YOGA AND Y ANTRA

KONINKLIJK INSTITUUT

VOOR TAAL·, LAND- EN VOLKENKUNDE

TRANSLATION SERIES 8

Dr. P. H. POTT

YOGA AND YANTRA

THEIR INTERRELATION AND THEIR

SIGNIFICANCE FOR INDIAN ARCHAEOLOGY

TRANSLATED FROM THE DUTCH BY RODNEY N.EEDHAM

PUBLISHED UNDER A GRANT

FROM THE NETHERLANDS MINISTRY

OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCES

Springer-Science+Business Media, B.V. 1966

Original title :

YOGA EN YANTRA

in hunne beteekenis voor de Indische archaeologie

Published by E. J. Brill, Leiden, 1946

Additional material to this book can be downloaded from http://extras.springer.com

ISBN 978-94-017-5626-6 ISBN 978-94-017-5868-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-5868-0

Softcover reprint ofthe bardeover 1st edition 1946

"Yad ihästi tad anyatra, yan nehästi na tat kvacit"

(Viivcz.sära Tantra)

Dedicated to the memory of my parents

and of Ir. J. L. Moens

PREFACE

It isarather long time since I wrote this study, and tobe confronted with it once again certainly involves some feelings of disappointment about the way in which, twenty years ago, I tried to formulate my ideas and arguments. If I had to deal with the same topic now, I believe I would write another book. For this reason, I have refrained from making essential alterations in the original text, which has been so carefully translated into English by Dr. Needham. It was given its form at a certain moment, it should keep its same composition now, however much I should prefer to change some parts of the text and to add better and more convincing examples which I have at my disposal now. Nevertheless, I venture to hope that this study may contribute a little to the furtherance of the understanding of Indian art in general, and of later Buddhist iconography in particular, and that it may be of some help to him who sets hirnself to the task of compiling a comprehensive Buddhist iconographical handbook, while trying at the same time to get at its most fundamental sources. There is a special satisfaction in this approach, for it discerns the essential elements in the construction of this enormous pantheon, testifying to

spiritual activity of the human mind which is hardly to be equalled. This may teach us to be humble, but at the same time to be thankful for the possibility of learning to understand the rnanifestations of the human intellect in cultures outside our own. It may help tobring about that period in which - to quote the words of the famous orientalist Sylvian Levi - "man by his better insight will have lost the right of improper judgment".l May this study contribute a little to promote the advent of such a period !

Leiden

September, 1965

P. H. POTT

1 Sylvain Levi, Les Etudes Orientales, leurs le,ons, leurs resultats. Paris 1937, p. 93.

TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

A translator should not, in all prudence and consdence, undertake to render into another language a work that he does not fully com­prehend. For my own part, however, although an orientalist of a kind, I fear I have not the education or the competence to understand certain abstruse and exotic ideas with which Dr. Pott deals in this book, and I am conscious that this ignorance may have led to uncertainties, or at least to an impairment of fluency, in my translation. I ought therefore to explain, by way of apology, what, apart from the obvious merits of the book itself, induced me to translate Yoga en Y antra. The first consideration was the desire to be of service to my colleagues in the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, a learned body for which I have a high regard, and the concomitant sense of compliment that it should think an English social anthropolo­gist fit for the commission ; and the second was the technical challenge of submitring myself to a further and protracted discipline, a scholarly necessity for my own subject but not to be had so rigorously in any other way, in the rendering of academic Dutch into English. These personal factors cannot make up for a Iack of command of the subject matter which may well betray itself to Indologists, but if the latter should feel their confidence in the translation affected by lapses which an expert would have avoided, at least they deserve to know something of the reasons for such failings.

The translation has been carried out in the plainest fashion. Since the book is not a work of literary imagination, in which case questions of style, allusion, idiom, and other such subtleties may be paramount, I have stayed as close as possible to the form and expression of the original. The author's divisions of his exposition into sentences and paragraphs have been adhered to, and for the most part what he writes has been fairly directly transposed into English. The result may not be English prose of the most polished kind, but it should convey an impression of the way in which the author hirnself conceived and framed the argument, and it will also permit easier reference to the original on points of difficulty or special importance.

X YOGA AND YANTRA

The Dutch edition includes many quotations, sometimes of consider­able length, from works in English, French, and German. Since these are taken over as they stand in the languages of the sources, such passages have not been exposed to the dangers of double translation (e.g., from German into Dutch, and then by another hand from Dutch into English) but have merely had to be translated immediately from the French or the German.

I owe a particular recognition to Dr. J. C. Harle of the Department of Eastern Art, Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, for his generosity in reading through the manuscript in draft. My gratitude is also due to Dr. Pott and to the Editorial Committee of the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde for the patience and sym­pathy displayed to me during the long delays which the prior demands of my profession imposed upon the completion of the translation.

Merton College, Oxford April, 1%5

R. N.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface . . . . Translator;s note . Table of contents . List of figures in the text List of plates Introduction CHAPTER I : Yoga .

n: III:

IV:

v:

Yantra Symbols of Lamaist Ritual . The Sacred Cemeteries of Nepal . Pantheons in Java and Bali .

Conclusions . Bibliography List of abbreviations . Index. . . . Plates I-XV Tables I and II

LIST OF FIGURES IN THE TEXT

1. Drawing of the ViSuddhi-cakra (after Avalon) . 2. Drawing of the Nabho-dluira1Jlj (-mudrä) (after Schmidt) 3. Drawing of the Mülädluira (after Avalon) 4. Drawing of the bhü-dhäratJä (-mudrä) (after Schmidt) .. 5. Sketch of the Bagalämukh1:-dhära1Jlj-yantra (after Zimmer) 6. Drawing of the Äjnä-cakra (after Avalon) 7. sr"icakra or Sr"iyantra with letters (after Rao). 8. Sketch of the construction of the Sricakra . 9. Scheme illustrating the reduction of a stüpa to its elements

(after Fergusson) 10. Sign of the "All-powerful ten" on a signet-ring (after Filchner) 11. The composition of the sign of the "All-powerful ten" (after

Bleichsteiner) . 12. The yantra of smaJäna-Käli (after Avalon). 13. Scheme of the "Nava-sanga" system on Bali (after Scholte)

page

VII IX XI XI

XII XIII

1 28 51 76

102 137 143 157 159

10 12 31 33 34 37 41 42

52 59

61 85

135

LIST OF PLATES

I. Y ogin in vajrasana, showing the location of the cakras and the main n&fis. Photo: A. A. Bake (Wereldkroniek).

li. The Trawas monument, originally the central fountain of the J alatul).ga bathing place. Photo: Claire Holt.

III. Relief representing the Buddha seated under the bodhi-tree, accompanied by the ~tamahäbodhisattvas. Formerly Deslouis Collection. Photo : Kern Institute.

IV. Bronze dish for ritual purposes, decorated with the sign of the 'All-powerful ten'. From: Ergebnisse Fileher Expedition, VIII.

V. The 'Dab-brgyad yantra. From: Schlagintweit, 1881.

VI. Tibetan bronze representing Hevajra. Collection Rotterdam Museum, no. 29922.

VII. Group of Lamaistic bronzes found near Peking, and probably used in a Hevajravasit:ä, vanished shortly after their discovery.

Photo: E. E. Schlieper.

VIII. Ti betan drawing representing a smasäna-ma1J<Jala. V erbert col-lection. Photo: Royal Institute for the Tropics.

IX. Naga-stone from Nälandä. Photo: Arch. Survey of India, Central Circle, 1935-'36, no. 4514.

X. Thanka representing Daisin Tengri with his acolytes. V erbert collection. Photo: Royal Institute for the Tropics.

XI. Barabudur from the air. Photo : Royal Dutch Air Force for the Archaeological Service of Indonesia.

XII. The Amoghapäsa stone sculpture from Padang Ca.J).gi. Photo: Archaeological Service, no. 3779.

XIII. The Cämu1_1<;lä sculpture from Ardimulya, the so-called Guhyes-varl. Photo : Archaeological Service, no. 9023.

XIV. a. Balinese pedanda during the ngili-ätma ceremony. Photo: A. A. Bake (Wereldkroniek).

b. Nepalese vajräcärya during a corresponding ceremony. Photo: A. A. Bake (Kern Institute).

XV. a. Key-stone from the ceiling of Ca.J).gi Ngrimbi with the nava-sanga emblems. Photo : Archaeological Service, no. 11282.

b. Kekasang from Bali with the nava-sanga emblems. From: Damste, 1926.

INTRODUCTION

By way of introduction I ought first to explain briefly what is the task that I have set myself and by what means I have tried to accom­plish it. The aim of this study is to find out to what extent a knowledge of the concepts of yoga may prepare the way to a better understanding of Indian archaeology. Patafijali, however, cannot serve us as a guide in this undertaking; the yoga which must be taken as the basis for the study is that which forms the core of the Tantras, the writings which especially constitute the foundation of the extensive Indian pantheons. This Täntrik form of yoga is distinguished from the classical system, as De la Vallee Poussin observed many years ago,l by an extra­ordinarily refined and rigorously pursued elaboration of the original ideas. But since these are matters of esoteric doctrine it is far from simple to grasp this system, and it is art which often provides the clear~st indications of the ideas in question.

In this connexion there has been a certain interaction in this study between the end and the means; a proper understanding of Täntrik yoga only became possible in the course of the investigation. A survey of this system of ideas is given in the opening chapter, while in the succeeding chapters the various sorts of yantras are discussed, i.e., all the means employed by yogis in their meditational exercises as aids to the concentration of thought.

Perhaps it will be asked what is the use of this study. In discussing the question of the value of ancient J avanese monuments for present­day and future civilization, Bosch has made the following observations :

"Hindu-Javanese art flourished in the same sphere of mysticism as that in which European art of the middle ages was born. But to penetrate this sphere and to chart the world of ideas in which Indian symbolism originated is incomparably more difficult for us than when we are faced with Western phenomena of the same nature-.

The art arises entirely out of mysticism, but - and here is the point of difference from Western art - it is seldom given to us to witness

1 De Ia Vallee Poussin, 1898, pp. 91 et seq.

XIV YOGA AND YANTRA

this process. The Orienta.l is so accustomed to expressing hirnself in symbols that the last thing to occur to him is to account for this practice. There are no texts explicitly explaining how mysticism is expressed in symbols through the means of art. Incidenta.l observations scattered through the entire Iiterature of eastern Asia, judiciously brought together, must show the way to a deeper insight into the meaning of artistic productions. It is like a conversation carried on over our heads in a foreign language, the meaning of which we have to try to reconstruct by seizing and combining a few sounds and words. It would be going beyond the truth to maintain that schalarship bad felt itself particularly attracted towards the solution of the riddles presented by the symbols of Indian art. The task awaiting the scholar is therefore that of establishing the facts and introducing order, which means running the risk of being looked at askance and being Contra­dieted by those who have gone before and 'know better'. An ungrateful task, perhaps, but one that is not be shirked." 2

It is not surprising that in this field everything in fact still remains to be clone. There is no area within the field of Indian - and in this study I am using this denomination in its widest sense of covering all domains influenced by Indian culture - archaeology that is so apt to be taken for a subjective undertaking as precisely this. There are dangers implicit in the study of such a subject, one moreover which has been brought into discredit by inexpert treatment, and the likeli­hood of going wrong is relatively great.

There is however one area which can provide us with much material and which because of its great coherence offers the opportunity to avoid mistakes as far as possible, even though it cannot always preserve us from them, and that is the field of Indian iconography. Here we have at our disposal numbers of legends, which, although they are clearly secondary, nevertheless give an insight into the underlying relationships between symbols and ideas. Here finally each mystical conception has a counterpart in a dogmatic theory which can usually be known from more than one source; texts and plastic art furnish data which make checking possible. The investigation at the same time gives us in this way the opportunity to understand the structure of the pantheon of various Indian religions, which in turn provides the possibility of a deeper understanding of spiritual life in the Orient. This task is thus certainly not an ungrateful one.

2 Bosch, 1924, p. 172.

INTRODUCTION XV

Almost half a century ago Krom expressed the wish that it would not be long before a study of the Buddhist iconography of Java was written.S This scholar has hirnself laid the foundations for such a study in his various papers and in particttlar in his description of the Buddhist bronzes in the Museum at Djakarta.4 A Buddhist iconography of Java, however, is still awaited.

In order to compile such a work it would not be enough simply to give a description of the various religious images and their legends. It would be necessary to show the underlying connexions between the various gods, to define their nature and function ; in short, to bring life to the pantheon. Krom appreciated this very well, and regarded his own studies in this area as merely preliminary.

I should like the present study also to be seen in the same light, though perhaps in a rather different way. When trying to find an approach to come to a better understanding of the multiple forms in Buddhist iconography, the work clone by J. L. Moens, to whose memory I dedicate this study, has been a source of inspiration in this venture. I have tried to reach some understanding of the fundamental ideas which must lie beyond the outward forms of the various deities of later Buddhism, and in doing so to contribute something to the study of Buddhist iconography in a way which provides the satisfaction of feeling the pulsation of life in the fabulous construction to which it testifies.

3 Krom, 1922, p. 610. 4 Krom, 1912, pp. 1-83.