PACIFIC WORLD Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies

PACIFIC WORLD Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies Third Series Number 16 2014 TITLE iii The Abhayagirivihāra’s Pāṃśukūlika Monks in Second Lambakaṇṇa Śrī Laṅkā and Śailendra Java: The Flowering and Fall of a Cardinal Center of Influence in Early Esoteric Buddhism1 Jeffrey Sundberg Independent Scholar “Learn the facts, Steed-Asprey used to say, then try on the stories like clothes.” —George Smiley, in John Le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy INTRODUCTION Alone among the five extant Śailendra foundation inscriptions re- covered in Central Java, the one found on the Ratu Baka promontory concerns not the consecration of a temple but rather the advent of a group of foreign monks. Quite specifically, these monks were noted as being Sinhalese of the Abhayagirivihāra, which together with its rival Mahāvihāra stood as one of the two main vihāras of medieval Anurādhapura; clearly these Abhayagiri monks were of sufficient sa- liency in the medieval Buddhist world of ca. 790 CE that they merited an invitation to an important foreign court a thousand miles away. The building associated with the inscription, with two rectangular platforms joined together by a causeway and enclosed by a tall wall, has for several decades now been recognized as a “meditation house,” a padhānaghara, which have been found in scattered locations across Śrī Laṅkā and in clusters on the west side of urban Anurādhapura and at extraurban, upland Riṭigala to its south. The sole surviving liter- ary reference to the inhabitants of the double-platformed structures at Riṭigala records them to be “rag-wearers,” paṃsukūlikas, endowed by their royal benefactor, the hard-luck Sena I, with “supplies worthy of royalty,” with many “helpers” and slaves. A similar double-platform structure at Tiriyāy on the east coast of Śrī Laṅkā harbored the largest 49 50 Pacific World cache of esoteric Buddhist and Mahāyānist statues yet found on that island.2 This essay seeks to explicate these archaeological facts and offer a plausible narrative about how the Abhayagiri achieved such promi- nence during the early years of Laṅkā’s Second Lambakaṇṇa dynasty, a lineage that commences exactly with the first solid identification of a Laṅkān king who affiliates to esoteric Buddhist precepts, the Mānavarman of Vajrabodhi’s biography, who seems to inaugurate an unacknowledged period during which Laṅkā’s kings were devoted to the esoteric doctrines cultivated in the Abhayagirivihāra.3 Indeed, the early kings of Second Lambakaṇṇa Laṅkā may have been the first Indic regents to adopt esoteric Buddhism, and their preferred Abhayagiri monks may have been not only adherents of these doctrines but drivers of them. This esoteric Buddhist period can be defined, I believe, from the foundation of the dynasty when Mānavarman (r. 684–718) lever- aged the Pallava army to effect his coronation, to approximately 840 CE, the disastrous Pāṇḍya sacking of Anurādhapura under Sena I (r. 834– 854). (A companion essay4 will examine the situation of the Javanese Abhayagirivāsins in the year 856, at a time when Anurādhapura lay in ruins, the newly consecrated King Sena II [r. 854–889]5 had reestab- lished the primacy of the Mahāvihāra and its Theravāda doctrines and was beginning the process of yoking the Abhayagiri to them, and the royal Śaiva nobleman pu Kumbhayoni began erecting Śaiva structures and inscriptions within a meter of the Ratu Baka Abhayagiri’s walls.6) In the conclusion of the present essay, I will note a generalized loss of momentum for esoteric Buddhism across large swathes of Buddhist Asia within a handful of years of the Laṅkān departure from this course. I have addressed the topic of the Abhayagirin presence at the Ratu Baka on two prior occasions. While my first effort to explain the presence of the Abhayagirivāsins in Java and specifically account for the distinctive double-platform structure there relied upon a seemingly credible but secondarily-sourced claim about the presence of the Shingon patriarch Nāgajñā/Nāgabodhi among the forest monks of the Abhayagirivihāra,7 this claim was later revealed to be quite unreliably founded.8 The second tranche of my efforts to explain the double-platform structure and the Abhayagirivāsins in Java stemmed from a col- laborative examination with Rolf Giebel of the previously neglected ca. 760 CE biography of Vajrabodhi.9 In it, the astonishing find of esoteric statues at the double-platform of Tiriyāy find was noted, as well the Sundberg: Abhayagirivihāra’s Pāṃśukūlika Monks 51 biography’s failure to identify the home monastery of Vajrabodhi’s seminal preceptor Nāgajñā (Longzhi 龍智) stimulated the proposal that Nāgajñā was perhaps an itinerant wilderness monks.10 (The present study takes much greater care than the preliminary exegesis in dif- ferentiating the variety of ascetic monks in Laṅkā and no longer lumps them all together as “wilderness monks,” an imprecise catch-all term that seems to ignore the widespread presence of the “rag-wearing” pāṃśukūlika monks at premier sites within urban Anurādhapura.) The present essay’s novel perspective on the Laṅkān evidence has been informed by an unprecedented avenue of approach, one that pays close attention to external evidentiary sources that have opened up in recent years.11 This includes the contemporary biographies of the Buddhist masters Vajrabodhi and Amoghavajra who fed the Yogatantras to the Tang and the archaeological and epigraphical evidence from the Abhayagirivihāra’s daughter monastery established in Śailendra Java.12 Indeed, one might call this approach Abhayagirigenic as opposed to the traditional Mahāvihāragenic narrative, which has until now held primacy in the writing and interpretation of this period of Śrī Laṅkān history. Many of the innovative conclusions of the present essay are due to the subject matter of these external sources, which pertain to the losing, Abhayagirin side in the grand contest between Anurādhapura’s rival monasteries, the cosmopolitan Abhayagiri and the conservative Mahāvihāra, the latter generating the extant historical chronicles such as the Mahāvaṃsa and Cūḷavaṃsa upon which so much of the modern historical understanding of the island depends. The once-great Abhayagiri was the historical loser in the contest for primacy, with everything about the native history that was allowed to be written and was allowed to survive that is implied by their status as the vanquished. Indeed, the Abhayagiri is known to have maintained its own internal documents, both historical vaṃsas as well as doctrinal records and vinaya codes,13 but the events of ca. 840 precluded them from reaching modernity. This essay will use the few extant foreign eighth century sources of evidence in an attempt to explicate the Abhayagiri’s significance to Vajrabodhi ca. 715 and ca. 740; the Śailendra king ca. 792; Sena I, one of history’s losers, around 840; Sena II, one of history’s winners, around 854; and the Javanese Śaiva nobility ca. 856; and to shed light upon Abhayagiri episodes in its own suppressed history of the isle. In doing so, I have necessarily been forced, per the epigraph of this essay, to lay 52 Pacific World forth those particulars that can be made out of the Sinhalese ontology in so far as it can be known at the distance of twelve centuries and through the veil of the victorious Mahāvihāra’s accounts, and then try to fit a historical narrative to them. From this perspective, crippled though it might be by the loss and suppression of evidence, we will see that when the Abhayagirivāsins were induced to the Central Javanese realm of the Śailendras, they stood at their zenith, with a great deal of domestic credibility and in- ternational repute for their successes. As a waypoint along the route to an understanding of what brought the Abhayagirivāsins to Java in 792, the present essay takes an ex- tended look at the brotherhood in their own homeland in the century before and the century after their establishment in Java, using both epigraphical sources as well as light scattered back from the novel nature of the Mahāvihāran practices when they supplanted the Abhayagiri in the wake of the Anurādhapura catastrophe. My Abhayagiricentric perspective has led me to one of the research conclusions of the present essay, namely that a (Sanskrit) pāṃśukūlika is not a (Pāli) paṃsukūlika: those ascetics associated with the heterodox, Sanskrit-facile Abhayagiri were not the same species as the Theravādin monks of the Pāli-reading Mahāvihāra.14 (I will employ this pāṃśukūlika/paṃsukūlika notation throughout this essay). This pāṃśukūlika/paṃsukūlika distinction is pertinent to one of the central theses of the present essay: we do indeed possess domestic references to the preeminent tantric monks of the early Second Lambakaṇṇa dynasty, and they are the Abhayagiri’s pāṃśukūlikin group. The evidence for this distinction between the Abhayagiri and Mahāvihāra “rag-wearers” that I adduce and assess in the pages below is, grosso modo, that these particular monks were seemingly the group favored by the tantric-leaning kings of the early Second Lambakaṇṇa dynasty from Mānavarman to Sena I; despite their nominally common mode of soteriology with their Māhavihāran counterparts, ascetic practices among the Abhayagirins were scarcely compatible with the “efficacious means” and “enlightenment in this lifetime” techniques of the Vajra Path promoted at the Abhayagiri; that these very monks have been proven to harbor esoteric Buddhist statues in at least one of their monasteries; that such monks attracted the royal patronage not only of the esotericist kings of Sinhala but the esotericist king of Java as well; and that when Sinhalese royal religious practice reverted Sundberg: Abhayagirivihāra’s Pāṃśukūlika Monks 53 to the Theravāda in the wake of the ca. 840 military disaster, this Abhayagiri group walked out on the newly-Theravādin King Sena II.

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