Why is Newar Buddhism Largely Ignored in Buddhist Studies? Protestantism, the Narrative of Decline, and the Position of Invisibility

ABSTRACT

The accounts hitherto published of the Religious System of the Nepalese are far from being comprehensive or satisfactory.

—H. H. Wilson, 1828

[A] history of Newar Buddhism, cannot yet be more than tentative in many places, since scholarship has not even adequately documented the textual and epigraphic sources, much less analyzed them systematically.

—Todd T. Lewis and Naresh Man Bajracharya, 2016

THE TWO epigraphs to this article, the first by the British scholar Horace Hayman Wilson, in many ways a founder of the field of Indology, and the second in a joint publication by Newar Naresh Man Bajracharya and American Todd T. Lewis, are separated by 188 years but diagnose the same problem regarding scholarship on the Buddhism of Nepal. Put simply, there is a dearth of it. The strides made in Indology and Buddhist studies broadly are great, but the amount of scholarship on Buddhism in Nepal lags behind other specialties in these overlapping fields, despite talented ethnographers and textualists undertaking its study. Why is this? Why, after nearly two centuries, is the same problem in place? What follows is a survey of how Newar Buddhism and the Vajrayāna were represented in European scholarship from the beginning of the nineteenth century, how both were deemed unworthy of study at the very start of European-language scholarship on Buddhism, and how the study of Newar Buddhism never recovered from this initial treatment in the wider field of the study of Buddhism and religion in Asia.

When examining scholarship on Newar Buddhism, a common theme is quickly detected. This is a theme of decline. Namely, that due to the events of the last several decades (multiple governmental regimes, the dissolution of the monarchy, several constitutions, an increasingly globalized Nepal, etc.), as well as lingering impacts from the Rana period,¹ the institution of traditional Newar Buddhism finds itself in dire straits financially and culturally. A quick look at extracts from the work of prominent scholars in the field illustrates this sentiment that Newar Buddhism is in decline:

It is certain that the income for all ritual specialists[, that is, vajrācāryas and śākyas] has declined, both because the number of rituals performed has declined drastically and because the amounts offered have not increased with inflation. (Gellner 1995, 223)

There is definitely a decline in the practice of the daily rites [...]. But historical evidence from the Chinese sources, as well as comparative ethnographic data from Sri Lanka, suggests that what survives in the majority of the vihāras is not very different from a form of Buddha pūjā once widespread in South Asia. (Sharkey 2001, 292)

The discussion and utilization of contemporary traditions of Newar Buddhism in this book should not obscure the fact that in the modern setting the faith is in decline and what follows is, at times, a scholarly reconstruction of the recent past when belief and practice were more vibrant. [...] Far-reaching changes in many spheres have accelerated, with the medieval Newar preoccupation of celebrating the rich and elaborate cumulative religious traditions in the cultural domain that has suffered the most precipitous decline. (Lewis 2017, 18)

From the reformers’ perspective their efforts to revitalise the performance of rituals and imbue them meaning address what are perceived to be symptoms of degeneration of a tradition in decline. (von Rospatt 2012, 227)

The ramifications of [the democratization of Nepal, civil war, population increase, loss of the monarchy, and loss of land]² are complex and have been far from uniform, and to simply characterize them all as symptoms of decline would hardly do them justice. (Owens 2014, 137)

In most of these cases, the author points out that the state of decline is one also diagnosed by members of the current community itself and that attempts have been made to address the vitality of the institution. The conclusions in the extracts above are reached by the authors’ sincere engagements with the Newar Buddhist tradition, the notions of decline being diagnosed through serious considerations of the contemporary state of the religion. Quite apart from this genuine sense of crisis, however, another more pernicious scholarly narrative of decline is detectable already in nineteenth-century European writings on Newar Buddhism and the Vajrayāna. This older narrative reflects less engagement with the tradition than it does prejudicial favoring of particular forms of Buddhism over the Buddhist religion of the Newars.

In this article, I will consider the genealogy of this older narrative of decline, which developed in pioneering European scholarship on Buddhism in the nineteenth century. I will show that the older narrative of decline is a direct result of a Protestant approach to texts that informs a historiography that regards original to be synonymous with old and later developments to be a result of corruption. I will show how its concepts of decline and corruption have stymied the study of the Buddhism of Nepal, as a result of which this field did not receive serious scholarly attention until the 1950s, with a slight widening of the subfield in the 1980s. That Newar Buddhism continues to be neglected by scholars of Buddhism, and even scholars of Sanskritic Vajrayāna, into the twenty-first century has rendered Newars and Nepal largely invisible in prominent publications on the Vajrayāna.

In examining the academic notion of decline in the Vajrayāna, we will confine ourselves on the one hand to materials in Sanskritic registers, which were preserved in Nepal, and on the other hand to the attitudes toward lived Vajrayāna in Nepal recorded in scholarship. There is a natural overlap between the Vajrayāna preserved in texts and current Newar Buddhism. All Sanskrit Vajrayāna texts commented on by the scholars detailed below were encountered in Nepalese manuscripts. Most of these manuscripts were copied in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. They are, therefore, manuscripts copied by Newars and exemplars of the Newar tradition.

Nepal has often been regarded by scholars of Buddhism as simply a repository of texts, with no value of its own as host to the only surviving form of Sanskritic Buddhism. Nearly every textualist discussed in this article held that attitude, that Nepal’s worthiness for the study of Buddhism is confined to its manuscripts. This position was also held regarding the Mahāyāna texts preserved in Nepalese manuscripts, Mahāyāna texts regularly used by Newars liturgically, didactically, and as physical objects of devotion. Ironically, the texts were believed to function as windows into an extinct “Indian” Buddhism, but the actual practices found in the living Sanskritic Mahāyāna tradition of the Newars were not considered. Although an unbroken living tradition of Sanskritic Mahāyāna practice is preserved in Nepal, the exegetical teachings and ritual lives of the Newars did not receive consideration from scholars with Euro-American academic training until the latter half of the twentieth century.

The development through the nineteenth century of the scholarly attitude toward lived Vajrayāna practice in contemporary Nepal will be exemplified in the works of Brian Houghton Hodgson and Sylvain Lévi, whose respective writings function as bookends to the long-nineteenth-century engagement with Newar Buddhism. This is the case because the work of Hodgson, an amateur writing at a time when the study of Buddhism was a tabula rasa, bears stark differences from that of Lévi, a trained Buddhologist whose scholarship appeared after the narrative of decline in the Vajrayāna was well developed. I suggest that the overtly pernicious attitude Lévi displayed toward Newar Buddhism, absent in Hodgson’s work, resulted from the academic narrative established in the intervening eight decades between the two studies.

The work of several scholars will be presented and considered, but in the interest of focus there will inevitably be lacunae in this study. Certain individuals will not be considered, as an exhaustive study of the treatment of the Vajrayāna in secondary scholarship is not the aim here. Instead, I examine selected works of particularly influential individuals in order to exhibit the trajectory of the narrative of decline as it impacted any serious engagement with Newar Buddhism by European and European-trained scholars. In the context of this discussion, “European” refers to the scholastic tradition that existed in Europe in the nineteenth century and was imported to South Asia via British colonialism, therefore this tradition includes the nineteenth-century Indian scholars referenced.³ I will, therefore, not make a serious examination of Nepalese scholarship written in Nepali and Newar as that subject deserves a study of its own and is markedly distinct from the European-language scholarship in form and motivation.

The notion of decline regarding the longevity and vitality of the dharma, the Buddha’s teaching, is encoded into the religion from an early stage, possibly originating on Śākyamuni’s lips, and present in all forms of Buddhism. Like the degenerate fourth, and final, yuga ruled over by the demon Kali taught in Hinduism, Buddhism maintains that as time moves forward the strength of the Buddha’s teaching is inversely correlated and in perpetual decline. Despite the ubiquity of this concept of the decline of the dharma, our examination of decline will not take it into consideration for the simple fact that it is not, as far as I have located, present in Newar historiographies. In fact, invoking this concept in that context would be counterproductive, as Newar grapplings with crisis tend to attempt to situate the Newar Vajrayāna of the householding vajrin as the Buddhist path par excellence, something that would be impossible if one were to suggest that the tradition is evidence of the pan-Buddhist notion of decline. The Vajrayāna is held to be the most advanced vehicle and taught by Śākyamuni himself. The European scholastic positions highlighted also do not mention the traditional teaching regarding the decline of the dharma, although one may be correct to suggest they nevertheless maintained a similar position, considering their privileging of the less “corrupted” forms of Buddhism (i.e., earlier forms) as the most “real.”⁴

The European notion of decline detailed below saw the Vajrayāna as representative of decline for two reasons: it is late chronologically, and it contains several elements in common with strains of Hinduism, especially tantric Śaivism. Christian Wedemeyer has demonstrated that due to following a historiography that considered history analogous to a biological life, with marked stages of birth, growth, maturity, and decline, the final phase of Buddhism in South Asia was effectively already doomed to be seen as indicative of decline by European scholars. This way of thinking found, for example, in Hegel and then Marx, “of historical processes as conforming to the pattern of the individual organic life cycle has been endemic to historiographical practice throughout its history” (Wedemeyer 2001, 229). Gregory Schopen has shown that, following a model established in the Protestant reformation, Buddhist texts have been privileged by Euro-American scholars as the best available sources for historical reality, and any deviation from the normative model illustrated in these texts (such as that located in archaeological evidence) is not considered to be real Buddhism, or even Buddhist at all. “Textuality overrides actuality” (Schopen 1991, 11). And despite a rich textual tradition, the ritual lives of Newar Buddhists were regarded as anathema to the original Buddhism European scholars of the nineteenth century argued was locatable in Pali texts.

These two positions, a historiography that regards late developments as corruptions and an assumption that the normative prescriptions appearing in texts represent the most valid form of the religion, combined to prejudice nineteenth-century European scholars against the Vajrayāna. Despite the Vajrayāna’s exemplification in texts, its late arrival chronologically coupled with its deviation from the normative model presented in earlier texts, especially those recorded in Pali, significantly diminished its value as representative of Buddhism for these scholars. As Schopen remarked regarding this methodology rooted in the Protestant Reformation that any religious phenomenon not located in select normative texts is a deviation from the true religion, scholars of Buddhism possessed an “unwillingness to allow actual practice a meaningful place in the definition of religion and the devaluation of any sources that express it” (Schopen 1991, 21).

The methodology employed in the very start of European, colonial engagement with South Asian religions was directly derived from Protestant perspectives that originated during the Reformation. The recitation of mantras and performance of ritual was anathema to the Protestant ideal of Sola Scriptura; to Protestant European ears these were so many vain repetitions. “During the Reformation, Protestant theologians [...] identified ‘vain repetitions’ as a form of rhetoric, magic, and idolatry. The prototypical target of this charge was the Catholic’s incessant muttering of Hail Mary’s [sic]” (Yelle 2013, 106–7). Such practices were held to be a corruption in the same way that “a pure, original Christianity had been corrupted by paganism” (Yelle 2013, 43). Robert A. Yelle provides a summary of the “characteristic features” of the Protestant Reformation that are easily detected throughout nineteenth-century scholarship on the Vajrayāna:

A general repudiation of ritual, particularly in its magical dimensions; a distaste for ornament, including rhetorical and verbal; the favoring of plainness, simplicity, or a minimalist aesthetic; literalism, including not only the avoidance of allegorical interpretation and the insistence on the understanding or semantic comprehension of the liturgy and the Bible, but also the critique of certain metaphorical, symbolic, and poetical uses of language; and iconoclasm, or the prohibition against idolatry framed broadly so as to include both verbal and plastic images. (Yelle 2013, 132)

The Protestant critique aimed at Hindu practice and texts as detailed by Yelle would be mirrored when European scholars looked at the Vajrayāna and Newar Buddhism. The Vajrayāna, due to representing the latest phase of the development of Buddhism in South Asia, was viewed by European Orientalists as indicative of decadence and decline. In the nineteenth century a narrative was put in place that regarded the earliest form of Buddhism as the real Buddhism. The Europeans that generated this narrative, mostly English, regarded the Theravāda Buddhists in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma, lands colonized by Britain, as upholders of this real Buddhism.⁵ H. H. Wilson confirmed this prejudice in a lecture given as a kind of state-of-the-field in 1854 (published in 1856) when he claimed that Buddhism currently existed “in its greatest purity” in Ceylon, Burma, and Siam (Thailand) and that the worship of “idols” found in Nepal “is obviously incompatible with [Buddhism’s] spirit and [those “idols”] must be regarded as exotic corruptions” (Wilson 1856, 253).

The British colonizers’ iconoclastic Protestant outlook was suspicious of any ritual or anything Buddhist that might violate the apparent staid conservatism of the Theravāda monastics they found in their colonies. Unlike the Theravāda, the Vajrayāna was seen as corrupted with ritual that marked its decline from an original Buddhism to be located in Pali texts. Indeed, in the same lecture Wilson compared the tantric system found in Tibet with the “Roman Catholic Church,” labeling the ceremonial headwear of Geluks as “mitres” (Wilson 1856, 263–64). The earliest European descriptions of Newar Buddhism, made by East India Company military men before Brian Hodgson’s arrival, rejected it as a valid form of the religion, holding it in direct comparison with the Buddhism of Burma.⁶ Ritual was the domain of the brāhmaṇas, so any manifestation of Buddhism that contained any ritual that superficially resembled brāhmaṇa ritual was considered to be corrupted, therefore not real Buddhism, and, as a result, unworthy of serious consideration. As Wilson made explicit, it was held in direct comparison with Roman Catholicism as well, viewed as a system of ecclesiastical superstition by Protestant academics. Finally, the intertwined Vajrayāna and Newar Buddhism were seen as representative of a Buddhism in decline.

European prejudice that regarded essentialized and allegedly pure religions as the most legitimate meant that any perceived similarity to other religions was not taken to be a sign of collaboration or adaptation but rather of corruption. We will therefore see that the Vajrayāna was often rejected as corrupted due to its inclusion of materials shared with Hindu tantric systems. The Buddhism of the Newars, ritual oriented and bearing superficial resemblance to Brahminical Śaivism, has not received sufficient study in part because of this long-established prejudice.

BRIAN HODGSON’S PIONEERING STUDY OF NEWAR BUDDHISM

Modern Buddhist studies originated in Nepal in the 1830s when the British resident⁷ Brian Hodgson posted Sanskrit manuscripts from Kathmandu to Eugène Burnouf, the “père” of the field, in Paris. But even before Burnouf began his thorough examination of the manuscripts, Hodgson had already undertaken a pioneering study of Newar Buddhism. His primary aim in conducting this research was to shine a light on the whole of Buddhism, relying on his local informants, Newar Buddhists,⁸ to provide him the desired information. What he ended up producing, and publishing in 1829 in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland as “Sketch of Buddhism, Derived from the Bauddha Scriptures of Nipál,” is very much a picture of living Newar Buddhism at the start of the nineteenth century.

Hodgson was only twenty-seven when he published his “Sketch,” which was likely the result of three to five years of research and direct involvement with Newar Buddhism. In addition to contributing to the fields of zoology, botany, and linguistics as an astute hobbyist, he turned his attention to the Buddhist religion of his hosts. As a career civil servant, he was not an expert (by the standards of the day) in Buddhism or Hinduism, nor was he trained as a Sanskritist. The “Sketch” takes the form of a catechism, with questions posed to his “old Vajra Ácarya friend” (Allen 2015 (89–113) identifies him as Amṛtānanda) and summaries of the Newar’s answers recorded, supplemented with detailed endnotes. Hodgson’s line of questioning was reflective of his amateur background and positionality as an early-nineteenth-century Englishman. He asked things such as: “What is matter, and what spirit?”; “What are the attributes of God?”; “In the opinion of the [Newar Buddhists], did God ever make a descent on Earth?” Particularly indicative of his era is the fact that he inquired about the “curled locks” of the Buddha, a question reflecting the debates of the eighteenth century over whether the Buddha originated in Eurasia or Africa, which often put his curly hair on center stage.

Despite his career with the East India Company and lack of academic credentials, Hodgson proved to be a sensitive amateur ethnographer. He frankly discussed the sexual imagery he encountered in Vajrayāna art and attempted to determine its meaning and origin without making moral comments on it. He correctly identified the nava grantha (nine books) of the Newar Buddhists, correctly ascribed Nepalese provenance to the Guṇakāraṇḍavyūha (Bamboo Repository on the Qualities [of Avalokiteśvara]) and the Svayambhū Purāṇa (History of the Svayambhū [Mahācaitya]), accurately described the pañcabuddha (five buddhas) in detail, alluded to the non-dual characteristics ascribed to the Ādi Buddha, meticulously recorded the organization of Newar castes and traced the name of the priestly groups (“bánra”) to the Sanskrit Buddhist monastic title (bhadanta, Hodgson records “bhanda”), and noted an etymological connection between Newar and Nepal. Even where he is inaccurate, there are traces of accuracy. For example, he discussed the “Swabhávika” and “Prájnika” schools, which appear to be misunderstandings of the Svātantrika and Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka schools.⁹ At times it seems either he or his informants heavily conflated aspects of Buddhism with Brahminism, but it is not to be discounted that his subjects lived in a Hindu kingdom with a Hindu majority. It is easy to look at his work two centuries later as the product of general ignorance, but in fact his attention to detail is impressive, and the “Sketch” offers an on-the-ground account of Newar Buddhism at the start of the nineteenth century. It is particularly noteworthy for the present article that there is no pejorative judgement to be located in his “Sketch.” He closed the work by remarking:

To conclude: with respect to the notes—that portion of this sketch, which is my own—no one can be more sensible than I am that the first half contains a sad jumble of cloudy metaphysics. How far the sin of this indistinctness is mine, and how far that of my original authorities, I cannot pretend to decide; but I am ready to take a large share of it to myself. (Hodgson 1829, 246)

Such a display a humility, and an allowance that his Buddhist informants are more knowledgeable than him, was not a common sentiment among European scholars of Buddhism during the long nineteenth century. The next ethnographic study of Newar Buddhism undertaken by a European was that of Sylvain Lévi, published in 1905. The intermediating eight decades between the works of the two men saw the establishment of a normative narrative regarding what real Buddhism is, and I suggest that this narrative would have an impact on Lévi’s work that is undetectable in Hodgson’s.

WILSON’S AND BURNOUF’S TREATMENTS OF THE VAJRAYĀNA AND NEPALESE BUDDHISM

The disregard of the Vajrayāna as worthy of serious study is found already right at the beginning of serious academic European engagement with Buddhism, in publications by founders in the fields of Indology and Buddhist studies H. H. Wilson and Eugène Burnouf, respectively. Wilson was the first Boden Chair of Sanskrit at Oxford, and Burnouf’s work laid the foundation for modern Buddhist studies. Their related critiques of Nepalese Buddhism and the Vajrayāna set the tone for generations of scholars to come. Both men made their studies from manuscripts sent to them by Brian Hodgson, whom they each regarded as a great expert of Buddhism, although his influence on their thinking does not appear to have been particularly substantial. This is perhaps because Hodgson, himself not a textualist and self-admittedly incapable of reading Sanskrit texts, engaged with Buddhism directly through Newar informants as noted above. His reliance on the testimony of actual living Buddhists was not reflected in the work of Wilson or Burnouf.¹⁰ Wilson’s article “Notice of Three Tracts Received From Nepal” appeared in 1828, and Burnouf’s monumental work Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme Indien was published in 1844. Both men, although genuinely engaging the Vajrayāna materials, viewed these materials with contempt and suspicion.

Wilson’s article is an examination of a single manuscript containing three texts sent to him at the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Hodgson. The texts are the Aṣṭamīvratavidhāna (Manual on the Performance of the Aṣṭamī Vrata), the Naipāliya Devatākalyānapañchaviṃśatikā (Twenty-Five Stanzas Praising Deities of Nepal), and the Saptabuddhastrotra (Praise of the Seven Buddhas). Already in the second paragraph of his article he asserted that the Buddhism of Nepal is a corruption of “pure” doctrine. “Nepal, evidently, constitutes no exception [to the practices of syncretism found in Hinduism], and the worship of Śiva, and Tantra rites, are so widely blended with the practices and notions of the Buddhists, that an accurate appreciation of the latter is no longer derivable from any but original and authentic sources, or the ancient works of the Bho’tiyas [Tibetans] in which the pure and primitive doctrines are enshrined” (Wilson 1828, 451). Not only was the Buddhism of Nepal “blended” with Hinduism, but it was apparently so far gone as to be unrecognizable. He concluded that since the worldview in such works does not align with those found in the Theravāda locales with which he was comparatively more familiar that “as authorities, therefore, [the works sent to Wilson by Hodgson] are of no great value, although they may be taken as guides to common and corrupt practice and belief” and that they show “how far the Buddha creed has been modified by Tántrika admixture” (Wilson 1828, 452). When faced with the system of the five buddhas (pañcabuddha), he called the “theistical pantheon” (the pañcabuddha along with the Ādibudda) the “vulgar Aiśwarika system” (Wilson 1828, 458). Wilson recorded the Svayambhū hill as “Sambhunáth mountain” (Wilson 1828, 460) and “mount Sambhu” (Wilson 1828, 466), the Svayambhū caitya as “Sambhu Chaitya” (Wilson 1828, 460), and the Svayambhū Purāṇa as the “Sambhu Puráńa” (Wilson 1828, 463, 466). This might be betraying a prejudice that the Buddhism of Nepal is an “admixture” with Śaivism, as Śambhu is a common name for Śiva; but it could also be an influence from Hodgson, who recorded “Sambhú Purána” (in place of Svayambhū Purāṇa) in his “Sketch.”

On the Aṣṭamīvratavidhāna, which details one of the critical rituals of Newar Buddhism (the aṣṭamī vrat), Wilson wrote that the text “is of much greater [length], than either of the preceding, but is of less value for the illustration of ideas originally Bauddha. It belongs to that faith, but is still more copiously interspersed with notions from a foreign source than even the preceding [texts examined], being, in fact, a ritual of the Tántrika practices of persons professing the religion of Buddha” (Wilson 1828, 472). He incorrectly ascribed the genesis of the practice to a vaidika tradition, something he ambiguously located in the Vaiṣṇava purāṇas, remarking that this tradition is “imitated by the Bauddhas of Nepal” (Wilson 1828, 473) when, in fact, the Nepalese aṣṭamī vrat practice is a modified version of the recitation of the conservative monastic prātimokṣa, the upoṣadha rite. He claimed that the stated goals of the performance of the ritual, “aversion of all evils, the preservation of health, and the attainment of fortune […] belong to Brahmanical Hinduism” (Wilson 1828, 474; for the Buddhist genesis and development of the aṣṭamī vrat in Nepal from the upoṣadha/uposattha fast, see Sinclair 2016). After giving a provisional translation of a portion of the Aṣṭamīvratavidhāna, which includes mantras ubiquitous in the Vajrayāna, he wrote in closing: “Such is the nonsensical extravagance with which this and the Tántrika ceremonies generally abound; and we might be disposed to laugh at such absurdities, if the temporary frenzy, which the words exists in the minds of those who hear and repeat them with agitated awe, did not offer a subject worthy of serious contemplation in the study of human nature” (Wilson 1828, 478). This statement reveals not only prejudices about what constitutes an alleged real Buddhism but also a position universal in the minds of Orientalists of the early nineteenth century: the idea that, where the societies of Europe are progressive, marching ever onward to the future, the societies of Asia are backward and regressive, ever reflecting on the past. The “temporary frenzy” suggests participants in the ritual become mindless and lose their volitional capacities. Although at first glance the suggestion that this ritual is “a subject worthy of serious contemplation in the study of human nature” seems to laud the ritual, in fact the reverse is asserted. Human nature was considered primitive, and if this ritual offers a window into human nature, this ritual too must be primitive and therefore regressive.

In Wilson’s view there is a pure and real Buddhism, which he implied several times and explicitly mentioned (“pure”) in the quotation given above referring to the Tibetans. Although he did acknowledge that much of the Vajrayāna is of Buddhistic origin,¹¹ his tone regarding the Buddhism of Nepal was condescending. This position is ironic considering that his opening sentence, one of the epigraphs to this article, lamented the sorry state of Orientalist knowledge regarding the religion of Nepal. Wilson’s dismissive and sometimes downright malicious attitude (“blended,” “corrupt,” “admixture,” “vulgar,” “foreign,” “nonsensical extravagance,” “absurdities”) regarding the Buddhism of Nepal is a sentiment that would be inherited by generations of scholars and functioned as a primary impediment to the advancement of the study of both the Vajrayāna and Newar religion.

Later in life, in the 1854 lecture cited earlier in this article, Wilson seemed to have decided that Newar Buddhism did not deserve mention. Aside from the pejorative statement quoted above, in that same lecture Wilson mentions Nepal only as a repository of texts. Although he alluded to Newar Buddhism several times when he mocked the concept of the Ādi Buddha, he is otherwise silent on Buddhism in Nepal, leaving it invisible and only implied. He detailed the contemporary Buddhism of Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Tibet, China, Mongolia, and Japan, but not Nepal. He rendered the living Buddhism of Nepal invisible, yet given his familiarity with Hodgson’s work and his own work on the “three tracts,” Wilson was undeniably aware of living Buddhism in Nepal.

The influence of Eugène Burnouf’s monograph Introduction à l’histoire du Bouddhisme indien on the Western academic study of Buddhism is difficult to overstate. Burnouf initially conceived of the work to function as an introduction to his translation of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka sūtra (White Lotus of the True Dharma Sūtra aka the Lotus Sūtra), which he believed would serve only to confuse readers without sufficient explanatory material. This introduction soon ballooned into a consideration of the traditional three divisions of the Tripiṭika (Three Baskets; sūtra, vinaya, abhidharma) literature, as well as the tantras. Burnouf’s materials were manuscripts sent to him by Hodgson, which the latter had commissioned to be copied in Nepal by Newar Buddhists. In total Burnouf personally received fifty-nine manuscripts, and the French Société Asiatique, also in Paris, received eighty-eight.¹²

Although from a Catholic background, Burnouf’s emphasis on texts in favor of living religion as the most “scientifique” methodology placed him firmly within the Protestant mode of scholarship exemplified by the British and highlighted by Schopen.¹³ Burnouf demythologized the figure of the historical Buddha and located him in India. He demonstrated the fundamentally Indic nature of the Sanskritic works he examined. Before this, a study of a Buddhism in its homeland in today’s northeast India and southern Nepal had not been undertaken, since a tradition no longer existed there. Burnouf showed that a number of Tibetan, Mongolian, and Chinese materials were translations from texts originally composed in Sanskrit. As the title makes clear (“l’histoire”), the work also lays out a historical development of Buddhism, going against the grain of contemporaneous European ideas that Asia had no history. Donald Lopez summarizes the study’s influence:

Burnouf’s book was studied assiduously not only by his illustrious students [including Max Müller and Edward Eldridge Salisbury], but by the next generations of European scholars of Buddhism such as Sylvain Lévi, Otto Franke, Hermann Oldenberg, Émile Senart, Theodor Stcherbatsky, F. W. Thomas, E. J. Thomas, Louis de la Vallée Poussin, and Alfred Foucher. A work of similar scope would not be produced for more than a century, when in 1958 the Belgian scholar Monseigneur Étienne Lamotte, a direct heir of Burnouf’s legacy, published Histoire du Bouddhisme indien. (Lopez Jr. in Burnouf 2010, 3)¹⁴

In many ways Burnouf’s Introduction comprises the cornerstone of the metaphorical edifice that constitutes the field of Buddhist studies. All subsequent scholarship would build on the foundation laid by Burnouf. His consideration of the tantras in his Introduction is, therefore, striking.

Burnouf read Wilson’s work on the “Three Tracts from Nepal” and agreed with the Englishman’s assessment of the Vajrayāna materials. Yet, Burnouf did consider the tantras Buddhist literature and took them seriously, devoting a section of the Introduction to them. He clarified his opinion of them at the start of this section, writing that the “tantras are indeed treatises with a very special character, where the cult of bizarre or terrible gods and goddesses is combined with a monotheistic system [...] of a supreme buddha and superhuman buddhas and bodhisattvas” (Burnouf 2010, 479).¹⁵ He concurred with Wilson that the tantras represent a mixing of Buddhism and Śaivism. “One sees there the most complicated mythology and the conceptions of the most scholarly schools of Buddhism mingled with the names of divinities, several of whom belong in particular to the special cult of Śiva” (Burnouf 2010, 480). He reiterated this theme of “mixing” with the “Śivaites” throughout this section (Burnouf 2010, 500). Burnouf made clear his opinion regarding this apparent borrowing, arguing that in the teachings of Śākyamuni “neither the female energies of the Buddha and Śiva, nor the obscene worship one renders to them, nor the formulas by which one assures their protection appear” (Burnouf 2010, 482). Not only is the worship espoused in the tantras “obscene” and in violation of Śākyamuni’s teachings, but the appearance of “female energies” is itself part of the alleged corruption found in the Vajrayāna as well.

Burnouf also speculated on the reason for the secrecy undertaken by Hodgson’s Newar informants surrounding the works.

This part of the Nepalese collection is not the first that Mr. Hodgson discovered, and his Buddhists revealed its existence to him only when he had already obtained from them many other works of a different character. If, as the title tantra indicates, and as this analysis will prove, the impure and coarse cult of the personifications of the female principle, as accepted among the Śivaists, found a place in these books, one can understand that an honest Buddhist hesitated to reveal to a foreigner proofs of so monstrous an alliance. But another reason must have also long shielded this part of Buddhist literature from the researches of Mr. Hodgson: it is the idea that the Nepalese and the Tibetans seem to possess about the value and importance of the tantras. (Burnouf 2010, 479–80)

The tantras are initially held back from Hodgson, but allegedly not because the practitioners of the religion value them above all other texts and are hesitant to just hand them over to a foreigner; rather, their apprehensiveness is supposedly due to shame surrounding the most sacred and guarded aspects of their Buddhism. Again, they use derisive language (“impure,” “coarse,” “monstrous”), and again “female principle” contributes to the purported corruption. Despite his clear awareness of the importance placed on these texts by living Buddhists, Burnouf did not give them the same treatment he afforded the Tripiṭika texts in his possession.

It is not my intention to long dwell on this part of the Nepalese collection, which I am inclined to regard as the most modern of all, and whose importance for the history of human superstitions does not compensate for its mediocrity and vapidity. It is certainly not without interest to see Buddhism, which in its first organization had so little of what makes a religion, ending in the most puerile practices and the most exaggerated superstitions. But this deplorable spectacle has but quickly wearied the curiosity and humiliated the intelligence. (Burnouf 2010, 483)

He maintained that the tantras contain nothing but “exaggerated superstitions” and are marked by “mediocrity” and “vapidity.” Exposing his historiographical position, Burnouf asserts that they are “the most modern,” and therefore suggestive of decline and opulence, a sentiment echoed when he refers to their imagery as a “deplorable spectacle.”

Burnouf claimed that the “clearest” “alliance” between Buddhism and Śaivism is found in the Suvarṇaprabhāsa (Golden Light Sūtra), a text he took to be a tantra (Burnouf 2010, 501). Yet, the Suvarṇaprabhāsa is not a tantra but rather a Mahāyāna sūtra, from the same literature as the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka, a text Burnouf admired enough to translate in full and introduce at length and onto which he heaped lauds and praises. He argued that the Suvarṇaprabhāsa is effectively absurd, loaded with apparently obsequious and hyperbolic language to Śākyamuni Buddha—ironically, the very same style of language that is found pervading the Saddharmapuṇḍarīka. The fundamental problem with the Suvarṇaprabhāsa for Burnouf was that he considered it to be a tantra.

Burnouf’s view of the tantric literature was so negative that he expressed disbelief regarding the view of the Magyar Transylvanian Csoma de Kőrös, whom he respected deeply, toward this material.

I am surprised nonetheless that this scholar, who has given a full analysis of the legends of the Vinaya, where the story of the preaching of Śākyamuni is sometimes recounted in so captivating a manner, and who has done so without allowing the slightest sentiment of interest in these fascinating stories to come through, has only found words of admiration and enthusiasm for books that appear to me the most miserable product of ignorance and the most coarse credulity. (Burnouf 2010, 483–84)

After airing his incredulity regarding Kőrös’ “admiration” for the tantras, Burnouf closed his short (much shorter than the other parts of his Introduction) section on tantra with a final salvo against the Vajrayāna. He wrote that “one must descend to the tantras to see [Buddhism and Śaivism] associated in a manner monstrous and unknown to all Buddhist schools, except to that of the North” (Burnouf 2010, 504).

A REJECTION OF NEPALESE BUDDHISM CEMENTED IN THE ACADEMY

The sentiment toward the tantras exhibited by Burnouf prevailed among later-nineteenth-century European scholars. In 1882, the Bengali¹⁶ scholar Rājendralāl Mitra published The Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal, an extended survey of eighty-six manuscript bundles that Hodgson sent to the Asiatic Society of Bengal.¹⁷ He opened with a veritable panegyric to Hodgson before turning his attention to the claim that the Pali scriptures contain the original sayings of the Buddha. He rejected this notion to assert that they were likely not written down until centuries after the Buddha, arguing that from this we may assert that the Sanskrit texts are as old or older than the Pali.¹⁸ Mitra ascribed a “Hindu” origin to the bulk of the tantric and dhāraṇī (apotropaic formulae) texts he surveyed and described two root tantras, the Mahākāla (Great Time) and Guhyasamāja (Secret Gathering) tantras. He gave a brief description of the former of roughly a paragraph but dedicated four pages of critique to the latter.

As a Tántric composition of the esoteric kind, it has all the characteristics of the worst specimens of the Śákta works of that type. [In it] theories are indulged in and practices enjoined which are at once the most revolting and horrible that human depravity could think of, and compared to which the worst specimens of Holiwell Street literature of the last century would appear absolutely pure. [...] Looking at them philosophically the great wonder is that even a system of religion so pure and so lofty in its aspirations as Buddhism could be made to ally itself with such pestilent dogmas and practices. (Mitra 1882, 261)

Mitra echoed Burnouf’s and Wilson’s shared sentiment that the tantric literature represents a corruption of “pure” and “lofty” Buddhism. He reflected that even London’s Holywell Street—a place infamous in the early nineteenth century as a refuge for radicals inspired by the French Revolution, where erotica, such as religious satirical erotica lampooning the church and government, was openly displayed—was pure by comparison. Stating that the rituals of the Guhyasamāja tantra are “debauchery of the most bestial character” (Mitra 1882, 261), “mystical and revolting” (Mitra 1882, 263), and “absurd, unmeaning, or stupid” (Mitra 1882, 263), Mitra turned his attention to the Nepalese practitioners themselves. He wrote that the tantric texts were considered “sacred by men who are by no means wanting in intellectual faculties of a high order, [and] we can only deplore the weakness of human understanding which yields to such delusion in the name of religion, and the villainy of the priesthood which so successfully inculcates them” (Mitra 1882, 264). Mitra, like Burnouf before him, speculated that the texts of the Vajrayāna were not readily shared with Hodgson due to the shame of their owners rather than the protection of their secret contents. Furthermore, he associated the Newar Buddhist priesthood with “villainy” and “delusion.”

The following year, in 1883, the Englishman Cecil Bendall published the Catalogue of the Buddhist Sanskrit Manuscripts in the University Library, Cambridge. This collection of manuscripts was sent by his contemporary, the British resident Daniel Wright, not Hodgson, who was by then retired and outside Nepal. Unlike Burnouf and Mitra, Bendall devoted little time to explaining the contents of the texts, primarily limiting himself to material details such as the number of leaves present, the number of lines per leaf, and so forth. But in the little that he did say, he indicated that the attitude professed by Mitra in Calcutta the previous year was shared in Cambridge. Regarding the Vajrayāna, of which he had access to a number of texts,¹⁹ he wrote that the works are of “the tantric kind, where debased Buddhism is hardly distinguishable from Çivaism” (Bendall 1883, x). He remarked that the tantric works he cataloged are characterized by the “decline of religion and learning in the country for the last five centuries” (Bendall 1883, xvii) and stated that the history of Nepal was uninteresting compared to the history of Bengal.²⁰ At one point in his catalog, to justify his decision to not provide any information on several Vajrayāna works, he argued that “these [...] tantric stotras and prayers [are] too unimportant to need description” (Bendall 1883, 167).

Among nineteenth-century scholars, Louis de la Vallée Poussin wrote both seriously and charitably on the subject of the Vajrayāna in his 1898 Bouddhisme: Études et materiaux.²¹ The book devotes no less than 171 pages to a study of tantric materials, including the editio princeps of the Ādikarmapradīpa (Illumination on the Novice/Preliminary Practices).²² At the opening of his work, de la Vallée Poussin reflected on the Hindu influence on the Vajrayāna (so much so that he mentions “Buddhist Hindus”), but unlike his Orientalist predecessors and contemporaries he saw no reason for this influence to make the material of the tantras any less “Buddhist” than the material of the Pali sources.

One usually regards the idolatrous and superstitious Tantrism as “no longer being Buddhism”; one forgets that Buddhism is inseparable from Buddhists, and that the Buddhist Hindus (les Hindous bouddhistes) were voluntarily idolaters, superstitious or metaphysicians. If the beliefs and rites of the Buddhist populations, groups without cohesion, badly brought together, never completely assimilated, do not directly concern the history of the relatively conservative communities, which is debatable, certainly these rites and beliefs constituted the Indian religion for many centuries, and it was the Buddhist schools which gave amorphous mysticism a decent literature, a regular liturgy. (de la Vallée Poussin 1898, 6)

He also opened his section on “Mahāyāna and Tantrayāna” to reflect that both were likely influenced by “Hinduism” (de la Vallée Poussin 1898, 61). In a discussion on dhāraṇīs, he defended the view that Buddhism, occupying the same milieu wherein Vedic mantras were uttered, likely adopted these popular (“vulgaire”) practices (de la Vallée Poussin 1898, 128–29). Indeed, de la Vallée Poussin held the view that the Vajrayāna and tantric Śaivism alike drew from a common source for their origins (de la Vallée Poussin 1898, 133), a position that David Seyfort Ruegg would take up in the late twentieth century.²³ De la Vallée Poussin was unfazed by the possibility of a potential productive exchange between the Buddhists and Śaivas, a sentiment that landed him in professional trouble.

The English Orientalist Edward James Rapson, while applauding de la Vallée Poussin’s pioneering editions, harangued the rest of the French scholar’s work. He especially took issue with de la Vallée Poussin’s contention that the Pali texts may not represent the earliest strain of Buddhism, a position he called “startling” (Rapson 1898, 909). Rapson found de la Vallée Poussin’s position that “popular” forms of Buddhism, namely the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna, could come from an earlier period in Buddhism’s history untenable, as he viewed their varying assimilations of outside practices as indicative of decline, something he equated to the development of Brahmanical religion as well. Rapson considered earlier Buddhism to be more “philosophical” (Rapson 1898, 912). Although further study has confirmed that the Vajrayāna is a later development than what appears in the Pali texts, it is Rapson’s paradoxical position, that Buddhism developed in India alongside Brahmanical religion but that any assimilation with it was indicative of decline, that should concern us here. Rapson’s view on Vajrayāna texts and practices was the prevailing attitude of his day: they are “non-Buddhistic in character, due entirely to foreign importation” (Rapson 1898, 909) and a “very unpleasant subject” (Rapson 1898, 914). De la Vallée Poussin never again devoted a study to Vajrayāna works, which may have been a direct result of the treatment he received from a senior scholar in his field,²⁴ representative of the professional status quo.

NEWAR BUDDHISM IN LÉVI’S LE NÉPAL

At the start of the twentieth century, the French Orientalist Sylvain Lévi published his monumental, three-volume study Le Népal: Étude Historique d’un Royaume Hindou. The first two volumes, both published in 1905, contain an historical study ranging from Nepal’s hoariest past through the Licchavis, Mallas, Shahs, and into the Rana period. He details the caste organization of the Newars and Gorkhas alike, undertakes a thorough examination of traditional Newar literature, festivals, and rituals and speculates on Gorkha and Newar cultural influences on one another, as well giving a detailed travelogue of time in the field at the turn of the century. Although similar studies had previously been produced on aspects of Nepalese culture, such as those by British residents Hodgson and Wright, the impressive breadth of Lévi’s work provided a clear and firm foundation on which to build a European-language study of the culture of the Nepal Valley. Lévi is the first scholar with formal training in the Euro-American tradition to engage Newar Buddhism in an academic study, and we may consider the publication of his Le Népal as a watershed moment in the history of that subfield of Buddhist studies.

Lévi echoed the historiography of birth, production, maturity, and decay, placing this narrative in the context of the history of India, which he placed in four stages. He viewed the 1768–1769 conquest of the Nepal Valley by the Gorkhas as

the annexation of Nepal to Brahmanical India. Peopled by un-Āryan (an-aryennes) races, converted and civilized by Indian Buddhism, conquered and absorbed by Hindu Brahmanism, Nepal has already undergone the first three stages of Indian history; entered late in the cycle of events, it has yet to know the last phase, [...] where India has been engaged for a long time: the fight against Islam and the stranglehold (mainmise) of Europe. (Lévi 1905, I, 28)

The “un-Āryan” Newars were “civilized” by Indian Buddhism, then “conquered” by Gorkha Brahmanism. All that was left, the fourth stage, was apparently a two-pronged struggle against Islam and European colonialism. In Lévi’s view, the Buddhism of Āryan India was civilizing, but the ritualist brāhmaṇa religion was detailed in the language of conquest. Note as well that if Nepal’s history should parallel that of India’s as laid out by Lévi, then, from this position, Nepal would be behind India in its historical development. Nepalese Buddhism was also, therefore, behind that of India, by then long extinct.

The sentiment that Newar Buddhism is thoroughly corrupted by Brahmanism pervades Le Népal. Lévi remarked that the “bandyas” (vajrācāryas and śākya) are the “brāhmaṇas of Buddhism” (Lévi 1905, I, 240) and that the Buddhism of Nepal is “rudimentary” (Lévi 1905, I, 224), a result of “inevitable assimilation” (Lévi 1905, I, 248). He pointed out that the Gorkha takeover brought about the “decline of Newari,” yielding to the tongue of the “vanquishers” (Lévi 1905, I, 252). Although he conceded that the Mahāyāna and Vajrayāna both “absorbed the popular culture of India” (Lévi 1905, I, 325) and that the “Buddhism of Nepal admits the pantheon and the pandemonium common to” (Lévi 1905, I, 330) the Mahāyāna, he nevertheless argued that the apparently Brahmanical elements detected in the contemporaneous Newar Buddhism were indicative of a “disgraced [and] weakened” (Lévi 1905, I, 320) institution, “monstrous creations due to the sect of Tantra, and direct borrowings from Hinduism” (Lévi 1905, I, 330). He made all of these claims while still maintaining that “Nepal hardly changes” (Lévi 1905, I, 321) and was “India in the making” (Lévi 1905, I, 28).

Lévi’s diagnosis of the state of the material institution of Newar Buddhism was particularly pessimistic and deserves to be considered in full.

The population of the vihāras has sadly changed; the ancient community of celibate, educated and studious monks has disappeared; it ceded its place to unworthy heirs, the banras [bandyas, i.e. vajrācāryas and śākyas]. If the monasteries have been the asylum of meditation and prayer, they serve now as lodgings for a swarming and noisy multitude of men, women and children crowded in defiance of hygiene in narrow and low rooms where they exercise worldly professions [...]; others among the banras are employed outside as carpenters, as founders, as plasterers. The science is dying, or, rather, is dead: a wretched pūjārī, charged by the community with daily worship, comes every day to mutter hymns (stotras) in barbaric Sanskrit which he does not understand before the statue of Śākyamuni, or to recite a section of the Prajñā-pāramitā in Eight Thousand Stanzas (Aṣṭa-sāhasrikā), which he understands even less; it is he who holds the old manuscripts traced in the past by pious copyists and who, with bewildered indifference, leaves time and insects to consume their work of destruction on these relics. The tradition of old knowledge is disappearing; at the start of the nineteenth century Hodgson still found true scholars to instruct him. Amṛtānanda, the pandit who served as his initiator and guide, handled Sanskrit with ease. (Lévi 1905, II, 26–27)

Lévi was probably not wrong in his assessment that the erudition of Buddhist ritualists had significantly decreased in the previous century. The reasons for this, the oppression of Newars and Buddhism by an oppressive and self-consciously Hindu regime, are too lengthy to detail in the present article. For now, we should note the tone of Lévi’s appraisal. The direct heirs of the Buddhist lineage from ancient times are “unworthy.” He used derogatory language to describe the people who live around the vihāra courtyards, whom he said were “swarming,” “noisy,” and “in defiance of hygiene.” He called the daily ritualist “wretched” and asserted that the man’s Sanskrit was “barbaric.” The practitioners were “bewildered” by their own tradition, whereas those of a century prior were “true.”

Although Lévi contributed more to the study of Nepal’s living religion than ever before, he was, after all, concerned with the history of a “Hindu” kingdom. This is all the more striking when considering that Lévi was primarily a Buddhologist, yet he assigned no value to the Sanskritic Buddhism in Nepal. His appraisal, read by a European and American audience, established the worthiness of the serious study of the current Buddhism practiced in Nepal. Lévi’s observations concerning contemporaneous Buddhism in that kingdom were belittling and made clear his position that the religion was unworthy of a more thorough examination. After all, if the reflections in his travelogue are true—“these poor Buddhist pandits do not know anything” (Lévi 1905, II, 317)—what would motivate a European to risk their life to travel to Kathmandu, a place he called “the domain of filth” (Lévi 1905, II, 325)? Especially when, even at the best of times, the Vajrayāna was considered to represent a corruption and not true Buddhism by his European and American readers. Lévi, a rigorously European-trained scholar of Buddhism, brought with him to Nepal an inherited attitude regarding what constituted real Buddhism. His own engagement with the study of Buddhism, largely centered around philosophy, likely only furthered his position regarding the alleged corrupted nature of the Buddhism he encountered in Nepal. After all, there he saw a Buddhism whose prerogative was ritual practice, not cloistered philosophical speculation. His descriptions of Newar Buddhism reflect the eight decades of European hostility toward Nepalese Buddhists and their Buddhism, with his assessment that neither are worthy of serious study.

INTO THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Following Lévi’s Le Népal, the Buddhist religion of the Newars received almost no²⁵ scholarly attention during the first half of the twentieth century. The second half of the twentieth century saw a growth of academic production on the religion of Nepal by Nepalese scholars.²⁶ This largely followed the historiographical approach of drawing a chronological narrative of progress through Nepal’s history, beginning in the 1950s with the Nepali-language journal Itihās Samśodhan (Revisions to History) and then a journal that published records of inscription, Abhilekha Saṃgraha (Collection of Inscriptions), in the 1960s. Pūrnimā, initially coedited by Gautama Vajracarya and Mahesh Raj Pant, began printing in the 1960s. These journals all had a similar, dovetailing raison d’être: to bring the writers of the narrative of Nepalese history back into Nepal while improving the state of history education in their homeland. The collective of scholars contributing to these journals lamented the state of the study of history in Nepal, which they pointed out was largely based on oral traditions and legends, and they aimed to use the rich material evidence found locally in the form of inscriptions, artwork, and manuscripts to rewrite that history. Unfortunately, most of these journals have since ceased publication. Pūrṇimā occasionally publishes an issue, largely consisting of Pant’s own work.

This prerogative of Nepalese leading the writing of Nepalese history found its expression in monographs as well. Hemraj Shakya started extensively publishing in the 1970s, producing monographs on important Newar Buddhist sites,²⁷ as well as a number of articles and collections of inscriptions and colophons. Kamal Prakash Malla published widely beginning in the 1980s, including an edition and Nepali and English translations of the Gopālarājavaṃśāvalī done alongside Dhanavajra Vajrācārya, himself a prolific writer of articles in Nepali and compiler of inscriptions, in 1985. Painter and art historian Lain Bangdel was active beginning in the 1960s, and his daughter Dina would also produce substantial research on Newar Buddhist ritual art and architecture.

The 1980s ushered in increased interest in the religion of Nepal among foreign scholars. Although some work had been produced prior, such as studies by Michael Allen (1996)^,28 and Siegfried Lienhard (1974), the work of John Locke (1980, 1985) marked the first comprehensive overviews of Newar Buddhism, especially his monograph on Avalokiteśvara among the Newars. Mary Slusser’s 1985 two-volume Nepal Mandala: A Cultural Study of the Kathmandu Valley showcased the sacred geography of the Valley and traced the history and practices related to it. Todd T. Lewis and David N. Gellner undertook their doctoral fieldwork and defended their dissertations during this time—Lewis in 1984 on the Buddhist uḍay merchants of Kathmandu and Gellner in 1987 on the Buddhist vajrācāryas of Lalitpur. A number of German scholars, such as Axel Michaels and Alexander von Rospatt, were in residence in Nepal in the 1980s and 1990s as part of the Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project and completed ethnographic and textual work in the process. Japanese scholars Kimiaki Tanaka and Kazumi Yoshizaki began publishing articles in Japanese in the 1990s as well.²⁹ Although academic engagement with Newar Buddhism waned somewhat at the start of the new millennium, since the 2010s progress has been made in the field of Newar Buddhism and Sanskritic Buddhism in Nepal; for example, dissertations by Iain Sinclair (2016), Alexander J. O’Neill (2021), myself (Grimes 2022), Kris L. Anderson (2022), Amber Moore (2024), and Andrea Wollein (2024) and several publications by Manik Bajracharya, Dina Bangdel, Will Douglas, Camillo Formigatti, Jinah Kim, Lauren Leve, and Kerry Lucinda-Brown. The field of Newar Hindu studies (as separate from Parbatiya Hinduism) has also advanced considerably in the twenty-first century, with works by Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz, Chiara Letizia, Bal Gopal Shrestha, and Astrid Zotter, to name a handful.³⁰

Although the subfield of Newar Buddhist studies continues to grow, its status remains largely unchanged since Lévi in both the wider field of Buddhist studies and the more specialized area of study of the Vajrayāna. When it is invoked in wider literature, it is typically to say that Nepalese Buddhism is corrupted by Hinduism. For example, consider a sign on display in San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum as recently as 2024 stating that in the Kathmandu Valley “Buddhist and Hindu rituals and philosophies have interwoven into a kaleidoscopic array of ever-transforming deities and doctrines.” It is rarely, if ever, mentioned in scholarship. Two representative monographs published in the American academy in the twenty-first century that make no mention of Nepalese Buddhism are Ronald M. Davidson’s Indian Esoteric Buddhism: A Social History of the Tantric Movement, which appeared in 2002, and Christian K. Wedemeyer’s Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism: History, Semiology, and Transgression in the Indian Traditions in 2012.

Davidson nowhere mentions Nepal as hosting an unbroken institution of Sanskritic Vajrayāna, a lacuna David N. Gellner calls “galling and puzzling” (Gellner 2004, 415). A passage from Gellner’s consideration of this issue is worth quoting in full:

Surely, then, he must deal somewhere with the Newars who are the last remaining Mahayana South Asian Buddhists, as a long line of scholars have recognized [Gellner here lists 25]. Surely Davidson will at least mention the one South Asian society where the Namasangiti is still recited in Sanskrit as part of the daily liturgy and where each complex Buddhist ritual begins with a samkalpa that locates the action as taking place in the mandala of Sri Samvara in the northern Pancala country of Bharatavars? But no, Davidson proceeds to claim, in the one statement of the book, which I feel wholly competent to say is a fundamental, and very unfortunate, error of fact and interpretation, “... there are no continuously surviving Indian Buddhist institutions...” (p.24). (Gellner 2004, 413–14)³¹

Wedemeyer’s book won the American Academy of Religion’s 2013 Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion: Historical Studies, illustrating the potential impact of the book on nonspecialized readers. It is, therefore, worth noting that a mention of Nepalese Buddhism is located nowhere in the body of the text and that Wedemeyer does not consider Newar Buddhists in his effort to “make sense” of tantric Buddhism. One could defend him, however, by pointing out that it is the transgressive language he discusses and that the Newar Buddhists, who do not interpret this language literally, would not shed light on the prerogatives of tantric yogins of medieval South Asia. Even so, is it not at least worth mentioning that there are living practitioners for whom the Sanskrit texts detailed constitute their most sacred scriptures and that their interpretation has sublimated the transgressive aspects of those texts? Nepal is not considered in an historical context either, despite the fact that Wedemeyer discusses texts that were likely produced in Nepal, such as the Saṃvarodaya tantra (Arising of Saṃvara) and Caṇḍamahāroṣaṇa tantra.³²

Only once in Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism is the interpretation of Newar practitioners alluded to, in a footnote, where caryānṛtya (tantric dance) is said to be a “contemporary, attenuated enactment of the Tantric rite of caryāvrata” (Wedemeyer 2012, 257 n130). Wedemeyer suggests that the practice could help in our understanding of his subject, the caryāvrata, but he makes no attempt to do this in the book. The inclusion of “contemporary” is noteworthy, as it implies that the worthiness of its modern practitioners to “make sense” of tantric Buddhism is low. However, material evidence for the caryānṛtya practice dates back at least multiple centuries, as a quick perusal of the collection at Kathmandu’s Āśā Archives will feature a number of nineteenth-century and older thyāsaphūs (Newar “folded books,” accordion-style books) and other manuscripts with illustrations of the mudrās and foot placement to be employed in dance, and the tradition of tantric singing goes back to the first millennium.³³ One of the sources Wedemeyer cites on the subject of caryānṛtya records that the “tradition [of caryānṛtya] possibly goes back to the seventh or eighth century” (Ahmed 2003, 161).

It may be that Newar Buddhism’s superficial resemblance to Śaivism, with a ritual world revolving around married householders, is part of the reason that it was not engaged in these works. More likely though is that Newar Buddhism, nearly invisible in the wider field of Buddhist studies, never even came to mind.³⁴ Situated in the margin between India and Tibet, Nepal is ignored.³⁵ The development of Buddhism among the Newars is nevertheless critical for widening our understanding of Sanskritic Vajrayāna, both in modern and premodern South Asia. Indeed, many “studies have been conducted regarding Tantric Buddhism in India and Tibet. Tantric texts in Nepal should also be more researched attentively” (Sugiki 2024, 1074).

CONCLUSION

It should be clear from the examples given above of the rhetoric in European-language scholarship that Newar Buddhism, as well as its being rendered invisible in recent prominent monographs on the Vajrayāna, faces problems of being taken seriously even today. Furthermore, as there is a shift in the academy toward a preference for highlighting modern aspects in lived Buddhism, Newar Vajrayāna, with its ecclesiastic patriarchy and archaic feel, is passed over in favor of Theravāda reformers and new Buddhist options.³⁶ The impactful female agents in the Theravāda reformation are given well-deserved praise and attention, but unfortunately the female practitioners taking advantage of new opportunities in traditional Newar Buddhism, including initiations and leading rituals, are not afforded any consideration in academic studies.³⁷

Newar Buddhism, once rejected as a late, and therefore corrupted, form of Buddhism, now faces the threat of being passed over by wider serious study, ironically because of a perception that it is an ossified relic of an ancient form of Buddhism. This is a tradition steeped in the past by maintaining practices that disappeared elsewhere on the Indian subcontinent. We have much to learn from Newar Buddhism, not only regarding the Buddhism lost in India but also by observing how Newar Buddhist actors have continuously adapted that living Sanskritic tradition to fit ever-changing circumstances.

REFERENCES

Footnotes

Author notes