Dharmodayā: The Identity and Esoteric Tradition of the Nepalese Svābhāvikas Unveiled and Interpreted in the Light of Theosophy, or the Primordial Wisdom-Religion
In the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal, the territory traditionally designated Nepāl Maṇḍala, there dwells a people who may lay claim to being “innately, primordially Buddhist” due to their alleged descent from disciples of the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī.[1] These people are the Newars and the practice of Buddhamārga, “the path of the Buddha,” is to this day still a living reality for many of them. This little known tradition, dubbed Newar Buddhism by scholars, is the last remnant of Sanskrit Buddhism in a native Indic cultural context and has been enormously important in the history of the Western reception of Buddhism.[2] In the 19th century, the British Resident in Nepal, Brian Houghton Hodgson, would have the opportunity to study this tradition and forward a vast quantity of Sanskrit Buddhist texts to European academic institutions; this in turn would result in the first modern academic study of Indian Buddhism by the French scholar Eugène Burnouf.[3]
Among the findings of Hodgson that initially excited the fascination of educated Europeans was the existence of four distinct schools of Buddhism in Nepal; the Svābhāvikas, Aiśvarikas, Kārmikas, and Yātnikas. One of these schools, the Svābhāvikas, was the subject of particularly great interest. The Svābhāvikas were understood to hold the atheistic (or perhaps pantheistic) doctrine that the phenomenal world ultimately derived its existence and the unfolding of its infinitely varied manifestations from an inherent essence or svabhāva and “that this substance exists by itself (svabhâvât), without a Creator or Ruler.” The phenomenal world, as the effect of this timeless inherent essence, was understood to be always already contained within its transcendent cause and to cycle eternally between the states of nivṛtti (repose and quietude) and pravṛtti (activity and development).[4]
Fig. 1 "The Valley of Nepal from Naikal." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1853.
This philosophy would prove itself to be very congenial to the thought-world of the early Theosophical Society; its primary theoretician, H.P. Blavatsky, had declared that the “Buddhism of Nepal… may be said to have diverged less than any other from the primeval ancient faith”[5] and had described herself as a Svābhāvika, “a Buddhist Pantheist, if anything at all.”[6] Further, she described her guru M. as “a Buddhist, but not of the dogmatic Church, but belongs to the Svabhavikas, the so-called Nepal Atheists.”[7] Another member of the same fraternity, K.H., had recommended the study of the doctrines of this school to his correspondent A.O. Hume, who was having misgivings about the “materialistic” and “atheistic” bent of Theosophical teachings: “Study the laws and doctrines of the Nepaulese Swabhavikas, the principal Buddhist philosophical school in India, and you will find them the most learned as the most scientifically logical wranglers in the world. Their plastic invisible eternal omnipresent and unconscious Swabhavat is Force or Motion ever generating its electricity which is life.”[8]
H.P.B. wrote about this school in Isis Unveiled and presented her magnum opus The Secret Doctrine as in one sense a commentary on and explication of a passage in the former work about the Svābhāvikas.[9] In the Theosophical interpretation of the Svābhāvika doctrine, the “one homogenous divine Substance-Principle” which is the ontological source of the manifest universe is more or less equated with mūlaprakṛti, the “root-substance” of the ancient Indian Sāṁkhya philosophy,[10] and in its “highest aspect” is called svayambhū, i.e. “the self-existent” or “self-manifested.”[11] Although this “one element” is singular in and of itself, it is also conceptualized as “Spirit or Force at its negative, Matter at its positive pole.”[12] This manifests as a “dual movement of the one element remaining what it is while growing into something else. Since it is ‘ever present’ and ‘inexhaustible,’ Swabhavat… is endlessly ‘running’ and ‘moving.’ For this reason, Master K.H. called Swabhavat more than merely a force; it was the ‘infinite life’ of Ādi-Buddha throughout his ‘universally diffused essence.’”[13] In fact, it is asserted that something like these esoteric Buddhist teachings “preceded by far Gautama Buddha,” being essentially the once universal “Wisdom-Religion” that is still preserved among the Mahatmas.[14] So the identity of the Svābhāvika school and its doctrines as found in Hodgson’s writings is of some interest to students of Theosophy, to say the least.
Unfortunately for followers of the Theosophical teachings, who understand H.P.B. to be a genuine emissary of the Mahatmas, it is now well-accepted among specialists thanks to the research of David Gellner that there are no schools of Buddhism, Nepalese or otherwise, that bear the names given by Hodgson. That being the case, Gellner pronounced the issue a “blind alley.”[15] The late Nepalese researcher Harihar Raj Joshi, on the other hand, had a different intuition; rather than being a “blind alley,” it is perhaps a case of “the blind man and the elephant.”[16] A “new chapter” could be written by carefully parsing, analyzing, and researching what Hodgson wrote and what his informant, Pandit Amṛtānanda Vajrācārya, actually said to him. “Hodgson himself would have appreciated such a study very much,” he writes.[17] What follows is that new chapter, which we hope may do honor to the memories of Hodgson and Amṛtānanda as well as the emissary of the Mahatmas for the 19th century, H.P.B.
It must be conceded upfront that Gellner’s primary conclusion, that there are no Buddhist schools then or now that go under these monikers, has a strong evidential foundation.[18] After Burnouf had observed that the canonical “four schools” of Indian Buddhism were actually Vaibhāṣika, Sautrāntika, Yogācāra, and Madhyamaka,[19] Hodgson was compelled to considerably clarify the nature of his own four schools for the readers of his collected Essays. “My Bauddha pandit,” he writes, “assigned these titles to the Extract made from his Sástras, and always used them in his discussions with me. Hence I erroneously presumed them to be derived from the Sástras, and preferable to Mádyámika, &c., which he did not use, and which, though the scriptural denominations, were postponed to those here used on his authority as being less diagnostic. In making the extracts we ought to reach the leading doctrines, and therein I think we succeeded.”[20]
So clearly these titles were heuristic. But just what are the “leading doctrines” that these titles are “diagnostic” to? Hodgson writes that these doctrines concern “the origin of the world, the nature of a first cause, and the nature and destiny of the soul.”[21] In other words, they primarily concern cosmogony. This is further verified in Hodgson’s papers where the four schools are actually called the four types of worlds or world-systems (caturvidhasaṃsāra).[22] But where did the names of these diagnostic cosmogonies or “schools” come from?
Hodgson reproduces one of his discussions with Amṛtānanda on cosmogony and it is here that we discover the origin of the school titles. He asks, “Is matter an independent existence, or derived from God?” In his answer, Amṛtānanda largely paraphrases a segment of Aśvaghoṣa’s epic poem on the life of the Buddha, the Buddhacarita, which deals with the matter of jagatkāraṇas, or causes of the universe, a relatively common trope in ancient Indian texts.[23] In this segment, emissaries of the Buddha’s father, who had been sent with the purpose of persuading the future Buddha to return to his princely householder duties, present various theories as to whether the body (śarīra, deha) and the world (saṃsāra) derive from intrinsic nature or svabhāva (“Svābhāvika”), God or Īśvara i.e. “Lord” (“Aiśvarika”), or karma (“Kārmika”).[24]
Fig. 2 "The Birth, Death, and Apotheosis of Sakya Sindha Buddha, the Founder of Buddhism," Plate from Henry Ambrose Oldfield, Sketches from Nipal Vol. 2, London, 1880, pg. 54.
Concerning this, Gellner writes: “The religious positions the minister is describing are in fact non-Buddhist doctrines which Sarvārthasiddha (the future Buddha) rejects as inadequate.”[25] While the future Buddha was obviously not persuaded by this line of argumentation he did not, as Gellner asserts, reject these cosmological theories out of hand either. Rather, he refused to pronounce on them, having not yet obtained enlightenment on these issues. “As for this disputed question of existence and non-existence in this universe, no decision is possible for me on the strength of another’s words. I will arrive at the truth for myself by asceticism and quietude and will accept what is determined accordingly in this manner.”[26] This statement of the future Buddha will serve as Amṛtānanda’s justification for the use of these titles; at the end of his reply to Hodgson’s query on matter and God, Amṛtānanda loosely paraphrases it as follows: “Some persons say that Sansára is Swábhávaka, some that it is Kármika, and some that it is Aiśwarika and Atmaka; for myself, I can tell you nothing of these matters. Do you address your meditations to the Buddha; and when you have attained Bodhijnána, you will know the truth yourselves.”[27]
Amṛtānanda was quite aware that these doctrines in their original signification were non-Buddhist, however. This comes across very clearly in his own 1830 recension of the Buddhacarita. The Sanskrit Buddhacarita had lost its original concluding cantos and Amṛtānanda wrote four new ones to finish the work. In one of these new cantos, the now fully enlightened Buddha actually does refute the cosmological doctrines given originally by his father’s minister in their full non-Buddhist signification.[28] So there is no question here of a misapprehension of non-Buddhist doctrines as Buddhist by Amṛtānanda, contra Gellner. Rather, these non-Buddhist cosmogonies or jagatkāraṇas appear to serve a heuristic function for him, as they have close parallels to cosmogonies represented in Buddhist scriptures that he was familiar with.
We get a more detailed look at these cosmogonies in a later essay wherein Hodgson attempts to prove the accuracy of his description of the Buddhist schools via a translation of a Sanskrit document written by Amṛtānanda containing illustrative quotations from various Buddhist scriptures and texts.[29] The success of this endeavor must be regarded to be of a mixed character since some of these texts do not contain what Amṛtānanda’s citations say they contain, as Burnouf noticed in cross-checking these references in the Sanskrit manuscripts provided to him by Hodgson. Burnouf attributed this to title transposition, something that Hodgson had already complained of. That something like this scenario must have occurred is demonstrated by the fact that the copy of Candrakīrti’s Prasannapadā that Burnouf received from Hodgson is also under an incorrect title.[30] Further, many of Amṛtānanda’s citations belong to “a set of massive compilations of didactic stories associated with the performance of lay vows called Garland (mālā) texts,” which are in fact medieval Newar Sanskrit compositions rather than Indian originals.[31] The incorrectly titled texts among the citations probably also belong to this genre. So although we are unable to accurately trace all of these citations, they are still illustrative of these cosmogonies as understood in Newar Buddhism and among them are scattered various unsigned “comments” which are very illuminating and most likely emanate from Amṛtānanda himself and members of his scriptorium, including his brother Sundarānanda.[32]
The Svābhāvika doctrine presented in the Buddhacarita is that of ancient Indian svabhāvavāda, i.e. the materialism represented most prominently by the atheistic Cārvāka school.[33] They held that the elements of which the world is composed "are earth, water, fire, and air” and that these “elements move through original impulse," i.e. the impulse of their “intrinsic essence” or svabhāva.[34] This is paralleled in a comment on one of Amṛtānanda’s Buddhist Svābhāvika scriptures in which an account is given of the world arising from the elements out of ākāśa (sky, space, or ether) in the descending order of air, fire, water, and earth. From earth comes Mount Sumeru “with its own substance of gold” (qualified elsewhere as a “wheel of gold”) and from Mount Sumeru “all the various kinds of trees and vegetables; and from them all the variety of colors, shapes, flavors, and fragrances, in leaves, flowers, and the fruits.”[35] The world revolves out of being into ākāśa in reverse order. This process of creation and destruction repeats eternally: “Such is the Swábhávika Sansára; which Sansára (universe) constantly revolves between Pravritti and Nirvritti, like a potter’s wheel.”[36]
This generation of the world from the great material elements (“mahābhūta”) is recognizably an aspect of the classical non-theistic Buddhist cosmogony, to be found in both the Abhidharma and Kālacakra (“Wheel of Time”) systems, in which “world systems come into being from subtle particles of earth, water, fire, and wind, which are the basis for the initial formation of the universe, together with the collective karma of sentient beings.”[37] The last element of this account, the collective karma of sentient beings, is essentially the Kārmika cosmogony of the world arising from collective avidyā (ignorance) which leads to the saṃskāras (mental impressions) and the rest of the nidānas of the karmic chain of dependent origination.[38] In the Abhidharma account, this collective karma takes the form of a primal wind which brings about the manifestation of the elements again following the last dissolution.[39] Thus the Svābhāvika and Kārmika cosmogonies are actually isolates of the classical cosmogony that is more or less accepted by all traditional Buddhist schools.
Fig. 3 "View of the Hill on Which the Swayambhu Chaitya Stands," Plate VIII from Daniel Wright, History of Nepal, Cambridge, 1877, pg. 80.
The “theistic” Aiśvarika account, on the other hand, is clearly the Vajrayāna (or “Adamantine Vehicle”) Tantric understanding that “the engine of existence is not karma, but the gnosis of the Ādibuddha, the original Buddha”[40] and the Five Tathāgatas or “Dhyāni Buddhas.”[41] Giuseppe Tucci writes that Ādi-Buddha as such is “specially proper to the Kālacakra system… But it is a principle common to all Tantras of the higher class… that beyond the pentad [of Tathāgatas], conditioning it, transcending it, and nevertheless mysteriously permeating it, there is a Buddha, earlier than the apparent multiplicity, an indiscriminate Buddhahood, the reason and the source of all apparent things. This Buddha… has several names according to the different schools.”[42] Newar Mahāyāna Buddhism has a “Vajrayāna backbone” and so this doctrine, which is esoteric, has become an essential aspect of the public exoteric religion.[43] Already the importance and centrality of this primordial Buddha belief in exoteric Newar Buddhism had commanded the attention of Dr. Francis Buchanan during his enquiries in Nepal in the company of Captain Knox in 1802-1803; he wrote that the Buddhists of Nepal profess “a supreme being called Sambu, or Swayambhu, from whom have proceeded many Buddhs, or Intelligences.”[44]
Hodgson, while acknowledging the linkage between the Aiśvarika system and Tantra, emphasizes that Ādi-Buddha is not only to be found in Tantric writings but also in Mahāyāna texts which are now classified as belonging to the “Garland” genre.[45] Given that these texts “employ the language of the late Vajrayāna,” this finding has much less significance than Hodgson gives it, to say the least.[46] Regardless, Hodgson points to two texts among this genre, the Svayambhū Purāṇa and the metrical Guṇakāraṇḍavyūha, as giving “the least obscure enunciation” of the Aiśvarika doctrine.[47] In the latter text, Ādi-Buddha is given the title maheśvara, i.e. “great Īśvara,”[48] a title typically bestowed on Hindu deities such as Viṣṇu and Śiva,[49] and Gellner notes that it has “an account of the creation of the world by Ādibuddha” that “clearly parallels the role of Viṣṇu in Hinduism.” He also notes that Newar Buddhists have a monistic or pantheistic conception of their many “great gods”; these deities have a relationship amounting to identity which is implied in the indifferent use of the term Īśvara to address them.[50] As Amṛtānanda says, the “names of Adi-Buddha are innumerable.”[51]
Relevant to this matter, B. Alan Wallace has drawn attention to the correspondences between the primordial Buddha cosmogony and the very philosophically sophisticated theistic cosmogonies in non-Buddhist traditions such as Advaita Vedānta and neo-Platonic Christianity. Regarding the latter, Wallace particularly points to the Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena, who brought this trend to its fullest pantheistic development.[52] Hodgson actually anticipated this very same comparative approach almost completely; in a long footnote he compares the perspectives of Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism and asserts that the difference really amounts to very little, even pointing his readers to a citation of Eriugena to reinforce his point.[53] So it is not so absurd for Amṛtānanda and Hodgson to present a “theistic” Buddhist cosmogony based on Īśvara.
This comparison can only be taken so far, however, since Buddhism has ever refuted the literalistic belief in a supreme personality who fashions the world in the same way a potter might, such as we find in the Hebrew Bible.[54] But as Puṇḍarīka writes in the Vimalaprabhā commentary on the Kālacakra Tantra (a text well known to the Newar Buddhists and found in Amṛtānanda’s scripture catalog reproduced by Hodgson), there is a need to give teachings that appeal to the predispositions of audiences who are habituated to theism as they would otherwise be "shut out from the path to omniscience" due to their wrong beliefs.[55] Thus the need for something like the Aiśvarika teaching. In line with the non-literal nature of this "great Lord," the Aiśvarikas understand Ādi-Buddha and the five Dhyāni Buddhas to be “quiescent” and uninvolved in “the active work of creation and rule.”[56] It is denied that Ādi-Buddha exercises “providence and dominion.”[57] The Vimalaprabhā, too, is very explicit in denying that there is a literal creator deity who exercises providence over the world and dispenses rewards and punishments. “Everything animate and inanimate comes into existence due to the agglomeration of substances. The nature of karma is not due to the Creator’s will. This is a universal rule.”[58] The significance of all of this was not lost on Hodgson; indeed, he found this lack of “providence and dominion” to be the “great defect” of all of his schools. The full significance of this for Hodgson comes out in a Latin quote he reproduces from Isaac Newton. Translated into English, it reads: “God without providence and dominion is nothing but fate and nature.”[59]
So while Hodgson was willing to call this doctrine and similar ones “theism,” it is quite clear all the same that he was not naïve about it; these doctrines were not his kind of theism but rather amounted essentially to a deification of the universe. It is no surprise, then, that Hodgson also found Amṛtānanda’s assertion that “the wise” know that Ādi-Buddha is not a distinct entity from “the world with all it containeth” to be very disagreeable. For Ādi-Buddha is in fact the monistic non-dual reality behind all pluralistic phenomena. “Adi-Buddha, though he comprehends all living things, is yet one. He is the soul, and they are but the limbs and outward members, of this monad. Such is nirvritti, which, being deeply studied, is found to be unity,” according to Amṛtānanda.[60] As the supreme monadic “soul,” Ādi-Buddha is the nature of mind. Thus H.P.B. writes that the “true Buddhist, recognizing no ‘personal god,’ nor any ‘Father’ and ‘Creator of Heaven and Earth,’ still believes in an absolute consciousness, ‘Adi-Buddhi.’”[61]
These considerations bring us next to the Yātnika cosmogony, which is given in a scriptural citation and “comment” thereon. Therein we learn that Īśvara (or Ādi-Buddha) produced yatna out of his union with his consort Ādi-Prajñā (Prajñāpāramitā). Through this yatna, Ādi-Buddha then produced five jñānas and five Dhyāni Buddhas who likewise created five Dhyāni Bodhisattvas through yatna and so on until we come to the generation of saṃsāra; it is asserted also that just as saṃsāra comes into being through yatna, so also is it vanquished by the same means. Hodgson defines yatna as “intellect, intellectual force, and resource,” which dovetails with what was noted above, that Ādi-Buddha is “absolute consciousness.”[63] This word is also to be found in the same section of the Buddhacarita that the other school titles derive from, where it is used in the sense of exertion or effort in the service of spiritual practice.[63]
It must first be noted that yatna in the Yātnika cosmogony takes the place that dhyāna (meditation) has in the standard understanding of Ādi-Buddha’s emanation of the Dhyāni Buddhas.[64] It must also be noted that this yatna corresponds almost exactly to the principle of tapas as it is found in the Vedas. This Vedic tapas is a fiery incandescent creative principle of “cosmic ardor” and spiritual exertion born from the primordial male and female principles and is in turn also utilized by the seers in their spiritual practice to bring about liberation. Jeanine Miller writes that tapas in an ontological sense “is cosmic energy without which the universe would come to a standstill. Psychologically tapas is a specific inner contemplative exertion, an intensive spiritual focusing such as takes place in deep contemplation, a contraction to an innermost point and an expansion to an outermost circumference, as a result of which the creative flame is aroused.” It is related also to the cosmogonic Mahat found in the Stanzas of Dzyan brought forth by H.P.B.[65] This correspondence is also more or less confirmed by Hodgson, who writes that both the Kārmikas and Yātnikas hold “preferentially to the Tapas and Dhyàna, the severe meditative asceticism of the older schools.”[66] So yatna must be taken to be more or less equivalent to tapas and dhyāna.
It should come as no surprise at this point that Hodgson and Amṛtānanda’s Yātnika cosmogony is also in essence identical with the teachings of the most esoteric Tantras of the Vajrayāna tradition, wherein the primordial male element is understood to be the “means,” or upāya, of reaching transcendence; the female element is prajñā or wisdom. Ultimately, they are two sides of the same coin and “illumination, identical in its nature to absolute cognition, is born from their union.” This illumination is not only cognition, however; it is also light.[67] In the Buddhist understanding, these two, consciousness and light, are intimately linked as they share the same “quality of illumination.”[68] Along these lines, Amṛtānanda says that Ādi-Buddha is “merely light” and a scriptural citation from the Guṇakāraṇḍavyūha is given that describes Ādi-Buddha as “stainless” and “revealed in the form of flame or light,”[69] just like the incandescent flame-energy tapas. In this text Ādi-Buddha is called svayambhū (“self-manifested”) and the Sanskrit word used for “form of flame or light” is jyotirūpa.[70] Ādi-Buddha likewise appears in the Svayambhū Purāṇa as a self-manifesting form of flame or light. The Sanskrit word used for the light of this jyotirūpa is prabhāsvara, commonly rendered as “luminosity” or “clear light.”[71] Epitomizing the traditional account of the Purāṇa, Amṛtānanda writes in his Nepāliya Devatā Kalyāna Pañcaviṃśatikā, “May that light which, a proportion of himself, the Supreme Buddha caused to issue from the lotus that sprang from the seed planted in Nagavasa by Vipasyi, and which, (light,) itself one, became five-fold in the five Buddhas for the preservation of mankind, be propitious to us. I adore it.”[72] This “clear light” which became the five-fold light of the Dhyāni Buddhas is thus clearly no ordinary light or flame as it is the very self-manifested light of Ādi-Buddha who is of the nature of śūnyatā prabhāsvara, which is itself the ultimate nature of mind or consciousness.[73]
Fig. 4 "The Emergence of Swayhambhu Jyotirupa from a Lotus,"
Thangka Painting on Cloth, 1995, Private Collection.
Iain Sinclair notes that the creation accounts in both the Guṇakāraṇḍavyūha and the Svayambhū Purāṇa share a special cosmogenic terminology (“Ādi-Buddha,” “svayambhū,” and “possessed of the triguṇa”) that is originally to be found together in the Kālacakra Tantra and its corpus of related literature.[74] Amṛtānanda also takes note of the Kālacakra Tantra as a very significant Tantra and illustrations and descriptions of the Kālacakra maṇḍala are to be found in Hodgson’s papers.[75] Prabhāsvara is an integral feature of the classic Vajrayāna cosmogony that is to be found in the Kālacakra system and numerous other Tantras and their commentaries. In this cosmogony, the stainless prabhāsvara in concert with the energy-winds that are its steed creates the phenomenal universe; these steed-like energy-winds may in turn be identified with the world-creating collective karmic winds of the standard Abhidharma account.[76] As a Vajrācārya, or recognized Vajrayāna master with full authority to perform Tantric rituals, Amṛtānanda was quite knowledgeable about these matters; he had even composed Vajrayāna literature himself.[77] So it seems that in the prabhāsvara cosmogony we have the origin of the Yātnika system.
Burnouf had noted of the schools that “the same texts serve as the foundation for all the doctrines; only the explication of these texts marks their naturalist, theist, moral, or intellectual tendency.”[78] In line with this observation, what we earlier noted of the Svābhāvika and Kārmika accounts holds true of the other cosmogonies; none of them really contradict each other but are in fact complementary. Ādi-Buddha is prabhāsvara who rides the karmic winds, which stir up the elements. And as regards the “the nature and destiny of the soul” all alike teach “metempsychosis and absorption,” as Hodgson notes.[79] An underlying unity can also be perceived in Hodgson’s commentary on Amṛtānanda’s Devatā Kalyāna Pañcaviṃśatikā, which was unfortunately not included in his collected Essays. Although this document is a general collection of devotions to the various deities, Bodhisattvas, and Buddhas revered in Newar Buddhism in general, Hodgson’s commentary assigns some of these to the Svābhāvikas and others to the Aiśvarikas.[80] Some specialists have also had an intimation of this; John Brough, in his doctoral dissertation of 1945, had noted that both Svābhāvika and Aiśvarika influences are to be found in the Newar Buddhist ritual manual Pāpa-parimocana[81] and Gellner himself had already discerned the complementary nature of three of Amṛtānanda’s schools but perhaps did not carry this initial finding far enough.[82] From all of these indications we can see that the “schools” are ultimately fragments of one united cosmogony with a shared pantheon of divine beings. But Hodgson and Amṛtānanda present a great more than just cosmogonical material as being doctrines of the various schools; there is also much that relates to ontology, metaphysics, and epistemology, as we might expect from Buddhist schools proper. This material will also have to be analyzed, and we may suspect that these doctrines also are only aspects of a greater whole.
From Gellner’s other studies, we learn that the internal structure of Newar Buddhism deliberately and knowingly incorporates the three yānas or vehicles of Buddhism, i.e. Śrāvakayāna or Hīnayāna (“Disciples Vehicle” or “Lesser Vehicle”), Mahāyāna (“Greater Vehicle,” the Bodhisattva Path), and Vajrayāna (“Adamantine Vehicle,” Buddhist Tantra), and that this construct is widely understood and used by its practitioners to explain their religion. These three yānas in Newar Buddhism “represent a hierarchy through which the Buddhist neophyte ascends, thereby recapitulating the history of Buddhism itself.”[83] At the same time, “there is also a sense in which they all coexist, higher levels being merely alternative and more powerful ways of expressing the truths of the lower levels, for all that they may appear to invert them.”[84] These yānās may certainly be considered different schools of Buddhism and within their ascending hierarchy, there is a place for the many other different teachings and schools to be found within Buddhist history.[85] Of such potential correlations, Burnouf had written that to “determine up to which point the four sects enumerated by Mr. Hodgson are included in those mentioned by the Abhidharmakośa [the canonical Indo-Tibetan four], or to show that there are quite different sects who later shared the heritage of primitive beliefs, is a task for which we need new assistance.”[86] Scholarship has advanced substantially in the more than 150 or so years since the lifetimes of Burnouf and Hodgson, and we are now in a position to give “new assistance” and reach a more positive answer to the question of the “schools” than the one given by Gellner, as helpful and foundational as his own research is to our endeavor.
We may begin with the Newar understanding of Mahāyāna; Newar Mahāyāna corresponds essentially to the Yoga Tantra level of the Vajrayāna canon, as exemplified especially in the Nāmasaṃgīti scripture, and this presentation in turn corresponds essentially to Amṛtānanda’s Aiśvarika school.[87] Newar Buddhists typically interpret this “Aiśvarika” doctrine of Ādi-Buddha and the five Dhyāni Buddhas through the lens of the teachings of the Yogācāra school, which is the epistemological, meditation-based tradition of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu. This strongly idealistic school is understood by Newar Buddhists to teach “that the phenomenal world is a mental construction of the heart mind (citta), and that the true nature of reality can thus only be realized through samādhi (visualization) and yoga (mental concentration).” This teaching is further encapsulated for Newar Buddhists in the doctrine of the tathāgatagarbha (“Buddha-Nature”), the golden seed of Buddhahood within all sentient beings.[88] It is not surprising, then, that Amṛtānanda’s presentation of the Aiśvarika, Kārmika, and Yātnika schools also shares this idealistic emphasis to a greater or lesser extent and that Hodgson presents the latter two as essentially sub-schools of the former.[89]
Gellner writes regarding the latter two sub-schools that “the Kārmika school represents the Buddhist axiom that within the world everything is determined by one’s karma; and the Yātnika school represents the Buddhist belief that karma is determined by the individuals intentions, which it is always open to beings to improve upon… far from being alternatives, [these] are integral parts of the most basic and universal Buddhist teachings.”[90] While this is true enough, there is a certain hierarchical ritual order within Newar Buddhism; as we have noted, Gellner himself emphasizes this fact repeatedly. Within the ritual order of the idealistic Yogācāra-influenced Newar Mahāyāna, these “basic and universal Buddhist teachings” may have a specific place and context. We may first take note of the extremely significant Ādikārmika Bodhisattva practices.[91]
Apparently introduced originally by the siddha Advayavajra (also known as Maitripa) in his Kudṛṣṭinirghātana, a document whose “general structure and spirit are exactly the same as that of Newar Buddhism today,”[92] Ādikārmika practices emphasize the accumulation of karmic merit with the view towards becoming a full-fledged Bodhisattva. Ādikārmika means both “beginning action” and “ground” or “foundational action”; these practices are for beginners on the Bodhisattva path but also remain foundational at every stage. Particularly emphasized are daily recitations of the aforementioned Nāmasaṃgīti,[93] the “root text” for the Newar Buddhist understanding of Ādi-Buddha and his Dharmadhātu maṇḍala[94] which is also extensively elaborated on in the Kālacakra literature.[95] Another important Ādikārmika practice is the poṣadha vrata fast,[96] one of the practices inculcated especially in the Garland literature.[97] These practices bridge Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna and it appears that Advayavajra’s project was very influential in the infusion of Vajrayāna concepts into Newar Buddhist Mahāyāna.[98] It also does not take a great leap to identify the Ādikārmika practice stage with Amṛtānanda’s Kārmika school.
In describing the practitioners of Ādikārma in his Kudṛṣṭinirghātana, Advayavajra asserts that they are always exerting themselves, or exercising yatna.[99] In the Yoga Sūtra of Patañjali, what might perhaps be called the “root text” of the yoga system, which Chr. Lindtner is pleased to call the “central philosophy of ancient India,” yatna is defined as the essence of the practice (abhyāsa). Lindtner writes that “this ‘model’ can, mutatis mutandis, be found in virtually all Indian philosophical texts, even the most popular ones, from the earliest time onwards.” This includes the various Buddhist systems with some terminological variation, and especially Yogācāra.[100] On this same pan-Indian system of yoga, Giuseppe Tucci remarks that “men in India, if they would rediscover within themselves the divine spark, must rely upon themselves. They must draw out into the light the Supreme Reality hidden in themselves, and this they will be able to do only by recognizing it. And so, all the Indian systems proclaim the necessity of knowledge and initiation. We should, indeed, remember that the attitude of India — and therefore of the peoples who have been influenced by her thought — has tended, with time, to become initiatory. That is to say truth is a personal conquest which one attains through a mystery. It is a long and wearisome ascent during which, one by one, there must be cast aside the impediments, the obstacles, the veils which hide the truth so that, at last, the sought-for light may dawn.”[101]
Fig. 5 "The Mitre (mukuta in Sanskrit, mukkor in Niwari) worn by the Vajra Acharya, or highest order of Banhra Priest," Plate from Henry Ambrose Oldfield, Sketches from Nipal Vol. 2, London, 1880, facing pg. 136.
As we noted above, the Yātnika cosmogony is essentially tantric and the Tantras, which are the Indian initiatory system par excellence, carry over much of the Yogācāra theory and practice.[102] So it is no surprise that within the Tantras we also find yatna used in the context of these yogic practices.[103] Through this exercise of yatna, the aspirant may develop a strong faculty of will, identifying themselves with the Ādi-Buddha and his yatna through Tantric deity yoga, and eventually become a siddha or vidyādhara,[104] such as the famous Sāntikarācārya, the original Vajrācārya.[105] The Vajrācārya caste embodies the role of siddha archetypally, although few Vajrācāryas reach these heights in actual fact;[106] as one modern Newar Buddhist notes, success depends on the prayatna exerted by the individual practitioner.[107] But we may nevertheless perhaps see the emphasis of the Yātnika school most fully fulfilled by Vajrācārya initiation and that part of Newar Mahāyāna that Gellner calls “exoteric Vajrayāna,” which centers deities such as Vajrasattva, Vajradhara, and Mañjuśrī Dharmadhātu-vāgīśvara, as well as the Dharmadhātu maṇḍala; these deities and iconographic elements are especially linked with the Vajrācāryas on a symbolic and ritual level.[108] Of course, this exoteric Vajrayāna also necessarily bleeds over into esoteric Vajrayāna proper.
Unlike the idealistic emphasis of the Aiśvarikas and their two sub-schools, Hodgson interprets the Svābhāvika school as holding the directly contrary doctrine of “materialism.” The terminology of “matter” and “materialism” is rather his own than Amṛtānanda’s, however, as Amṛtānanda spoke only in terms of body (śarīra and deha) and world (saṃsāra) rather than matter.[109] It would be tempting to stop here and dismiss this as a simple confusion on Hodgson’s part. While idealism is generally an acknowledged and often discussed strain within the broader Buddhist tradition, the same can not be said for materialism as Buddhism is not particularly concerned with matter as such, and certainly does not give it the kind of emphasis that Hodgson does. Already Burnouf had written that with the enumeration of the basic elements the “Buddhists can dispense with speaking of matter, an abstract notion of which I do not believe they have occupied themselves.”[110]
Nevertheless, an examination of Hodgson’s understanding of this subject will still prove extremely illuminating in our search for the Svābhāvikas and is especially relevant since the Mahatma K.H., speaking on behalf of the occult fraternity, declares that “we believe in MATTER alone, in matter as visible nature and matter in its invisibility as the invisible omnipresent omnipotent Proteus with its unceasing motion which is its life, and which Nature draws from herself since she is the great whole outside of which nothing can exist.” Elsewhere, he elaborates further on this “universal Proteus,” i.e. Svabhavat or mūlaprakṛti, and writes that “we recognize but one element in Nature (whether spiritual or physical) outside which there can be no Nature since it is Nature itself, and which as the akasa pervades our solar system[,] every atom being part of itself[,] pervades throughout space and is space in fact.”[111] T. Subba Row likewise writes that “really, every form of matter is finally reducible to Akasa”[112] and H.P.B. also notes that matter, or more properly “the substance or essence of matter,” has an ontological priority over spirit.[113] She writes that svabhāvāt or mūlaprakṛti is personified as the “Mother Goddess”[114] and that its manifestation, ākāśa, which is the “Soul of matter” and “the base and source of material existence,” is likewise a female principle with the vibrational quality of sound being proper to it and that this ākāśa is symbolized by water.[115] So let us see if we can’t find points of convergence between this Matter or Nature which manifests as ākāśa or space and the doctrines of Newar Buddhism as Hodgson understood them and as they are in fact.
At the start of our examination, we must first ascertain what is meant by matter, for although it is a concept of undying relevance, it has never been easy to get a grasp on what exactly it is. It was famously defined by Newton as consisting of “solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles.” After his epoch a view much the opposite of this prevailed, i.e. elastic, and thus by implication composite, particles were the “stuff” of matter. The trend in scientific discourse in more recent times has been to bring less and not more clarity to the concept, with mathematical abstractions being the “stuff” of which it is composed. The Wisdom-Religion, on the other hand, defines “matter in its invisibility” as the one undifferentiated essence, mūlaprakṛti, as we have just seen. But we may presently put these contending ideas aside and say that “matter as visible nature,” to use K.H.’s phrase, is just that which is delivered to our senses as a third-person object of our subjective first-person experience. From these sensations, the intellect derives abstract properties such as extension. This definition of matter qua “visible nature” would be agreeable to the empiricism of such paradigmatic thinkers as John Locke and Baron D'Holbach, whatever their other differences on the subject, and would be uncontroversial to Western philosophers in Hodgson's time, nor should it be particularly controversial today.[116]
Hodgson’s own interpretation of “materialism” and “matter” was heavily influenced by the 18th century philosophical disputes which followed on from the work of the aforementioned Locke in regards to matter. The disputing parties were the Spinozistic free thinking pantheists or deists and the Newtonian theological tradition represented most prominently by the Rev. Samuel Clarke, who Hodgson numbers among “the best European philosophers,”[117] thus showing his own bias towards the later position. A primary subject of contention was whether matter could have the quality of thought. The deistic party answered in the affirmative while the Newtonian party vehemently denied the possibility.[118] Their most famous representative, Clarke, held that consciousness could only be the property of an unchanging soul, not matter in motion. On this basis only could rewards and punishments be justly dispensed by an omnipotent and providential deity.[119] While the Newtonian tradition insisted on this strict dualism, the ultimate implication of matter’s thinking for the deists is what Matthew Stewart calls “monistic parallelism,” the notion that the physical and mental are but different aspects of one single underlying thing.[120] This is also in basic outline the position of the Wisdom-Religion.[121]
Viewed through this prism, it is not so hard to see why Hodgson found a Buddhist materialism. Hodgson uses “nature” or “system of nature” as a synonym for matter in many instances and writes that the various forces or powers of matter or nature are both “intellectual and physical.” Like K.H., Hodgson understands ākāśa to be very nearly the subtlest form of matter or nature; annotating one of his Svābhāvika commentators who declared ākāśa or space to be “omnipresent, and essentially intellectual,” Hodgson writes that ākāśa “is here understood as synonymous with Súnyatá, that is, as the elemental state of all things, the universal ubi and modus of primal entity, in a state of abstraction from all specific forms: and it is worthy of note, that amidst these primal principles, intelligence has admission. It is therefore affirmed to be a necessary ens, or eternal portion of the system of nature, though separated from self-consciousness or personality.” Such a conception is much like the thinking matter of the deists. So when Hodgson writes of “matter” he means primarily to contrast these doctrines with “immateriality” by which he designates God and/or pure idealism; in other words, the theism and supernaturalism of Isaac Newton and Samuel Clarke. As with the European pantheists and the Wisdom-Religion, all the powers and “energies” that are extrinsic to the system of nature in theistic cosmogonies are intrinsic for the Svābhāvikas.[122]
Fig. 6 "The Market Place, Kathmandu. The building (from which the City derives its name) was erected A. D. 1596." Plate from Henry Ambrose Oldfield, Sketches from Nipal Vol. 1, London, 1880, facing pg. 106. Note: This structure, Kasthamandap, was rebuilt recently in the aftermath of the 2015 earthquake and is now known to date from the 7th century.
So Hodgson's "matter" is unlike the now common modern understanding of matter as devoid of intellection or subjectivity. It is also consistent with a non-theistic Buddhist understanding of the natural universe which takes the physical and the mental to be essentially homogenous and denies a heterogenous and unchanging soul. David Kalupahana writes that early Buddhism was thoroughly naturalistic and that this naturalism is best expressed by the term dharmatā,[123] which translated means “the nature of things.” He notes that “while the word is used to explain the behavior of physical phenomena, it is not confined to that. Even psychological attitudes are given naturalistic explanations and are illustrated by examples from physical nature.” “Supernatural” phenomena, too, whose reality is undisputed, are explained in the same kind of natural causal terms.[124] In this naturalistic framework, mind and matter are not understood to be “distinct entities,” rather both are explained in terms of “processes of experience.”[125]
These “processes” are essentially physical; E.H. Johnston writes that in ancient Indian thought “all classes of phenomena are looked on alike as having a material basis, the difference resting merely on the degree of subtlety attributed to the basis.” Edward Conze likewise writes that in “Buddhism physical and spiritual reality is co-terminous, all spiritual experiences have their physical basis and counterpart, and the body, brought to full maturity by the practice of Yoga, is a cognitive organ of the highest order...”[126] In the Buddhist understanding of cognition, all conscious sense perceptions are understood to be based on rūpa, or form, which is composed of the great material elements (mahābhūta), the discreet realities or dharmas of material existence. But rūpa in turn is causally dependent on the many cognitive dharmas to “complete its own sensory processes.” They are mutually supporting and entailing, like “two sheaves of reeds… leaning against each other.”[127] And so Paul Griffiths writes that “Buddhist intellectuals were not, when discussing the mind-body problem, considering the possible relations between qualitatively different substances – as for instance, was Descartes.”[128] There is a duality, then, but it is a duality in experience, not in substance. We see here a conception that is very close to the empirical analysis of matter and the “monistic parallelism” of the European infidels that Hodgson had in mind; both mind and matter in “the nature of things,” or dharmatā, are fundamentally the same kind of stuff and are causally intertwined within the chain of dependent origination (pratītyasamutpāda).
The Buddha is renowned and celebrated for discovering this dharmatā, “something which clearly others had not realized, for they had not taught it to him.”[129] It was a discovery made upon essentially scientific and empirical lines, i.e. the testimony of direct experience rather than the a priori argumentation and appeals to authority of many of the Buddha’s contemporaries which are regarded as unverifiable and essentially meaningless.[130] K.N. Jayatilleke calls this epistemological doctrine the “early Buddhist theory of knowledge,” but this understanding does not belong to early Buddhism only; it is also an essential aspect of the Buddhist logic of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti[131] and even a Tantric text as late as the Vimalaprabhā ridicules the claims of the theistic creator deity as “meaningless,” as they “are established by means of authority (ājñā) and are devoid of verifying cognition (pramāṇa) and logic.”[132]
This great empirical discovery of the dharmatā and pratītyasamutpāda, or dependent origination, is indicated succinctly in the words of the famous “ye dharma hetu” dhāraṇī: “Of all things proceeding from cause, the cause (of their procession) hath the Tathágata explained. The great Sramana [renunciant] hath likewise declared the cause of the extinction of all things.” Such is Hodgson’s rendering.[133] These “manifestly atheistic” lines prompted Hodgson’s interlocutor, the Reverend W.H. Mill, to pronounce the Buddha “the Epicurus of this great oriental system” and to recall the famous verse of Virgil from his Georgics: “Qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas.”[134] Burnouf found himself in agreement with the justice of Rev. Mill’s comparison and declared the doctrine of natural causation found in the twelve nidānas of dependent origination to be “the truly ancient philosophical part of Buddhism.” Indeed, Burnouf had already realized all the essential points that Jayatilleke, Kalupahana, and others would later elaborate on. He writes that in Buddhism “the distinction between mind and matter is almost completely lacking, that is to say, in order to express myself in a manner more in accordance with Buddhist ideas, […] the distinction is lacking between the phenomena that fall under the senses, and those which escape them and which intelligence conceives. Indeed… for the greatest number of Buddhists, who believe only in the testimony of direct observation, all phenomena, whether material or immaterial, are essentially homogenous; they are not fundamentally different from one another. Material, they are called external; intellectual, they are named internal; it is a simple difference of location…”[135]
Fig. 7 "The Durbar, or Royal Palace, Katmandu (Nepal)." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1852.
At this point in his discussion, Burnouf cites Hodgson’s comments on a paper of the pioneering sinologist Rémusat. In this communication, Hodgson writes that “if there really be but one class of phænomena in the world, it must be either the material, or the immaterial, class.” Hodgson, like Burnouf, notes that it is indeed the case that “all phænomena are homogenous” for the Buddhists and this holds true regardless of whether phenomena be regarded by them as illusory or not, i.e. whether the universe is regarded as ultimately pluralistic or monistic in its ontology. In other words, Buddhism is unlike Cartesian dualism. That being so, Hodgson reasons that the ontological priority of mind or matter must essentially come down to “a mere façon de parler,” or figure of speech, since the classical properties of both classes will have to be assigned to just one class, whether we call that single class “mind” or “matter.” Nevertheless, for most Buddhists the framework in which phenomena are presented is naturalistic as opposed to idealistic or theistic and the uniquely heterogeneous soul principle is denied, so Hodgson determines that it is most appropriate to classify them as materialistic even if the distinction is in many respects a semantic one.[136] And so Burnouf, paraphrasing Hodgson, concludes that for the homogenous phenomena of that large section of Buddhism which is naturalistic it is as much as to say that “mind is only a modification of matter and that the order of the universe, which is one, is the physical order.”[137]
So we see that Hodgson and Burnouf were making a relatively informed philosophical evaluation of the Buddhist texts; whether one agrees or disagrees with the justice of this evaluation, it is not a case of mere ignorance. A similar reading of Buddhism as a species of materialism, made on much the same basis as Hodgson and Burnouf, has been lately made by a prominent Buddhist Studies scholar, Francisca Cho, in the context of the dialogue between Buddhism and neuroscience; she too holds that the traditional Buddhist perspective can meaningfully be described as a “Buddhist materialism” in which mind and matter are fundamentally the same sort of thing.[138] So the understanding of Buddhism as a kind of “materialism” is certainly a live option even today and we may see something like a familial resemblance between the Buddhist understanding and the “materialism” of both Theosophists and European deists and pantheists, which probably all alike derive from the denial of an all-powerful deity who exercises “providence and dominion.”
We have been discussing dharmatā and dharmas, the “nature of things” and the “natures” or “realities” themselves, and the later Sanskrit word in its singular form of dharma is very important to Hodgson’s disquisitions on Buddhist “materialism.” His understanding of this word essentially encapsulates his thoughts on the homogenous nature of all phenomena in Buddhism. Dharma encompasses many different meanings including morality and law, as Hodgson himself notes, but he points especially to the root dhri, which has the meaning of “to support,” “to hold,” and generally indicates the maintenance of stability. On this basis, he interprets dharma to be “the universal substratum… which supports all form and quality in space” and asserts that the word “substance” is its “precise equivalent.”[139]
Such an interpretation in fact has deep roots in ancient Indian thought. The meaning of dharma was once much more closely linked to and essentially synonymous with the concept of Brahman, the ultimate spiritual reality or principle, truly the ultimate sustainer of all things.[140] While Brahman is now usually understood in terms of consciousness, it was also once classified as a dravya or “substance.”[141] In the Upaniṣads, too, it is equated with ākāśa and prāṇa, or “breath”, as well as jyotis or “light.”[142] The physical and mental aspects of Brahman in this context are not ultimately contradictory; Stanislaw Schayer emphasizes that ancient Indian thought was entirely uninfluenced by Descartes’ bifurcation of extension and cognition; the spiritual was conceived spatially and so there was no “opposition between the material, extensional, and the spiritual or ideal, non-extensional worlds.”[143] The imagery of “space” and “light” which is often applied to consciousness in ancient Indian texts is inherently extensional and spatial and is to be taken literally.[144]
By comparison with its ancient equivalent Brahman, then, it is not so hard to see how such diverse meanings as law and substratum and so on could also arise from this single word, dharma. Like Brahman, dharma itself could also be defined in terms of a universal physical substratum in ancient Sanskrit texts; the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa equates the primordial waters, the material cause of creation, with dharma (“dharmo vā apas”).[145] The Vedic scholar Jeanine Miller wrote extensively of these primordial waters and wholly confirmed the writings of H.P.B. on this matter; similarly to Brahman, these waters are “made of prāṇa,” and are in essence identical with ākāśa, presented in the Vedic scriptures as a “fluidic essence” which is “radiant, flame-powered,” and a medium for “the rippling power of vibration” which molds the cosmos. As a vibrational ether, these waters are personified by the goddess Vāc, the primordial sound.[146] Thus dharma in its original usage may be understood as a universal physical medium or ether with mind-like qualities i.e. ākāśa, the nearly ultimate form of matter or nature to be found in the writings of both K.H. and Hodgson.[147]
Such a conception is also to be found in Newar Buddhism. Hodgson notes that the Newar Buddhists equate dharma, personified as the Buddhist goddess Prajñāpāramitā, with the material principle prakṛti[148] and recounts a narrative derived from the Svayambhū Purāṇa which tells of the manifestation of Ādi-Buddha as light and of Ādi-Dharma or Prajñāpāramitā as water. In this narrative, Prajñāpāramitā is identified with the Tantric goddess Guhyeśvari (“Secret Goddess”) who has a temple dedicated to her on the bank of the Bagmati river, some distance from Ādi-Buddha’s own Svayambhū stūpa. There is in this myth a great lotus that grew from a seed planted by the past Buddha Vipaśyin many aeons ago when the Kathmandu Valley was still a great lake called Kalīhrada or Nāgavāsa; the root of the lotus is located at what is now the Guhyeśvari temple and the flower is at Svayambhū stūpa; the “recumbent stalk being extended throughout the interval between them.” In later ages Mañjuśrī, in the form of Mañjudeva, would depart from “Great China” and make his way to the lake. Wishing to make the self-manifested light more accessible for the benefit of the devout, he would create a gash in the southern barrier mountain with his flaming sword Candrahāsa, draining the lake into Chobhar Gorge and forming the Kathmandu Valley as it exists today. Mañjudeva would then obtain the benediction of the five-fold light of Ādi-Buddha at the lotus flower, as well as that of Prajñāpāramitā Guhyeśvari in the form of water at the root, in which form she dwells still to this day.[149] So it is that in this Newar Buddhist conceptualization, Guhyeśvari Prajñāpāramitā “ultimately generates the sacred environment of the Valley,” which is understood by the initiated to be in actuality a Tantric Cakrasaṃvara (“Circle of Bliss”) maṇḍala.[150]
Fig. 8 "The Draining of the Lake,"
Thangka Painting on Cloth, 1995, Private Collection.
Although on its surface this story pertains to the origin of the geography and religious sites of the Kathmandu Valley, “a sacred Mahāyāna land made habitable by Tantric siddhas,”[151] it is actually a microcosm of universal processes, just as the Cakrasaṃvara maṇḍala itself is. At the macrocosmic level, this narrative is a cosmogony of the same type as we find in the Laws of Manu in which svayambhū is born as Brahmā from a lotus that grows out of the feminine primordial waters i.e. ākāśa.[152] This is also evident in the traditional identification of the Svayambhū stūpa with Sumeru, the great mountain at the center of the world system, the axis mundi, the World-Tree, that cosmic linga which has been often symbolized by the lotus rising above the waters; at the summit of this mountain dwells the Ādi-Buddha, or Cakrasaṃvara, in Akaniṣṭha Bhuvana heaven.[153] And so Tucci writes that for the Newar Buddhists, “the yoni became the symbol of the cosmic waters and the turbulent movement of the limitless possibilities of being, while the linga symbolized the emergence from this turbulence of the lotus, representing the ordered life which reaches its culmination in spiritual serenity.”[154] At the root of the manifest lotus rising above the waters, however, lies the feminine primeval lotus, the padmamūla, within the deepest depths of the waters, and “just as the primeval waters are the foundation of all things created and are identified with the dharma…, so the primeval lotus, the symbol of these waters, is the foundation, their pratishṭhā, and at the same time the supporter of the universe, the dharma of the universe, for dharma means supporter.”[155]
The Indologist Maryla Falk, a protégé of Schayer, presented a substantial amount of evidence that the conception of dharma as a universal substratum was very ancient in Buddhism, preceding the canonical period. It was conceived as a “Great Ocean,” which was “infinite” and “universally radiant,” like the Vedic cosmic waters. This unitary noumenal dharma was a vast quantity of dharmas in phenomenal manifestation. Eventually the universal and singular dharma as substratum was lost sight of in the scholastic systematization of Hīnayāna Buddhism and became just one dharma among the many, i.e. nirvāṇa, although the most significant one. Later on, Mahāyāna Buddhism would to a great extent recover the original notion behind the unitary noumenal dharma although the terminology had undergone modification in the meantime.[156] This ancient monistic understanding of dharma was also Amṛtānanda’s own. In his Dharma-koṣa-saṃgraha, written at Hodgson’s request and a significant source for his essays, Amṛtānanda writes that dharma means dharmadhātu, i.e. the “perfectly pure” ultimate noumenal element that stands behind the many dharmas to be found in developed Mahāyāna Buddhism.[157] Thus, in this equation of Amṛtānanda we find the origin and source of Hodgson’s own conception of the omnipresent dharma which is the substratum of manifest existence.
The interpretation of this universal quality-supporting substratum dharma, the “Great Ocean,” by the Svābhāvikas gives us a key to discovering their identity. Or rather, we should say interpretations, for Hodgson actually writes of two different Svābhāvika schools; these are the primitive simple Svābhāvikas and the Prājñika Svābhāvikas. This distinction is highly revealing and crucial for our endeavor and corresponds to the two divisions implicated in the picture laid out by Falk. The Svābhāvikas simpliciter believe that dharma consists of various “powers” and that these powers always exist, whether in pravṛtti (phenomenal activity) or nivṛtti (cessation, nirvāṇa). The Prājñikas, however, while accepting the plurality of powers in pravṛtti, “unitize the powers” in nivṛtti and “make that unit, deity” which is “their proper modality.” Whereas the Prājñikas “unitize the active and intelligent powers of nature,” the Svābhāvikas simpliciter “do not unitize them.”[158] What we have then is a pluralistic ontology on the one hand and a monistic or non-dual ontology on the other; these ontologies are diagnostic to Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna respectively, as we have seen.[159] Hodgson also indicates that he doubts that phenomena are illusory and unreal for the Svābhāvikas simpliciter as they are for the Prājñikas.[160] This, too, is diagnostic of the difference between Hīnayāna and Mahāyāna.[161] So we will have to look within these two subdivisions of Buddhism to find our two subdivisions of the Svābhāvikas.
At this point we may recall the classical Buddhist cosmogony given by Hodgson as that of the Svābhāvikas. Behind this cosmogony in its original formulation stands the Abhidharma and behind the Abhidharma is a Hīnayāna scholasticism that is highly concerned with metaphysical and epistemological issues. For the physical and intellectual “powers” of nature that Hodgson speaks of and the “essentially homogenous” material and immaterial phenomena of Burnouf are the many discreet dharmas or fundamental elements of existence to be found in the Abhidharma literature, which “hold up” and “support” the manifest universe, and which we have noticed already in discussing Buddhist “materialism.” Among these dharmas are to be found the great elements or mahābhūta which are not only the basis of sensory experience and conscious perception but are also the basis for the generation of the world in the classical cosmogony. Hodgson writes that the “powers” of matter are symbolized by various letters and when we turn to the scriptural citations given to illustrate the Svābhāvika school we find that these powers designated by various letters are the same primary material elements.[162] Hodgson also gives out the epistemological theory of dharmas in terms of the six cognitive senses or indriyas and six objects or viṣayas (also called simply the twelve āyatanas) as a doctrine of the Svābhāvikas.[163] These are designated the “internal seats” and “external seats,” respectively,[164] as Burnouf alluded to above in his discussion of the Buddhist understanding of natural phenomena. Elsewhere, Hodgson gives the great elements a correspondence with the twelve āyatanas.[165]
In arguing with votaries of the sect of the Ājīvikas, which denied the influence of karma, the Buddha had said in a scripture of the canon of northern Buddhism that “everything exists” (sarvāstitva). When pressed further on the matter of what the “everything” that existed was, he defined it as the twelve āyatanas. The sixth sensory object of the twelve is further subdivided so that a vast quantity of dharmas are encompassed. In fact “everything” is encompassed by the twelve āyatanas; “everything” and the āyatanas are synonymous. A school of Hīnayāna Buddhism would take the declaration that “everything exists” literally and derive their name from it.[166] This was the Sarvāstivāda (also known as Vaibhāṣika) school, once “the principal Buddhist philosophical school in India.” They were also the most influential codifiers of Abhidharma in northern Buddhism; among the texts that Hodgson passed along to Burnouf was Yaśomitra’s sub-commentary on Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa-Bhāṣya, an auto-commentary on his compilation of Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, which is an extremely crucial text for the transmission of these teachings.[167] So Amṛtānanda would doubtless have been quite familiar with the Sarvāstivāda doctrines.
The Sarvāstivādins maintain that these dharmas are utterly ephemeral in their manifestations as visible nature; the manifestation of a dharma is but only a momentary point-instant and the continuous series of these momentary flashings constitutes motion. But when a dharma has fallen out of manifestation and is taken up into nirvāṇa (or nivṛtti), it does not cease to be. The svabhāva of the dharma remains; its true nature is mysterious and transcendental. These transcendental svabhāvas exist eternally in the three times of past, present, and future, and cause and effect are but phases of one and the same thing.[168] Schayer notes that while all Hīnayāna schools can be considered svabhāvavādins in that they all accept the reality of the svabhāva of the dharmas understood in the sense of svalakṣaṇa, i.e. own-mark or “absolutely individual characteristic,” the Sarvāstivādins go far beyond this in that they also accept svabhāva in the sense of prakṛti, upādāna, and āśraya, i.e. an “unchanging, eternal substratum.”[169] Likewise, Hodgson writes that in the Svābhāvika understanding, the āyatanas are ephemeral in manifestation (or pravṛtti) but eternal and transcendental in the state of nivṛtti; their svabhāvas exist through “an eternal revolution of entity and non-entity.”[170]
Fig. 9 "The Durbar, or Royal Palace, at Lalitpur (Patan) in Nepal." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1855.
For the Sarvāstivādins, as for Buddhism more generally, the ceaselessly changing manifestation of the dharmas constitutes duḥkha (“suffering,” or “commotion” in the rendering of Stcherbatsky). Through the refinement of the dharma prajñā, the manifestation of consciousness and sensory input comes to an end and this constitutes nirvāṇa.[171] Commenting on the attainment of the Svābhāvika nirvāṇa, Hodgson draws a relevant parallel with the Neoplatonic tradition, noting that “Plotinus contended that the most perfect worship of the Deity consisted in a certain mysterious self-annihilation or total extinction of all our faculties.”[172] Although nirvāṇa is attained through the annihilation of the sense faculties, the Sarvāstivādins nevertheless did not understand nirvāṇa to be a pure nothing; it is an existing dharma with a svabhāva that is “permanent and wholesome” that only an ārya is able to grasp.[173] Beyond that, however, little of a positive nature could be said. It is “sometimes, especially in popular literature, characterized as bliss, but this bliss consists in the cessation of unrest (duḥkha). Bliss is a feeling, and in the absolute there neither is a feeling, nor conception, nor volition, nor even consciousness.”[174] Anne MacDonald characterizes this as “an existing ‘non-being.’”[175] On the other hand, the major Hīnayāna opponents of the Sarvāstivādins, the Sautrāntikas, denied that nirvāṇa was anything more than a mere name for the extinction of phenomenal existence. Some Sautrāntikas asserted that a subtle consciousness endured beyond nirvāṇa “in a plane of complete quiescence” while others understood it to be a pure and total annihilation.[176]
Regarding this disputed matter, Lambert Schmithausen notes that in Buddhism (we might say Hīnayāna Buddhism particularly) the description of nirvāṇa as positive or annihilative is secondary and essentially superfluous, especially since even when positively characterized nirvāṇa is nonetheless wholly transcendent and beyond the reach of words. The primary goal remains the end of suffering; this suffering which is characteristic of mundane existence due to its ceaseless changeability.[177] In agreement with all of these data points, Hodgson describes the Svābhāvika nirvāṇa as “bliss,” which “consists of repose or release from an otherwise endlessly recurring migration through the visible forms of Pravritti.” He also describes it as a “non-entity” and “a state of things concerning which nothing can be predicated.” He further informs us that there was some dispute as to the nature of nirvāṇa among the Svābhāvikas simpliciter as to whether it had a more positive content as an “eternal repose” or a purely negative and annihilative content, although it was nonetheless asserted that even if nirvāṇa was purely of an annihilative nature it would still be a supreme good as it is the cessation of suffering.[178]
And like Hodgson’s Svābhāvikas who believe the laws of nature or matter to be “primary causes” which are “not impressed on” nature “by an immaterial creator,”[179] the Sarvāstivādins also have no need of the hypothesis of God or Īśvara. Indeed, they were pioneers in the Buddhist use of logical argumentation to refute this entity.[180] “Since the world is composed of dharmas, even Gods are composed of dharmas. Consequently, Buddhism has no place for a creator God who transcends dharmas,” writes Hirakawa Akira. And although we noted earlier that the classical Buddhist cosmogony is explained in terms of karma, this is not the most basic description; karma is ultimately reducible to dharmas. Through the actions of sentient beings, the “world of dharmas is transformed into a world of karma.”[181] And so, just as the Svābhāvikas explain the evolution and dissolution of the universe in terms of the “intelligence” inherent in “matter,” so too do the Sarvāstivādins understand the same in terms of whatever corresponds to the mental among the dharmas (i.e. vedanā, saṃjñā, saṃskāra, and vijñāna).
As we have noted previously, Newar Buddhism incorporates all three yānas, including Hīnayāna or Śrāvakayāna, and according to the idiosyncratic classification of the influential Advayavajra, the Śrāvakayāna is entirely subsumed by the Sarvāstivāda or Vaibhāṣika school, to the exclusion even of the Sautrāntikas.[182] It is not at all unlikely that this understanding was incorporated into Newar Buddhism more generally. In any case, the Śrāvakayāna stage in Newar Buddhism is most prominent in the coming-of-age bare chuyegu ritual, already accurately described by Hodgson. In this ritual, young Newar boys of the Śākya and Vajrācārya castes are initiated as Śrāvakayāna monks, complete with monastic staff and begging bowl, and are expected to practice the appropriate precepts for four days before being released from their vows so that they may go on to become householders in the Mahāyāna tradition and begin Ādikārmika Bodhisattva practices, although they also maintain their functional and social status as monastics, many of them even inhabiting monasteries, the bāhās and bahīs.[183]
Śrāvakayāna traditions continue in both of these monastic institutions to some extent, but this is especially the case for the bahī class. These monasteries were until relatively recently very conservative and retained a large amount of Śrāvakayāna character in their practice of Buddhism; indeed, the architecture of these monasteries is very austere with only the barest of concessions to tantrism. We learn from the so-called “Wright History” of Nepal (named for its editor Daniel Wright, but actually a Newar historical chronicle translated by Amṛtānanda’s nephew, Guṇānanda, and S.S. Singh) that in the 17th century these monasteries were futilely resisting the imposition of Tantric practices, as they identified with the more primitive ascetic tradition of celibate forest-based bhikṣus. Current Newar Buddhist tradition also indicates that long ago, before the imposition of hard hereditary caste lines, these institutions were genuinely celibate centers of Śrāvakayāna monasticism; Newar Buddhists would have been expected to pass through this grade before choosing whether to continue on to householder Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna practice.[184] In Amṛtānanda’s time practitioners of Buddhism were much more numerous than they were later to become, being still the majority religion of the Newar people,[185] so it would not be at all impossible that there were still inhabitants of the bahīs who adhered to doctrines that were more or less of a Sarvāstivādin character.
In another possible indication of the identity of the bahī monastics with the simple Svābhāvikas, Hodgson notes in his Essays that a small portion of the Svābhāvikas rejected the special sixth Dhyani Buddha, Vajrasattva.[186] To reject Vajrasattva is ultimately to reject the authority and ritual monopoly of the Vajrācāryas who embody and represent this celestial Buddha, as well as Vajrāyana itself, since Vajrasattva is held by the Vajrācāryas to be the originator of this yāna.[187] Although modern bahīs would not reject Vajrasattva, they certainly have historically rejected the authority that the Vajrācāryas claim to derive from him, and even Gellner’s aged informant, a bahī elder, was still heard to assert the superiority of their yāna and status as bhikṣus to that of the Vajrācāryas. With the arrival of the Śrāvakayāna tradition of Theravada Buddhism in the Kathmandu valley in the 20th century, however, the status claims and conservative religious function of the bahīs have become largely redundant and fallen away.[188]
Fig. 10 "Interior Courtyard of Monastery at Lalitpur (Patan) in Nepal." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1854.
Taking all of the above into consideration, the identity of the primitive Svābhāvika school with Hīnayāna Buddhism generally and the Sarvāstivādins in particular seems well established and it is even a distinct possibility that there remained Newar Buddhists who adhered to these doctrines in the time of Hodgson and Amṛtānanda; at the very least, this school is archetypally fulfilled in Newar Śrāvakayāna, especially if we take into account the doxographical classification of Advayavajra. But while the Sarvāstivādins may at one time have been able to lay claim to the title of “the principal Buddhist philosophical school in India,” and their svabhāvas are certainly “plastic,” “eternal,” and, absent manifestation, “invisible” and “unconscious,” they are not an omnipresent singular svabhāva, as in Mahatma K.H.’s description of the Svābhāvika philosophy. Turning to the Prājñika Svābhāvikas, we meet with a much closer match to the Nepalese Svābhāvikas as understood in Theosophical writings.
The Prājñika school “seems to have considered matter as the sole entity, to have ascribed to it all the attributes of deity, and to have assigned to it two modalities; one termed nirvritti, and the other pravritti.” These two modes, Hodgson informs us, correspond to the categories of abstract and concrete. To the concrete belong all the “powers” of nature or dharmas. This is the realm of “action, multiplicity, change, pain” and it is “the contingent mode.” The abstract is the “proper modality” in which these powers exist in “unity, immutability, rest, bliss.” This “proper modality” is “the great secret (Súnyatá) of nature” and “man’s summum bonum,” which is not “a vague and doubtful association to the state of Nirvritti; but a specific and certain absorption into Prajná, the sum of all the powers, active and intellectual, of the universe.”[189]
So it is clear that the svabhāva or intrinsic essence acknowledged by the Prājñikas is śūnyatā, i.e. the “void” or “emptiness.”[190] What then is this śūnyatā or “emptiness”? According to Hodgson, “in the transcendental sense of the Buddhists, it signifies… the modus existendi of all things in the state of quiescence and abstraction from phenomenal being” since Buddhists “deem… all phænomena to be as purely illusory as do the Vedantists.” In this state the “energy of nature… is considered to be void of all those qualities which necessarily imply perishableness, and, which is the same thing, of all those qualities which are cognizable or distinguishable, and hence the energy in that state is typed by pure space.”[191] Clarifying this further in a handwritten annotation in a gift copy of his Essays, Hodgson writes that “Herbert Spencer’s Unknowable is the nearest equivalent of the Buddhist nirvana and sunyata.”[192] Spencer’s “Unknowable” is famously an unconditioned non-conceptual noumenon that stands behind the relative, what is called the “Absolute” in European philosophical parlance.[193] So for Hodgson śūnyatā entails the illusoriness and unreality of all phenomena and a state of monistic Absoluteness on the ultimate level which is void or empty of everything phenomenal. It is “eternally, unchangeably, and essentially one.” This proper modality is “symbolized by the Yoni, and personified as a female divinity Adi-Prajná and Adi-Dharmá.”[194]
We have had occasion to note this “female divinity Adi-Prajná” before; she is the goddess Prajñāpāramitā, or Perfection of Wisdom. She is the Buddhist equivalent of the Gnostic Sophia[195] and a representative of the ancient mother goddess archetype,[196] and as such is the personification of that purification or perfection of the dharma or element prajñā which brings about nirvāṇa.[197] She is the subject of a vast class of literature and some of it is quoted in Hodgson and Amṛtānanda’s scriptural citations for the Svābhāvika school and for the concept of “Adi-Dharmá.”[198] Most prominent among these citations is the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, or Prajñāpāramitā in 8,000 Lines, which is the original scripture of the Prajñāpāramitā class and one of the navadharma (the nine holiest scriptures in Newar Buddhism).[199] This “transcendental” scripture which primarily details the tenets of the Svābhāvika school “is a work of philosophy rather than religion, and its spirit is skeptical to the very verge of pyrrhonism,” writes Hodgson.[200]
Fig. 11 "Vasudhārā Maṇḍala,"
Thangka Painting on Cloth, 1777 (Nepal Samvat 897), The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Pyrrhonism, the “skepticism” propagated by Pyrrho in ancient Greece, is an apt comparison with the view of the Prajñāpāramitā, and one that was also made by Edward Conze, the preeminent authority on this class of scriptures.[201] The Prajñāpāramitā scriptures are noted for deconstructing every aspect of conventional reality, which is declared to be śūnyatā or “empty.” What is infrequently noted by modern commentators amidst all the deconstruction, however, is that the description of conventional reality in terms of the dharmas is regarded by the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures as superior to the naïve view of the average person who accepts entities such as a permanent self which is actually just composed of dharmas (the five skandhas in this case). Distinguishing the dharmas, getting them “into view,” is a necessary step to achieving real insight on the spiritual path.[202] According to the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, if an entity is not a dharma it does not exist.[203]
The Prajñāpāramitā scriptures also follow the Sarvāstivādins in asserting that these dharmas have a svabhāva. It is denied, however, that all the dharmas have their own unique svabhāva for “there are not two essential natures of dharmas, but just one single is the essential nature of all dharmas.”[204] As with the Prājñika Svābhāvikas, this single essential nature is śūnyatā. There are two implied meanings in the Mahāyāna understanding and usage of this word; the first is equivalent to the literal translation of śūnyatā as “emptiness,” which is a mere lack of essential nature or svabhāva from the perspective of conventional phenomenal existence;[205] it is “the nature which has no nature of its own.”[206] The second implied meaning is equivalent to “fullness,” i.e. the fullness of evanescent phenomenal reality or “appearance.” The first sense “denies any fixed self-nature to anything, the second implies that this is also fullness and limitless possibility, for lack of any fixed characteristics allows the infinite diversity of impermanent phenomena.”[207] A simile often used in the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures to illustrate śūnyatā is ākāśa or space, which gets at both implied meanings as space is unobstructed, unbounded, and unconditioned (asaṃskrta).[208] Ultimately, both the lack of fixed nature and the fullness of phenomenal appearance come to the same point and have a relationship of identity, what The Voice of the Silence calls “the voidness of the seeming full, the fulness of the seeming void.”[209] The canonical expression of this identity in the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures is found in the Heart Sūtra where we read that “form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form; emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness; whatever is form, that is emptiness; whatever is emptiness, that is form; the same is true of feelings, perceptions, impulses, and consciousness.”[210]
For the one who understands these words of the Heart Sūtra and consequently can see from the non-dual perspective of ultimate reality, śūnyatā or svabhāva is understood to be perfect purity; the emptiness of all dharmas and the fullness of the ever-shifting phenomenal world of appearance are seen to be of a single and pure nature or essence. Dharmas are “by their nature perfectly pure,” in the words of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā.[211] This transcendent perfect purity is the ultimate final svabhāva of the dharmas. It “is that which looks only to itself, and not to anything outside. It is what we call the ‘Absolute,’ compared with which all separate dharmas are parabhāva (relative). The mark (lakṣaṇa) of that own-being is that it is not contingent, not conditioned, not related to anything other than itself.” This svabhāva is described in another Prajñāpāramitā scripture as “the unbroken unity of all dharmas” and it may also be understood as monistic “since all multiplicity is relegated to a lower plane and denied ultimate validity.”[212]
The primary “Prājñika” commentarial source on the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā used by Amṛtānanda appears to be Haribhadra’s Abhisamayālaṁkārālokā Prajñāpāramitā-vyākhyā. Hodgson gives this commentary a very prominent place in his itemized scripture list,[213] which is itself derived from Amṛtānanda’s Dharma-koṣa-saṃgraha,[214] and Donald Lopez infers that this work, or at least a derivative one, is probably the commentary Amṛtānanda used to explicate the esoteric meaning of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā to Hodgson.[215] Significantly, Haribhadra also speaks in this commentary of a “pure body,” or śuddhakāya, also called the svābhāvikakāya, which “is a way of saying non-created, absolute, and pure.”[216] This svabhāva or essence body is “one and the same with all the Buddhas, being an undifferentiated whole.”[217] We shall have more to say about the svābhāvikakāya anon.
This commentator, Haribhadra, belonged to the Madhyamaka school, which is seen as giving the definitive exegesis of the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras. Indeed, this school is so intimately connected with these scriptures that its founder Nāgārjuna is also traditionally credited with having retrieved the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras from the underwater realm of the nāgas or serpents.[218] This Mahāyāna school would go on to displace the Sarvāstivādins as “the principal Buddhist philosophical school in India” and also become the mainstream and dominant understanding of the Tibetan inheritors of Indian Buddhism. In the Madhyamaka “system of nature,” the Sarvāstivāda doctrine of momentary point-instants is fully taken on-board. In this understanding, causation “is kinetic. What exists is always acting, always moving; it is an illusion that a thing exists placidly, that it exists without acting; what does not act, does not exist; action is motion, this motion itself is causation.”[219] In this philosophy, it is also the case that matter (the four great elements or mahābhūta) and mind (vijñāna) are dependently originated and mutually supportive; neither can manifest without the other.[220] The ultimate nature of both qualities, according to Nāgārjuna, is the dharmadhātu, the Absolute reality, the “basic element” which is “held to be the basis of all dharmas.”[221] A Prajñāpāramitā scripture says of the dharmadhātu that “the Dharma-element would be upset (vikopita), if there were any other Dharma outside it. But no other dharma can be apprehended outside it. If one could be apprehended, there would be an upsetting of the Dharma-element.”[222] Haribhadra also writes of the dharmadhātu as having a svabhāva of which the dharmas are active qualities or characteristics.[223] With the dharmadhātu, then, we have a truly transcendental unity as the basis of a “monistic parallelism” and also a clear echo of the Theosophical “one element” with two poles that is always “running” and “moving.”
Fig. 12 "Nagarjuna, Conqueror of the Serpent." Tempera by Nicholas Roerich, 1925.
For Nāgārjuna and his school, realization of the dharmadhātu is identical with nirvāṇa and this nirvāṇa is not a “doubtful” entity as in the Sarvāstivāda teachings. Rather, just as in Hodgson’s Prājñika doctrine, it is the “sum of all the powers, active and intellectual, of the universe.”[224] For as Jaideva Singh, summarizing Stcherbatsky, writes, “Nāgārjuna gives a new orientation to Nirvāṇa. The Vaibhāṣika maintained that Nirvāṇa was something real (dharma) in which consciousness and life were extinct for ever; the Sautrāntika believed that it was the simple cessation of the world process. In both cases, something real was assumed to exist before Nirvāṇa and to disappear afterwards. This made Nirvāṇa a product of causes (saṁskṛta). Nāgārjuna asserted that there was not a shade of difference between the Absolute and the Phenomenal, between Nirvāṇa and Saṁsāra. The universe viewed as a whole is the Absolute, viewed as a process, it is the phenomenal.”[225] Nirvāṇa is called variously tathatā (Suchness), tattva (Reality), or Prajñāpāramitā and “Prajñāpāramitā as non-dual Intuition is the Absolute.”[226]
Nāgārjuna’s most famous commentator is Candrakīrti. This author’s Prasannapadā, or In Clear Words, a commentary on Nāgārjuna’s Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, is noted in Hodgson’s Essays under a characteristically incorrect title and is to be found ubiquitously in Hodgson’s papers and the Sanskrit manuscript collections forwarded by him to various learned bodies.[227] So we may assume that this work was important for Amṛtānanda’s understanding of the Prājñika Svābhāvika doctrine. In this work, Candrakīrti writes of an ultimate svabhāva of the dharmas which is the ultimate object of the spiritual path.[228] This svabhāva is a transcendent non-conceptual ultimate reality with “a form that transcends all manifoldness” to be realized directly by āryas in meditative equipoise through non-dual gnosis (jñāna), which is something totally other than mundane consciousness (vijñāna). This ultimate and Absolute śūnyatā or svabhāva which gnosis perceives transcends manifoldness and all conventional words and concepts so completely that it is regarded as self-empty; the dharmadhātu is “empty” of the four extremes of existence, non-existence, both, and neither.[229] This is the famed “emptiness of emptiness.” Summarizing, T.R.V. Murti writes that the “Absolute is Śūnya as it is utterly devoid of the conceptual distinctions of ‘is’ and ‘not-is’, free from all subjectivity (nirvikalpa, niṣprapañca).”[230] Schayer, too, writes that with the positing of this singular Absolute svabhāva which is “undifferentiated by the hypostases of conceptual thought,” the Mādhyamikas may be called svabhāvavādins.[231] Indeed, Candrakīrti writes that although this ultimate svabhāva is not existent or non-existent, i.e. not conceptual, it may still be asserted to “exist” as a merely conventional entity in the context of conventional discourse.[232] This semantic duality, i.e. that the lack of svabhāva on the mundane level is in actuality an utterly transcendental svabhāva on the ultimate level, is indicated also in a passage of a “Svābhāvika” tenor in the Newar Buddhist Sanskrit ritual manual Pāpa-parimocana that elaborates on the “state of śūnyatā”: “In whatever sense the Tathāgata is possessed of svabhāva, in that sense also is this world possessed of svabhāva; in whatever sense the Tathāgata is without svabhāva, in that sense the world is without svabhāva.”[233]
The understanding of Madhyamaka as an Absolutism which we have been outlining thus far was once dominant in academia and has at least the great virtue of elucidating Hodgson’s own understanding of śūnyatā as an Absolute, in line with the many prominent Western interpreters who were to follow him. For that reason alone and apart from any other virtues it may have, an examination of Madhyamaka in these terms is useful and helps us to establish the identity of Hodgson’s Svābhāvikas. Nevertheless, this interpretation has in recent decades fallen out of fashion in academia and given way to an interpretation of the Madhyamaka ultimate truth as being a semantic conventionalism that eschews anything particularly mystical, metaphysical, or transcendental; “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth.” But this interpretation is now itself “increasingly disputed”[234] and it is certainly possible that the “semantic interpretation” tells us more about the unconcealed and perhaps unexamined positivistic and materialistic presuppositions[235] of certain modern western academics than it does about Nāgārjuna, as its claim to represent the correct interpretation of his intent is improbable.[236] This issue of Nāgārjuna’s true meaning need not detain us long, however. For present purposes of identification it is only necessary to point out that the old “Absolutist” or monistic interpretation of the Western academy is also in its essential points the interpretation of a great many traditional Buddhist schools and scholars of past ages and the present. And so Douglas Duckworth writes that the semantic interpretation “does not represent a reading of Madhyamaka consistent with the ways Madhyamaka has been interpreted in Tibet.”[237] What is said of Tibet regarding this may be said with equal justice of Nepal.
In sum then, the Prājñikas may be identified with Madhyamaka. Hodgson may also have intuited something of this connection. So late as July 1834, he was still querying the possible connections between his four schools and the canonical four[238] and in a communication to the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal in August of the same year Hodgson relays some early intelligence and speculations from Burnouf according to which the “transcendentalist” Madhyamaka school is identified as a skeptical “middle way” between his atheist and theist Buddhisms.[239] Reading only a little between the lines, it is apparent that Hodgson’s understanding of the Mādhyamikas aligns most closely with the Prājñika Svābhāvikas in his systematization. The primitive Svābhāvikas are the most explicitly atheistic school in his presentation and the Kārmikas and Yātnikas are understood by him to follow the Aiśvarikas in being basically “theistic.” Between these two streams stand the Prājñikas who “unitize” their deified nature and assert that śūnyatā or emptiness is this nature’s proper modality, an assertion that is essentially equivalent to Spencer’s “Unknowable,” or the non-conceptual Absolute.
Although the identification of the Prājñikas with the Mādhyamikas is solid as far as it goes, it does not go quite far enough. As seen in our previous discussion of Newar Buddhist Mahāyāna, we are dealing with a very unique tradition that is thoroughly influenced by Vajrayāna doctrines at every level. A merely sūtra based Madhyamaka identity, then, is clearly not the whole story; we will need to dig deeper still. In the early twentieth century, Nagendranath Vasu would intuit the beginnings of a correct solution to the enigma of the schools, but seemingly no one would notice.[240] In researching late survivals of Buddhism in Bengal, he would also have occasion to write on the “schools” of what he understood to be the late Mantrayāna (i.e. Vajrayāna) of Newar Buddhism. He identified the Aiśvarikas, Kārmikas, and Yātnikas as being essentially a single school that was “a compromise between the ancient Yogāchāra and the Vedānta Philosophy.” He would also identify the Svābhāvikas with “a later development of the Mādhyamika school inaugurated by Nāgārjuna” and correlate both of these doctrinal persuasions with the crypto-Buddhist Yogāntaka and Nāgāntaka schools of 16th century Orissa, respectively.[241] Thus he reduced the schools to two primary streams which correspond to the two primary divisions within Mahāyāna Buddhism more generally. Dovetailing with this, Advayavajra writes that Buddhist Tantra is to be explained in terms of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra[242] and Min Bahadur Shakya also notes that the “Vajrayana doctrine of Nepal is usually based on Madhyamika as well as Yogacara doctrines.”[243]
The Madhyamaka school appears to have ended up correlated with the Vajrayāna pole of female wisdom, or prajñā, and Yogācāra with the pole of male means, or upāya; the “means” or upāya are the yogic techniques derived from Yogācāra and “wisdom” or prajñā is the universal void, or śūnyatā, which is especially characteristic of Madhyamaka.[244] Hodgson speaks of the Prājñikas and Aiśvarikas centering Prajñāpāramitā or Ādi-Buddha, respectively, as the primal originating principles in their understandings of the Triratna (the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Saṃgha, which correspond to Ādi-Buddha, Prajñāpāramitā, and Avalokiteśvara in the Newar understanding)[245] and there are also illustrations from a Newar artist, probably Raj Man Singh, depicting these respective configurations in one of Hodgson’s papers as originally published; they are labeled as the Upāyika and Prājñika triads, the very labels demonstrating their derivation from the traditional Vajrayāna conception. As we have also already had occasion to notice, the Newar Buddhists have an understanding of Prajñāpāramitā as being equivalent to prakṛti, dharma, water, and the feminine element, whereas Ādi-Buddha corresponds to puruṣa, Buddha, fire/light, and the masculine element. The Svayambhū Purāna also characterizes them as Śiva and Śakti.[246]
Fig. 13 Detail of Plate II from Brian Houghton Hodgson, "Sketch of Buddhism, Derived from the Bauddha Scriptures of Nipál," Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland Vol. 2, 1829.
Surprising as it may be, it would appear that the Prājñika and Aiśvarika/Upāyika schools existed in the 19th century and exist within Newar Buddhism even today, whether under those monikers or not. While veneration of Ādi-Buddha is centered in Kathmandu, where his Mahācaitya is situated, veneration of Prajñāpāramitā in her Tantric guise as Guhyeśvari is centered in Deopatan where her own temple is located.[247] The Newars refer to this temple as “Guhyeśvari jala” or “the waters of Guhyeśvari.” Appropriately then, this temple enshrines a well that contains these healing waters. Some Newar Vajrayāna bāhā monasteries today take this goddess as their lineage and tutelary deity and the Vajrācārya inhabitants do yearly pūjā at her temple; thus they might easily be considered present day representatives of a distinct “school” of Prajñika Svābhāvikas that existed also in Amṛtānanda’s time.[248] Likewise, the large number of bāhās that take Svayambhū as their lineage deity may be considered modern day representatives of the Aiśvarikas.[249]
These Prājñikas and Aiśvarikas are not separate religious entities engaged in dogmatic disputes, however; Hodgson writes of two subschools of the Upāyikas or Aiśvarikas, called the dakṣiṇācāra (right-hand path) and vāmācāra (left-hand path), which paths in Vajrayāna correspond to the aforementioned male “means” or upāya and female “wisdom” or prajñā, but indicates that the later sub-school of the Aiśvarikas is probably after all actually just the Prājñika Svābhāvika school due to its emphasis on the priority of the feminine.[250] Hodgson elsewhere emphasizes that even the Svābhāvikas have an Ādi-Buddha, as is apparent from their presentation of the Triratna, and one of his Svābhāvika scriptural citations asserts that in relation to the illusory phenomenal universe, svabhāva and Īśvara (or Ādi-Buddha) are “essentially one, differing only in name.”[251] Additionally, the five Dhyāni Buddhas, which Hodgson associates especially with the Aiśvarika system, belong just as much to the Svābhāvika system, if not more so, as Burnouf perceptively observed, since “they are are pure personifications of natural phenomena of the sensible world.”[252] Additionally, these five Buddhas are actually androgynes and “make mystically ten” once their female counterparts are counted, as H.P.B. notes.[253] In fact, Ādi-Buddha and Prajñāpāramitā are androgynes also. As we have previously noted, they are in fact two sides of the same coin as both represent Absolute non-dual reality which is necessarily also ultimately beyond the dualities of female (prajñā) and male (upāya);[254] taken as a non-dual unit, they are prajñopāya,[255] the yab-yum of Tibet and the “Eternal Mother-Father” of the Stanzas of Dzyan.[256] The true distinction between the Prājñika and Upāyika understandings, then, is not to be found in these dualities. It rather pertains to different levels of increasingly advanced teaching, with the Prājñika doctrine being the most esoteric, for Hodgson writes that in addition to the division into Svābhāvikas and Aiśvarikas, there “is another division into exoteric and esoteric doctrines,” and every one of these esoteric doctrines that he takes note of are classified by him as doctrines of the Svābhāvikas.[257]
Following on from this significant hint, we assert without hyperbole or exaggeration that Newar Buddhism as such simply is the Prājñika Svābhāvika school at its very esoteric core. More or less full confirmation of this assertion may be found in the encyclopedic doctoral dissertation of the late and renowned historian of Himalayan art, Dina Bangdel, titled Manifesting the Maṇḍala. Therein, she succeeded in uncovering the internal logic connecting the many iconographic motifs, rituals, and teachings of Newar Buddhism and the Tantric deities she identifies as central to the esoteric dimension of the religion are in fact the very same that Hodgson says belong to the esoteric vāmācāra teachings of the Svābhāvikas.[258] Bangdel demonstrated that the Ādi-Buddha teaching, embodied in the Svayambhū stūpa and associated Dharmadhātu maṇḍala, belongs to the exoteric and public Mahāyāna side of the religion while the highest inner Vajrayāna teachings pertain to Prajñāpāramitā in her Tantric guise as Guhyeśvari (also known as Khagānanā, Vajravārāhī, Nairātmyā, and Jñānaḍākinī) and the associated Cakrasaṃvara maṇḍala. This distinction roughly correlates to that between Yoga and Mahāyoga Tantras and Yoginī Tantras, the “generation stage” and “completion stage” of Vajrayāna practice, dakṣiṇācāra and vāmācāra, and, we would add, the Aiśvarika and Prājñika schools. In the “completion stage” of Newar Buddhist practice, the goddess Prajñāpāramitā Guhyeśvari is understood to be the ultimate “ontological source,” the svābhāvikakāya, which is “formless, pure, and selfless” while simultaneously being possessed of “many forms.” Recalling our earlier discussion of cosmogony, we might also say that she is the ultimate jagatkāraṇa or world-cause, as she is identified as the dharmodayā, literally the “source of phenomena.”[259]
Fig. 14 "Temple of Guyheshuri, Pushputtinath." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1850-1863.
Another eminent historian of South Asian art (as well as being an eminent Sanskritist), Gautama Vajracharya, has further illuminated the mysteries of this “Secret Goddess” who is the dharmodayā, and it will be beneficial to present some of his findings. The dharmodayā is identified in the Vimalaprabhā as an “inverted triangle symbolizing the female principle” and another Tantric commentary identifies the dharmodayā with the “endless sky” on the macroscopic level and prajñā inwardly. Elsewhere, it is identified as a yoni and a gate and equated with the dharmadhātu. In Newar Buddhism, the inverted triangle is symbolic of Khagānanā, the “aboriginal female divinity” of waterholes who is worshiped in association with the monsoon rains; this connection is especially evident at Guhyeśvari Khagānanā’s shrines, including at her temple in Deopatan, which are often “actually underground, fresh-water springs covered by a repousse lotus.” These waterholes represent the original lake of the Kathmandu Valley, Kalīhrada, as well as “mother sky,” i.e. ākāśa, which is the source of rain and thus of terrestrial water and is “itself considered a big hole, mahābila.” The water holes are also sometimes “named after Ākāśagańgā, the milky way which is viewed as celestial water in both Sanskrit literature and Newar tradition.” Summing up these and other data points, he writes that “in Newar Buddhism, the word dharmadhātu symbolizes not only śūnyatā but also water. The hidden logicality behind this association of śūnyatā with water is based on the view that śūnyatā is the sky, which is the main source of life-giving water both celestial and terrestrial. The sky is, however, a big hole, a gate, a yoni symbolizing the great mother goddess, Khagānanā.”[260]
Along the same lines, H.P.B. writes that it “is from Padma-yoni – ‘the bosom of the lotus’ – from the absolute Space of the Universe, outside of space and time, that came forth the Cosmos conditioned and limited by time and space.”[261] Although the understanding of Prajñāpāramitā as the dharmodayā or padma-yoni is one of the highest esoteric teachings it is actually already present in the exoteric Svayambhū Purāṇa, where we read that in the Kathmandu Valley “the presiding deity of the world (loka), the goddess Khagānanā appeared in the shape of the yoni, extending through the three worlds, (viz.) heaven, the world of mortals (and the underworld)... In her innate form (svarūpa) of ‘dharma-origin’ (dharmodayā) she permeated the three worlds.”[262] We may recall here that in the account from the Svayambhū Purāṇa discussed earlier, Prajñāpāramitā Guhyeśvari as the primordial waters is the source of the lotus flower from which the Ādi-Buddha in his jyotirūpa form arises.[263] This jyotirūpa consists of five rays of five different colors corresponding to the five Dhyāni Buddhas[264] and in the course of the progression of increasingly impure times, a great stūpa was built over the jyotirūpa by Sāntikarācārya to protect it from degradation. This is the Svayambhū Mahācaitya, the holiest site in Newar Buddhism. The association between this stūpa and the “Aiśvarika” teaching is so strong that the Newar Buddhists often use the name “Ādi-Buddha” as an epithet for the stūpa according to David Gellner.[265]
But this holy site is not only the home of Ādi-Buddha and the Five Tathāgatas, it is the home also of their source. As Bangdel shows, basing herself on the context provided by the Svayambhū Purāṇa, the deepest level of meaning of the Mahācaitya corresponds to the Cakrasaṃvara maṇḍala and thus Guhyeśvari Khagānanā, which is also the deepest level of the Nāmasaṃgīti root text.[266] This identity is visually and structurally present at the site; as noted by Gautama Vajracharya, the goddess maintains her presence at this stūpa and others in the form of dharmadhātu shrines composed of vertical stone slabs which represent the yoni and fittingly resemble palace gates; thus called toraṇas or gates by the Newars.[267] In addition to this, Svayambhū Mahācaitya resembles and symbolically represents a water pot, or kalaṡa, one of the primary ritual implements of the Vajrācāryas and also one of the primary symbols of the goddess Guhyeśvari. The mythological origin story of the Mahācaitya itself is likewise a macrocosm of the ubiquitous kalaṡa pūjā or water pot ritual performed by the Vajrācāryas;[268] Prajñāpāramitā Guhyeśvari is the “mother of Buddhas” and the water pot is her womb and padma-yoni, “the symbol of the cosmic waters and the turbulent movement of the limitless possibilities of being.” From this yoni have emerged many Buddhas, most especially the Dhyāni Buddhas, which represent “the emergence from this turbulence of… the ordered life which reaches its culmination in spiritual serenity.”[269]
Fig. 15 "View of the Chaitya and Other Buildings on the Summit of the Swayambhu Hill," Plate IV from Daniel Wright, History of Nepal, Cambridge, 1877, pg. 23.
The birth and life cycle of Prajñāpāramitā’s progeny, the Buddhas, from their ontological source in Absolute abstraction to their progress through the ceaseless motion of manifestation and finally nirvāṇa, is another primary aspect of the multivalent symbolism of this stūpa which Theosophical researcher Don Shepherd has lately given an excellent description and interpretation of in terms of the Great Madhyamaka “other-emptiness” Vajrayāna doctrine. He demonstrates that this self-same “Svābhāvika” doctrine of a svābhāvikakāya or “’basic element’ of ‘five self-arisen pristine wisdoms’ that dwelt ‘pervasively in all the stable and the moving’ as the ‘great life of all living beings’” is to be found in the texts of the Great Madhyamaka masters and that the Svayambhū stūpa itself has been intertwined with the promulgation of this doctrine in Nepal from the time of Asaṅga and Vasubandhu down to the 19th century.[270] Likewise, a recent translator and commentator interprets the Svayambhū Purāṇa, the root text for the mythology of the Mahācaitya, in terms of Great Madhyamaka due to its presentation of the empty nature of the dharmadhātu Ādi-Buddha as an imminent and primordially ever-present, mind-like reality; in very fact “the true nature of mind, inseparable spaciousness and awareness.”[271]
This school, the Great Madhyamaka, is asserted to be the original understanding of Nāgārjuna prior to the split into Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika. Like Theosophy, it integrates the terminology of both Yogācāra and Madhyamaka as well as sūtra tathagātagarbha teachings and the doctrines of the Tantras (particularly those of the Kālacakra tradition) into a unified whole. It is asserted that the primary authorities of both Yogācāra and Madhyamaka actually belonged to one single school and taught the same doctrine of other-emptiness.[272] A primary conduit for the transmission of these teachings to Newar Buddhism can be identified in the influential works of the siddha Advayavajra, who we noticed earlier in connection with the codification and propagation of Ādikārmika Bodhisattva practices in Nepal.[273] He is identified as a crucial link in the transmission of the Great Madhyamaka tradition by the Tibetan historian and Jonang Great Madhyamaka master Taranātha.[274] Another important figure in this regard is the Cakrasaṃvara and Kālacakra master Vanaratna, who lived and taught among the Newar Buddhists during the period of the composition of the Garland literature;[275] Iain Sinclair notes connections between the writings of this teacher and the Garland literature and suggests the possibility that he had a hand in the composition of the latter.[276] Vanaratna, too, belonged to the same lineage as Advayavajra and taught much the same doctrine.[277]
Although Great Madhyamaka is also expounded within the Tibetan Kagyü school,[278] which has had a good deal of historical interaction with and influence upon Newar Buddhism,[279] these teachings were most fully developed and codified by the influential Lama Dölpopa and his Jonang sect and we shall take his understanding as paradigmatic due to its close connection with the Kālacakra tradition, something which will take on greater significance as we proceed. Of Dölpopa’s understanding, we may note first that the self-emptiness presentation of masters such as Candrakīrti is regarded as necessary for establishing the nonconceptual Absolute.[280] And so Dölpopa agrees with the Prāsaṅgika Mādhyamikas in teaching that consciousness and its objects are equally unestablished[281] and that the primordial jñāna realized in meditative equipoise transcends the manifoldness of the four extremes.[282] However, he held that post-meditation and in the context of conventional discourse the Absolute should be presented as not empty of itself but rather empty of everything other than itself; it is “other” than all conventional dichotomies or dualistic mental fabrications and conceptual reifications, it is "beyond the inner and outer, the internal and external."[283] It is an other-emptiness, not a self-emptiness, and it has a svabhāva that is truly established and truly existent.[284]
In contrast to the Prāsaṅgikas, who present a view of the relationship of saṃsāra and nirvāṇa as one of dialectical mutual dependency, the Great Madhyamaka presents a more subjective and epistemological view of the relationship between the Absolute svabhāva and the phenomenal world, the “pervader” and “pervaded.”[285] It is a hierarchical relationship much like that between Brahman and māyā in Advaita Vedānta; it is an “appearance-reality distinction.” The Absolute appears as saṃsāra to the unenlightened although it is not so in reality. Thus, the Absolute is necessary for saṃsāra to exist but it is not the case that saṃsāra is necessary for the Absolute to exist, because saṃsāra is contingent and unreal in and of itself. Saṃsāra is a mere superimposition and the Absolute can do very well without it, as it is empty of the unreal.[286] The “appearance-reality distinction” of the Great Madhyamaka is paralleled in Hodgson’s distinction between the illusory “contingent” and Absolute “proper” modes of svabhāva.[287] For Dölpopa, this Absolute svabhāva is an ever-present reality, a state of enlightenment which is always already the case; like the puruṣa of Sāṁkhya, it is primordially free and has never truly been bound.[288] On the other hand, Dölpopa also calls this Absolute the “partless pervader,” terminology that is more characteristic of the Sāṁkhya mūlaprakṛti; such a description differs greatly from Buddhist teaching as it is usually understood.[289] This “partless pervader” or “basic element” of Dölpopa is also in essence identical with the “Swabhavat” or “one element” of K.H. “which, as Ākāśa, pervaded the ‘solar system’ in both its spiritual and physical aspects so that ‘every atom’ was the one element itself.”[290]
Fig. 16 "The Durbar, or Royal Palace, Bhatgaon (Nepal)." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1854.
These broad parallels may be further fleshed-out by examining the teachings of the Kālacakra Tantra and its commentarial literature and the intersections of this tradition with passages in Hodgson’s Essays. This Tantra is central to the understanding of the Jonang tradition and is also very important for Theosophy as it is profoundly linked to the Stanzas of Dzyan, as David Reigle has shown.[291] Crucially, we have also seen that it is highly important in the formation of the Newar Buddhist Garland literature. Its influence on the developed Svayambhū Purāṇa is particularly significant as this text “validates and legitimizes the significant aspects of the religious practices” of Newar Buddhism and provides “a philosophical and theoretical framework for [its] core visual symbols,” according to Bangdel.[292] Although not a major practice lineage within Newar Buddhism like Cakrasaṃvara, the Kālacakra tradition is very influential on the level of doctrinal view and we shall have further demonstration of this in what follows.
While the Kālacakra tradition incorporates many concepts from the Yogācāra school, the Prajñāpāramitā sūtras and Madhyamaka authors are nonetheless absolutely central for its presentation of śūnyatā.[293] In addition, Prajñāpāramitā qua goddess is identified both explicitly and implicitly with Ādi-Buddha Kālacakra’s consort Viśvamātā and with the dharmadhātu in this tradition.[294] The Kālacakra Tantra understands itself to be a nondual Tantra; it is neither a Mahāyoga (means) nor Yoginī (wisdom) Tantra, but a union of both.[295] Thus, this Tantric tradition is both “Prājñika” and “Upāyika.”
We may begin our examination by noting a passage purportedly from the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā which Amṛtānanda cites in illustrating the Svābhāvika teachings. Hodgson renders it as follows: “All things are governed or perfected by Swabháva; I too am governed by Swabháva.” As we have seen previously, the basic purport of this does indeed occur in the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, although it is not to be found there in the form presented by Hodgson and Amṛtānanda. In fact, Amṛtānanda’s passage is a common mantra to be found in the sādhanas of many Vajrayāna traditions. As derived from the Kālacakra sādhana, it reads in Sanskrit, “Oṃ svabhāvaśuddhāḥ sarvadharmāḥ svabhāvaśuddho ‘ham,” which David Reigle renders as, “Oṃ; Naturally pure are all things, naturally pure am I.” As discussed previously, this fundamental purity of nature is understood to refer to the Absolute or noumenal point of view, rather than the relative or phenomenal.[296] Although Hodgson’s translation is certainly not the most literally accurate, he also understands the governing svabhāva to be the abstract noumenal svabhāva and the noumenal may certainly be said to “govern” the phenomenal.[297] So there is some basic semantic agreement.
Related to this fundamentally pure final nature, there is also the fourth body of the Buddha, which is identical with the fundamental noumenal nature of things and which was noticed earlier in our discussion of Haribhadra as well as in Shepherd’s paper and Bangdel’s thesis. Although in most presentations there are only three bodies, the Kālacakra Tantra and a few others posit four.[298] The Kālacakra Tantra dubs this the śuddhakāya or “Pure Body” and the Vimalaprabhā commentary introduces the “Essence Body” or “Svābhāvikakāya of the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajñāpāramitā)” as being equivalent. This body may also be called the prajñāpāramitākāya.[299] The Abhisamayālaṅkāra of Maitreya, a foundational text for this understanding, says of the “embodiment of the Sage (muni) in his essence (svabhāvikakāya): Its identity is the primordial nature (prakṛti) of the undefiled dharmas which are obtained in utter purity.”[300] Urban Hammar identifies the svābhāvikakāya in the Kālacakra tradition with Ādi-Buddha and compares it with the mūlaprakṛti of the Sāṁkhya school in that it “is the unmanifest (avyakta) that becomes manifest (vyakta)” and shapes “the world as we see it.”[301] The resemblances to the Nepalese Prājñika Svābhāvika doctrine should be evident. David Reigle has also demonstrated that the fourth body appears to be implied in the Stanzas of Dzyan which are the basis for The Secret Doctrine.[302]
At this point it will be necessary to pull together a few more threads dispersed throughout this essay. Earlier, it was pointed out that the Svābhāvika cosmogony was essentially the classical Buddhist cosmogony found in both the Abhidharma and Kālacakra systems. While the cosmogony has the same core in both presentations, the version laid out by Hodgson’s anonymous commentator is clearly the Kālacakra version. In the presentation in Hodgson’s essays, Mount Sumeru is round like a wheel. This is diagnostic of the Kālacakra version; in Abhidharma, Sumeru is square.[303] Hodgson’s commentator also speaks about the world revolving out of being and the elements dissolving into one another. This occurs in reverse order as compared with the order in which the elements evolved to create the universe.[304] This is, again, a feature of the Kālacakra Tantra; the Abhidharma account is very different.[305]
Most significant for our purposes is the role of space or ākāśa, the vibration transmitting “waters” of ancient Indian cosmology and represented by Prajñāpāramitā in the understanding of Newar Buddhism. The Dalai Lama writes that the “Kalachakra system presents space not as a total nothingness, but as a medium of ‘empty particles’ or ‘space particles,’ which are thought of as extremely subtle ‘material’ particles. This space element is the basis for the evolution and dissolution of the four elements, which are generated from it and absorbed back into it.”[306] These space particles ought rather to be understood as mutually dependent centers of force rather than truly discrete entities.[307] They have only one sensual quality, which is sound, and contain the seeds of the mahābhūta. “Because space particles, with the quality of sound, endure throughout all four cycles of a universe, one could say that they are eternal. Kalachakra explains that this is the deeper hidden level of meaning of the eternal sound of the Vedas and Samkhya.”[308]
The dharmadhātu, which is the nature of emptiness, pervades the element of ākāśa and bears its characteristics in temporal manifestation.[309] In the Kālacakra system, there is an intimate link between the space element and emptiness that approaches identity; sometimes “emptiness is… said to be similar to space, since it is indestructible and without parts, indivisible, omnipresent, and all-pervading; at other times, it is identified with space directly. The Buddha’s lion-seat from which he taught the Kālacakratantra is identified as the space element (ākāśa-dhatu) having all aspects. Like space, emptiness is a source of phenomena (dharmodaya). It has conventional reality as its form, and it is also a form of conventional reality. In this way, it is endowed with all aspects.”[310] This “emptiness endowed with all aspects” is also called the “form of emptiness” (śūnyatā-rūpa), and it is the space element which is the basis on which it arises. This “emptiness is inseparable from space”[311] and is “a sentient emptiness (ajaḍā-śūnyatā) with a cognitive dimension as opposed to an inert void.” It is “a positive ground of emptiness.”[312] Douglas Duckworth writes that with “the Jonang tradition, other-emptiness in Madhyamaka reflects directly the pregnant (fullness of) emptiness in the Kalācakratantra.”[313]
Fig. 17 "Chobhar Gorge and Ganesh Temple." Watercolor by Henry Ambrose Oldfield, 1857.
This is paralleled in what is said in one of the anonymous comments in Amṛtānanda’s collection of scriptural citations. The commentator writes of the evolution of the four mahābhūta out of the “self-supported” ākāśa, which is śūnyatā, and declares ākāśa to be “omnipresent, and essentially intellectual.” He also asserts that ākāśa “is Swábhávika, because it is established, governed, perfected (suddha), by its own force or nature.” This parallels the Tantric svabhāva mantra and the fourth body, the svābhāvikakāya.[314] The commentator also identifies this ākāśa or śūnyatā as ātman,[315] and this is also an appellation applied to the Absolute by the Jonang tradition,[316] the Kālacakra Tantra,[317] and Theosophy. Additionally, ākāśa is also identified by the commentator as ālaya,[318] i.e. the store-house consciousness of Yogācāra teaching, which is the receptacle of karmic traces. The Vimalaprabhā relates the ālaya to jīva, i.e. life-force,[319] which in most contexts would otherwise be identified as a distinctly non-Buddhist Hindu teaching. The jīva teaching also belongs to Theosophy[320] and we will have occasion to return to the subject shortly.
There are yet more points of convergence from another angle. Earlier it was noted that Theosophy understands “Swabhavat” to be “Spirit or Force at its negative, Matter at its positive pole.” These poles correspond to the dualistic Sāṁkhya teaching of puruṣa and prakṛti, or spirit and matter. Although this teaching is typically understood to be non-Buddhist in origin and is often refuted by Buddhist writers, it does reflect in a way the conventional duality of experience acknowledged even in Buddhism. The Kālacakra Tantra, however, more fully appreciates the value of these Sāṁkhya teachings and appropriates them as its own, although reinterpreted in a thoroughly Buddhist and non-dual manner.[321] Notable in this regard, the Jonang teachings have been (negatively) compared to those of the Sāṁkhya by native Tibetan commentators[322] and Gavin Kilty notes that this charge of being crypto-Sāṁkhya is ironically one “that had been leveled against the Kālacakra tantra itself by its Indian and Tibetan opponents.”[323] The influence of Sāṁkhya as mediated by the Kālacakra Tantra and its commentarial tradition can also be seen in Newar Buddhism; the Guṇakāraṇḍavyūha asserts that Ādi-Buddha is “possessed of the triguṇa,” a phrase which derives from this tradition. The triguṇa or three guṇas have been understood by “some Indian Kālacakra commentators” and “most Newar Buddhists” (including Amṛtānanda in his discussions with Hodgson) as referring “to the well-known three sattva-rajas-tamas categories of the Sāṁkhyas,” which are the ultimate elements of prakṛti.[324] The implications of this are far reaching; Vesna Wallace quotes the Kālacakra Tantra to the effect that karma is “contained in the three guṇas of prakṛti,” and is thus regarded as essentially physical.[325]
In the Vimalaprabhā, these three guṇas are correlated with three prakṛtis, which are gross, subtle, and supreme. Beyond these prakṛtis, we are informed, there is a fourth prakṛti which serves as the basis of the other three and is thus functionally equivalent to the mūlaprakṛti of Sāṁkhya; like Ādi-Buddha, we could say that it is “possessed of the triguṇa.” This fourth prakṛti is the jñanakāya, or gnosis body, which has the svabhāva of the dharmadhātu and a jīva, or life, called the “great breath,” or mahāprāṇa, which is also a significant cosmological concept in The Secret Doctrine corresponding to “absolute Abstract Motion.”[326] This prakṛti, the jñānakāya, is also equivalent to the śuddhakāya, svābhāvikakāya, and prajñāpāramitākāya.[327] So at the most subtle and abstract level of reality, according to the Kālacakra tradition, there is a pure mind-like svabhāva which is also prakṛti or matter/substance and which has eternal motion as its life. Indeed, this eternal motion or mahāprāṇa is “present in the heart of every sentient being.”[328] It would be very difficult to find a stronger parallel with the Svābhāvika doctrine as understood in Theosophy; we may recall in this context Mahatma K.H.’s “Force or Motion ever generating its electricity which is life,” the very “infinite life” of the “universally diffused” Ādi-Buddha.[329]
Along the same lines, Amṛtānanda speaks of sentient beings possessing a “soul” or jīva which is also called prāṇa and is “a particle of the essence of Adi-Buddha.” He says of those who will attain nirvāṇa that “their jyotish (flame, essence) will be absorbed into the jyotish of Buddha.”[330] Although Amṛtānanda speaks in term of the Aiśvarika understanding, the same could be said of Prajñāpāramitā Guhyeśvari; she is also spoken of in Newar Buddhist texts as both an all-pervading jyotis (flame) and jala (water), conformably to her ultimately non-dual and androgynous nature.[331] Elsewhere, Amṛtānanda asserts that Ādi-Buddha, who encompasses the phenomenal universe in non-dual unity and is the only true monad, is the sustainer of saṃsāra and if he “averts his face” from it, saṃsāra would be “annihilated” and only Ādi-Buddha would remain.[332] As it is the nature of an illusion to disappear when investigated, so it may also be said that those who have realized the identity of their jīva with Ādi-Buddha/Prajñāpāramitā, the prajñopāya, have indeed averted their face from saṃsāra and “annihilated” it, as they have returned to their “proper modality.”[333] So this ultimate svabhāva (the pervader) can do well enough without the unreal illusory world of phenomena (the pervaded) but phenomena can’t do without this svabhāva. What we have then is a hierarchical “appearance-reality distinction” like the relationship between Brahman and māyā in Advaita Vedānta. In other words, the ultimate svabhāva is other-empty and we may identify the Nepalese Svābhāvikas with the Great Madhyamaka tradition.
Summarizing our findings, the Svābhāvika doctrine may be understood firstly as a foundational Buddhist cosmogony. On a deeper level, the Svābhāvikas may be understood as two different schools of Buddhism, one belonging to Hīnayāna and the other to Mahāyāna and both having a place within the ascending hierarchical structure of Newar Buddhism. The Mahāyana school, Madhyamaka, is the philosophical basis for the final level of understanding. This final level is a Vajrayāna teaching that is embodied in the goddess Prajñāpāramitā Guhyeśvari and persists within Newar Buddhism to this day as its most esoteric doctrine. It is in essence a Vajrayāna teaching that has the texts of the Kālacakra tradition as its primary theoretical basis and finds its closest parallels in the Great Madhyamaka tradition of other-emptiness to be found in Tibet. A major through-line connecting these various levels, as well as the Theosophical teachings and Hodgson’s understanding of Buddhist “materialism,” is the element ākāśa which is an almost ultimate cosmic principle that is intimately connected with the Absolute non-conceptual noumenon, the svābhāvikakāya, which is itself functionally identical with mūlaprakṛti. So the Nepalese Svābhāvikas are far from being a source of embarrassment for Theosophy. Rather, they are a source of confirmation and illumination that can allow us to see the teachings of the primordial universal Wisdom-Religion in a new light.
Fig. 18 "Cover of Lalitavistara Manuscript," 1803, British Library. This cover depicts Amṛtānanda (far left) presenting the Lalitavistara to Captain Robert Knox (far right). Between them are Mañjuśrī on the left, Svayambhū Mahācaitya in the middle, and the dharmodayā on the right.