Kalacakra Tantra

The Inner Kalacakratantra: A Buddhist Tantric View of the Individual by Vesna Wallace (Oxford University Press) Solid research in the Indian tradition of this inportant Buddhist Tantra will appeal to specialists and serious lay inquiries, considering thousands of westerns have been initiated into the first stages of this Tantra by the Tibetans.

Excerpt:
 The Kalacakratantra is an early eleventh-century esoteric treatise belonging to the class of unexcelled yoga-tantras (anuttara-yoga-tantra). To the best of our knowledge, it was the last anuttara-yoga-tantra to appear in India.

According to the Kalacakra tradition, the extant version of the Kalacakratantra is an abridged version of the larger original tantra, called the Paramadibuddha, that was taught by the Buddha Sakyamuni to Sucandra, the king of Sambhala and an emanation of Vajrapani, in the Dhanyakataka stupa, a notable center of Mahayana in the vicinity of the present-day village of Amaravat! in Andhra Pradesh. Upon receiving instruction on the Paramadibuddhatantra and returning to Sambhala, King Sucandra wrote it down and propagated it throughout his kingdom. His six succes­sors continued to maintain the inherited tradition, and the eighth king of Samb­hala, Manjusri Yasas, composed the abridged version of the Paramddibuddhatantra, which is handed down to us as the Sovereign Abridged Kdlacakratantra (Laghukala­cakratantraraja). It is traditionally taught that it is composed of 1,030 verses written in the sradghard meter.' However, various Sanskrit manuscripts and editions of the LaghuMlacakratantra contain a somewhat larger number of verses, ranging from 1,037 to 1,047 verses. The term an "abridged tantra" (laghu-tantra) has a specific meaning in Indian Buddhist tantric tradition. Its traditional interpretation is given in Nadapada's (Naropa) Sekoddesatika, which states that in every yoga, yogini, and other types of tantras, the concise, general explanations (uddesa) and specific explanations (nirdda) make up a tantric discourse (tantra-samgiti), and that discourse, which is an exposition (uddesana) there, is an entire abridged tantra.

The tradition tells us that Manjugri Ya'sas's successor Put darika, who was an em­anation of Avalokitesvara, composed a large commentary on the Kalacakratantra, called the Stainless Light (Vimalaprabha), which became the most authoritative commentary on the Kalacakratantra and served as the basis for all subsequent commen­tarial literature of that literary corpus. The place of the Vimalaprabha in the Kala­cakra literary corpus is of great importance, for in many instances, without the Vimalaprablha, it would be practically impossible to understand not only the broader implications of the Kalacakratantra's cryptic verses and often grammatically corrupt sentences but their basic meanings. It has been said that the Kalacakratantra is ex­plicit with regard to the tantric teachings that are often only implied in the other anuttara-yoga-tantras, but this explicitness is actually far more characteristic of the Vimalaprabha than of the Kalacakratantra itself.

According to Tibetan sources, the acarya Cilupa from Orissa, who lived in the second half of the tenth century, after reading the Kalacakratantra in the monastery in Ratnagiri, undertook a journey to Sambhala in order to receive oral teachings that would illuminate the text. After his return to southern India, he initially had three students, one of whom was the great pardita Pindo, who was originally from Bengal. The acarya Pindo became a teacher of Kalacakrapada the Senior, who was from northern Bengal (Varendra). After returning to eastern India, Kalacakrapada the Se­nior taught the Kalacakratantra to his disciples, the most famous of whom was Kala­cakrapada the Junior, who built the Kalacakra temple in Na1anda, believing that the propagation of the Kalacakratantra in Magadha would facilitate its propagation in all directions. I shall not discuss here all the variants in the accounts given by the Ti­betan Rwa and `Bro traditions of the history of the Kalacakratantra in India, for these accounts have already been narrated in other readily available works by other West­ern scholars and in English translations of the Tibetan sources.

One of the references that seems significant for establishing the period of the propagation of the Kalacakratantra in India is the reference in the Kalacakratantra and the Vinlalaprabha to the end of the sexagenary cycle that comes 403 years after the Hijri, or Islamic era of 622 CE. Likewise, the same texts assert that the hundred and eighty-second year after the Hijri era is the period of the eleventh Kalki, the king Aja, which is corroborated by the Kala­cakranusdrigaruta, which states further that after the time of Kalki Aja, 221 years passed till the end of the sexagenary cycle. Thus, adding 221 years to 182, one arrives at the number of 403 years after the Hijri era. In light of this, I agree with G. Orofino in determining the year to be 1026 CE, relying on the Indian system of reckoning years, in which 623 CE is included in the span of 403 years. This is in contrast to G. Gronbold and D. Schuh, who assumed without substantial evidence that the Kalacakra tradition incorrectly calculated the Hijri era as beginning at 642 CE and thus determined the year to be 1027 CE by adding the span of 403 years to the year of 624 CE.

According to the Vimalaprabha commentary, the Paramadibuddhatantra was com­posed of twelve thousand verses, written in the anustubh meter? However, we can­not determine now with certainty whether the Paramadibuddhatantra ever existed as a single text or as a corpus of mutually related writings, since we know from the Vi­malaprabha8 that the Sekoddega, which circulated as an independent text in early eleventh-century India, has traditionally been considered to be a part of the Paramadibuddhatantra. Nearly two hundred and ten verses from the Adibuddhatantra are cited throughout the five chapters of the Vimalaprabha; and some verses attributed to the Paramadibuddhatantra are also scattered in other writings related to the Kalacakra literary corpus, such as the Sekoddegatippani and the Paramardasarngraha,  which cites the verse from the Paramadibuddhatantra that coincides with the opening verse of the Dakinivajrapanjaratantra. Likewise, some citations from the Paramadibuddhatantra are found in the commentarial literature on the Hevajratantra, specifically-in the Heva­jrapirddrthati and in the Vajrapaddsarasamgrahapanji.

In addition to these, there are other pieces of textual evidence found in the Abridged Kalacakratantra and in the Vimalaprabha, such as the repeated references to the Hevajratantra, the Guhyasamajatantra, the Cakrasamvaratantra, and to the Manjusrindmasamgiti, which the Vimalaprabha identifies as the sixteenth chapter of the Mayajalatantra. These suggest that the Paramadibuddhaantra must have been composed after these tantric traditions of the seventh and eighth centuries were al­ready well established.

The works of the eminent Indian Kalacakratantra adepts, such as those of Darika, Anupamaraksita, and Sadhuputra, which are preserved in the different versions of the Tibetan Bstan'gyur, can be dated to the beginning of the eleventh century. The writings of the Bengali author Abhayakaragupta, who was a contemporary of the Bengali king Ramapala, and the works of Ravigrijiiana from Kasmir, can be traced to the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Likewise, the writings of the Bengali author Vibhuticandra who studied in Magadha, and the works of the Kagmir author Sakyasribhadra can be dated to the second half of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries. Some Tibetan authors indicate that although writing on the Kalacakratantra might have ceased in India with the Turkish invasions of Bihar and Bengal at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Kalacakra tradition did not completely die in India until the fifteenth century. In his History of Indian Bud­dhism, Taranatha mentions one of the last of the Indian Buddhist panditas, Va­naratna, from eastern Bengal, who in 1426 was the last Indian pandita to reach Tibet through Nepal. Having reached Tibet, he taught and co-translated several works of the Kalacakra corpus from Sanskrit into Tibetan. According to the Blue Annals, the best of the initiations and precepts of the Kalacakratantra came at that time from Va­naratna. Thus, it seems that the doctrine and practice of the Kalacakratantra were promulgated in India for almost five centuries.

It is difficult to determine with certainty the parts of India in which the first au­thors of the Kalacakra tradition resided. The Tibetan accounts, however, indicate that even though the Kalacakra tradition initially may have started in south India, the Kalacakratantra's sphere of influence in India was confined to Bengal, Magadha (Bihar), and Kashmir, wherefrom it was transmitted to Nepal, Tibet, and eventually to Mongolia, where Kalacakra was instituted as the protective deity of the Mongol nation.

Headline 3

insert content here

WT Main | About WT | Review Links | Contact | Review Sources | Search