Varanasi to Tibet

When he attained enlightenment the Buddha set off for the city of learning, Varanasi, keen to share his newfound knowledge.  Just outside the city he preached his first sermon at Sarnath and Buddhism was born.  Along with the Buddhist temple and stupas that mark this spot, it is thus appropriate that Sarnath is also home to a Tibetan institute which aims to return to India its Buddhist heritage – thousands of Sanskrit texts detailing the teachings of the Buddha. 

The Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, or CIHTS, was set up as by Nehru and the Dalai Lama a few years after China took control of Tibet in 1959, primarily to provide a centre for students of the Himalayan region – who had previously come to Tibet – to study Buddhism.  In 1981 it started a restoration programme designed to reconstruct the original Sanskrit texts which had travelled to Tibet from the 7^th century AD onwards. 

While Buddhism flourished in its adopted home in Tibet – as well as elsewhere in Asia – it declined in India and many of these Sanskrit texts were subsequently lost.  In many cases, the only extant versions are the Tibetan translations which came out of a large and well organised translation programme in Tibet, sponsored by its kings.  Indian scholars such as Shantaraksita and his disciple Kamalashila, and Atisha – who revived Buddhism in Tibet after in faltered in the 10^th century – travelled to Tibet and took with them the teachings of the Buddha, the canon known as Kagyur, as well as their commentaries on the canon, called Tangyur.  In the 9^th century the Tibetan king created a Tibetan-Sanskrit dictionary, the Mahavyutpatti, to standardise the translation of these many texts by prescribing the particular Tibetan term for each Sanskrit word.  He also set rules which determined which texts should be translated and appointed an editorial board to vet each translation. 

As Dr Pempa, an editor in the restoration department, explains, these efforts to control and standardise the translation into Tibetan greatly help the Institute’s programme to reconstruct the originals.  Tibetan scholars work with Indian Sanskritists; the Tibetans explain the meaning of each text, in Hindi or Sanskrit, to the Indian scholars who then render it in Sanskrit.  The Sanskritists use the metre to ensure that the reconstructed text matches the original exactly, or as closely as possible.  Where a fragmentary Sanskrit manuscript is available, as is the case with some tantra texts where fragments have been found in Nepal, this is also used to rebuild the original.   The Institute’s translation department then works to translate these texts into Hindi, and occasionally English, to make them as widely accessible as possible in India.  As Dr Pempa puts it, “We want to return the generosity of the Indian scholars who first brought these texts to Tibet by bringing them back to India.”

The Institute’s library houses an extensive collection of Tibetan and Indian manuscripts, all beautifully wrapped in yellow cloth. These manuscripts are quite different from the palm-leaf manuscripts found in India. Tibet set up four main printing presses which allowed for the mass production of these manuscripts.  The blocks might take several years to create but once ready they could be used to print many copies.  The Tibetan ones are simply decorated with a Buddha at either end; the ones from Bengal have elaborate paintings of various gods on the wooden boards that hold the folios together and include a series of delicately drawn mandalas.  Tibetan manuscripts were printed on a handmade paper which is remarkably durable – some in the library are over 200 years old.  The librarian, Mr Sunaam, explains that many of these manuscripts were brought to India by Tibetan exiles fleeing the Chinese occupation in the 1960s thus providing the material needed for this restoration programme.  It is thanks to them that the teachings of the Buddha have returned to their original birthplace and can once again make themselves heard in India.   

For more about the CIHTS see their website here

Golden Lotuses in Bangalore

The Foundation for the Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions, or rather more manageably the FRLHT, has a grand vision: “to revitalise Indian medical heritage”.  A large and well-equipped campus spread over 15 acres in North Bangalore and a 100-plus team of medical and horticultural experts suggests that realising this goal is well within the FRLHT’s grasp.

The Foundation is active in promoting the use of traditional medicine systems – including siddha medicine, a system similar to ayurveda but based on mercury (rasa-aushadi), as well as ayurveda – and in re-establishing the traditional methods of transmitting this knowledge.  The executive chairman, Mr Darshan Shankar, distinguishes between the very sophisticated Sanskrit oral tradition and that of other cultures and languages, Indian and otherwise, which focus more on practical knowledge.  “There are tribes in India that are totally illiterate who can set a broken bone, whether of a man or an animal, pretty well; but the Sanskrit tradition is much more than that.”  He stresses the importance of sound for the oral tradition and likens reading a Sanskrit manuscript to reading sheet music – much of the meaning of the notation cannot be brought out without sound.  It is the sound of the words which, he says, engage with the mind.

A large part of the organisation’s work involves conserving the plants used in Indian medicine for thousands of years and the campus is dotted with all manner of trees and flowers each with a particular medicinal quality.  The team has endeavoured to identify and catalogue each plant in several Indian languages, including Tamil, Marathi and Hindi, as well as Sanskrit.  There are perhaps 400 plants on campus out of the 2,000 they have positively identified; another 3,000 estimated species are said to be known to various local traditions.  

Three Ayurvedic doctors, a horticultural expert from Kerala and a Sanskrit poet-cum-psychiatrist reveal just there is to learn from each plant: the different types of medicinal usages, the parts you can eat and how to prepare them, the varieties of the plant and which part of India it comes from, and how to reconcile this reality with the at times fantastical descriptions of flora found in Sanskrit poetry.  Dr Suparna explains how the ishvari, a plant with bizarre purple flowers that resemble a brain (above), cures snakebites; while the nirgundi is used for arthritis.  Dr Shankar, who leads the team responsible for translating Sanskrit texts into English, notes that the names match the plants’ morphology, so the asti-shrnkhala (literarly ‘chains of bones’) is a shrub with small green tubular leaves separated into several joints (below). 

Some take their name from other characteristics, the ugra-gandha for instance is a type of kasturi, or musk, so called because of its fierce (ugra) smell (gandha).  The parijata, one of the five divine trees which were produced at the churning of the ocean and which was later brought to earth by Krishna, is happily found to be alive and well – on the FRLHT campus at least.  Its tiny white flowers have a bright almost fluorescent orange stem, justifying its alias as the coral tree. 

The lotus pond though brings a disappointment as the botanist, Mr Ram, explains that lotuses and water lilies grow only in still water.  The golden lotuses that Kalidasa has growing in the divine river, Ganga, may owe more to poetic licence than botany but nature here reveals so many weird and wonderful that it is easy to forgive the poets their overactive imaginations.

For more about the FRLHT click here

Leather Puppets In Action

 

Stones hang from electricity pylons to ensure a ready supply of siphoned off power in Vaderahalli, a village in between Bangalore and Kanakapura.   A cluster of five or six pale green houses on each side of a narrow street form the village.  Each low tiled roof juts out above a verandah filled with fodder upon which cows are grazing.  The verandah of the second house on the right though houses not cows but a makeshift theatre for this evening’s   Togalu Gombeyaata performance.

Togalu Gombeyaata is a the particular type of shadow puppetry - an ancient art form which originated in India but is now most famous in South East Asia – practised in Karnataka.  It is used most often to narrate episodes from the epics, and tonight’s performance is taken from one of the many sub plots of the Mahabharata, that of the duel between Arjuna and his son, Babhruvahana.

Four puppeteers  – two men and two women – from Kollegal, another village in Karnataka not far away, enact the violent confrontation between Arjuna and the son he disowns.   The play opens with Ganapati, the god for all beginnings, flanked by two troll-like creatures and two elaborately decorated trees.  Behind the white cloth that forms the screen for the shadow play the artists break into a wild-sounding Kannada song, accompanied by a harmonium and a dhol, as one of the women sweeps the invocatory god and his foliage offstage to be replaced by a narrator with a maniacal dance.  Next come the epic characters, each beautifully crafted on fine almost paper thin leather and painted in colours brought out to vivid effect by the back lighting – a single, pendulous bulb.  Recognisable characteristics identify each character: Bhima has his club, Krishna is an electric blue. 

Babhruvahana challenges his father’s ashvamedha – a sacrificial rite involving a horse by which rulers assert their sovereignty – by stealing the horse.  Despite the intercession of various tiny women – all the male characters are at least twice the size of the females – the father and son eventually proceed to a duel.  The ‘sarpa-bana’ – ‘snake arrow’ – warrants a wonderful display of the puppeteers’ skill as the snake slithers up and down before shooting across the screen.  Each puppet is controlled by one or more bamboo sticks that are used to push the flat leather shape across the screen – the humans all have stick-controlled arms so Arjuna can touch Krishna’s feet, the two warriors can fight with sword and bow and the women can indulge in almost perpetual frantic gesticulation.  Undoubtedly the best scene involved the mass decapitation of certain evil characters that would appear in hideous splendour before a shooting arrow separated their heads from their bodies. 

In between the singing, the puppeteers share the dialogue between the characters on the screen.  They sit opposite one another shouting with a very convincing agression as they act out the father and son dispute.  The stories, like the puppets and the techniques, are passed on from one generation to the next.  This performance was only an hour long, but the team could use the same puppets to entertain a village for a whole night or longer.

In addition to the 15-odd city types with large cameras and an unusual interest in local traditions, many villagers crowded round to watch the performance.  The children watched in delight, favouring this novel type of entertainment to the television in the house behind the stage.  Two old men came up at the end of the show to congratulate and thank the artists and the woman who had organised it, a software engineer who runs a quirky travel company.  They explained how they used to do Yakshagana theatre as well as ‘bayalu’ in their village many years ago, with real people running up and down ropes rather than just puppets.  ‘Santosh ayata’, announced one with a large grin, “I am happy”. 

The puppet show was organised by Vasanti Panchakshari who runs the travel company Tazad – click here for more details.