sems ma dal na rkang lag la bsdad dbang myi mchi' gsung //

'dod pa ma thongs na nyams su blangs pa la dgos pa myed pa'i brda' ru / ru rbal rlan dang 'grogs pas ci la phan lan tsha'i chu rgod ngo myi shes / dgra' ru de las gnad pa myed gsung //

Lion of Siddhas: The Life and Teachings of Padampa Sangye, translated by David Molk with Lama Tsering Wangdu Rinpoche, Snow Lion (Ithaca 2008).

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[1] Molk, p. 186: “He said, ‘With the monkey mind not relaxed, the limbs have no capacity to remain still.’ To indicate that, if one does not turn the mind from samsara, there is no need for staying in retreat.” I searched out this translation (I couldn't find the one about the turtle & the lan-tsha) just so you will have another translation to compare. I made my own translation without being under any influence from this one.

[2] Molk, p. 185: “When asked the nature of the perfect ultimate mode of existence, he said, ‘I have no idea! Ask the head of the frogs.’ To indicate that transcendent wisdom of the mind is beyond expression.”

The Paw This Time

The sub-title this time ought to be something like ‘Grasping at the Grasper,’ or maybe more to the point, ‘Fool Me Thrice? Shame on the Both of Us!’ Maybe the next time ought to be ‘We Both Fool Each Other? Shame on Neither of Us!’

Sorry, just joking... About that last part being a future blog title, I mean.

I hope you can remember from the latest Tibeto-logic blog the main story of The Monkey Heart, along with the additional episode of The Talking Cave (Die sprechende Höhle, for the one reader who prefers German). Both parties involved in the two stories, the monkey side and the turtle side, have their wants, hungers and emotional needs. And each side uses what seem like sensible ways to go about finding satisfaction. To show this kind of interpersonal dynamic, & not just to entertain, is surely an important motive for telling the story to begin with. You may not have noticed how I skipped the brief frame story that conveys the circumstances of its telling.

As always, the Buddha has very present circumstances that bring him to call up the stories of his, and others’, previous lives. In this case, the monkey is identified as a prior incarnation of Himself, the future Śākyamuni, while the turtle/crocodile is His cousin Devadatta. Later on I’ll refer you to a source on the elaborate tricks Devadatta tries to play on his cousin, some of them quite murderous in intent. It might be fun to one day do a close comparison between the deeds of the animals and those of the cousins and draw out parallels that may or may not have been intended, but for now I’d like to keep on track and go on to visit a mysterious third episode.

In 1957, Rodney Needham, who would later evolve into the well-known Oxford social anthropologist by the same name, published a set of eight tales from a place in the eastern Indonesian island called Sumba. They were collected for him by a local assistant named M. Maru Mahemba. Number Four of the eight is “The Crocodile and the Monkey." I won’t copy or tell over the somewhat different episodes of The Monkey Heart and The Talking Cave. I’ll just quote directly a brief third episode that is squeezed between the other two.

The next day, in the morning, the crocodile came back to the place where he had met the monkey, and saw the monkey drawing water. The crocodile drew near, disguising himself as a floating log. He stretched out slowly and seized the monkey’s paw. But the monkey did not lose his presence of mind, and immediately laughed like mad, saying, “Who has been so silly as to grab the branch of a tree, thinking it to be the paw of a monkey?" When the crocodile heard this he let go of the monkey’s paw. 

As soon as he was free of the grip of the crocodile the monkey ran up a tree and called out, “Hey, friend crocodile, let us play at riddles." 

“All right," said the crocodile, and the monkey pronounced his riddle. “Friend crocodile who is very stupid was tricked by a small and humble monkey, so that he let go the monkey’s paw when he had seized it."

Needham came back to examine his Kodi Fable no. 4 more closely a few years later, in 1960. He divided it into three episodes, just as we have done above. He finds that while The Monkey Heart is in all recensions of the Pañcatantra, The Talking Cave is in only a few versions, and the two episodes are never found together there as they are in the Tibetan and Kodi versions.

He turns to the Jātaka collection in Pāli language, and finds that the main narratives of The Monkey Heart are found in the Vānara Jātaka (no. 342), and in greater detail the Sumsumāra Jātaka (no. 208). The only one that includes anything close to The Talking Cave as part of its version of The Monkey Heart is the Vānarinda Jātaka (no. 57), but even then it’s a talking stone and not a talking cave, although the narrative structure is rather similar.

Needham found neither a Jātaka source nor a Pañcatantra source for The Monkey Paw episode. He locates several versions of it in insular SE Asia and in Malaysia, with slight variants. Sometimes the monkey tells the crocodile that what he’s grabbed hold of is not a monkey paw, but a piece of wood, or nothing but the root of a tree, a stick for measuring the depth of the water, and so on. Nowhere is it made explicit, but I believe we have to understand that the monkey is partly submerged in the muddy water so that the crocodile is unable to see what exactly he has bitten.

Here’s the version from Timor (see Middelkoop’s article):

Not so long after that, the crocodile took hold of the monkey’s leg; the monkey became aware of the crocodile taking hold of his leg and suddenly played the crocodile a trick, saying: “Why, dear friend! Do you think you have gripped my leg? It will be a real shame for you, because you are very stupid. You took hold of the root of a tree." The crocodile thought: “Maybe what, he tells me is right." Shortly afterwards he released the monkey’s leg. Thereafter the monkey and the crocodile lived in hostility with each other until the present day.

Needham apologizes for being too tedious, as I would, too, if I were feeling in a kinder mood, and then goes into (pp. 246-8) nine versions of The Monkey Paw collected from different parts of India. His conclusion is worth quoting: “[T]his is one of the oldest, as well as one of the commonest of Indian tales. The talking-cave motif has literary predecessors by which its age may be known : the monkey/jackal-paw motif has none, but its constant association with the former in Indian folklore suggests that it may be equally old."

So, The Monkey Paw has no datable classical Indian literary occurrences? Not so any more, or not exactly so. We do have a South Indian in southern Tibet who makes mention of it about eight centuries before the Indian and Indonesian versions were put into writing.

Can we use our understandings of the more recent versions to document the meaning of the first literary occurrence? Don’t historical developments have to flow forward in time? And our understandings as historians of culture along with them? Forward? It’s probably forbidden by all the rulebooks of philology known to the modern academy to use newer sources to document older meanings. There may be good reasons for upholding this kind of logic. But I think there are also good reasons for flexibility when it’s called for. We simply must not be so utterly married to the datable evidence of compositions and their physical manuscripts that we refuse to give weight to oral transmission. And this ought to hold in matters of folk stories as much as in the extremely rarified, secret Bön and Buddhist spiritual transmissions Tibetans describe as being ‘passed from mouth to ear’ (kha-nas snyan-du brgyud-pa, usually shortened to snyan-brgyud).

56. The turtle has gotten a monkey claw, no reason not to eat it in caustic solution.

According to my latest way of reading this gnomic saying of Padampa we’re supposed to already know the story of the turtle and the monkey with its various (2 or 3?) episodes. Evidently everybody in India knew it, but I’m not so sure if our commentary writer did. Today we can know for certain, with our folkloristic knowledge gained in the last two centuries, that the turtle never does get that monkey claw. (Or, OK, he got it momentarily, but was misled into thinking he didn't and lost it...) So the absence of the claw entails the ‘why not?’ of the instructions to wash it in something that would anyway dissolve it away before he could get a chance to eat it. The words ‘no reason not to eat’ could also be translated, more literally, ‘no contradiction in eating.’

No reason why I shouldn’t end here... but one thing more.

The combination of elements in Padampa’s metaphor and in the folk story are just too similar to be accidental. Still, if you are the skeptical type, as we all tend to be in one area or another, you might ask, ‘How can you be so sure that Padampa knew The Monkey & Turtle story?’ Well, I can’t be entirely sure. But I did notice something that might be suggestive. This passage from a text translated by — and possibly also revealed to — Padampa that is included in the Tanjur entitled The Dakini’s Soft Song, mentions a ‘monkey[s] without a heart,’ which does appear to allude to The Monkey Heart episode. In any case, it’s very much about desire, which plays a very central role in my reading of Padampa’s animal metaphor 56. It is section 9 of the text according to my own added numbering:

’dod-pa dug-gi sdong-po-la //

spang blang gnyis-kyi yan-lag gyes //

zhen-pa’i lo-mdab phyogs bcur rgyas //

rtsol-sgrub-kyi me-tog mkha’-la ’phur //

sdug-bsngal-gyi ’bras-bu thur-la brul //

snying-med-kyi spre’u bsgrubs-kyi za //

’khor-ba’i nags-su ’chi nyen yod //

yan-lag : C yal-ga; T yas-ga. lo-mdab : CT lo-’dab. rtsol-sgrub-kyi : C rtsol-bsgrub-kyi. sdug-bsngal-gyi : T sdug-bsngal-gyis. thur-la : C thang-la. spre’u : C spri’u. ’chi : ’ching.

From the trunk of the poison tree named desire

two limbs fork out called acceptance and rejection

and from them leaves of addiction grow in every direction.

The flowers known as striving and toil fly up toward the sky

while the fruits we call suffering hang down heavily.

The no-heart monkey[s], whose prasad food offerings [these fruits are],*

lies next to death’s door in the forest of sangsara.

*(Snying-po med-pa is probably meant in the positive philosophical sense of being without essence, as all things are in Buddhism’s non-essentialist philosophies. But this is no proof that The Monkey Heart isn’t also alluded to here. It is entirely possible that in Padampa’s use of the story, he reads the significance of the ‘heart’ that the monkey may or may not have in the very same philosophical light. My understanding of bsgrubs-kyi za as ‘prasad food offerings’ is based on reverse translation into Sanskrit, and is anyway provisional... I didn't know what else to do with this phrase... Do you?)

sna-tshogs zhen-med-kyi skyes-bu-yis //

gdang ’gyur-ba med-pa’i mtshon thogs-te //

’dod-pa’i sdong-po rmang-nas bsgyel //

dug lnga’i ’bras-bu sngo bskams byer //

dug ’chi-byed-kyi nus-pa zad-par gyis //

khyod zhe-’dod spongs-shig rnal-’byor-pa //

gdang : C rdeng; T gdong. bsgyel : C dgyel. bskams : C skams. byer : CT khyer. spongs-shig : C spongs-gcig.

The persons who are not addicted to the myriad things

wield as their unchanging weapon confidence,*

razing the tree trunk of desire from its very foundations.

The green fruits of the five poisons they dry up and split open.

They make the poison exhaust its death-dealing force.

You must give up desirous inclinations, my yogis.

(*I chose none of the 3 varying readings and settled on gdengs, ‘confidence.’ I don’t have very much confidence in my choice, and my best argument for it is just that it fits better than the alternatives. There are traditional lists of confidences, and in one known to the early Zhijé school, they are the three confidences of view, meditation and action.)

(Poison fruits and their reflections,
both apparently there for the grasping)

More reading —

Dakinis’ Soft Song. This is Ḍākinī-tanu-gīti (Mkha’ ’gro ma’i ’jam glu; or, ’Byam glu). Tôhoku catalog no. 2451. Dergé Tanjur, vol. ZI, folios 88‑90. Although the colophon isn’t very informative, we do know that it is part of a collection of works Padampa redacted and/or translated. And we do find it in the Zhijé Collection, vol. 1, pp. 359-367, where the Sanskrit is given in a Tibskrit version as: Dha ki ni ta la ghi ta na ma. I’m not sure of the significance of the title, where the word for ‘soft, gentle’ might just point to the metre used in its composition. If we read tāla instead of tanu, perhaps it has something to do with clapping, or dancing that includes clapping. Maybe a real Indo-logical person would like to weigh in on this?

P. Middelkoop, A Timorese Myth and Three Fables, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Leiden], vol. 115, no. 2 (1959), pp. 157-175. The quote is from the final page. The home page of the BTLV journal is here, and you might be able to download the PDFs for this and the two Needham articles there. Give it a try.

Rodney Needham (1923-2006), Kodi Fables, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Leiden], vol. 113, no. 4 (1957), pp. 361-379.

Rodney Needham, Jātaka, Pañcatantra, and Kodi Fables, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde [Leiden], vol. 116, no. 2 (1960), pp. 232-262.

I mainly know Rodney Needham for something he wrote much later, in 1963 — his brilliantly subversive preface to his own translation into English of Primitive Classification (first published in French in 1903 as a journal article, De quelques formes primitives de classification) by Emile Durkheim (1858-1917) & Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), in which he, Needham, completely pulls the rug out from under their main ideas, especially the idea that human thought itself, including its classifications, came into existence because of archaic social divisions (a crucial point for those who want to believe in the primacy of ‘the social’ and hence the primacy of socio-logical ideas in general... the same people who want to think of society as sui generis, a fancy legalistic-sounding claim that it, society, is the source of all causation and is not itself a product of causes outside itself... Nowadays even some sociologists would view this as ‘essentialism,’ which for Buddhists, also, is not a good thing... Among Buddhists, the absence of essence is what they are talking about when they do at times use words that mean ‘essence’...). One reviewer called R.N.’s preface “devastating, essentially ruthless, and to some extent bewildering and intellectually arrogant.” (Harry Alpert, who had already made a career of his Durkheimianism) Mind you, that’s the same preface I admire and call ‘brilliant.’ Where I see divine nectar in the Gangga, H.A. saw a river flowing with blood and pus. Interesting... Where do we go with that?

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Look online (as if you weren’t already) —

If you want to read the text or hear the audio recording of the Korean Monkey Rabbit version (in English) try here.

For a mapping of the distribution of type 91 folktales, look here.

There was a recent news release telling how modern scientists have discovered that at least one kind of animal behavior as recounted in old fables (in this case Aesop’s) might be observable nowadays and (therefore?) true. Look here.

Look at this photo by Samrat of a stone carving from a 6th-century Indian temple in Sirpur and compare it to the Borobudur frieze linked in the last Tibeto-logic blog.

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Interested a little in knowing Buddha’s relatives? Siddhārtha - དོན་གྲུབ་, the young man who came to be called the Buddha after His Awakening, had a brother named Nanda, and a cousin named Ānanda.* Cousin Ānanda (son of Amṛtodana; in Tibetan Dütsizé or Bdud-rtsi-zas - བདུད་རྩི་ཟས་) was Siddhārtha’s most devoted follower and the one who best memorized the words of the Teacher. The other cousin of the Buddha was Devadatta (also son of Amṛtodana), the polar opposite. Devadatta (Tib. Lhejin, Lhas-sbyin - ལྷས་སྦྱིན་,‘God[s]-Given’) tried several times to kill the Buddha, rolling boulders on top of him, sending raging bull elephants in his direction and, failing at these attempts, decided he would found his own counter-order with extra-added monastic rules that would justify his own followers’ claim to be more pure than the Buddha’s. There are some stories that in the end Devadatta was swallowed up by the ground and went straight to hell. Yet other stories have him eventually, against all the odds, brought on board by the Buddha, and placed on the Path to Enlightenment. For a little more background you can try this webpage, or the wiki, or whatever else might turn up from a schmoogle search. I could give you a bibliography of more technical publications in some rather obscure journals, but would you hunt them down and read them? Didn’t think so.

*(They should not be confused, although it’s true it’s been done... Nanda is Gawo [Dga’-bo - དགའ་བོ་] in Tibetan, while Ānanda is Künga [Kun-dga’ - ཀུན་དགའ་]... This last name, Künga, is also the name of Padampa’s most devoted follower and the one who best memorized the words of his teacher...)

∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆Ω∆

. . .

And it grew both day and night,

Till it bore an apple bright.

And my foe beheld it shine.

And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole

When the night had veiled the pole;

In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.

-Wm. Blake, A Poison Tree

Ste.-Chapelle, Paris

(click on photo to enlarge)