South Indian Inscriptions

EPIGRAPHIA INDICA

EPIGRAPHICAL NOTES

B. CH. CHHABRA, NEW DELHI

A.—Kāśyapa Image Inscription from Silao

This inscription has been published by me.^[7] It attracted the attention of Professor Dr. E. H. Johnson of the Balliol College, Oxford, England, who was good enough to offer some illuminating comments on it in a letter, dated the 18th October, 1941, addressed to Dr. N. P. Chakravarti the then Deputy Director General of Archaeology in India, New Delhi. Dr. Chakravarti kindly supplied me with the relevant extract from that letter. This extract runs as follows :

“Owing to various circumstances I have only recently seen Dr. Chhabra’s interesting article in Epigraphia Indica on the Kāśyapa image inscription at Silao. On one or two points however he has overlooked references, which would have modified his interpretation. If you would be good enough to send this letter to him, he might be interested to look up those I mention, and if he wishes to publish a supplemental note, he is welcome to make what use of my remarks he likes ; there is no need to mention my name.

“On page 330 he refers to Buddhacaritra, xvii, 12, in Cowell’s edition; but the whole of the text in Cowell from xiv, 33 on is a nineteenth century addition by Amṛtānanda, who was Hodgson’s pandit in Khatmandu. Aśvaghosa did give a full account of Mahākāśyapa’s conversion, and an English translation of it from the Tibetan and Chinese by me is to be found in Acta Orientalia, XV, canto xvii, 24 ff. There is also an earlier translation in German from the Tibetan only by Fr. Waller in Das Leben des Buddha von Aśvaghoṣa.

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^[1] The reference here is to the submarine mountains.
^[2] In an ordinary japa, the votary sits in a quiet corner and mutters prayer or repeats a formula there in an undertone or inarticulately, but in jala-japa, as the term indicates, he is required to keep sitting under water all the while.
^[3] One has to imagine that the exterior of the temple was originally white-washed, and that the main item of the up-keep of a temple usually consists of a fresh coat of lime-wash at least once a year. The poet no doubt wished that the temple built by Vishṇu might be well looks after and might endure for ever, but the phēna-puñja-pratishṭhā of the stanza lends itself equally to a totally opposite and undesired sense : the solidity of a heap of foam, a mocking reference to the ephemeral nature of man-made things.
^[4] The broad division of the universe into three : earth, heaven and the nether world, is here replaced by its more elaborate classification into the following fourteen sections : bhū, bhuvar, svar, mahas, janas, tapas, satya, atala, vitala, sutala, rasātala, talātala, mahātala and pātāla. The first one refers to this earth, the next six are above it, one over the other, and the remaining seven are under it, one below the other.
^[5] The fourteen traditional lores are four Vēdas , six Vēdāngas, Dharma, Mīmāṁsā, Nyāya and the Purāṇas collectively as the fourteenth.
^[6] The fourteen manvantaras constitute but one day of Brahman. They compirse 4,320,000 human years Six such periods have already passed, we are living in the seventh, and seven more yet to come.
^[7] Above, Vol. XXV, 327 ff. and plate.