A Harivamsa hymn in Yijing's Chinese translation of the Sutra of Golden Light.

• Author: Ludvik, Catherine

A HYMN IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS

The Harivamsa (first to third century), well known as an account of the life of the god Krsna, contains also a few hymns to the goddess Durga. These hymns are extremely inter-esting in that they are amongst the earliest written sources on Durga and represent one of the early efforts at establishing the identity, significance, and worship of Durga as the great goddess. (1) One of these hymns appears in Chinese translation in the Buddhist Sutra of Golden Light (Suvarnabhasottama Sutra), in Yijing's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (635-713) rendering of 703, (2) for which the original Sanskrit version does not survive. The presence of the hymn in a Buddhist context is not particularly surprising, given that the Indic Buddhist cosmos is populated with numerous Indic deities of Vedic, Brahmanical, Hindu, as well as folk origin. In the Indic Buddhist context as reflected in Yijing's translation, however, the hymn does not retain the same purpose that it had in the Harivamsa. In fact, it is no longer addressed to Durga, but instead to the goddess Sarasvati. And yet, despite the change of context, purpose, and deity addressed, the hymn remains remarkably effective: a warrior-like nature and countenance adds a fittingly fierce aspect to Sarasvati's role in a sutra for the protection of the state. (3) The effectiveness of the hymn in the sutra context renders its presence justifiable at the level of conventional truth, as the sutra itself suggests, (4) and its inclusion is indeed revealing in terms of the composition and compilation of the Sanskrit sutra.

In the Chinese translation of the sutra, furthermore, the hymn is metamorphosed into a different idiom meaningful in a different cultural context. The goddess is called Biancai tiannu [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] "Eloquence Goddess," a function held by Sarasvati in the Sanskrit sutra and entirely in line with her depiction from the late Vedic period onwards. We have, then, a hymn invoking Durga, used in the sutra context to invoke Sarasvati, and rendered into Chinese to praise Biancai tiannu, whose name points to Sarasvati's function and whose warrior-like form is borrowed from Durga.

Here we shall examine the above mentioned versions of this hymn from two different contexts and in two different languages: the Sanskrit text as found in the Harivamsa, alongside the Chinese version of the hymn in Yijing's translation of the Sutra of Golden Light. Through an annotated translation of and commentary on both the Chinese and the Sanskrit, we shall find we are in fact dealing with two versions of the same, rather than simply a related, hymn. We shall also ascertain, in large part, the version of the hymn that appeared in Yijing's no longer extant Sanskrit manuscript and point out the ways in which Yijing and his translation team went about rendering the hymn into Chinese verse.

THE HYMN IN THE HARIVAMSA

The Harivamsa hymn in question is one of a small number of hymns to Durga appearing in the vulgate Mahabharata epic (mid-second century B.C.E. to the year zero), (5) to which the Harivamsa forms a kind of supplement, and in the Harivamsa itself. Our hymn, like most of these early Durga hymns, is not included in the critical edition, but appears instead in an appendix to it. (6) It consists, in fact, of the latter part of a hymn uttered by the god Visnu in Harivamsa 47:38-57 of the critical edition, "inserted," according to the editor Parashuram Lakshman Vaidya, after 47:52. Our hymn is identified as the Arya stava "praise of she who is noble." The context is Krsna's complex birth story, and the hymn is offered by Visnu when arranging the birth of Krsna. Wicked King Kamsa knows he is to be slain by one of the children of Devaki and Vasudeva (Krsna's parents), and hence confines them and slays their children as each one is born. In the first half of the hymn, Visnu requests the goddess Nidra, "Sleep" (one of the names applied to Durga), to arise in the womb of Yasoda, from whom she will be born at the same time as Krsna from his mother Devaki. The babies will then be exchanged, so that when evil Kamsa sees baby Nidra, who has taken the place of Krsna, and dashes the little girl against a rock, Krsna's life will be spared. Visnu's request ends in a praise of the goddess, which indicates that she is actually Durga, identified with a long series of goddesses. (7) The latter part of Visnu's praise is our hymn, the Arya stava, which found its way into the Sutra of Golden Light.

THE HYMN IN THE SUTRA OF GOLDEN LIGHT

This sutra was a highly influential text throughout Buddhist Asia, and would have existed in some form already in the first century C.E. The extant Sanskrit text was edited by Johannes Nobel in 1937 and translated into English by Ronald E. Emmerick in 1970, who then revised and corrected his translation in 1990, 1992, and 1996. (8) A new edition of the Sanskrit is being prepared by P. O. Skjaervo, for which he uses a Nepalese manuscript that was not available to Nobel. The translation of the Sutra of Golden Light into numerous ancient languages reveals the importance of this text and the existence of earlier and different versions of it. In addition to Chinese and Tibetan renderings, there are Khotanese, Sogdian, Xi Xia (Tangut), Mongolian, and Old Turkic translations.

The great popularity of the sutra in China is attested by the remarkable number of manuscripts of it from Dunhuang and elsewhere. (9) The Taisho (1912-26) edition of the Buddhist Canon includes three different Chinese versions (10) of the sutra: (a) Dharmaksema's translation of 417, (11) Jinguangming jing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in 4 juan and 18 parivarta (T. vol. 16, no. 663), based on an earlier Sanskrit version of the sutra than the extant version edited by Nobel in 1937; (b) Baogui's [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] edition of 597, Hebu Jinguangming jing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in 8 juan and 24 parivarta (T. vol. 16, no. 664), including the translations of Dharmaksema from 417, of Paramartha from 552, and of Yasogupta and Jnanagupta from 561-78; (c) Yijing's translation of 703, (12) Jinguangming zuishengwang jing [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in 10 juan and 31 parivarta (T. vol. 16, no. 665). The Harivamsa's Durga hymn appears only in Yijing's Chinese translation, in the chapter dedicated to Biancai tiannu (Sarasvati). It is not found in the extant Sanskrit text of the sutra. On the other hand, the hymn does appear in some of the Tibetan translations. (13) The Tibetan versions, however, are beyond my linguistic abilities, and hence I leave their discussion to scholars competent in the field.

The Sarasvati chapter, in the extant Sanskrit, in the edition of Baogui, and in Yijing's rendering, consists of three parts, each of which presents the goddess in a different aspect: in the first part Sarasvati appears as a deity of eloquence; (14) in the second she teaches a ritual herbal bath; and in the third she is invoked by the brahmana Kaundinya. Yijing's Chinese version of the Harivamsa hymn is found in the third part, placed in the mouth of Kaundinya and addressed to Biancai tiannu. (15) It consists of twenty-two stanzas (T. vol. 16, no. 665, p. 437a6-b20), as opposed to the Harivamsa's twenty-nine stanzas (that is, twenty-eight stanzas plus introductory stanza included in 591*, an insertion after Harvamsa 47:54).

IDENTIFICATION OF THE HYMN IN THE SUTRA

The appearance of a Chinese version of a Harivamsa hymn in Yijing's translation of the sutra has been noted previously. As far as I am aware, it is first mentioned in a note found in vol. 16 of the Taisho edition of the Buddhist canon. (16) Its presence was then duly noted in 1929 in the first fascicle of the Hobogirin encyclopedic dictionary of Buddhism. (17) Neither work, however, specified to which hymn of the Harivamsa it referred. Some years later, in 1932, an inaccurate identification of the text from which the hymn derives appeared in the Japanese rendering of Yijing's translation of the sutra in Kokuyaku Daizokyo [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]: in a very brief note, Watanabe Kaigyoku [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] stated that Kaundinya's praise was taken from a laud to Durga found in the Mahabharata epic and amplified. (18) Watanabe did not specify which Mahabharata hymn to Durga he had in mind.

Nobel in 1958, in his German translation of Yijing's Chinese rendering of the sutra, located the hymn in the Harivamsa, but quoted only its first ten (of twenty-nine) Sanskrit stanzas in a note. (19) Nobel stated that ten of the eleven stanzas he quoted (20) were almost literally translated in Yijing, but that the rest of the Harivamsa stanzas were certainly not literally rendered, although the Chinese contained numerous allusions to their contents. (21) As my study will attempt as far as possible to demonstrate, Yijing's entire twenty-two-stanza rendering of the hymn is indeed a literal Chinese translation of the hymn in the version that appeared in his Sanskrit manuscript of the Sutra of Golden Light.

More recently, Nagano Sadako [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], like Watanabe, has claimed that the source for Kaundinya's praise in Yijing is a Mahabharata hymn, but provides a more specific reference: Yudhisthira's hymn to Durga. (22) The small number of Durga hymns found in the Mahabharata and the Harivamsa are indeed closely related, (23) but, as we shall see, Yijing's Chinese version clearly corresponds to the Harivamsa hymn identified by Nobel, and not to a Mahabharata hymn. Watanabe and Nagano, nevertheless, are correct in their understanding of the invoked goddess as Durga.

On the other hand, because Naluoyan [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] (Narayana) appears in the introductory stanza (591* lines 3-4), (24) the Hobogirin tells us that "Benzaiten [Japanese reading for Biancaitian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]] y est identifiee a la deesse Narayani, epouse de Visnu ..." and...