Review: [untitled] Author(s): Leonard W. J. van der Kuijp Source: Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol.

123, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 2003), pp. 228231 Published by: American Oriental Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3217872 Accessed: 13/07/2010 12:27
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separatebut together in themselves, then they attempt to make links and correspondencesbetween case, them, and finally they end up choosing the new and pushing out the old. In Brahmabandhab's of his Hindu conceptual world, then built impressive and however, he startedwith a near-repudiation creativebridges between his Christianand Hindu heritages,before finally separatingthem completely in his public and private lives. That he was forced to the latter move, late in life, was not simply the result of changing theological opinions. It was also a tragic outcome of personal and political frustrations, as well as a growing nationalistresentmentagainstimperialistarrogance.In any case, the lasting ideas in the field of indigenous Christianizingmovements are Christian heritage of Brahmabandhab's monastic institutions such as Shantivanam,established in 1950 by Swami Abhishiktanandaand his associates, in orderto make Christianitytruly Indian (p. 205). It is ironic, given their origins in Brahmabandhab'sown monastic experimentation,that the Vishwa Hindu Parishadroundlycondemns such Christianashramasas being anti-nationalcovers for missionary activity. While it is clear that Lipnerhas warmedto his task in writing this biography-through his writing one gets a real feel for Brahmabandhab's impetuousness,impatience, charisma,and strengthof charsustained acter,nicely symbolized by Lipner's metaphorthroughoutthe chapterheadings of the flame, snuffed out-one of the things I most appreciateabout this then to a blaze and being quickly rising book is the author'srefusalto eulogize or deify. Brahmabandhab's theological experimentsare groundbrandof fulfillment breakingand laudable, yes. But, Lipner asks, what is lost by this straightforward also be reformed in in Cannot Christians to its true calling Catholicism)? theory (Hinduism leading recourse to a Sanskrit-basedphilosophical the encounter?And what is the cost of Brahmabandhab's brandof Hindu thought?What of Hindus for whom Sanskritis not a backgroundtradition,or, worse, for whom it has been a tyranny?Lipner's critiques of his subject are harshest when it comes to the defendedwith pride,beand social purity,which Brahmabandhab subjectof caste, vamrnsramadharma, maintainedin an indigand should be of natural reason of the divine that were gift they part lieving ashramawould have been enous Christianity.Lipner notes with some distaste that Brahmabandhab's neither very Christian,because of the caste separations,nor very Hindu, since renouncers are supdisparagingremarksabout posed to give up their social personalities. And what of Brahmabandhab's Muslims and Buddhists?In this, the present-dayproponentsof Hindutvawould find common cause. In the end, Lipner leaves us with four large questions which are pertinentnot only in India today and but also in all contexts of inter-religious dialogue and inculturation.Can we speak of "natural" of our labels How narrow should in terms? truths cultural-neutral religious identity "supernatural" be? Is there a sharedbridgeheadon which religio-culturaldiscussions can stand?And is it possible to be a patrioticIndianChristian?Except for wishing that answers to these questions were easy, and that he had given them to us definitively, I can think of no criticism of Lipner's outstandingwork. In preyet compelling form, he has demsenting Brahmabandhab Upadhyay to us in such a straightforward onstratedjust how complex the issue of Christianindigenization was and still remains for Indians committed to their country.
FELLMCDERMOTT RACHEL BARNARDCOLLEGE

Jatarupa's Commentary on the Amarakosa, pts. 1 and 2. Edited by MAHES RAJ PANT. New Delhi: 2000. Pp. x + 468, x + 512. Rs 1295. MOTILAL BANARSIDASS, Amarasimha's Ndmalihganusdsana, better known as the Amarakosa, is surely the most famous and oldest extant lexicon of the Sanskrit language. The very large corpus of complete manuscripts of the text that has been handed down attests to its great popularity, yet next to nothing is concretely

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known about its author.Even an edition with a suitably critical apparatusis still outstanding.Writing in circa the sixth centuryA.D., Amarasimhabegins the substanceof his work not with one or the other Hindu deity, but with an enumerationof twenty-five different terms for the Buddha, from sugata to mayadevisuta. For this and two other reasons, namely that the first entry of its listing of trees is the Ficus religiosa (bodhivrksa),the tree underwhich the Buddhaachieved his enlightenment,and that the opening stanzais suggestive of a Buddhistreligious environment,he is usually consideredto have been a Buddhist. The fact that the Amarakosa is by no means obviously or stridently Buddhist in tenor must no doubt have contributedto its enormous popularity throughoutthe subcontinent.It is organized into three kanda-sections comprising twenty-five chapters (varga). The first two comprise ten chapterseach. The thirdhas five chapters,of which the last deals in forty-six stanzas with a grammatical summaryof the rules of gender (lihgadisamgraha).It is estimatedthatmore thaneighty commentaries were written on it. The well-known histories of Sanskritlexicography by C. Vogel (1979) and M. M. Patkar(1981) list a good portion of this interpretiveplenum, the vast majorityof which remain as unstudied as they are unedited. The Amarakosawas also translatedinto a host of Indic languages, including Sinhalese. A Moggallana (ca. twelfth century) relied a great deal on it when compiling his the earliest extant lexicon of Pali. It also exerted no uncertaininfluence beyond Abhidhanappadipika, the subcontinent,for it was renderedinto Burmese, Nevari, Tibetan as well as Mongolian. The work under review, Mahes Raj Pant's study and edition of the oldest extant exegesis of Amarasimha'swork, titled simply Amarakosatlka,by the hithertobarely known Jatarupa,represents in every respect a milestone in the field of Amarakosa studies and Sanskritlexicography in general. It is based on the author's discovery of two Sanskritmanuscriptsthat were copied in Nepal. One is housed in the Kaisher Library,Kathmandu,and is dated 1119 [= A]; the other forms part of the colandis dated 1755 [= B]. They were filmed by the Nepallection of the National Archives, Kathmandu, GermanManuscriptPreservationProject under, respectively, Reel nos. C 121/1 and A 1031/10 (and once again underB 266/15). Unfortunately,both manuscriptsare incomplete. ManuscriptA originally consisted of 153 folios, but some ninety-three folios of the text are missing; manuscriptB has but twenty-five folios and ends with the seventh varga of the first kanda. Part 1, pp. 57-282, of Pant's work is an incrediblydetailed examinationof these two manuscriptsand their distinguishingfeatures; part2, pp. 3-325, forms his meticulously executed edition of both manuscripts,to which he has added five appendices (pp. 327-408) and no less than twenty indices (pp. 409-512). Needless to say, both parts are informed by the impressive range of the author's erudition,as indicated in the long bibliography (part 1, pp. 7-53) andby his copious annotations.The latterare sometimes shortessays in themselves, as is for example note 21 on the term upakdrika,which occupies some nine pages (1: 389-97). Pant details "Jataruipa: His Time and Place" in part 1, pp. 283-308. ManuscriptA is dated 1119 and this forms a convenient terminus ad quem for Jatarupa'swork. The fact that, with his stunning knowledge of a wide range of Sanskritliterature,the authorwas able to trace an unidentifiedquotation in Jataruipa to Rajasekhara's(early tenth century)Viddhasalabhanjika drama(2: 70) leads him to must have flourishedin the second half of the tenth century, at the earliest. In conclude that Jatariipa the absence of a sufficient numberof exact dates, one method that needs to be used for arriving at a and his commentaryis to establish a relative chronology more or less satisfactory dating of Jataruipa among the oldest known Amarakosa exegeses; these are: (1) Sarvananda's1159-60 Tikasarvasva, (2) Ksirasvamin's undated Amarakosodghatana, and (3) Subhuticandra'sequally undated Kamadhenu (or, as Pant prefers, Kavikamadhenu).Before continuing, we must note an observation made by G. Cardonathat merits repeating.Manuscriptsof texts travelled across India at a much faster pace than is usually assumed, and there is evidence that two decades or so aftercomposition was often sufficient for one to reach either extremity of the subcontinent.Jatarupais cited by Sarvanandaand, in Pant's view, by Ksirasvaminas well, so that he would also antedatethe latter. Contraryto the dating of Ksirasvaminproposedby C. Vogel (namely, the firsthalf of the twelfth century) and giving a more of the author's colophon of Ksirasvamin'sKsiratarahginl,Pant argues that convincing interpretation Ksirasvamin flourished one century earlier and that, in fact, it indicates he was a contemporaryof King Bhoja (ca. 1000-1055) of Malava. Beginning with Ksirasvamin,the Amarakosacommentators regularly and variously quote from this king's dense studies of grammar,literarycriticism, and poetand the Srhgaraprakada. does not do so in his ics, such as the Sarasvatikanthabharana Only Jatarupa

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extant comments on the corresponding Amarakosaentries. This detail provides the firstbit of circumstantial evidence that he lived before Bhoja's literarytreatises. Pant also demonstratesthat Jatarupa was familiar with Sridhara'sNydyakandallof 991-92, and thereby establishes this as the terminusa quo for his commentary.He shows furthermore,on the linguistic evidence of the commentaryitself, that Jatarupawas most probably a native of Bengal. As is known, the term "Gauda"is often used in the sense of Bengal. Ksirasvamincritically refers to an exegete by the name of Gauda on some seventeen occasions, of which nine occur in the relevantAmarakosaentries for which we have available Jatarupa'scomments. Six of these give the strong impression that he targeted Jatarupa,while the remainingthree tell us nothing in this regard.The authorconcludes on the strengthof this corpus of circumstantial evidence that Jatarupalived around the year 1000 and that he was anterior to Ksirasvamin.Though not airtight,the evidence he provides points to the very high probabilitythat he is right on this score. Lastly, Sarvanandacites both Jatarupaand Ksirasvamin,but not expressly Subhuticandra. Pant adduces in part2 parallel and identical passages in the comments on AmarakosaI. 1 for Jatarupaand Ksirasvamin(pp. 355-58) and Jatarupaand Sarvananda(pp. 371-82). The relative chronology of Jatarupaand Subhuiticandra is uncomplicated,for the formeris doubtless anteriorto the latter. Fairly well known in India, Subhuticandraand his work were also quite familiar quantities in Tibetan scholarly circles, and I believe there is very little reason to doubt that he is the very same Subhuticandra who is mentioned in the long and convoluted translator'scolophon Pa Lo tsa ba Tshul khrims rgyal mtshan appended tshab ("Sanskritistcum translator") ('gyur byang) 1 Therewe learn that to his Tibetantranslationof the enormousAryasaddharmasmrtyupasthanastra. Pa tshab had studied the sutra in Nalanda monastery under, among others, mahapandita Abhayaand that he had received instructionson the same from mahapanditaSubhuticandra while at karagupta,
Vikramasila monastery. He says of the latter that he was "a scholar of grammar (sgra, sabda), poetics (snyan dngags, kavya),2 and the 'modality' of the Sanskrit language (sgra dang / snyan dngags dang / legs par sbyar ba'i skad kyi lugs la mkhas pa)"; the latter phrase may, but only may, indicate lexi-

cography. The first draft of the translationwas completed, as Pa tshab says, sometime during the reign of the Pala King Ramapala,who ruled from about 1072 to 1126.3 Given that Abhayakaragupta flourished somewhere between roughly 1060 and 1125-his last dated work, the enormousAmnayamanjari commentary on the Samputatantra (and a great deal else besides), was completed in Ramacan therefore predicate more or less the same of pala's thirty-seventh regnal year (circa 1110)-we

1. The Tibetan Tripitaka,Taipei [= Sde dge] Edition, ed. A. W. Barber(Taipei: SMC Publishing Inc., 1991), vol. 15, no. 287 [#287], 65/7-6/3 [Sha, 228a-9b]. We may note here that,in spite of the fact that Pa tshabexpressly states that he made use of standardizedorthographyand nomenclature,as indicated by his use of the expression bkas bead, the last post-colophonic line by an unknowneditor states: "Therealso appearssome dissimilaritieswith the obsolete terminology of yore" (yi ge'i brda sngon gyi rtving pa dang mi 'draba cung zad kyang snang). Aside from the usage of bkas bead, "[standardsfor nomenclature]determined by royal decree," and skad gsar bead, for new terminology,"in connection with the Tibetantranslationsof Buddhist scripturesduringthe "determination imperialperiod, Nyang ral Nyi ma'i 'od zer (1124-92) also uses the latterexpression in the ecclesiastic chronicle he wrote towards the end of his life, with reference to its applicationin the era of the royal monk Lha Bla ma Zhi ba 'od (1016-1 111); see his Chos 'byungme tog snying po sbrang rtsi'i bcud, ed. Nyan shul Mkhyenrab 'od gsal, Gangs can rig mdzod 5 (Lhasa:Bod Ijongs mi dmangs dpe skrunkhang, 1988), 465. 2. This expression is not listed in Dbus pa Blo gsal Byang chub ye shes' (ca. 1265-1355) undatedBrda gsar rnying gi rnampar dbye ba, a glossary of obsolete terms (brda rnying) and their updated(brda gsar) equivalents; see Mimaki Katsumi,"Dbuspa Blo gsal no 'Shin kyu goi shu' kotei bon shok3,"in Asian Languages and General Linguistics: Festschriftfor Prof TatsuoNishida on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday(Tokyo, 1990), 17-54. However, the cognate Brda gsar rnying gi rnam gzhag li shi'i gur khang of 1536 (ed. Mgon po rgyal mtshan [Beijing: to Skyogs ston Lo tsa ba Rin chen bkra shis (ca. 1485-?), registers Mi rigs dpe skrunkhang, 1991], 16), attributed dngags as an obsolete form of the updated ngag. Dpa' ris Sangs rgyas, Das yig rig pa'i gab pa mngon phyung, ed. Dbang phyug mtsho mo (Xining: Mtsho sngon mi rigs dpe skrun khang, 1999), 447, rightly dismisses the suppositionof unnamedothers that, whereas snyan ngag denotes verse characterizedby the use of poetic figures, snyan dngags refers to a treatise devoted to an exposition of such figures. 3. D. C. Sircar,Some EpigraphicalRecords of the MedievalPeriodfor EasternIndia (New Delhi: AbhinavPublications, 1979), 31.

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who was probablyat thattime a senior scholar as well, if only because he, too, is styled Subhuticandra, a mahapandita. Pant dates his Amarakosa commentary to about the third or fourth decade of the twelfth century,but this may have to be pushed back a few decades. The translationof the sutracan perhaps be dated not earlier than the first or the second decade of the twelfth century, and Subhuticandramust alreadyhave been a senior scholar at this time. The four manuscriptsof the Sanskrittext of the Kamadhenuthat have been located so far are all fragmentary. Judgingfrom my (cursory) readof the Tibetan translation a 1750-57 (or 1748-56) ing through virtually complete text of the Kamadhenu by Si tu Pan chen Chos kyi 'byung gnas' (1700-1774), Subhuticandra nowhere explicitly refers to either Jatarupa(Tib. *Skye gzugs) or Ksirasvamin(Tib. Zhi ba'i rje).4 The KathmanduValley was Si tu Pan chen's source for several incomplete manuscriptsof the Kamadhenuhe was able to use for this translationand his other studies of Indo-Tibetanlexicography. and his scholarlypracticethatcan be gleaned from Pantalso discusses the few details aboutJatarupa was probably a Buddhist. He points out that ManuscriptA behis commentary(1: 409-46). Jatarupa gins with a line of homage to the Buddha (namo buddhaya//) and B with one to the Omniscient One (om namah sarvvajnaya///). He rightly refrainsfrom concluding that this necessarily implies he was a Buddhist. Indeed, the very fact that we have these variant readings suggests that at least one of these reflects the religious sentiments of their unknown scribes. But he does indicate that Jatarupa's comment on the indeclinable particle khalu in Amarakosa III.3.252d (2: 289) reads atha khalu bhagavan, which is "well known from Mahayanatexts." The two manuscripts of Jatarupa's thatenteredthe Kathmandu Amarakosatlka Valley at an unknown time, and were then copied there, once again demonstratethe key role the valley has played, and continues to play, in the transmissionand preservationof the Indian subcontinent'smost valuable literary treasures.It is thus quite fitting that Pant, among the very best of the scholars currentlyactive in the valley, has laid before us such an exquisitely arcane piece of work as this exhaustive study. It is a monument to the kind of scholarshipthat is now, in the face of unrelentingmodernity,progressively and regrettablyon the decline.
LEONARD W. J. VANDERKUIJP

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

4. Ming dang rtags rjes su ston pa'i bstan bcos 'chi med mdzod kyi rgya cher 'grel pa 'dod 'jo'i ba mo, Collected Works, vols. 4 and 5 (Sansal: ShesrablingInstituteof Buddhist Studies, 1990), 243-738, 2-421.

The Haunting Fetus: Abortion, Sexuality, and the Spirit Worldin Taiwan.By MARC L. MOSKOWITZ. OFHAWAI'I Honolulu: UNIVERSITY 2001. Pp. viii + 206. PRESS, During-thepast three decades, the legalization of abortioncombined with the importationof popular beliefs and practices from Japanhave reshaped the ways that Taiwanese women attemptto cope with the physical and emotional traumaof having an abortion. Marc L. Moskowitz's book on this subject, which is the revised version of his 1999 Ph.D. thesis, provides a vivid and at times moving ethnographicaccount of cults to fetus ghosts (yingling -l ) and fetus demons (xiaogui /J\j), spirits widely believed to be the souls of fetuses who were aborted by their mothers or who were miscarried. Moskowitz is highly qualified to research such a sensitive and deeply personal subject, having done extensive fieldworkin Taiwan from September 1994 to September 1999. In addition to visiting temples and shrines dedicated to the worship of fetus spirits, he also interviewed forty-threewomen and twelve men who had experiences with fetus ghosts or who were appeasing such ghosts, as well as ninety-threefriends and relatives of people who had such experiences. The majority of his informants were residents of the capital city of Taipei, but he also conductedinterviews with people from the central and southernparts of the island.