[Buddha-l] The Origins of Om Manipadme Hum

[Jayarava]

I've been lurking in Buddha-L since about 1996 but under other names. Having been ordained as Dharmacari Jayarava in 2005 I now use that name in most circumstances. I find myself in the interesting position of having being praised by Richard without apparent irony which may mean that he actually likes what I write. Thanks, but for some reason I feel embarrassed. However the sword I wield (if the metaphor fits) is as likely to inflict wounds on myself as anyone else. Maybe that's not a bad thing for a Buddhist. (BTW Richard are you going to the Convention in India in 2009?)

I had prepared a rant about Western preoccupations with isolating religious ideas and not taking into account the Indian approach - which seems to be very much mix and match. And then I spent the morning being annoyed at the number of people that write via my other website (visiblemantra.org) asking me to do Hindu calligraphy, or to write a Hindu mantra in Tibetan script etc. I'm a *Buddhist* calligrapher god damn it! I do *Buddhist* mantras. Oh... I see that I am a westerner too...

And then I remembered how much time the Bhagavan spends lecturing the bhikkhus about not behaving like lay people, or Brahmins, or Jains, Ajivakas and other Shramanas. The poor man seems to have had a lot of trouble getting the bhikkhus to behave like Buddhists.

That said in India mixing went on the whole time and still goes on, and I wonder whether we have it wrong when we refer to this as co-opting, and borrowing; or even as conflation and confusion. I think there's a subtle orientalism in this. It smacks of Christian theology, but also Classical theories of categorisation (as opposed for instance to George Lakoff's theory). It seems to be failure to step outside the preoccupations of Western culture.

Pāli text misgivings not withstanding it is clear that Buddhism has always been in a dialogue with other religious communities. The Pāli clearly draws on, at times relies on, the early Upaniṣads, and on the same pool of stories that as available to the Mahābharata for ideas, concepts, language and images. The Mahāyāna texts draw on the Puraṇas. Tantras are a synthesis of everything that happened to be around at the time of the collapse of the Gupta Empire. Mixing is really the norm in Indian rather than the exception. Not only this but it happened in China as well, and presumably in Central Asia and that feeds back to India. This bothers us sometimes - both scholars and Buddhists. But the facts are right there in our texts and icons.

Where some explanation for an obviously Śaiva idea needs an explanation the Buddhist approach seems to be to portray Śiva being converted - peacefully in the Karaṇḍavyūha, and savagely in the Sarvatathāgata-tattvasaṃgraha Tantra (where he is first killed by Vajrapaṇi and then reanimated). Mythically then from these points onwards Śiva is in fact a Buddhist because he goes for refuge to the Buddha. What was his is ours now! Ha! But actually these are quite rare moments of self consciousness in the texts.

It seems to me that Indians had a sensitivity to living and thriving spiritual traditions and where a European Christian might want to stamp out the heresy, the Indian seems to have attempted to assimilate it. I've written a blog post about Brahminism as operating somewhat like Microsoft in business, whereas Christianity was more like AT&T Bell. The result was hegemony in both cases, but the methods were quite different. 

Richard rightly draws attention to Lopez's account of the Avalokiteśvara mantra in "Prisoners of Sangrila", but Studholme adds quite a lot more to it in terms of context, and disagrees in some of the details for instance in deciding what kind of compound we should read maṇipadme to be. Studholme's book is a PhD thesis - ie it is thorough to the point of being boring at times, and aimed at the specialist reader with a knowledge of Sanskrit. But I found it fascinating and it challenged some of my preconceptions.

I'd like to draw attention to Sally McAra's (another Buddha-L member) recent book "Land of Beautiful Vision" which is a useful and engaging account of the kind of synergistic syncretisation happening amongst contemporary white settler descended Buddhist converts in New Zealand - we (I'm in it) incorporate elements from (eclectic FWBO) Buddhism, Maori culture, and depth psychology for instance. So the "borrowing" is still going on.

Best Wishes
Jayarava

BTW Thanks to whoever it was who first mentioned jayarava.blogspot.com I had my highest daily readership the day after that!