Nepalese Sacred Space in Premodern and Early Modern Hindu-Buddhist Context: One of India’s desa and Independent punya bhumi
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Abstract
A paper is dedicated to the question pertaining to the sacred space by the Buddhists in premodern and early modern Nepal. Medieval Nepal saw the rise of new ideas, expressed by the Svayambhu Purana that proclaimed total independence of the Nepal mandala (the Nepal valley) from the Indian sacred landscape as well as a self-sufficient character and independence of Nepalese Buddhist tradition. This paper studies the main narratives of the Svayambhu myth using a wide range of sources, with a particular focus on text documents and visual sources (religious art, etc.). The paper also studies, how the sacred geography of Nepal influenced the identity of the Nepalese in the context of competing for the coexistence of Buddhism and Hinduism. The Svayambhu myth (15th c.) in fact represents another (new) system of understanding the landscape of the country of Nepal (Nepal mandala/Nepal des), which almost ignores India as the Motherland of Buddhism. However, in reality, the Nepalese understanding of their country as a self-sufficient Buddhist mandala, as a blessed Buddhist land (bodhisattva bhumi and punya bhumi) was the reinvention of the local tradition, both in the vision of the space and as a tradition of Buddhist line. It was legitimized through the very idea of Buddhahood, which revealed itself in a form of Adi Buddha. Adi Buddha manifested in the form of light and dharmadhatu, later transformed into a stupa – the main stupa of the country (Svayambu caitya). But behind this “radical” reinterpretation of the sacred space, still there was a place for understanding of the Nepal mandala as a part of India. Furthermore, a pan-Indian model was at the very base of the Nepalese system of rendering sacred landscapes, as it was rooted in the Cakrasamvara mandala and Vajrayogini tradition (as A. Rospatt shows). This paradoxical contradiction in a Nepalese paradigm of the sacred geographical landscape is one of the main themes of this paper. The author argues that two different systems pertaining to space overlapped and were coexisting in many ways in a compromising manner.
How to Cite
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Buddhism, identity, metageographical revolution, Nepal, pilgrimage, sacred space, Svayambhu caitya, Svayambhu Purana
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