Newsletter... 6-5-02


Tibet and Sri Lanka
by Venerable Dhammika
(volume 76:1 p. 19) May 2001
The Middle Way
 
 
Maradana Road is one of Colombo's main thoroughfares. Walking along it past
the railway station, you soon come to the statue of a Buddhist monk standing
on a tall pedestal. It is an unremarkable piece of work, one of many such
statues of eminent prelates set up around the city which the crowds rush
past and hardly seem to notice. Closer inspection of the name on the
statue's pedestal suggests, however, that there is an interesting story
behind this monument. For it is a statue not of a Sri Lankan but a Tibetan
monk, Venerable Tibetjataka Mahinda. What is a statue of a Tibetan monk
doing in the capital of Sri Lanka, that stronghold of orthodox Theravada
Buddhism?
 
It would be difficult to imagine two more different countries than Tibet and
Sri Lanka. One is cold, bleak and hemmed in by snow-capped mountains while
the other is tropical, lush and set in a turquoise sea. True, both countries
have ancient Buddhist cultures, but the kind of Buddhism that prevails in
them could hardly be more different from each other. The Dhamma first came
to Sri Lanka only 237 years after the Buddha's final Nirvana, when it was
still young and relatively uncomplicated. It did not become firmly
established in Tibet until nearly a thousand years later, after being
transformed by centuries of mystical insights, philosophical speculation and
living side by side with Hinduism. However, despite the differences between
the two cultures, the distance separating them and the obvious difficulties
involved in getting from one to the other, the Buddhists of Tibet and Sri
Lanka have had intermittent contact with each other for many centuries.
Sometimes this contact has been direct - monks from one country have gone to
the other; but more often it has been indirect - monks from both countries
have met in India or Indian monks have visited both countries and acted as
intermediaries.
 
When Tibetans started going to India to learn Buddhism or to collect
Buddhist texts they of course heard about Sri Lanka, a land where, unlike
India, the king and all his subjects were fervent Buddhists. They found that
even Indians looked upon Sri Lanka as a sacred land, a Buddhist paradise
blessed with numerous sacred relics where the Sangha received unstinting
state support. They also learned from the Lankavatara Sutra that the Buddha
had sanctified the island by visiting it and from the Karandavyuha Sutra
that Avalokitesvara had appeared there as well. What interested them most,
however, was the reputation of Sri Lanka's great Mahayana and Tantric
masters. That Mahayana and Tantra Buddhism flourished in what is now a
Theravadin country may surprise the contemporary followers of those schools,
but Buddhism in Sri Lanka has rarely conformed to the simplistic
generalizations so often made of it.
 
The island's interest in Mahayana started at the very beginning of the new
movement. Nagajuna's most brilliant disciple and successor, Ariyadeva, was a
Sinhalese of royal birth. According to Tibetan sources, Nagajuna spent his
last days in a monastery at Sripavata, a location now identified with a
plateau just outside Nagajunakonda in Andhra Pradesh. Significantly, the
ruins of a monastery called Simhala Vihara flourished at Sripavata from the
first century ce onwards, and according to an inscription found on the site,
this monastery was inhabited by Sri Lankan monks. It is not at all
improbable that this was where Nagajuna and Ariyadeva first met and that
from an early time Sri Lankans went there to study Mahayana. And the
evidence shows that 800 years later Mahayana still had a strong following in
the island. We read, for example, that in the ninth century Ratnarasanta,
the abbot of Somapura in India, came to the island accompanied by the envoy
sent by the Sri Lankan king. He arrived with some 200 Mahayana texts and
stayed for seven years; and when he finally returned to India to take up the
position of 'gatekeeper scholar' at Vickramasila, he left behind 500
disciples. Mahayana flourished in Sri Lanka until it finally succumbed to
Theravada at the beginning of the medieval period. Nonetheless, it left
behind numerous traces of its presence in the island's literature, sculpture
and popular religious practices.
 
Tantra has left far less evidence of its presence. It seems to have arrived
in Sri Lanka soon after it appeared in India in about the seventh century.
The earliest evidence of Tantra in the island concerns the Sinhalese siddha
(an attained yogi) Amoghavajira, senior disciple of the great Indian master
Vajirabodhi, who introduced Tantra to China. When Vajirabodhi was ailing
just before his death in 733, he instructed his disciple to return to India
via Sri Lanka to collect Tantric texts unavailable in China. Amoghavajira
arrived back in his homeland and was welcomed by the king, who accommodated
him in his palace for seven days. He met the famous Gabhadhatu Acariya and
received both the Vajiradhatu and the Garbhadhatu initiation from him as
well as several other secret empowerments. Later he collected 500 Tantric
texts and detailed information on the mudras, images, colours and deities
needed for making mandalas. He then left for India, returning to China in
746, when he presented the emperor with a letter and gifts from the Sri
Lankan king.
 
Tantra finally gained official recognition and patronage during the reign of
Sena 1 (833-853) who, we are told, had taken the bodhisattva vow. This
monarch was interested enough in new trends in Buddhism to establish an
ecumenical institute named Virankurarama, where 25 monks from each of the
four major sects in Sri Lanka could study the new ideas coming from India.
Special rules were made to prevent sectarian rivalries being excited. If the
monks representing a particular sect dropped below the prescribed number,
the shortfall could only be filled by monks from other sects with permission
from the sect concerned. Sometime during Sena's reign an Indian Tantric
siddha arrived in the island and won the king's favour. Although the facts
are unclear, it is possible that this siddha was invited to the island to
join Virankurarama, or it may be that the institute was established after
his arrival in order to examine his ideas. However, as in Burma, Japan and
elsewhere, accusations of sexual licence persistently dogged Tantra, and
eventually it disappeared from Sri Lanka. Despite this, archeological
evidence shows that it continued to exert an influence as late as the
twelfth century, and as we shall see, small groups of people continued to
practise, probably in secret, well into the fifteenth century.
 
Tibetans initially came to know about Sri Lanka by reading Buddhist texts,
but they had their first direct contact with Sri Lankans in India. Most of
these encounters took place at Bodh Gaya, where a huge monastic university
maintained by Sri Lankan monks flourished from the fourth to the thirteenth
century. The most interesting and detailed account of such encounters is
found in the biography of Chag lo tsa-ba Chos-rge-dpal, better known by his
Sanskrit name Dharmasvamin. This Tibetan pilgrim spent the three months of
the rains retreat of the year 1234 in Bodh Gaya, where he had much contact
with the 300 Sri Lankan monks who resided there. One day one of them asked
him what book he was carrying, and when he replied that it was a copy of the
Prajñaparamita Sutra the monk told him he should throw it in the river. Then
he added, 'The Buddha did not teach the Mahayana; it was enunciated by one
called Nagajuna, a man of sharp intellect.' Despite such sectarianism,
Dharmasvamin commented that the Sri Lankans always greeted him courteously
and treated him with more kindness than did some of his fellow monks in
Tibet. The Sinhalese for their part could not believe that Dharmasvamin was
a Tibetan. He spoke such excellent Sanskrit, and all the Tibetans they had
met before were wild and uncouth. It was only when they saw corns on his
feet, something found only on boot-wearing Tibetans, that they finally
believed him.
 
An interesting example of co-operation between Tibetans and Sri Lankans at
Bodh Gaya is recorded in the Mkhas-pai dga-ston. According to this work, a
yogi named Ugyen Sangge, on one of his frequent trips to India, made contact
with the king of Sri Lanka and repaired the Mahabodhi Temple with his help.
This is said to have happened around the year 1286. The Mkhas-pai dga-ston
also says that while the repairs were being carried out, Ugyen Sangge stayed
to the north of the temple with 500 other yogis. The Sri Lankan monastery is
known to have been located there, so this must be a reference to that
establishment and its inmates. We cannot doubt that it was the Sri Lankan
monks at Bodh Gaya who put Ugyen Sangge in contact with their king in the
first place and that they had a major role in the repair work.
 
Towards the end of the thirteenth century a Sri Lankan scholar-monk named
Anandasri was in Bodh Gaya, probably teaching at the university. We hear of
him in Tibet early in the next century teaching and translating Pali texts
into Tibetan with the help of Nima rgyal mtshan dpal bzon po, one of Buston
Rimpoche's teachers. Buston himself is supposed to have been proficient in
several languages, including Sinhalese, so perhaps he met Anandasri and
studied the language from him. We do not know how or why Anandasri came to
be invited to Tibet but it seems likely that a mutual respect and friendship
between him and some Tibetans at Bodh Gaya had something to do with it.
Around this same time the Sri Lankan Tantric yogi Chandramala was also in
Tibet translating texts with the help of Sakya Yeshi Brog-mi, although it is
not known whether he arrived there from Bodh Gaya. The several works
composed by Sri Lankans that were included in the Kangyur and Tengyur (Word
of Buddha and commentaries) were probably brought to Tibet and translated by
monks like Anandasri and Chandramala. These works include a selection from
the Vimuttimagga, a commentary on the Saddharmapundarika Sutra by
Prithibandhu and Jayabanda's Cakrasamvara Tantra. The most important of
these works, Manjusrimitra's Bodhicittabhavana, is one of the seminal texts
on Atiyoga (Tib, rDzong chen). This work lacks much characteristic Atiyoga
terminology and thus may represent a branch of that school which evolved in
Sri Lanka independently of India and Tibet.
 
In the second half of the fifteenth century the Sri Lankan monk
Dharmadivakara arrived in Bodh Gaya and then decided to go on from there to
Wu Tai Shan, the Chinese mountain sacred to the Bodhisattva Manjusri. This
place had long been popular with Tibetans, and while there Dharmadivakara
met some who invited him to their country, where he taught widely. It seems,
however, that the strain of several long years of travel, the strange food
and the cold climate proved to be too much for him because we read that he
died in India while on his homeward journey. A far more recent encounter
between Tibetans and Sri Lankans took place at Bodh Gaya at the beginning of
the twentieth century. In 1929, when Rahula Sankrityayana was in Tibet, he
found a palm leaf manuscript of the Pali vinaya in Sinhala script, a
discovery that greatly intrigued him. Later he found out that the manuscript
had been given to the Panchen Lama by a Sri Lankan monk when the former had
visited Bodh Gaya in 1905.
 
During Tantra's period of ascendancy from the eighth to the twelfth
centuries, Indian Tantric masters were in demand in Tibet and Sri Lanka. A
significant number visited both countries, thus acting as mediums for the
transmission of literature, ideas and information. According to the Blue
Annals a Kashmiri monk had heard about the wisdom of the Sri Lankan master
Gunaratna and had gone to the island to meet him. When this Kashmiri was
about to return home, Gunaratna gave him a letter to deliver to the famous
Tibetan teachers Rin-chen-dpal and Buston Rimpoche, both of whom he
apparently had a deep admiration for. In the same work we read that rGyal-ba
Rimpoche (1203-1267) was so renowned that the king of Sri Lanka 'sent
numerous offerings to him'. These and other similar fragments of information
suggest that Buddhists in Kashmir and Tibet were well acquainted with the
teachings of Sri Lankan masters and vice versa. The Tantric siddha Vanaratna
(1384-1468) was another Indian who visited both countries. He went to Sri
Lanka in about 1404 and studied meditation for six years under Dharmakirti.
As India was no longer a congenial place for a Buddhist by the time he left
Sri Lanka, he went to Nepal, from where he made several trips to Tibet. The
last of these intermediaries between the two countries until modern times
was the siddha Buddhagupta, who lived in the sixteenth century. He travelled
very widely, spending considerable time in Sri Lanka, and made at least two
visits to Tibet, where Taranatha became his disciple. Taranatha's historical
writings contain some information about Sri Lanka, some of which he must
have got from Buddhagupta.
 
There are few references to Tibetans going to southern India in ancient
times, Man-luns-po's journey to Kerela in the early thirteenth century being
one of the few examples. However, no records exist of them going the short
distance beyond the mainland needed to get to Sri Lanka. The first Tibetan
we know to have visited Sri Lanka was Mahinda, the monk whose statue looks
out across Maradana Road. Born in Sikkim Mahinda was not technically a
Tibetan but a British Protected Person by nationality and a Lepcha by
cultural background, the Lepchas being one of the groups that make up the
Tibetan people. He was born Tashi Namgyal into a noble family in Gantok at
the turn of the nineteenth century. One of his brothers became prime
minister of Sikkim and another became professor of the Tibetan language at
Calcutta University. A third brother later joined Mahinda in Sri Lanka and
became a monk under the name Punnaji.
 
When the First World War broke out, the German monk Nyanatiloka, who had
been living in Sri Lanka, was interned in Australia as an enemy national. On
his release he was refused permission to return to Sri Lanka, and so he
decided to go to Tibet. When he arrived in Sikkim he discovered to his great
disappointment that Tibet's borders were closed to all foreigners, even to a
lone Buddhist monk seeking refuge. However, Nyanatiloka did make contact
with and received some help from the Sikkimese royal family. Some modernists
in the government were unhappy with the state of Sikkim's Sangha, and their
talks with Nyanatiloka convinced them that sending young monks to Sri Lanka
might help to bring about the reforms they wanted to see. Consequently, the
young Mahinda went to Sri Lanka and stayed at Nyanatiloka's Island Hermitage
at Dodonduwa. Later he studied at both Mahabodhi College and Vidyodaya
Pirivena. In 1930 Mahinda took his lower ordination under the great
Venerable Lunupokune Dharmananda and in 1931 his higher ordination. He
quickly mastered the Sinhalese language and later used his considerable
facility in it to write a large amount of fine poetry. He is mainly
remembered today for the religious poems and verses that he wrote for
children, a genre virtually unknown before him. He also wrote rousing
patriotic poetry urging Sri Lankans to be proud of their own culture and
religion and to struggle for independence from Britain. Recently some erotic
love poetry has come to light as well. Mahinda's other literary works
include a translation from Pali into Sinhalese of the classical poem
Sadhammopijana and a biography of King Prakamabahu. He died in 1951 at the
age of 50, but his children's poems continue to be widely read and
appreciated. Recently the Chinese government sent a scholar to Sri Lanka to
research into Mahinda's life and writings with the purpose of highlighting
the supposed 'Chinese' contribution to Sinhalese literature. When it was
discovered that Mahinda was born in Sikkim, not Tibet, the scheme was
quietly dropped.
 
Now that Buddhism is established in the West and many large cities there
have both Tibetan and Sri Lankan temples or centres, the opportunity for the
interchange of ideas between the two have never been better. However, this
does not seem to have happened yet. When Tibetan and Sri Lankan monks join
each other at inter-religious meetings or at celebrations, they always smile
at each other and exchange pleasantries, but the contact goes little deeper
than that. Most Sri Lankans still regard Tantra as a 'later distortion'
while the Tibetans look upon Theravadins as weaker cousins who they hope
will have the opportunity to practise the higher path in the next life. The
truth is that neither group know very much about the teachings of the other.
Mahayana has been studied with appreciation in Sri Lanka for years but
Tantra remains virtually unknown. Tibetans study the text of long extinct
'Hinayana' schools and assume that they know all that is worth knowing about
living Theravada. Hopefully the time will soon come when the openness,
respect and mutual sharing that existed in the past between the Buddhists of
Tibet and Sri Lanka will return once again.
 
The Middle Way May 2001 p. 19 (volume 76:1)