The Pradyumna-Prabhāvatī Legend in Nepal: A Study of the Hindu Myth of the Draining ofthe Nepal Valley by H. Brinkhaus; Jagatprakāśamallas Mūladevaśaśidevavyākhyānanāṭaka by H.BrinkhausReview by: Leonard W. J. van der KuijpJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 112, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1992), pp. 668-670Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/604492 .

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668 Journal of the American Oriental Society 112.4 (1992)

statements, in which unacceptable overt declarations could be rendered acceptable by declaring them to be intentional sur- face presentations of deeper meanings accessible only through the requisite exegesis. For a more detailed treatment of this problem and its solutions, both hermeneutical and doctrinal, we are referred by the author to the first chapter of his

Buddha-nature, Mind and the Problem of Gradualism in a Comparative Perspective (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1989).

In "Contemporary European Scholarship on Buddhism," a fitting final contribution to this wide-ranging volume, Russell Webb surveys the most prominent European researchers on Buddhism by area of specialization, with background informa- tion and bibliographical record of their publications and ac- tivities.

All scholars of Buddhism will undoubtedly find something of interest to be read with profit in this diverse collection of

papers. The editor and the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Tring, are to be thanked for bringing about the publication of this, and we hope future volumes of the Buddhica Britannica series.

COLLETT COX

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

The Tibetan Book of the Dead: The Great Liberation through

Hearing in the Bardo. Translated with commentary by

FRANCESCA FREMANTLE and CHOGYAM TRUNGPA. Boston: SHAM-

BHALA, 1987. Pp. xx + 120, 3 illustrations. $9.95 (paper).

This is the first English translation of the popular Bardo

Thotrol of Tibetan Buddhism since the pioneer work of W. Y.

Evans-Wentz and Kazi Dawa-Samdup in 1927. The Evans-

Wentz edition will always be valued for its extensive outline

of the steps of the Bardo Thotrol, and perhaps even more for

its commentaries by C. G. Jung, Anagarika Govinda, and John

Woodroffe. However, the present version is welcome for its

smooth and clear flow of language, and its noted absence of

distracting sectional interruptions and cumbersome terminol-

ogy. The Evans-Wentz translation with its King James biblical

language gives the text an unnecessary impression of Western

scripturalization. As Fremantle's introduction points out, there is consider-

able disagreement between the Trungpa and Evans-Wentz ver-

sions, due both to the use of more reliable Tibetan texts, and a

greater fidelity to the complexities of the Tibetan Buddhist

iconography. Introductory descriptions of basic Buddhist and tantric con-

cepts, and the summation of Trungpa's insights, help consider-

ably the reading of the text. For example, the meaning of yidam as "expression of one's own basic nature" internally and psychologically, rather than the traditional "chosen or protective deity"; and the skandhas themselves as "psycholog- ical components" rather than just "heaps of phenomena."

Such small but important insights reflect the views that Trungpa developed over his years as head of the Colorado and Vermont Naropa foundations, until his passing in 1987.

Clearly, his interpretation of the Bardo Thotrol is that this teaching is for recognizing one's own falsely-centered projec- tions of what reality is, and the dissolution of the sense of self in the light of reality.

The rich visualizations and classification of deities in this translation and commentary seem far more comprehensible than in the unwieldy and overwhelming wordiness of the Evans-Wentz categories. The simple analyses of these sym- bolisms in correlation to psychological states of the mind is very well done.

In short, this translation and commentary by Trungpa and Fremantle shows the Bardo Thotrol as a guide for living as well as dying. The here-and-now significance of the teaching is perhaps this version's most distinguishing feature. The text is meant to have immediate practicality, not just in the sense of preparing oneself for the event of dying, or of a ritual per- formed for dying persons; but rather, its value is in seeing every moment of life as a birth-and-death moment.

Excellent footnotes for further study.

RICHARD SHERBURNE, S.J.

SEATTLE UNIVERSITY

The Pradyumna-Prabhavati Legend in Nepal: A Study of the

Hindu Myth of the Draining of the Nepal Valley. By

H. BRINKHAUS. Alt-und Neu-Indische Studien 32. Stuttgart:

FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1987. Pp. vii + 398. DM 56.

Jagatprakagamallas Miladevasasidevavyakhyananataka. Trans-

lated by H. BRINKHAUS. Alt-und Neu-Indische Studien 36.

Stuttgart: FRANZ STEINER VERLAG, 1987. Pp. vii + 206. DM 34.

The geological fact that about thirty thousand years ago the

Kathmandu valley was a Pleistocene lake has precipitated a

vast literature in especially Sanskrit, Nevari and middle Indo-

Aryan languages which deal with the divine or semi-divine

origins of this lake and how it came to be transformed into the

fertile valley it now is. It is again in danger of being

flooded-in many places this has already happened-this time

by concrete and cement.

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Reviews of Books 669

There are essentially two accounts of its origin, a Hindu and a Buddhist one.' In the first volume under review, H. Brinkhaus focuses primarily on the Hindu dossier of this leg- end, since the two accounts are so radically different, conclud- ing that "a textual connection between the older Pauranic traditions of both sides ... cannot be established" (p. 3). Brinkhaus' meticulous and uncanny text-critical skills, already known from previous publications, especially from his work on the Mischkasten, are here brought to bear on the relevant Sanskrit Hindu paurdnic literature, which consists of the Vdgvatimdhdtmyaprasaamsa, also known as the Pasupati- purana (PasP), the Nepalamahatmya (NepM), which claims to be part of the Himavatkhanda (HimKh), but which is absent in each and every known manuscript of the latter, and the Ne- palamahatmya, which in fact does constitute a major portion of the Himavatkhanda. He takes us on a rather involved and at times tortuous, but always fascinating, journey through a text-

' The Sanskrit Buddhist versions of the myth were briefly studied by J. Brough, "Legends of Khotan and Nepal," BSOAS 16 (1954): 592-97, and R. Emmerick, The Annals of Khotan (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), 4-13. In addition to the enormously complicated textual history of the Sanskrit and Nevari versions of its key-source, the Svayambhiipurdna, we may mention here that a synoptic recension of this text was translated into Tibetan from the Sanskrit by the famous linguist Si-tu Pan-chen Chos-kyi 'byung-gnas (1699-1774). This work was recently published as the Bal yul rang byung mchod rten chen po'i lo rgyus or Rang 'byung-gi sngon rabs in thirty folios, eight chapters, in Bal yul mchod rten rnam gsum gyi lo rgyus dang gnas bshad gangs can rna ba'i bdud rtsi (n.p., n.d.), 3-59. Si-tu states in his concluding remarks, that his mentor and friend Tshe-dbang nor-bu (1698-1755) of Kah-thog monastery had had a stake in this undertaking. The translation itself was completed in 1748, at the 'Bras-spungs ri-bo vihara adjacent to Svayam.bhii itself. The guide to Nepal's holy places by Khams-sprul IV Bstan-'dzin chos-kyi nyi-ma (1730-79), in A. W. MacDonald and Dvags-po Rin- po-che, "Guide des lieux-saints du Nepal," in Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R. A. Stein, ed. M. Strickmann, vol. 1 (Bruxelles: Institut Belge des Hautes Ittudes Chinoises, 1981), 261, notes a 'Bras-spungs temple, which he suggests is the equivalent of Nepali (= Nevar!) Kim-to. Page 249 of this paper has it that Si-tu Pan-chen possessed an extensive recen- sion of the Svayambhipurana as well. Finally, a detailed study of references to the valley in the Buddhist canonical literature is owed to Glo-bo Mkhan-chen Bsod-nams lhun-grub (1456- 1532), himself a scion of the ruling house of Glo-bo Smon- thang, Mustang, Nepal, for which see his Mi'i dbang po mgon po rgyal mtshan gyi dris lan rgyal sras bzhad pa'i me tog, in Collected Works, vol. III (New Delhi), 1977), 5-15, 17-20.

historical thicket of enormous complexity affecting the trans- mission of these texts, where he is able to show convincingly that PasP actually consists of two separate texts, of which the second part, the Pagupatipurdna proper, was clearly Saiva from the very beginning, while its first section, the Vdgvati- mahatmyaprasamsa, seems to have been originally conceived as a Vaisnava work, which subsequently underwent a Saiva recoding. On the basis of a detailed comparison of a selec- tion of passages from all three texts (here the influence of P. Hacker's approach to anonymous texts is unmistakable) Brinkhaus comes to the well-nigh inevitable conclusion that both the NepM and the HimKh represent intermediate phases of the process that ultimately led to the welding together of the PasP's two parts. This he does by way of an in-depth ex- amination of those passages that deal with the genesis of the goddess and river VagvatiIVagmati [= present day Bagmati] (along which lies the well-known Pa~upatinath temple com- plex) and the narrative of her imprisonment and ultimate liber- ation which, leading to the draining of the lake, resulted in the Kathmandu valley (pp. 14-111). His conclusions for the first complex of passages analyzed in "Excursus I" (pp. 14-28) are as follows (pp. 27-28): The pauranic texts are far from homo- geneous, and both Vaisnavas and Saivas were intent to incor- porate the origin of Vdgmati into their own scheme of things. In connection with the PasP and NepM, for the Vaisnavas, her headwater was Mrgendragikhara, a Vaisnavatirtha, whereas for the Saivas, it was Sivapuri and, hence, a Saivatirtha. Both texts indicate that the myth of the Vagmati's genesis, probably Saivite in origin, had been given a different direction by the Vaisnavas, whose view of things was then subsequently al- tered by the Saivas. On the other hand, the narrative of the HimKh version is strictly Saiva in orientation, and no Vais- nava impulses are left.

The story of the draining of the valley, or how the Vdgmati was liberated from her imprisonment at the hands of the Daitya king Mahendradamana, the brother of Prabhavati, is considerably more elaborate and is closely tied to the work- ings of Pradyumna, the son of Krsna and an incarnation of Kama, and Krsna himself, as outlined in the Pradyumnavijaya portions of the PasP (pp. 31-49) and NepM (pp. 50-88), and the Pradyumnottara of the HimKh (pp. 95-111). "Excursus II" treats of the "Indian Version of the Pradyumna-Prabhavati Legend in the Harivamrna" (pp. 89-95). Apart from showing the interrelationships of these texts, another tangential, but no less important, result of their study is that it explodes the myth of religious tolerance that allegedly held sway among the different Hindu persuasions in Nepal. To be sure, there is hardly any evidence for outright physical violence between the two religious factions in question. But as is shown by Brinkhaus, the existence of textual aggression is undeniable. He also offers an intriguing suggestion, namely, that there are indications that the Indian account of the

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670 Journal of the American Oriental Society 112.4 (1992)

Pradyumna-Prabhdvati story in the Harivamzsa may originally

have come from Nepal. He acknowledges that the latter does

not mention Nepal, and that, if his "cautiously offered hy-

pothesis" be true, its genesis had also been long forgotten in

its putative homeland, for the story's "(renewed) entry" into

Nepalese literature went unrecognized. The second part (pp. 112-54) of the first volume is devoted

to a study of "The Pradyumna-Prabhdvati legend in the ver-

nacular dramas of the late Malla period," that is, from the sev-

enteenth century to the year 1768, when the Kathmandu valley

was conquered by the first Sdha king, Prthvi NMrayan the

Great of Gorkha, and slightly beyond. After a brief survey of

the enormous corpus of published and unpublished Nepalese

dramatic literature written mainly in Maithili, Bengali, Hindi

and Nevdri, Brinkhaus places five plays under the magnifying

glass-four with an identical title of Prabhavatiharanandtaka, by the Bhaktapur kings Jagatprakdgamalla (r. 1643-72), Bh5-

patindramalla (r. 1696-1722), Indramalla (r. 1706-9), king of

Patan, and Pratapasimha (r. 1775-77), the second Sdha king;

and Jagatprakdgamalla's Pradyumnavijayandtaka. After conveniently encapsulating the results of his study of

these paurdnic and dramaturgical sources on pp. 155-59,

Brinkhaus presents the latter, written in Maithili, in the form of

a critical edition and translation on opposite pages, together

with annotations, in "Appendix I" (pp. 161-345). Relevant

portions of Indramalla's play in Bengali are given in edited and

translated form in "Appendix II" (pp. 347-73); "Appendix III"

(pp. 375-80) consists of a translation of a select passage from

Pratapasimha's play in Nevdri. This well-executed and well-

produced book concludes with a bibliography, a map of the

Kathmandu valley and indices (pp. 381-91, 392, 393-98).

The second volume-this one auf Deutsch-is an offshoot

of the author's work on Nepalese vernacular literature, specifi-

cally, drama (ndtaka). It falls essentially into two parts, of

which the first is devoted to a discussion of the oldest extant

Nevari plays (pp. 1-9) and oeuvre of Jagatprakaiamalla, spe-

cifically his Maladevasasidevavydkhyananataka (pp. 10-35). The oldest Nevdri text as such dates from the year 1210, and is

contained in a Madhavanidana manuscript. Nepalese Sanskrit/

Prakrit manuscripts of plays go back to the fourteenth century,

whereas the earliest Nepalese manuscript of a play in a Middle

Indo-Aryan language-Brinkhaus suspects it is written in

"Bhrajabuli"-survives in a recension dated 1441, although its

concluding song suggests that it was composed in 1412.

The Kathmandu valley of the seventeenth century witnessed

an enormous upsurge in creative writing, and it is from this

period that the oldest Nevdri plays have come down to us; each

and every one of them is attributed to members of the ruling families of the kingdoms of Patan, Kathmandu and Bhaktapur. Of these, only Jagatprakd?amalla's Muladevagagidevavyakhyd- nandtaka, written in Nevdri, has been transmitted in a com-

plete form, that is, with dialogue, songs and stage directions.

Brinkhaus has written a separate paper on Jagatprakqgamalla's

extensive "collected oeuvre" (p. 11, n. 36), written in Maithili, Hindi, and Nevdri, although, to my knowledge, it has not yet ap-

peared in print. This king of Bhaktapur was an astonishingly prolific writer if, indeed, all that is attributed to him did in fact

flow from his pen. In his discussion of the play, Brinkhaus points out that the third act is of particular interest for Vaisnava- gaiva intersectarian relations (pp. 24-28). The critical remarks on the edition of this play (pp. 29-35) are followed by the

second part of this book, in which we find the actual edition of the Nevdri text with a German translation on opposite pages

(pp. 38-165). This is followed by notes to the edition and translation (pp. 166-76), a bibliography (pp. 177-83), with more than forty manuscripts filmed by the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, and the volume concludes on

pp. 177-83 and pp. 184-207 with, respectively, a valuable Neviri word index, where Sanskrit loanwords are omitted, and a concordance of the songs. Given the extremely limited work that has been done in Nevdri philology, the effort on Brinkhaus' part is largely that of a pioneer, and will of necessity be marred in places. There is therefore in my opinion no imme- diate reason for the rather intemperate critique of this volume in

an earlier review by S. Lienhard (Indo-Iranian Journal 33

[1990]: 72-82). With these two publications that grew out of his work with

the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, of which

he was the resident director from 1979 to 1981 and then again from 1983 to 1985, Brinkhaus has placed himself in the van-

guard of Indo-Nepalese and Nepalese studies. The first vol-

ume was originally written in German and presented as a

Habilitationsschrift to Hamburg University in 1984; its En-

glish version, for which many of us and our Nepalese col-

leagues will be grateful, is owed to requests to this effect by

Nepalese scholars and, above all, to the labors of the transla-

tor, Mr. Ph. Pierce. The two volumes amply underscore both

Nepal's literary wealth in part unearthed by the efforts of the

Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project, and the out-

standing use made of it by Horst Brinkhaus.

LEONARD W. J. VAN DER KuijP

UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

A Grammar of Limbu. By GEORGE VAN DRIEM. Mouton Grammar

Library 4. Berlin: MOUTON DE GRUYTER, 1987. Pp. xxviii +

565, 10 plates.

The Limbus are a people who live in the hills of eastern

Nepal, Sikkim, and the Darjeeling district of Bengal. Because

of their migration throughout the Himalayas and to the various

countries of the subcontinent, their total population is un-

known, but approximately 180,000 are said to live in Nepal.

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