Manth[a.bar]nabhairavatantram Kum[a.bar]rik[a.bar]khandah: The Section Concerning the Virgin Goddess of the Tantra of the Churning Bhairava.

White, David Gordon

Manth[a.bar]nabhairavatantram Kum[a.bar]rik[a.bar]khandah: The Section Concerning the Virgin Goddess of the Tantra of the Churning Bhairava. By MARK S. G. DYCZKOWSKI. Varanasi: INDICA BOOKS, 2009. 14 vols. $775.00, Rs. 15500.

This prodigious work of scholarship, two decades in the making, is an essential contribution to the study of Hindu tantra, and specifically to the cult of the goddess Kubjika, of which the Manth[a.bar]nabhairavatantra (MBhT) is a primary scripture. In terms of its sheer volume, this work is unprecedented in the field of Indology: the sole comparable scholarly productions are the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute's critical edition of the Mah[a.bar]bh[a.bar]rata (1927-1966) and the Baroda Oriental Institute's edition of the R[a.bar]m[a.bar]yana (1960-1975). However, whereas these are simply critical editions, Dyczkowski's work also comprises a translation and a massive introductory study. While these are entirely the fruits of his own labors, the work of establishing both the present edition--as well as editions of several other unedited tantras and texts used for the purpose of translating and exegeting the MBhT itself--was carried out in concert with a team of five assistants, whom Dyczkowski acknowledges (1: xxviii).

While the early ninth-century Kubjik[a.bar]mata is considered its "root text," the later, far more massive 24,000-verse MBhT is an exponentially richer source for the Kubjik[a.bar] cult and traditions. The present fourteen-volume work treats only of the Kurn[a.bar]rik[a.bar] Khanda (KK), the first of the three divisions of this work (the others are the Yoga Khanda and Siddha Khanda). Dyczkowski's 1735-page introduction to the text comprises the first three volumes, which are broadly divided into discussions of Kubjik[a.bar]'s mythology, cultus, and canon. The Sanskrit text (in Devanagari script), English translation, and notes are presented in volumes four through thirteen, and volume fourteen is devoted to bibliography and indexes. Volumes containing text and translation alternate with volumes devoted to notes: so, for example, volume four is composed of the text and translation of chapters one to seven of the KK, while volume five contains notes to the same chapters, with each chapter's notes divided into Sankrit text (for alternate readings and discussions of grammar, etc.) and English translation (presented as commentary on the verses themselves).

While Dyczkowski rarely refers to this as a critical edition of the KK (for example, at 4: liv), it is in fact based on all of the extant manuscripts of the work, of which there are twelve, all housed in the Nepal National Archives or held in private collections elsewhere in the Kathmandu Valley (4: xlvi-xlviii). Given the KK's size and the corrupt state of the Sanskrit in its manuscript witnesses, there is nothing that one could criticize with regard to the edition of this work. Rather, Dyczkowski and his collaborators are to be applauded for their superhuman work in spinning gold from straw, as it were. The same may be said for the English translation, in spite of the fact that it is contains many typographical errors. Far more than simply a heavily annotated edition and translation of the sixty-nine chapters of the KK itself (whose content Dyczkowski helpfully summarizes in 3: 221-73), this is a veritable encyclopedia of Hindu tantra, with specific reference to the Kubjik[a.bar] cult and its entire canon. In effect, Dyczkowski's work comprises a study and exegesis of no fewer than twenty-four major and minor scriptures, commentaries, and liturgies, which are discussed in detail (3: 310-406) and cross-referenced with passages from the KK in both the author's copious notes and in the form of synoptic tabulations (14: 3-22). In addition, the critical apparatus is rich in appendices, tables, diagrams, figures, and charts, which run into the hundreds of pages.

As is the general rule with tantric scripture, the MBhT is a sprawling, composite work, a cobbling together of heterogeneous topics that run the gamut from cosmology to iconography, ritual, devotion, initiation, subtle body mapping, mythology, lineages, mantra, yantra, myth, and far more. Often cribbed from other works, these fragments (khandas) seldom follow any logical order, because they were essentially compiled as reference works for tantric specialists. The same may be said for the present work. The few who will choose to read its fourteen volumes from cover to cover (to cover ...) will find that it is, like the text of the KK itself, rife with repetitions, digressions, and tangential discussions. So, for example, Dyczkowski's general introduction covers much of the material that is also found in his copious notes to the English translation of the text, notes which occupy over half of the content of volumes 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. Most will likely use this set of volumes as a reference work, and work back from the three indexes and slok[a.bar]rdh[a.bar]nukraman[i.bar] contained in volume 14 into the actual edition and translation of the KK. Given the disorganized state of the text itself and the corrupt state of its original Sanskrit (4: li-liv), this is the most fruitful way to approach the work, and to mine it for its rich tantric data.

With one important exception, Dyczkowski seldom ventures outside the world of the text to situate the Kubjik[a.bar] cult and its exponents in the real world contexts in which they practiced. A notable, and fascinating, exception is his treatment of the historical development of the Kubjik[a.bar] corpus, in which he analyzes textual, archeological. inscriptional, and philological data to chart the two major phases of the canon's redaction (3: 273-310). While there is scant data to localize the first phase, which comprises the Kubjik[a.bar]mata itself as well as the initial redaction of the grunatottara, Dyczkowski's scholarly sleuthing skills are brought to the fore in his discussion of the second phase, during which the compiling of the great bulk of the Kubjik[a.bar] scriptures, including the MBhT, took place. Here, the locus of the Kubjik[a.bar] traditions was the Konkana region, located between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea and, further inland, the western Deccan plateau. In fact, as Dyczkowski notes repeatedly, these Kubjik[a.bar] traditions have especially flourished in the Kathmandu Valley. Virtually every extant manuscript of its principal and secondary scriptures, commentaries, liturgies, and so forth is found there. As the "secret" form of Taleju, Kubjik[a.bar] was the royal goddess of the Valley's Newar populations, who continue to venerate her in accordance with her scriptural injunctions down to the present day. This being said, the fact that Nepal is barely mentioned in the scriptures themselves indicates that the canon was closed by the time it was embraced by the Newars. However, a significant body of secondary literature, in the form of liturgical works required for the performance of the Kubjik[a.bar] rites, is entirely Nepali (3: 274). While little attention is devoted in the present work to the this-worldly context of the Kubjik[a.bar] traditions, that context may be found in two chapters of Dyczkowski's A Journey in the World of the Tantras, also published by Indica Books (2004).

As he indicates in the opening sentences of his acknowledgments (1: xxvii), Dyczkowski has lived most of the past thirty-five years "in India, the Holy Land of the Rsis, Siddhas and Yoginis." Elsewhere, he makes no secret of his scholar-practitioner status: his book is "dedicated to the Goddess who willed it," and his acknowledgements include "the One Infinite Being" and "the revered Kashmir' master Swami Laksmanjoo [who] sealed my quest with his initiation and divinely inspired teachings." At the same time, the list of scholars whom he also acknowledges--from India, Nepal, England, and the United States--is long, and his appreciations of several of them quite reverential. In many respects, this book is the legacy of Dyczkowski's dual intellectual apprenticeship, at times reading more like an "indigenous" tantric commentary than a "Western" work of scholarship. I do not intend this as a criticism: other scholar-practitioners have taken such a hybrid approach with great success, as Edwin Bryant (The Yoga Sutras of Pataiijall: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary with Insights front the Traditional Commentators [New York: North Point Press, 2009]) has done for the Yoga S[u.bar]tras. In Dyczkowski's case, discerned links between Vedic and tantric traditions--e.g., between the Vedic Aditi and her earring (kundala) and the tantric Kubjik[a.bar] and the kundalin[i.bar] (2: 3-4), or the dark color of the Vedic god Rudra and the tantric goddess Kubjik[a.bar] (1: 44-45)--rather smack of brahminical "punditry," and do little to elucidate the data found in the Kubjika canon itself.

But these are quibbles, which pale in comparison to the remarkable insights and depths of understanding that Dyczkowski communicates through the length and breadth of his work, insights that he could not have had, had he not himself been initiated into the tantras from the inside. To give but one example, his discussion of the development of tantric systems, the mature fruit of decades of study and reflection, is profound, yet deceptively simple:

  Tannic systems develop by a process of accretion from the systems that
  preceded them. It is Iherefore nossihle to arrange them roughly in a
  chronological order and discern remnants of earlier systems and
  even pre-Tantric strata in them. Although breaks and distinctions
  between traditions are evident, there is always a no less evident
  continuity between them. The reason for this is simple. New Tantric
  systems are constructed by the initiates of earlier ones. As we go
  from one to the other and each one evolves, we retrace their history,
  rising, as it were, from lower, earlier systems to higher, later ones.
  Viewed by initiates from the inside, this journey through time is
  marked by the rungs of the ladder of initiation they ascend to gain
  access to their own school, which for them is the highest. (2:49)

No scholar willing to undertake such a journey could hope to find a more masterful guide than Mark Dyczkowski, This stunning work of erudition, which will long stand as one of the great monuments in the field of Hindu tantra, deserves a place in every research university library as well as on the bookshelves of any serious scholar of South Asian religions.

DAVID GORDON WHITE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA