Dharmodayā: The Identity and Esoteric Tradition of the Nepalese Svābhāvikas Unveiled and Interpreted in the Light of Theosophy, or the Primordial Wisdom-Religion

​​[148] Hodgson, Essays, 40. Refer to previous note 147 for evidence that this goddess is truly a prakṛteśvarī, as Hodgson has it. Cf. Adrian Snodgrass, The Symbolism of the Stupa (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1992), 212-214. Cf. also Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults, 332n1: “It should be noted… that the word Prakṛti in classical Sanskrit literature as well as in the Purāṇic literature became frankly synonymous with the word Śakti or Ādi-devi, the primordial goddess.” Bosch writes in his The Golden Germ, 51: “The Indian conceptions of the origin of life have of old been dominated by the belief in dual forces in nature, opposite in every respect and maintaining this complete contrast throughout eternity: the one, the male element, appearing as the creative breath, omnipresent, all-pervading and composed of pure light and intelligence; the other, the female element, being embodied in the lightless, chaotic, inert mass of the primeval waters. Left to its own resources either of these elements is barren, lacks creative power. They are like the lame and the blind to whom purusha and prakṛti in the Sāṃkhya system are likened. Not till they unite, till creative breath enters the waters, does the great mystery become a fact. At that moment and at that point Life, Hiraṇyagarbha, ‘the Golden Germ’, that is to be the beginning and origin of all creation, is born.” Cf. Richard Payne Knight, The Symbolical Language of Ancient Art and Mythology: An Inquiry, ed. Alexander Wilder (New York: J.W. Bouton, 1892), 25-28; G.R.S. Mead, Orpheus (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1896), 60-62; Gerald Massey, Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World Vol. 1 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), 36-39; H. Stanley Redgrove, “The Phallic Element in Alchemical Tradition,” in R.A. Gilbert, ed., The Journal of the Alchemical Society 1913-1915 (Bristol: Imagier Publishing, 2017), 331-360. As we have discussed previously in note 14, the puruṣa and prakṛti of the Sāṁkhya teachings are an important element of the pre-Vedic Buddhism posited in Theosophy. In the decades leading up to the establishment of the Theosophical Society, writers such as Henry O’Brien, Godfrey Higgins, and Hargrave Jennings, following the speculations of earlier Orientalists, would also write of an extremely ancient pre-Vedic Buddhism “preceding by far Gautama Buddha,” and H.P.B. and her more informed readers would have had this context in mind, as Tim Rudbøg notes in his paper “Early Debates in the Reception of Buddhism: Theosophy and Esoteric Buddhism,” in Tim Rudbøg and Erik Reenberg Sand, ed., Imagining the East: The Early Theosophical Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 77-81. These writers would posit the centrality of what Bosch identifies as the old Indian cosmogonic conception to this primordial Buddhism; i.e. the duality of male and female, with the male principle being represented by fire or light and the female being represented by water. Although many of the individual findings of these writers are no longer supportable on the basis of current knowledge, in the broad outline they may not have been wrong; such a conception is exactly paralleled in the Tantric Buddhist teaching of the Ādi-Buddha and his consort, as we have seen, and H.P.B. explicitly indicates that the Ādi-Buddha teaching is one that is far older than the Buddha of our current age (see Spierenburg, comp., The Buddhism of H.P. Blavatsky, 3-4, 17-18, 197), a statement that finds support in Gaudapada’s Māṇḍūkya-kārikā and Buddhist traditions of the extreme antiquity of the Kālachakra Tantra (see note 14 again). Although H.P.B. would frequently criticize the excesses of the “phallicism” current in anthropological research, she nevertheless maintained that all these works “are based on truth with regard to the facts given.” It is only insofar as their “fundamental conclusions and deductions” are concerned that these works are “all… erroneous and unjust.” (Caldwell, comp., The Esoteric Papers, 90). Indeed, she maintained “the purity of early phallicism” i.e. archaic phallicism based on impersonal principles rather than personal deities, for the dichotomy of male and female as reflected in ancient symbolism was a true aspect of the Wisdom-Religion that reflected ontological and cosmogonical truth (The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, 383). As the Mahatma M. writes: “In Cosmogony and the work of nature the positive and the negative or the active and passive forces correspond to the male and female principles. Your spiritual efflux comes not from ‘behind the veil’ but is the male seed falling into the veil of cosmic matter. The active is attracted by the passive principle and the Great Nag, the serpent emblem of the eternity, attracts its tail to its mouth forming thereby a circle (cycles in the eternity) in that incessant pursuit of the negative by the positive. Hence the emblem of the lingam[,] the phallus[,] and the (k)teis [i.e. yoni]. The one and chief attribute of the universal spiritual principle — the unconscious but ever active life-giver — is to expand and shed; that of the universal material principle to gather in and fecundate. Unconscious and non-existing when separated, they become consciousness and life when brought together” (Barker, comp., Mahatma Letters, 71). The “Maha Sahib,” the Master Serapis Bey, likewise wrote “that where a truly spiritual love seeks to consolidate itself doubly by a pure, permanent union of the two, in its earthly sense, it commits no sin, no crime in the eyes of the great Ain Soph, for it is but the divine repetition of the Male and Female Principles – the microcosmal reflection of the first condition of Creation.” See C. Jinarājadāsa, comp., Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, Second Series (Adyar: The Theosophical Publishing House, 2002), 42. On phallicism and the works of O’Brien, Higgins, and Jennings, see the analysis and summaries in Godwin, The Theosophical Enlightenment, 1-25, 76-91, 261-275. In the late 70s and early 80s, the no longer en vogue phallicist theme was revisited by some excellent and very intuitive scholars; these efforts are Mircea Eliade’s “Spirit, Light, and Seed,” in his Occultism, Witchcraft, and Cultural Fashions: Essays in Comparative Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 93-119, which should be read with the appropriate cautions, Alex Wayman’s “Male, Female, and Androgyne: per Buddhist Tantra, Jacob Boehme, and the Greek and Taoist Mysteries,” in Michel Strickmann, ed., Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honor of R.A. Stein Vol. 2 (Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Ètudes Chinoises, 1983), 592-631, and John Irwin’s “The Axis Mundi and the Phallus; Some Unrecognised East-West Parallels,” in Venetia J. Newall, ed., Folklore Studies in the Twentieth Century: Proceedings of the Centenary Conference of the Folklore Society (Woodbridge / Totowa: D.S. Brewer / Rowman & Littlefield, 1980), 250-259. These papers collectively bring the subject relatively up-to-date, although there has been no further work in this area; this may owe as much to the prevailing positivist disdain in academia towards acknowledging substantive cross-cultural parallels as anything else. Also relevant to these matters, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya, in his Lokāyata: A Study in Ancient Indian Materialism (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1959), 359ff., presents evidence that the Sāṁkhya school was originally a kind of svabhāvavāda and that its puruṣa and prakṛti are to be understood as male and female, respectively, in what might be called an ancient proto-Tantric understanding. However, his Marxist analysis of these doctrines and the consequent marginalization of puruṣa, which he is unable to fully exorcize from the Sāṁkhya system, must be rejected. See also Johnston, Early Samkhya, 67-72. Refer also to note 103.​

[149] Hodgson, Essays, 59, 95, 115-116. This myth may also be found in the translation/paraphrase of the Svayambhū Purāṇa in Warren W. Smith, ed., Mythological History of the Nepal Valley from Svayambhu Purana, trans. Mana Bajra Bajracharya (Kathmandu: Avalok Publishers, 1978), 14 and in the extensive summaries in Hem Raj Shakya’s Śri Svayambhū Mahācaitya and Dina Bangdel’s doctoral dissertation, Manifesting the Maṇḍala. There is also a lightly abbreviated translation by Kamal Prakash Malla of one of the recensions of the Svayambhu Purana, mentioned in note 70. See also Alexander von Rospatt’s essay, “On the Monumental Scroll of the Svayambhūpurāṇa Now Kept in the VMFA Collection,” in Jinah Kim and Todd Lewis, ed., Dharma and Puṇya: Buddhist Ritual Art of Nepal (Boston: Hotei Publishing, 2019), 166-186, for a visual representation of the story via the reproduction of the titular scroll and summarizing comments by von Rospatt which epitomize the myth. A lower resolution reproduction of this essay may be found on www.academia.edu. Our summary draws from these sources as well as Hodgson’s account. Gutschow, in his The Nepalese Caitya, 34, also notes the ubiquity of the fire and water symbolism derived from this sacred myth in the reliefs of Nepalese caityas. Scholars that have commented on this legend have repeated ad nauseam that the notion that the Kathmandu Valley was once a lake has considerable backing in archaeological fact, and so we now also repeat this.

[150] Dina Bangdel, “Tantra in Nepal,” in John C. Huntington and Dina Bangdel, ed., The Circle of Bliss: Buddhist Meditational Art (Chicago: Serindia Publications, 2003), 34. The Cakrasamvara maṇḍala is thus the maṇḍala in the name Nepāl Maṇḍala (Gutschow, The Nepalese Caitya, 15-17). Cf. the words recited at “the beginning of every ritual performed on behalf of a parishioner” by Vajrācārya priests cited in Gellner, Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest, 191: “…in the place of the caitya Śrī Svayambhū, which is presided over (adhiṣṭhita) by Śrī Guhyeśvarī Prajñā Pāramitā, in the land presided over by Śrī Mañjuśrī, in the land (or mandala) of Nepal, which has the form of the mandala of Śrī Saṃvara…” For how the representation of the Kathmandu Valley as a Cakrasaṃvara maṇḍala works, see Naresh Man Bajracharya’s 1998 paper “Buddhism in Nepal and Nepal Mandala,” (http://web.archive.org/web/20081121030352/http://www.lrcnepal.org/papers/cbhnm-ppr-4.htm) and Yoshizaki, The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot, 59-62.

[151] Lewis and Bajracharya, “Vajrayāna Traditions in Nepal,” 97-98.

[152] Smith, ed., Mythological History, 42-44. Cf. Bosch, The Golden Germ, 51-57; Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, 57-58, 342-349, 379-386. Cf. also Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults, 340-341: “In some of the Nepalese schools of Buddhism Prajñā as Dharma is given the highest prominence in the scheme of the triad [Triratna] and Buddha emanates from Prajñā. In some of the Hindu Tantras also we find that the goddess has been given more prominence than the Lord, the former being conceived as the first principle. In some places, it has been pointed out, the primordial Lord is seen floating in water. What is this water? It is, according to some of the Tantras, Śakti, who is pervading the whole universe in the form of water. This belief influenced the Nepalese Buddhists also, who have often conceived of Ādi-prajñā in the form of primordial water.” At this point, Dasgupta cites Amṛtānanda’s Dharma-koṣa-saṃgraha for confirmatory evidence as well as comparable cosmogonic material from other cultures (341-342). Cf. also the ubiquitous Newar Buddhist cosmogonic and ritual conception of the water pot, or kalaṡa, which is filled with celestial waters as detailed in Yoshizaki, The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot, 1-11, passim.

[153] Bangdel, Manifesting the Maṇḍala, 430-434; Gutschow, The Nepalese Caitya, 92. Cf. Bosch, The Golden Germ, 164-166. Newar tradition is explicit in its identification of the Svayambhū stūpa with Sumeru, but the scholar John Irwin was convinced that all stūpas embody this ancient cosmogonic symbolism. His articles on this question are fascinating, well worth reviewing, and, in our opinion, convincing. This assessment holds good also for his prior four-part series in The Burlington Magazine and follow-up papers, along similar lines, on the so-called Aśokan pillars. It may also be noted, as an aside, that Irwin’s controversial theory of the totalizing influence of the ancient cosmogonical conception, by turns solar and phallic, on the ancient monuments or Sacred Spots of the Indian subcontinent and indeed throughout the civilizations of antiquity more generally, goes some way towards validating the basis of Henry O’Brien’s old theory that the Irish round towers are likewise a remnant of an ancient and widespread Sabian/Buddhist cosmogonic religious conception, what a Theosophist might see as a very archaic manifestation of the Wisdom-Religion. Irwin writes, in a passage pregnant with significance, that it “should not escape us that the Sanskrit term for ‘Sacred Spot’ is bhavana, from the root bhū-, ‘coming into existence’. The meaning is in danger of being lost if we say it is the place of the ‘Creation’, because in the archaic context, ‘creation’ is a misnomer. The world was not conceived as having been ‘created’ in our modern sense of something created out of nothing: it was imagined as having been shaped or moulded from what already existed (that is, asat or ‘chaos’). We must be equally cautious in using the word ‘evolution’, now contaminated by Darwinian notions which blind us to the real complexities. Cosmogonic ‘evolution’ is closer to the strictly etymological sense of Latin evolvere (e + volvere, ‘roll’); it is a rolling out or unfolding of what is already potential. Evolution from Chaos to Order (Sanskrit asat to sat) did not imply a succession of two different states, since the emergence of the ordered cosmos did not put an end to the existence of asat (the undifferentiated world of Chaos). The latter continued to exist in the differentiated form, essential to creativity - a notion that survived to inspire Plato's well-known image of the charioteer drawn by the Black and White horses: the Black one of lawlessness; and the White one of decorum and restraint. Without the former, he wrote, there would be neither motion nor life, and therefore no creativity; but without the White, no limits (Phaedrus, 253-254).” See John Irwin, “The Mystery of the (Future) Buddha's First Words,” Annali dell’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 41 (1981), 644. In this description we have a succinct presentation of cosmogonic evolution that is in essence identical to the Svābhāvika understanding and also embodied in all the truly archaic sacred monuments of India, including even the tree shrine that anciently marked the place of the Buddha’s birth at Lumbini in present-day Nepal; see R.A.E. Coningham, et al., “The earliest Buddhist shrine: excavating the birthplace of the Buddha, Lumbini (Nepal),” Antiquity 87 (2013), 1116-1117. Refer also to note 148. On the dwelling place of Ādi-Buddha/Cakrasaṃvara, see Robert Thurman’s preface to Gray, trans., The Cakrasamvara Tantra, x; Yoshizaki, The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot, 38-41; Burnouf, Introduction, 564-565; Hodgson, Essays, 42-43; Blavatsky. Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, 232-233. H.P.B. interprets Sumeru, Ādi-Buddha, and the associated dhātus (elements) or lokas (realms), inclusive of kāmaloka, rūpaloka, and arūpaloka, in terms of cosmogony, emanation, and evolution, similarly to the Sephiroth of the Kabbalah; indeed, she regards the Buddhist conception as the original and writes that the Kabbalah “has survived to show that their philosophy was precisely that of the modern Nepal Buddhists, the Svabhavikas.” She notes that both philosophies include eternal cycles of creation and dissolution and the generation of all things from self-created primal natures (Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, 220). Cf. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, 199-200 for a diagram comparing these two standpoints. H.P.B.’s interpretation of Sumeru and the three realms is also borne out by the findings of Schayer (“Precanonical Buddhism,” 125-130) and Maryla Falk, Nāma-Rūpa and Dharma-Rūpa: Origin and Aspects of an Ancient Indian Conception (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1943), 97-137. Retrieved from www.archive.org.

[154] Giuseppe Tucci, Rati-līlā: An Interpretation of the Tantric Imagery of the Temples of Nepal, trans. James Hogarth (Geneva: Nagel Publishers, 1969), 33. Retrieved from www.archive.org. Cf. Bosch, The Golden Germ, 164-166. Cf. also Gustave Le Bon, Voyage to Nepal, trans. Niloufar Maoven and Cecilia Leslie (Bangkok: White Orchid Press, 1996), 54: “The Hindu linga has also been adopted by the Buddhists of Nepal, but after totally changing its meaning. Instead of considering it as the symbol of Siva's male creative power, it is regarded as the emblem of the lotus in which the Adi-Buddha revealed himself in the shape of a flame to the Buddhists. Its shape has also been modified. Four images of Buddha have been carved on its sides and its top is adorned like Buddhist caityas.” Contra Le Bon, however, the “male creative power” and flame or light are not contradictory to each other, as we have seen. For more on this matter, see John Irwin, “The Axial Symbolism of the Early Stūpa: An Exegesis,” in Anna Libera Dallapiccola and Stephanie Zingel-Avè Lallemant, ed., The Stūpa: Its Religious, Historical, and Architectural Significance (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1980), 27-29; Gutschow, The Nepalese Caitya, 92.

[155] Bosch, The Golden Germ, 122. This padmamūla is also a flower like the visible lotus flower above the waters of which it is the root, and itself symbolizes the hiraṇyagarbha, the titular “Golden Germ” of Bosch’s volume. Bosch believes that this primeval lotus and its association with dharma and the primordial waters was also very influential on Buddhist conceptions of dharma (81-82, 119-124) and Guhyeśvari, who is equated with dharma in Newar Buddhism, is also represented as a primeval lotus. See Hodgson, “Translation of the Naipáliya Devata Kalyána, with Notes,” 402: “May that mysterious portion of Prajna, born of the lotus with three leaves in the form of Guhyeswari, made manifest by Manja Deva, void of form, the personification of desire, favourable to many, the giver of boons to her worshippers, praised by Brahma, Vishnu and Siva, revealed on the 9th day of the dark half of Marg in the fathomless waters (of Nagavasa), be propitious to us. I adore her.” See also Shakya, Śrī Svayambhū Mahācaitya, 13; Bangdel, Manifesting the Mandala, 887-888; Amber Moore, “Abodes of the Vajra-Yoginīs: Mount Maṇicūḍa and Paśupatikṣetra as Envisaged in the Tridalakamala and Maṇiśailamahāvadāna,” European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 55 (2020), 55-61. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/240. Cf. Gutschow, The Nepalese Caitya, 102-103. Bosch is unable to say how the flower of the lotus came to represent its root. H.P.B., however, provides the answer. She writes: “Sir W. Jones (and before him archaic botany) showed that the seeds of the Lotus contain—even before they germinate—perfectly formed leaves, the miniature shape of what one day, as perfect plants, they will become: nature thus giving us a specimen of the preformation of its production… the seed of all phanerogamous plants being proper flowers containing an embryo plantlet ready formed.” See The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, 57. The root being represented by the flower, then, besides having a certain basis in botanical fact, succinctly symbolizes the doctrine of self-unfolding from inherent self-nature or svābhāva, the quintessential Svābhāvika doctrine. For follow-up studies on aspects of Bosch’s thesis, see Jan Gonda, “Background and Variants of the Hiraṇyagarbha Conception,” in Perala Ratnam, ed., Studies in Indo-Asian Art and Culture Vol. 3 (New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture, 1974), 39-54 and Vajracharya, Frog Hymns and Rain Babies, 117-169ff.

[156] Falk, Nāma-Rūpa and Dharma-Rūpa, 1-14, 20-21ff, 56-67.

[157] Dasgupta, Obscure Religious Cults, 283.

[158] Hodgson, Essays, 25, 55-56.

[159] Cf. Ingmar de Boer, “Svabhāva as Prima Materia (v.4),” The Book of Dzyan – The Quest for an Original Text of the Book of Dzyan (blog), June 24, 2020, http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/svabhava-as-prima-materia-v-4/. Unfortunately Burnouf, who was usually a very attentive reader of his sources, mixed the doctrines of both schools together, as evidenced by the excerpt from his book presented in this essay. This doubtless contributed to confusing the issue due to his great authority.

[160] Hodgson, Essays, 104.

[161] Cf. N. Ross Reat, The Śālistamba Sūtra (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), 11-13.

[162] Hodgson, Essays, 55, 73.

[163] Hodgson, Essays, 79-81. More specifically, the doctrine is attributed to “one section at least” of the Svābhāvikas and the entirety of the Kārmikas. The “at least” qualification is important in indicating that Hodgson had no information either from Amṛtānanda or his texts indicating that this doctrine was not the property of every section of the Svābhāvikas or indeed of all of his schools. What was not known then to Hodgson is that “the Dharma-theory,” of which the āyatanas form a crucial part, “is common to all schools, and provides the framework within which Buddhist wisdom operates,” as Edward Conze notes in his Buddhist Thought in India, 92.

[164] Burnouf, Introduction, 461-462. There is also an internal and external chain of dependent origination. See Reat, The Śālistamba Sūtra, 34ff.

[165] Hodgson, Essays, 79-81.

[166] Theodore Stcherbatsky, The Central Conception of Buddhism and the Meaning of the Word “Dharma” (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2018), 4-9.

[167] Burnouf, Introduction, 18, 512.

[168] Stcherbatsky, Central Conception, 37-43, 75. Schayer’s protégé Constantin Régamy writes that the “lengths to which the Sarvāstavādins went to explain this eternity of the factors of impermanence can only be explained by the tight association of the ancient concept of dharma with the attributes of the Absolute: transcendence and eternity.” See Constantin Régamy, “The Question of Primitive Buddhism in the Closing Works of Stanislaw Schayer,” The Eastern Buddhist 48:1 (2019), 44. Retrieved from www.jstor.org. Compare these comments with the thoughts of Lambert Schmithausen relayed in Anne MacDonald, “The World Transcendent. A Madhyamaka Interpretation,” in Bernhard Nitsche and Marcus Schmücker, ed., God or the Divine? Religious Transcendence beyond Monism and Theism, between Personality and Impersonality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 121-122. Retrieved from www.academia.edu. She writes, following Schmithausen, that the Sarvāstivādin dharma ontology “appears to represent the assimilation and redesigning (‘antisubstantializing’) of the Sāṅkhya concept of prakṛti and the pre-existence (and post-existence) of this Ur-matter: the Ur-matter, in which qualities and states latently exist beyond their emergence in the present, loses its substance, so that in the past and the future only the pre- and post-existing independent qualities and states remain.” Taken together, these observations are suggestive as to the nature of primitive and even pre-Vedic Buddhism. Compare with note 14.

[169] Schayer, Ausgewählte Kapitel, 55-56.

[170] Hodgson, Essays, 55, 79-81.

[171] Stcherbatsky, Central Conception, 48-54.

[172] Hodgson, Essays, 24. Hodgson cites this information on Plotinus to “M. Laurien’s account of Newton’s discoveries p. 387.” The correct citation, which was by no means easy to uncover, should be Colin Maclaurin, An Account of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophical Discoveries in Four Books (London, 1775), 397. Retrieved from books.google.com. The relevant book chapter gives a good overview of the Newtonian theological view which Hodgson subscribed to in contrast to pantheism, which we have had occasion to discuss earlier. Maclaurin indicts the deity of Plotinus as being nothing more than a world-soul bereft of “intellect or understanding.” It is relevant to note in regards to the parallel Hodgson draws between the Svābhāvikas and the understanding of the Neoplatonic tradition on the issue of the annihilation of sensory input that Edward Conze would draw much the same parallel between Neoplatonism and Abhidharma scholasticism more generally. See his Buddhist Thought in India, 65-66.

[173] K.L. Dhammajoti, “The Sarvāstivāda Conception of Nirvāṇa,” in Buddhist and Indian Studies in Honor of Professor Sodo Mori (Hamamatsu: Kokusai Bukkyoto Kyokai, 2002), 348. Retrieved from http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/Sarv%C4%81stiv%C4%81da-Conception-of-Nirv%C4%81%E1%B9%87a.pdf.

[174] Stcherbatsky, Central Conception, 53.

[175] Anne MacDonald, “Knowing Nothing: Candrakīrti and Yogic Perception,” in Eli Franco and Dagmar Eigner, ed., Yogic Perception, Meditation and Altered States of Consciousness (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen akademie der Wissenschaften, 2009), 140-142. Retrieved from www.academia.edu.

[176] Eugéne Obermiller, Nirvāṇa in Tibetan Buddhism (Delhi: Classics India Publications, 1989), 37-38.

[177] MacDonald, “Knowing Nothing,” 140-142.

[178] Hodgson, Essays, 24, 58, 61.

[179] Hodgson, Essays, 25.

[180] Hajime Nakamura, A History of Early Vedanta Philosophy Vol. 1, trans. Trevor Leggett, Sengakul Mayeda, and Taitez Unno (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983), 147-151.

[181] Hirakawa Akira, A History of Indian Buddhism From Sakyamuni to Early Mahayana, trans. Paul Groner (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998), 185-186.

[182] Bhattacharyya, The Indian Buddhist Iconography, 9.

[183] David Gellner, “Monastic Initiation in Newar Buddhism,” in Richard F. Gombrich, ed., Indian Ritual and its Exegesis (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1988), 42-112. Retrieved from www.academia.edu. The bare chuyegu ritual is derived from the Mūlasarvāstivāda monastic Vinaya lineage. See Alexander von Rospatt, “The Transformation of the Monastic Ordination (pravrajyā) Into a Rite of Passage in Newar Buddhism,” in Astrid Zotter and Christof Zotter, ed., Words and Deeds: Hindu and Buddhist Initiations in India and Nepal (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), 203-206ff. Retrieved from www.academia.edu. Although the relationship between the Sarvāstivāda and Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinayas is somewhat obscure and debated, the names would suggest that a relationship does indeed exist. On this matter, Bhikkhu Sujato, while making a strong defense of Frauwallner’s case that the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya derived ultimately from the region of Mathura as opposed to the Kashmir of the Vaibhāṣika Sarvāstivādins, notes that this Vinaya nevertheless also incorporates Kashmiri traditions of the Sarvāstivādins and holds that there is no good reason to think that both Vinaya lineages did not have more or less the same “all exists” Abhidharma doctrine. He also takes note of the strong association of the Mūlasarvāstivāda Vinaya with avadāna and jātaka stories, probably deriving ultimately from the Mathura lineage figure of Upagupta; the promulgation of such stories is also still to this day a prominent feature of Newar Buddhism as well and doubtless derives from the Mūlasarvāstivādin heritage. See Sujato’s Sects & Sectarianism, 134-146 (Santipada, 2012) and A History of Mindfulness: How Insight Worsted Tranquility in the Saṭṭipathāna Sutta, 350-351 (Santipada, 2012). Retrieved from www.santifm.org. On avadānas and jātakas in Newar Buddhism, see Todd Lewis, "Avadānas and Jātakas in the Newar Tradition of the Kathmandu Valley: Ritual Performances of Mahāyāna Buddhist Narratives," Religion Compass, 9:8 (2015), 233-253. Retrieved from www.academia.edu.

[184] David Gellner, “The Newar Buddhist Monastery - An Anthropological and Cultural Typology,” in Niels Gutschow and Axel Michaels, ed., Heritage of the Kathmandu Valley: Proceedings of an International Conference in Lϋbeck, June 1985 (Sankt Augustin: VGH Wissenschaftsverlag, 1987), 382-398 and Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest, 167ff. Cf. Bangdel, Manifesting the Maṇḍala, 116-120 and Yoshizaki, The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot, 35-38. The institution of caste and the total abandonment of monastic celibacy was in large part a situation forced onto Newar Buddhism by the dominant Hindu society, which Newar Buddhists adapted to for the survival of their tradition. “It is easy to imagine how changing the details of practice to ensure the survival of the Dharma, what the Mahāyāna tradition would celebrate as upāya-kauśalya, would have been a conscious ideal in the minds of ancient Buddhist monastic leaders.” At the same time, it must be emphasized that celibate monasticism never actually died out completely as there “were Tibetan monasteries at Svayambhū and Bauddha where the celibate monastic traditions continued, institutions where Newars interested in this spiritual path could be ordained” (Lewis and Bajracharya, “Vajrayāna Traditions in Nepal,” 92, 137). See also Lewis, “A Chronology of Newar-Tibetan Relations,” 149-150 who writes even more forcefully that “celibate monasticism in the Buddhist field of Kathmandu Valley civilization is a historical continuity and did not disappear.” At this point, it may also be worth pointing out that although Newar Buddhists are by and large householders and thus not celibate, they nevertheless do not interpret the sexual material in the Tantras literally; it is all understood in a symbolic manner. See Gellner, Monk, Householder, and Tantric Priest, 297-304.

[185] Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Reciting the Goddess: Narratives of Place and the Making of Hinduism in Nepal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 52-53.

[186] Hodgson, Essays, 80.

[187] Yoshizaki, The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot, 38-41.

[188] Gellner, “The Newar Buddhist Monastery,” 391-392, 398.

[189] Hodgson, Essays, 55-56, 61.

[190] Cf. Saunders, “A Note on Śakti and Dhyānibuddha,” 302: “The Svābhāvikas recognize Void as the real nature of things (svabhāva) and the two states of quiescence (nivṛtti) and phenomenal development (pravṛtti).”

[191] Hodgson, Essays, 83.

[192] Joshi and Joshi, Harihar-Indu’s Bibliography, 30. This annotation is to page 61, line 10, of his Essays, a passage dealing specifically with the Prājñika doctrine and cited above.

[193] Elijah Jordan, “The Unknowable of Herbert Spencer,” The Philosophical Review, 20:3 (1911), 291-309. Retrieved from www.jstor.org. See Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, 14-15, 19, 54 and Barker, comp., Mahatma Letters, 159 for Theosophical commentary on this doctrine of Spencer. On the “Absolute” more generally, see the articles “Absolute” and “Absolute (Vedantic and Buddhist)” by J.B. Baillie and Satis Chandra Vidyabhusana, respectively, in James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1908), 40-48.

[194] Hodgson, Essays, 56. Gellner notes that “Hodgson was ahead of his time in understanding that śūnyatā does not mean ‘nothingness’” (“Hodgson’s Blind Alley?,” 14).

[195] Edward Conze, Buddhism: Its Essence and Development (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1959), 142-143 and Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1967), 207-209. Cf. note 103 and Blavatsky, “Editors’ Note,” 131: “From Marcus, the Gnostic, down to the last mystic student of the Kabala and Occultism, that which they called their ‘Bride’ was ‘Occult Truth,’ personified as a naked maiden, otherwise called Sophia or Wisdom.” There is a substantial amount of evidence for some manner of connection between Buddhism (inclusive of Hīnayāna, Mahāyāna, and Vajrayāna) and the phenomenon of Gnosticism. See Edward Conze, “Buddhism and Gnosis,” in Ugo Bianchi, ed., The Origins of Gnosticism: Colloquium of Messina 13-18 April 1966 (Leiden: Brill, 1967), 651-667; Wallace, The Inner Kālacakratantra, 143-149; Giovanni Verardi, “The Buddhists, the Gnostics and the Antinomistic Society, or the Arabian Sea in the First-Second Century AD,” Annali del’Istituto Orientale di Napoli 57 (1997), 323-346. Retrieved from opar.unior.it/1042/1/Articolo_Verardi_pdf.pdf. Such comparisons are not new; early modern writers like Mosheim assimilated Gnosticism to the same “Oriental philosophy” to which Buddhism was also assigned. Later, the very well informed missionary and academic Orientalist Isaac Jakob Schmidt, who lived and worked for a time among the Buddhist Kalmyks and was Schopenhauer’s main authority on Tibetan Buddhism, would directly compare these two spiritual philosophies. Schmidt’s writings, based as they were on the Vajrayāna Buddhism of the Tibetan tradition, would in turn be the catalyst for the still very insightful comparison and analysis to be found in Ferdinand Christian Baur’s Christian Gnosis: Christian Religious Philosophy in Its Historical Development, trans. Robert F. Bowen, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Oregon: Cascade Books, 2020), 3-7, 28-34. Later, C.W. King, an authority drawn upon by H.P.B., would present a similar analysis, comparing the Gnostic doctrines especially with those of Newar Buddhism as found in the essays of Hodgson. See King’s The Gnostics and their Remains, Ancient and Medieval 2nd Ed (London: David Nutt, 1887), 49-50ff. Besides monism, emanationism, reincarnation, and absorption, a Gnostic doctrine of particular interest for our purposes, especially in comparison with Vajrayāna, is that of the male and female syzygies.

[196] Edward Conze, “The Development of Prajñāpāramitā Thought,” Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1967), 125. Cf. Stewart, Nature’s God, 88-89: “In much of Epicurean imagery, incidentally, the guiding intuition takes on a female form. For Lucretius, Nature is a ‘goddess,’ Venus, a ‘creatress,’ ‘the fruitful earth,’ a ceaselessly fertile substance, responsible for the ‘conception’ of all things and rightly called ‘mother.’ Bruno embraces the same sensibility. ‘Matter,’ he says, ‘unfolds what it holds folded up,’ it is ‘a thing divine, the best parent, generator, and mother of all natural things,’ and so it is ‘called woman (to gather everything into a single term) by those who have most effectively evaluated its reality.’ Vanini, too, evinces his fealty to the Epicurean ‘creatress’ divinity when he describes Nature as ‘the Queen and Goddess of the Mortal Ones.’”

[197] Alex Wayman, The Buddhist Tantras, 166-169.

[198] Hodgson, Essays, 73ff, 85ff.

[199] The navadharma or navagrantha, the nine books, constitute the dharma maṇḍala, one of three Triratna maṇḍalas. The dharma maṇḍala itself represents Prajñāpāramitā and the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā is placed in the center of the maṇḍala. See Tuladhar-Douglas, Remaking Buddhism for Medieval Nepal, 95, 144-147, Locke, Karunamaya, 193-196, and Alexander James O’Neill, “Textual Manifestations: The Use and Significance of Mahāyāna Literature in Newar Buddhism,” European Bulletin of Himalayan Research, 54 (2020), 36-65. Retrieved from https://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/292. See also Jinah Kim, Receptacle of the Sacred: Illustrated Manuscripts and the Buddhist Book Cult in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) for more on the intimately related topic of Buddhist book worship, particularly as it relates to Newar Buddhism and the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā.

[200] Hodgson, Essays, 13, 16, 60.

[201] Conze, Buddhism, 140-142 and Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies, 217-220. See Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, 531-532 for her view on Pyrrho, whose philosophy she believes parallels that of the Svābhāvikas.

[202] Edward Conze, “The Ontology of the Prajñāpāramitā,” Philosophy East and West, 3:2 (1953), 118-119. Retrieved from www.jstor.org.

[203] Johannes Bronkhorst, “Reflections on the origins of Mahāyanā,” Séptimo Centenario de los Estudios Orientales en Salamanca (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2012), 494-495. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net. There are many indications of the influence of the Sarvāstivādin school upon the Prajñāpāramitā texts; K.L. Dhammajoti, the uncontested modern expert on Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma, writes that the “early Prajñāpāramitā scriptures (e.g. the Pañcaviṃśatisāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā)… display, from the beginning, an unmistakable familiarity with Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma doctrines. These include (at least, in respect of enumeration, terminology, and broad outline): the contrast between the perfected wisdom (particularly the notion of sarvākārajñatā) and compassion (mahākarunā) of the Buddha and those of the two yānas (pratyekabuddha and śrāvaka); the process of abandoning contaminations, divided into darśanamārga (including the distinctive Sarvāstivādin scheme of the 16 kṣaṇas and the 16 ākāras of the four noble truths) and bhāvanāmārga, the path of cultivation; meditative attainment such as the nine anupūrvavihārasamāpattis; contamination (kleśa) vs habitual residue (vāsanā), and that the Buddha alone was able to completely abandon all kleśas together with the vāsanā; etc.” See K.L. Dhammajoti, “The Contribution of Saṃghabhadra to Our Understanding of Abhidharma Doctrines,” in Bart Dessein and Weijen Teng, ed., Text, History, and Philosophy: Abhidharma across Buddhist Scholastic Traditions (Boston: Brill, 2016), 223-224. Retrieved from www.researchgate.net. Bronkhorst likewise maintains that the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, and other texts of the Prajñāpāramitā class, “is largely built on the scholastic achievements” of the Abhidharma ontologists of Greater Gandhāra and neighboring Kashmir who were perhaps the Sarvāstivādins. Noteworthy also is that the earliest extant manuscripts of the Aṣṭasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā are from Greater Gandhāra (“Reflections,” 492-494). Bronkhorst’s emphasis on the centrality of Greater Gandhāra in the formulation of these doctrines is very significant, as Nepal and Gandhara are connected. The Nepalese cult of Dipankara Buddha, the Buddha of many past kalpas who predicted the coming future enlightenment of Śākyamuni Buddha to the latter in one of his past incarnations, appears to be derived from this region, and possibly at a very early date. See Kerry Lucinda Brown, Dīpaṅkara Buddha in Nepal: A Contextualization of the Newar Buddhist Iconography and Iconology (Columbus: Ohio State University, 2003), 18-101. Retrieved from www.academia.edu. In addition, the region of Greater Gandhāra, and more specifically the holy land of Oḍḍiyāna, was also the source for the initial propagation of Vajrayāna and the homeland of Padmasambhāva, one of the central apostles of Buddhism in Tibet. He is alleged to have spent four years in the Kathmandu Valley before arriving in Tibet and, according to Min Bahadur Shakya, he is venerated in Nepal under the name of Odianacharya and the ritual hat of the Vajrācāryas is called an “Odianacharya hat” after him. See his A Short History of Buddhism in Nepal 2nd Ed (Kathmandu: Young Buddhist Publications, 1986), 17. H.P.B. writes some very pregnant passages on Padmasambhāva and the magical arts of Oḍḍiyāna and the neighboring regions of Serindia traversed by the Silk Road in her Isis Unveiled Vol. 1, 599-603, which she felt important enough to reproduce in what would become the posthumous Volume 3 of The Secret Doctrine; these passages may be profitably compared with the many works of the famed Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci on the same subject. See his Tibetan Painted Scrolls Vol. 1, 212-213 and the papers posthumously collected in On Swāt: Historical and Archaeological Notes (Rome: Istituto italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, 1997), especially "Travels of Tibetan Pilgrims in the Swat Valley" (1-57). See also Alexis Sanderson, “The Śaiva Exegesis of Kashmir,” in Dominic Goodall and André Padoux, ed., Mélanges tantriques à la mémoire d’Hélène Brunner / Tantric Studies in Memory of Hélène Brunner (Pondicherry: Institut français d'Indologie / École française d’Extrême-Orient, 2007), 265-269; Luca Maria Olivieri, “Guru Padmasambhava in Context: Archaeological and Historical Evidence from Swat/Uddiyana (c. 8th century CE),” Journal of Bhutan Studies, 34 (2016), 20-42 (www.bhutanstudies.org.bt), as well as Rafi-us Samad, The Grandeur of Gandhara: The Ancient Buddhist Civilization of the Swat, Peshawar, Kabul and Indus Valley (New York: Algora Publishing, 2011) and Sir Aurel Stein, On Ancient Central-Asian Tracks: Brief Narrative of Three Expeditions in Innermost Asia and Northwestern China (New York: Pantheon Books, 1964) and Serindia: Detailed Report of Archaeological Explorations in Central Asia and Westernmost China 5 Volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), especially Vol. 1, 1-24 of the latter, for more on the subjects of Greater Gandhāra, Oḍḍiyāna, and Serindia, or Central Asia. As H.P.B. writes: “When the Nagas, or serpent-worshippers of Kashmere had been converted through the efforts of the apostles sent out by the Sthaviras of the third councils, the religion of Gautama spread like wild-fire. Gandhara, Cabul, and even many of the Satrapies of Alexander the Great, accepted the new philosophy” (Isis Unveiled Vol. 2, 608). Continuing the story, Samad writes: “Gradually the politically, socially and culturally integrated region of Greater Gandhara evolved into a unique civilization. The civilization was at its peak in the first four centuries of the Common Era. In this period Greater Gandhara had developed into a highly interactive region and the impact of its culture was felt in distant regions of Central Asia and China. Around Jalalabad, the modern Afghan capital of Nangarhar Province, at Charikar, Bagram (ancient Kapisa) and Bamiyan, and on either side of the Oxus River, huge Gandhara style monasteries and statues emerged; Khotan at the southern edge of the Taklamakan Desert in the Xinjiang Region of Western China, developed into a major center of Gandhara culture” (The Grandeur of Gandhara, 7). These were the regions of the Silk Road and Central Asia and therein may be found “traces of an immense civilization… [which] is undeniably prehistoric” (The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, xxxii), older even than Gandhara, and the cradle of our Fifth Root-Race. These Silk Road paths were traversed by the famed travelers Xuanzang and Marco Polo, about whom H.P.B. wrote, as well as the later Sir Aurel Stein. H.P.B. herself followed much the same paths in one of her attempts to penetrate Tibet, at one point becoming stranded along with her Tatar Shaman guide in the regions of the great Taklamakan Desert in the Tarim basin before being rescued by a contingent of “Lamaist” horsemen. See Walter Carrithers, “Behind the Mask: Poisoned Pen & Poisoned ‘Popes,’” Theosophical Notes 10:5 (1975), probably one of the most insightful papers on Theosophical historiography despite its bitterness and vitriol.

[204] Conze, “Ontology,” 121.

[205] David Loy, Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1997), 50.

[206] Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine Vol. 1, 61.

[207] Loy, Nonduality, 50. Loy notes that both of these implied meanings are already contained in the root of the word śūnyatā, which is the Sanskrit word śū. Śū means to swell, which may be taken in the sense either of hollowing out or filling up, i.e. “emptiness” and “fullness.” Cf. Neumaier, “Buddhist Forms of Belief in Creation,” 53: “The term śūnya, however, is related to śūna, meaning both ‘swollen,’ ‘budding,’ as well as ‘empty.’ Thus, absolute emptiness is also absolute potential. A state empty of inherent being can adopt all shapes and forms of existence; a place empty of all can hold everything possible. In contrast to common nihilistic understandings of emptiness, the actual meaning of the term implies a very positive, albeit undefined [understanding].”

[208] Nancy McCagney, Nāgārjuna and the Philosophy of Openness (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 21ff.

[209] H.P. Blavatsky, trans., The Voice of the Silence (Pasadena: Theosophical University Press, 2015), 55-56.

[210] Edward Conze, Buddhist Wisdom: Containing the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra (New York: Random House, 2001), 86.

[211] de Boer, “Svabhāva.”

[212] Conze, “Ontology,” 120-121. Cf. Schayer, Ausgewählte Kapitel, 56-57.

[213] Hodgson, Essays, 16.

[214] Haraprasad Shastri, A Descriptive Catalogue of Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Government Collection Under the Care of the Asiatic Society of Bengal Vol 1. (Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1917), 191-193. Retrieved from www.archive.org.

[215] Donald S. Lopez Jr., “The Ambivalent Exegete: Hodgson’s Contributions to the Study of Buddhism,” in David M. Waterhouse, ed., The Origins of Himalayan Studies: Brian Houghton Hodgson in Nepal and Darjeeling 1820-1858 (Boston: Brill, 2016), 73. This secret meaning is the nature of the Bodhisattva path and Hodgson’s compelling description of said path is given explicitly as part of the Prājñika doctrine (Hodgson, Essays, 62). On the subject of the Bodhisattva path in the Prajñapārāmitā scriptures, see Eugéne Obermiller, Prajñapārāmitā in Tibetan Buddhism (Varanasi: Pilgrim’s Publishing, 1999), passim.

[216] Hammar, Studies in the Kālacakra Tantra, 146. See John J. Makransky, Buddhahood Embodied: Sources of Controversy in India and Tibet (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 50-54, 211-256, for the relationship between the pure ultimate svabhāva and the svābhāvikakāya as well as an examination of Haribhadra’s writings on the topic.

[217] Eugéne Obermiller, trans., “The Sublime Science of the Great Vehicle to Salvation, Being a Manual of Buddhist Monism: The Work of Arya Maitreya with a Commentary by Aryasangha,” in Hari Shankar Prasad, ed., The Uttaratantra of Maitreya (Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 1997), 239 (109).

[218] Edward Conze, The Prajñāpāramitā Literature (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2017), 1-2. Prajñāpāramitā is symbolized by water, as we have seen previously, and the nāgas are said to inhabit the primeval lake Kalīhrada as their kingdom in the traditional mythology of the Kathmandu Valley; thus this lake is also called Nāgavāsa. See Smith, ed., Mythological History, 5, 51-60; Yoshizaki, The Kathmandu Valley as a Water Pot, 52-54. It is appropriate, then, that Nāgārjuna should retrieve the Prajñāpāramitā scriptures from the realm of the nāgas. In the exoteric mythological understanding these nāgas are elemental spirits, but H.P.B. understands this to be a cypher for the “ancient initiates.” See Blavatsky, trans., The Voice of the Silence, vi. Jaideva Singh also supports this understanding and backs this opinion up with Buddhist scriptural citations. See Theodore Stcherbatsky, The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāṇa (With Sanskrit Text of Madhyamaka-Kārikā), ed. by Jaideva Singh (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2018), 5. For more on the nāgas, see J. Ph. Vogel, Indian Serpent Lore: Or, The Nāgas in Hindu Legend and Art (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1926). Retrieved from www.archive.org.

[219] Lal Mani Joshi, Studies in the Buddhistic Culture of India During the Seventh and Eighth Centuries A.D. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1987), 201.

[220] Jan Westerhoff, “Nāgārjuna’s Yogācāra,” in Jay L. Garfield and Jan Westerhoff, ed., Madhyamaka and Yogacara: Allies or Rivals? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 165-183.

[221] Nāgārjuna, In Praise of Dharmadhātu, trans. Karl Brunnhölzl (Ithaca: Snow Lion Publications, 2007), 119. The dharmadhātu is also prabhāsvara. See Jacques Mahnich, “Dharmadhâtu = Buddha Nature = Clear Light,” The Book of Dzyan – The Quest for an Original Text of the Book of Dzyan (blog), April 12, 2012, http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/dharmadhatu-buddha-nature-clear-light/.

[222] Conze, “Ontology,” 128.

[223] David Reigle, “The Connection to a Svabhava Teaching in Buddhism,” The Book of Dzyan – The Quest for an Original Text of the Book of Dzyan (blog), March 9, 2012, http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/the-connection-to-a-svabhava-teaching-in-buddhism/. This description calls to mind Amṛtānanda’s singular dharma or dharmadhātu and its many “powers,” i.e.  dharmas.

[224] Hodgson, Essays, 56.

[225]  Stcherbatsky, The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāṇa, 71. Cf. Barker, comp., Mahatma Letters, 515: “The absolute and infinite is composed of the conditioned and finite. Causes are conditioned in their modes of existence and attributes, and as individual aggregates – unconditioned and eternal in their sum or as a collective aggregate.” The Absolutist reading of the relationship of nirvāṇa and saṁsāra in Madhyamaka is supported in Anne MacDonald’s recent careful and philologically informed study, “The World Transcendent,” 128-130, as well as in her “Knowing Nothing,” 144-146. It may also be remarked that nirvāṇa is so far from being regarded as a nothingness and extinction in the Madhyamaka school that Haribhadra regards it as a state which is the very acme of perpetual compassionate activity on behalf of sentient beings. See Obermiller, Nirvāṇa in Tibetan Buddhism, 58-61.

[226] T.R.V. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism: A Study of Mādhyamika System (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2020), 228. Cf. Blavatsky, The Esoteric Writings of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky: A Synthesis of Science, Philosophy, and Religion (Wheaton: Quest Books, 1980), 336-337, who writes of “the truths of Shunyata, the emptiness and impermanence of every terrestrial, evanescent thing, and the mysteries of Prajna Paramita, or ‘knowledge across the river,’ which finally lands the ‘Perfect One’ in the regions of the One Reality.”

[227] Anne MacDonald, In Clear Words: The Prasannapadā, Chapter One Vol. 1 (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2015), 12-13. See also Mitra, Sanskrit Buddhist Literature, 169-172 and 28.19 in the online inventory of Hodgson’s papers.

[228] William L. Ames, “The Notion of Svabhāva in the Thought of Candrakīrti,” Journal of Indian Philosophy, 10 (1982), 166-170. Retrieved from http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/Svabh%C4%81va-in-the-Thought-of-Candrak%C4%ABrti.pdf.

[229] MacDonald, “Knowing Nothing,” 142-144, 159-164. Cf. Jose Ignacio Cabezon and Geshe Lobsang Dargyay, trans., Freedom from Extremes: Gorampa’s “Distinguishing the Views” and the Polemics of Emptiness (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2006), 214-217.

[230] Murti, Central Philosophy, 142. Cf. Cabezon and Dargyay, trans., Freedom from Extremes, 92-95.

[231] Schayer, Ausgewählte Kapitel, 56-57. Cf. Schayer, “Notes and Queries on Buddhism,” 206-211.

[232] Ames, “The Notion of Svabhāva in the Thought of Candrakīrti,” 168. See also Tsongkhapa’s discussion of this passage in his Lam rim chen mo, for English translations of which refer to http://prajnaquest.fr/blog/wp-content/uploads/Lam-rim-chen-mo-on-svabh%C4%81va.pdf. It may be noted also that although Candrakīrti belongs to the Prāsaṅgika sub-school of Madhyamaka, such a presentation of ultimate reality as the above would be more or less acceptable also to the other major sub-school, the Svātantrikas, although they differ on the epistemology of realizing it. See e.g. Kevin A. Vose, Resurrecting Candrakīrti: Disputes in the Tibetan Creation of Prāsaṅgika (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2009), 63ff on these differences. See also Blavatsky, The Esoteric Writings, 336-337 for her perspective on these two schools of Madhyamaka and the ultimate truth posited by them. She writes that they both “maintain the existence of One Absolute pure Nature [and] the illusion of everything outside of it” and “can never be contrasted for one moment with the nihilistic or materialistic schools of India, such as the Charvaka. They are pure Vedantins - if anything - in their views… the Prasanga school is surely the Advaita [Non-Dual] philosophy of the land [Tibet]... the followers of the Prasanga school are nearer to esoteric Buddhism than are the Yogacharyas; for their views are those of the most secret schools…” Although most Buddhists are loath to admit a commonality between their views and any Hindu philosophy, including Advaita Vedanta, it is clear enough from these remarks that H.P.B. understands even exoteric Madhyamaka to be essentially a philosophical Absolutism, as do Schayer, Murti, and the early Stcherbatsky, who were inclined to draw much the same comparison with the Advaita Vedanta teaching to a greater or lesser extent.

[233] John Brough, Pāpa-parimocana, 74-75. The translation of this ritual invocation has been modified to reflect better the underlying Sanskrit.

[234] Anne MacDonald, “The Quest for an English-Speaking Nāgārjuna,” Indo-Iranian Journal, 58:4 (2015), 375. Retrieved from www.jstor.org.

[235] Positivistic and materialistic in the lesser, non-transcendental sense, of course, not in the transcendental sense of Jayatilleke’s “early Buddhist theory of knowledge.”

[236] One reason among many to reject this view is that it is formally indistinguishable from the now largely discredited interpretation of Madhyamaka in terms of nihilism which was once standard in French Buddhology. Such a view is not credible because nihilism, or the position that ultimately nothing exists, is one of the four “extremes” which Madhyamaka as the “middle way” philosophy explicitly rejects, as we have seen previously. Although the advocates of the “semantic interpretation” would like to avoid the charge of nihilism, it is hard to see how they can simultaneously and coherently avoid the other horn of naïve realism, which is of a piece with the extreme of eternalism. See Giuseppe Ferraro, “A Criticism of M. Siderits and J.L. Garfield’s ‘Semantic Interpretation’ of Nāgārjuna’s Theory of Two Truths,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 41:2 (2013), 195-219 and “Grasping Snakes and Touching Elephants: A Rejoinder to Garfield and Siderits,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 42:4 (2014), 451-462. The “semantic interpretation” also has to unconvincingly explain away the passages in Nāgārjuna’s works that touch upon tattva (“reality”), if it even bothers noticing them at all; this tattva is the universe absent the rubric of conceptualizations that cut the cosmos into discreet individual parts. Concurrently with this, the semantic theorists attempt to reduce Nāgārjuna’s two truths, the conventional and the ultimate, to a single truth, the conventional, despite the clear textual indications of the illegitimacy of such a maneuver. See Richard H. Jones, “Dialethism, Paradox, and Nāgārjuna’s Way of Thinking,” Comparative Philosophy 9:2 (2018), 41-68 and “On What is Real in Nāgārjuna’s ‘Middle Way,’” Comparative Philosophy 11:1 (2020), 3-31. It is not the case that the ultimate truth of nirvāṇa, which is equivalent to tattva, is to be reduced to the useful semantic fictions of saṁsāra; rather, saṁsāra in its true nature is seen to be the same as the transcendent “unoriginated” and “undifferentiated” tattva that is nirvāṇa. See Perry Schmidt-Leukel, “Nirvāṇa as ‘Unconditioned’ (asaṃskṛta) and ‘Transcendent’ (lokottara) Reality,” in Bernhard Nitsche and Marcus Schmücker, ed., God or the Divine? Religious Transcendence beyond Monism and Theism, between Personality and Impersonality (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2023), 87-102. Further, the semantic interpretation’s reduction of the two truths to the merely conventional truth incurs the fault of separating Nāgārjuna from the Buddha’s own explicit teachings as well as those of his most famous commentator, Candrakīrti, which very clearly postulate an ultimate truth that is transcendent of the conventional. See Karen C. Lang, “Candrakīrti on the Limits of Language and Logic,” in Steven M. Emmanuel, ed., A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy (Malden: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 336-339. MacDonald also critiques the naïve realist tendency of the “semantic” reading, writing: “For Nāgārjuna, however, according to whom saṁsāra, a temporary mistaken illusion, has always been in a state of calm nirvāṇa, there is nothing worldly whatsoever to be salvaged” (“The Quest for an English-Speaking Nāgārjuna,” 374). This point is developed extensively in her fuller study, “The World Transcendent,” 117-132, where she does not hesitate to call Nāgārjuna’s nirvāṇa an “an incomprehensible, concept- and language transcending absolute” (130). On this note, it must also be said that the interpretations of Nāgārjuna offered by Ferraro and Jones in contrast to the “semantic” reading can’t be regarded as fully satisfying either. Their attempts to distance their own readings from the “Absolutist” interpretation ultimately come down to semantics, such as the assertion that there exists a meaningful difference between claiming that there exists a reality or tattva that can not be captured by “ordinary conceptual tools” and the “Absolutist” claim that the tattva is ineffable and beyond conceptualization, as if there may possibly exist super-epistemic conceptualizations which must nevertheless elude conceptual expression when vocalizations leave the lips or when pen is put to paper; such conceptualizations would not be conceptualizations at all but “ineffable” in the full literal meaning of the word. Stanislaw Schayer’s old papers “Das mahāyānistische Absolutum” and “Notes and Queries on Buddhism” are good correctives to this sort of language game. See also Harry Oldmeadow, “Sankara’s Doctrine of Māyā,” Asian Philosophy 2:2 (1992), 131-146 for more general comments on the “Absolutist” theme that are of relevance, particularly as regards the relationship of the noumenal to the phenomenal.