Post 3/?
This post is the long version of the previous post. Wrote it, so posting it.
1. The Avatamsaka Sutra - the primary, originating source for the Potalaka myth - does NOT place Potalaka in real geography.
It is the Gandavyuha Sutra subsection of the Avatamsaka Sutra that is relevant, as it is Gandavyuha that mentions/introduces Potalaka, where it is the setting for Avalokiteshwara; among the many settings of the many Buddhist spiritual characters (Bodhisattvas and Buddhas) that the main character of the text ("Sudhana") meets.
- It was later Buddhists that tried to place Potalaka in actual geography.
As mentioned in one of my earlier posts on Ayyappa: the attempt to superimpose the mythical Potalaka onto real geography has long been a passtime of Buddhists (in much of Buddhicised Asia, not just India) and subsequently also of historians who have taken the cue from them.
- Even in what's deemed to be the earliest descriptions of Potalaka in the Avatamsaka Sutra text, it is only ever a spiritual location: where Avalokiteshwara* seated on a giant diamond rock is found lecturing on the Dhamma to an audience of a "multitude" of Bodhisattvas (not random earthly Buddhists, note), all seated on huge jewel rocks. It is only the rest of the backdrop to this spectacle that sounds "earthlike", though this is no different from paradisal natural descriptions in Hindu literature of groves and gardens of the Hindu Gods in Swargam: may sound "earthlike too, but not on earth. [The Avatamsaka descriptions of Potalaka that are deemed newer, make it even more bejewelled.]
* Avalokiteshwara is not a historical Buddhist person: this deity-like Buddha-variant (a special Bodhisattva) is admitted, even by Lokesh Chandra, to have been modelled on the Hindu God Shiva (and as a replacement for him. In Chinese regions, however, he got remodelled again: to encroach on an extremely popular female Taoist Goddess and replace her with Buddhism, and so GuanYin became the Goddess of Mercy there). Avalokiteshwara originated as a Buddhist spiritual character in Mahayana. It's the search for a real Potalaka that has, in more modern times, resulted on occasion in the spin-off search for a historical human Buddhist to identify as the blueprint for the spiritual Buddhist deity-like figure, Avalokiteshwara. But the Gandavyuha never presented Avalokiteshwara as a human, and his special status only grew when this bodhisattva became specially popular in Asian countries Bauddhised by Mahayana, where his popularity vied with full-blown Buddhas like Maitreya and Manjushri.
- The protagonist Sudhana makes his journey by being directed from one spiritual Buddhist character living in a spiritual place to another who can impart further information. As one stopover node of Sudhana's journey, he is sent to Potalaka to look for Avalokiteshwara. The entire journey of Sudhana, including the Potalaka stretch of it, is not meant to be historical** (and not actual geography): his journey actually represents a spiritual journey. That is why places, when they're described and not merely named (often with names that exist only in this text and which frequently have an allegorical meaning), are often bejewelled to what seems like excess, but it is a visual cue for meditation. Similar to the settings being non-physical and for the purpose og proding a backdrop, the characters that Sudhana meets are supra-human.
Because it is a spiritual quest and because in the Buddhist view of the cosmos it is peopled with multiple buddhas, many of the characters Sudhana meets are anachronistic (like Shakyamuni Buddha's mother), and non-historical characters like the future Buddha (Maitreya) and further multiple Buddhas (Manjushri, Avalokiteshwara) and unnamed multitudes of Buddhas, as well as other special beings in Buddhist cosmology (some taken from Hindu cosmology and placed lower in the Buddhist hierarchy).
[The number of teachers Sudhana meets being 53 seems religiously-significant: approximately that number was already significant in Hindu religion; Buddhism and Jainism are sometimes off by a few units from significant Hindu numbers.]
So why does Avalokiteshwara's Potalaka suddenly become "real geography" when none of the others are?
A: Don't know about the reason for the obsession of Bauddhified Indian individuals of today. But for the rest: other Asians didn't know actual Indian geography (although, the reference to Jambudvipa was generally to the world inhabited by people and not usually to India in specific), so some E/SE Asians took it all literally. And of course because it concerns Avalokiteshwara, who is now an important character in Buddhism. Despite Avalokiteshwara's bit part in this early sutra, where he shares the limelight with others and when his character was not yet developed to the extent it is now, he in time became much more significant to Tibetan and E Asian Mahayana Buddhism, as stated.
** Note that Buddhism never claimed its Sutra literature to be historical. Inspired by how Hindu religion claims spiritual reality to its sacred narratives, Buddhism's Mahayana Sutras and (backprojected) jatakas are claimed to be a spiritual 'truth'. E.g. the IIRC the story associated with the Heart Sutra features a super-magical deer that was to have lived in India and which lives in a forest setting too. The earthlike settings don't make the tale real. The purpose of the tale was to teach "compassion". (But renditions show that it took digs at Hindu religion, just as the Jatakas often did).
The visual meditatons of Buddhist sutras are clearly modelled on the style of Hindu visual meditations. I.e. the descriptions in the texts are visual cues that produce mental responses conducive to meditative states and spiritual purification. In Hindu religion, the ancient Hindoo meditative texts - found in our epics and puranas - even produce the Hindoo state known as samAdhi in Expert Hindoo practitioners. Buddhism and Jainism would later adopt the notion of samadhi too, and - later still - they would stop crediting Hindu religion for its origins and even claim that they had invented it and that Hindu religion had borrowed it from them. Ramayanam, and at least sections of MBh - e.g. the end section of Urvashi's shApam on Arjuna clearly explains the spiritual purity that results from hearing/reading the section; Valmeeki and other Vaidika Ramayanams, Srimad Bhagavatam, any Mahaatmyam, LalithopAkhyanam, are all spiritual/yoga journeys and feature visual cues like that of the dscriptions of Amman's Sreenagara, etc.
2. It is the 2nd source, the Buddhist Chinese visitor to India, Xuanzang=Hsuan-Tsang (HT) - and otherwise variously spelled - who, assuming the Avatamsaka Sutra to be literal truth and taking Potalaka [and possibly the rest of Sudhana's quest] literally, as earthly geography (because of Avalokiteshwara's popularity in China and E Asia), claimed that Potalaka was a real place and furthermore makes reference to a decisively geographic location in India. (But other Asians have similarly claimed Potalaka to lie elsewhere - outside India - "in the south".) The geography that Hsuan-Tsang described and chose to designate as Potalaka, is actually the one that modern historians especially (often Buddhist) have been trying to locate in earthly geography. Though it is only Buddhist writers/research which insist on considering HT's designated earthly "Potalaka" to actually *be* the (spiritual) Potalaka of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Though not all Buddhists take it literally.
- HOWEVER: Scholars, including a translator of Hsuan-Tsang's writings, have concluded that Hsuan-Tsang never actually visited the place that he chose to designate as Potalaka. His descriptions are from HEARSAY.
- Next, the only part of his description that is not seen through his Bauddhifying glasses can at best only mark out the place that he alludes to as a Shaiva sacred site: he admits that, from the hearsay he received, the devotees sometimes got to see the temple deity appear to them in the flesh as "Ishwara"/a "PAshupata Yogin" (elsewhere translated as "Shiva-PAMshupata"). HT *chose* to interpret this as a syncretist Buddhism, i.e. as Avalokiteshwara, the Buddhist clone of Shiva. He interpreted the descriptions of the site as matching that of Potalaka.
What I'm saying is that: the descriptions that Hsuan-Tsang documents from hearsay are of a real place in India - and specifically a Shaiva place - but he mistook it for the Buddhist Potalaka or a syncretised variant.
- HT's descriptions of the place he alleges as the Buddist "Potalaka" are actually not very precise - this is not a crime, except it invites to much speculation.
As seen from the fact that the Japanese scholar (Shu, mentioned in an earlier post of mine on the subject) placed it in a real, existing Hindu temple site at Podigai/Potiyil part of TN, even as the scholar admitted that originally it was a Hindu site and that the locals remained Hindu and did not buy into any attempted Buddhist syncretism on Shiva there; while Lokesh Chandra has sought to place it in Ayyappa's Shabarimalai abode in Kerala.
[This is beside some northern Indian neo-Buddhists nowadays claiming that Tirupati is Potalaka, and E Asian Buddhists having variously identified Potalaka in their own backyards.]
Modern Buddhist writers, often western, argue that references to other Bodhisattvas designated with the qualifier "Potalaka" may indicate that this was an earthly locality where these were worshipped. If it were Hindu, this may be the case. But Mahayana bodhisattvas like the "Potalaka Bhagavati" need not be grounded*: e.g. Indra and Indraani are regularly referenced with Swargam - or the quarter of the heavens (Vasava) that is their abode - as their locality identifer. It does not follow that the locality is *earthly* geography.
* Unless, of course, they were specifically created as Buddhist attempts at localised syncretism on (aka Buddhist clone of) a local Bhagavati=wife of Shiva, as the equivalent for Buddhism's Potalaka Lokeshwara [Avalokiteshwara] as a replacement-via-syncretism on Shiva in some region. Since Shiva always exists with his wife, so Mahayana Buddhism would have been forced to introduce the Bauddhified Tara, or equivalent Buddhist clone, to mask Shiva's Wife.
3. I will treat "the Hymn to the Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara" and Lokesh Chandra's speculations (which he based on both this hymn and the above 2 sources) together. Lokesh's speculations on the subject of Ayyappa/Shabarimalai's alleged connection to Buddhism/Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka are in his book "The Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshwara". His conjectures are also not admissable as evidence, let alone justifying the additional spin-off speculations indulged in by those that have bought into his Mere Hypothesis.
Subsequent posts will contain the relevant screenshots from Lokesh's book where he tries to Ayyappa/Shabarimalai with Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka. Summary of the issues:
- Lokesh admits his choice to identify Ayyappa at Sabarimala with Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka is but speculation - "Lord Ayyappa of Shabarimala, [...] could have been the Potala Lokesvara of Buddhist literature" - a hypothesis thatis itself based on comparatively late Buddhist speculation - such as especially by Hsuan-Tsang - that Potalaka may be real worldly geography, which HT had conveniently located in India based on hearsay.
(And uh, wasn't Potalaka from Buddhist literature - still pre-Hsuan-Tsang - supposed to be IIRC an island? If people are going to try pin-pointing it geographically, it sounds more like Malaysia or a Mahayana Buddhist claim on Theravadan Sri Lanka.)
- Also relevant is that from the same Buddhist sources, most especially Hsuan-Tsang's third-hand hearsay account of a real place in India, Japanese scholar Shu, also in search of HT's particular earthly Potalaka, came to different conclusions from that of Lokesh:
+ not only did Shu identify a Hindu temple site in Tamil Nadu as his probably Potalaka, and as having experienced a "syncretist Hindu-Buddhist" past therefore, but
+ Shu even derived the origins of the word Potalaka differently. But just like Lokesh, he too derived the word in such a way as to suit/support his choice of Potalaka.
- Lokesh bases his identification of Ayyappa/Shabarimalai with Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka on 5 points he advances, and which he derives from the 3 sources (the Sutra, Hsuan-Tsang's description and the Hymn to the 1000-armed Avalokiteshwara) and Chinese translations thereof.
+ 3 of these 5 points are about the meaning of the name Potalaka as *he* interprets it based on the 3 sources. His interpretation of the etymology of Potalaka seems more sound than that of the Japanese scholar - both of whom derive widely-different origins for the word, as will be seen further below, though both have come up with their etymology so as to forcefit/make it conducive to fit the different geographic location each has identified in south India as HT's Potalaka. Having said that, however, Lokesh's etymological derivation of the word becomes much weaker than that of Shu when it's time for him to plead that this would refer to Shabarimalai.
+ the remaining 2 (of the 5) points Lokesh submits in building his 'argument' do no more than show that Buddhism had encroached on Shiva and his personal names for Avalokiteshwara.
- Lokesh makes too much of the real Buddhist appropriation of both Shiva and Vishnu that's seen elsewhere (such as in Lokesh's argument of Indonesia) and tries to introduce it unnecessarily into this particular context, in order to use it to tie it back to Shabarimalai. That is, Lokesh uses Harihara to forcefit his theory on Ayyappa (since Ayyappa is Hariharaputra). In this too he departs from the Japanese scholar, who does not feel the need to introduce Buddhist appropriation of Vishnu or Vishnu-Shiva into Avalokiteshwara (and others scholars dealing with the same Buddhist sources don't either - no more than they bring up Hindu Gods in general as being formative influences behind the Buddhist Avalokiteshwara), because the Hindu temple site *Shu* chose to identify as being possibly Potalaka was largely a Shaiva site.
As for the Buddhist Padmapani form: it's true that Buddhism regularly tried to encroach on Shiva using Padmapani, e.g. it was one of the major means with which Buddhism tried to encroach - euphemised to "syncretism" by modern amnesiac/revisionist/Bauddhified "Hindus" - on a very particular famous manifestation of Hindus' Shiva as Guru in several temples. So Hindus of that time eventually dropped the (traditional, Hindoo) use of padmam in his 4th hand when making vigrahas of that Shiva manifestation, for the express reason that Buddhists tended to use this route for inculturation/encroachment/forced merger via Padmapani. [Such a last-ditch reaction by native heathens to Buddhist inculturation is also seen in E Asia, BTW.]
- Lokesh makes elementary mistakes :
+ in the section where he wishes to recount the popular variant of narratives on Ayyappa, he refers to a MahiShasura instead of the MahishAsurI/MahiShI, who (representing the ignorance clouding the aatman) was defeated and the lady inside (the pristine jeevaatman) got liberated by Ayyappa. Another error is that Lokesh swaps leopards for tigresses. And he keeps speaking of "Hari and Hara" as Ayyappa's literal parents, when it is specifically Hara and Mohini-Hari - Vishnu's Shakti form, i.e. his female aspect. But Lokesh needed to forcefit Buddhism onto Ayyappa using the Buddhist encroachment on Vishnu-Shiva seen in other Mahayana Bauddhised countries, so Mohini would not have been handy for his purpose. All these differences are not nitpicking: they do matter to all but unHindus, and no Hindu would get it wrong.
Maybe all the above mistakes are because Lokesh's ancestry is in the now-Pakistani part of Punjab: Lokesh himself was born in Haryana but his dad, an indologist/Sanskritist, is from Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Both are a long way removed from Ayyappa's traditional homegrounds in the south of the Hindu subcontinent. So it may be understandable that Lokesh doesn't really know/care about the tradition (beyond his interest in how much it can be made to fit his Buddhist theories), though a scholar would have made it a point to find out, and ethnic Hindus from anywhere would have made certain to get it right.
+ Then there is that tell-tale error - one repeated by Rajeev who appears to have parroted Lokesh: Lokesh's conclusion that Dharmashaastaa "must be" a reference to the Buddha merely because Buddha in time came to be referred to as "shaastaa" too (but the name shAstR^i means: teacher and commander/ruler. Like the word Guru, its meaning is general. It is also the personal name of the Vedic God Dharmashaastaa aka Ayyappa, like Brahmashaastaa is the name of Murugan.*) Although I've already covered this false conclusion in detail in an earlier post (somewhere between 105 to 111), what is notable that it is an error made peculiarly by Buddhists and the Bauddhified, who are always more familiar with Buddhist history and backprojected history than with Hindu religio-historic originals.
And this last is my own speculation (based on prior experience):
Lokesh Chandra - whether he is named after the original Shiva the Lokeshwara (one of his names), or after Shiva's later Buddhist clone Potalaka Lokeshwara/Avalokiteshwara - certainly has the hallmarks of a researcher of Buddhist leanings/tendencies: his field of research=his field of interest = Buddhism, his need to identify Hindu temple sites as Buddhist even if it is only by means of bad speculation, his lack of knowledge of details of Hindu religion (other than parroting what is convenient) and being far removed from anything he could know by direct experience even though he will nevertheless speculate on and on from general accounts, his comparatively better knowledge of Buddhism stemming from his greater interest in it, his promoting Buddhist variations as the standard ("shaastaa" in its specific Buddhist meaning, rather than the older, general Hindu meaning of shaastaa). There is choice of topic too - the 1000 armed Avalokiteshwara for his book - and his interest in collecting Buddhist hymns in his book, both of which are features also of specifically-Buddhist western scholars.
Next to all this is Lokesh's propensity to speculate based on flimsy evidence on behalf of Buddhism (=lack of actual scholarship) - and which is somehow passed off as scholarship - and which is evident in just the section of his book that I perused. Of course, he's not the only one guilty of that crime.
This post is the long, long version of the previous one.
This post is the long version of the previous post. Wrote it, so posting it.
1. The Avatamsaka Sutra - the primary, originating source for the Potalaka myth - does NOT place Potalaka in real geography.
It is the Gandavyuha Sutra subsection of the Avatamsaka Sutra that is relevant, as it is Gandavyuha that mentions/introduces Potalaka, where it is the setting for Avalokiteshwara; among the many settings of the many Buddhist spiritual characters (Bodhisattvas and Buddhas) that the main character of the text ("Sudhana") meets.
- It was later Buddhists that tried to place Potalaka in actual geography.
As mentioned in one of my earlier posts on Ayyappa: the attempt to superimpose the mythical Potalaka onto real geography has long been a passtime of Buddhists (in much of Buddhicised Asia, not just India) and subsequently also of historians who have taken the cue from them.
- Even in what's deemed to be the earliest descriptions of Potalaka in the Avatamsaka Sutra text, it is only ever a spiritual location: where Avalokiteshwara* seated on a giant diamond rock is found lecturing on the Dhamma to an audience of a "multitude" of Bodhisattvas (not random earthly Buddhists, note), all seated on huge jewel rocks. It is only the rest of the backdrop to this spectacle that sounds "earthlike", though this is no different from paradisal natural descriptions in Hindu literature of groves and gardens of the Hindu Gods in Swargam: may sound "earthlike too, but not on earth. [The Avatamsaka descriptions of Potalaka that are deemed newer, make it even more bejewelled.]
* Avalokiteshwara is not a historical Buddhist person: this deity-like Buddha-variant (a special Bodhisattva) is admitted, even by Lokesh Chandra, to have been modelled on the Hindu God Shiva (and as a replacement for him. In Chinese regions, however, he got remodelled again: to encroach on an extremely popular female Taoist Goddess and replace her with Buddhism, and so GuanYin became the Goddess of Mercy there). Avalokiteshwara originated as a Buddhist spiritual character in Mahayana. It's the search for a real Potalaka that has, in more modern times, resulted on occasion in the spin-off search for a historical human Buddhist to identify as the blueprint for the spiritual Buddhist deity-like figure, Avalokiteshwara. But the Gandavyuha never presented Avalokiteshwara as a human, and his special status only grew when this bodhisattva became specially popular in Asian countries Bauddhised by Mahayana, where his popularity vied with full-blown Buddhas like Maitreya and Manjushri.
- The protagonist Sudhana makes his journey by being directed from one spiritual Buddhist character living in a spiritual place to another who can impart further information. As one stopover node of Sudhana's journey, he is sent to Potalaka to look for Avalokiteshwara. The entire journey of Sudhana, including the Potalaka stretch of it, is not meant to be historical** (and not actual geography): his journey actually represents a spiritual journey. That is why places, when they're described and not merely named (often with names that exist only in this text and which frequently have an allegorical meaning), are often bejewelled to what seems like excess, but it is a visual cue for meditation. Similar to the settings being non-physical and for the purpose og proding a backdrop, the characters that Sudhana meets are supra-human.
Because it is a spiritual quest and because in the Buddhist view of the cosmos it is peopled with multiple buddhas, many of the characters Sudhana meets are anachronistic (like Shakyamuni Buddha's mother), and non-historical characters like the future Buddha (Maitreya) and further multiple Buddhas (Manjushri, Avalokiteshwara) and unnamed multitudes of Buddhas, as well as other special beings in Buddhist cosmology (some taken from Hindu cosmology and placed lower in the Buddhist hierarchy).
[The number of teachers Sudhana meets being 53 seems religiously-significant: approximately that number was already significant in Hindu religion; Buddhism and Jainism are sometimes off by a few units from significant Hindu numbers.]
So why does Avalokiteshwara's Potalaka suddenly become "real geography" when none of the others are?
A: Don't know about the reason for the obsession of Bauddhified Indian individuals of today. But for the rest: other Asians didn't know actual Indian geography (although, the reference to Jambudvipa was generally to the world inhabited by people and not usually to India in specific), so some E/SE Asians took it all literally. And of course because it concerns Avalokiteshwara, who is now an important character in Buddhism. Despite Avalokiteshwara's bit part in this early sutra, where he shares the limelight with others and when his character was not yet developed to the extent it is now, he in time became much more significant to Tibetan and E Asian Mahayana Buddhism, as stated.
** Note that Buddhism never claimed its Sutra literature to be historical. Inspired by how Hindu religion claims spiritual reality to its sacred narratives, Buddhism's Mahayana Sutras and (backprojected) jatakas are claimed to be a spiritual 'truth'. E.g. the IIRC the story associated with the Heart Sutra features a super-magical deer that was to have lived in India and which lives in a forest setting too. The earthlike settings don't make the tale real. The purpose of the tale was to teach "compassion". (But renditions show that it took digs at Hindu religion, just as the Jatakas often did).
The visual meditatons of Buddhist sutras are clearly modelled on the style of Hindu visual meditations. I.e. the descriptions in the texts are visual cues that produce mental responses conducive to meditative states and spiritual purification. In Hindu religion, the ancient Hindoo meditative texts - found in our epics and puranas - even produce the Hindoo state known as samAdhi in Expert Hindoo practitioners. Buddhism and Jainism would later adopt the notion of samadhi too, and - later still - they would stop crediting Hindu religion for its origins and even claim that they had invented it and that Hindu religion had borrowed it from them. Ramayanam, and at least sections of MBh - e.g. the end section of Urvashi's shApam on Arjuna clearly explains the spiritual purity that results from hearing/reading the section; Valmeeki and other Vaidika Ramayanams, Srimad Bhagavatam, any Mahaatmyam, LalithopAkhyanam, are all spiritual/yoga journeys and feature visual cues like that of the dscriptions of Amman's Sreenagara, etc.
2. It is the 2nd source, the Buddhist Chinese visitor to India, Xuanzang=Hsuan-Tsang (HT) - and otherwise variously spelled - who, assuming the Avatamsaka Sutra to be literal truth and taking Potalaka [and possibly the rest of Sudhana's quest] literally, as earthly geography (because of Avalokiteshwara's popularity in China and E Asia), claimed that Potalaka was a real place and furthermore makes reference to a decisively geographic location in India. (But other Asians have similarly claimed Potalaka to lie elsewhere - outside India - "in the south".) The geography that Hsuan-Tsang described and chose to designate as Potalaka, is actually the one that modern historians especially (often Buddhist) have been trying to locate in earthly geography. Though it is only Buddhist writers/research which insist on considering HT's designated earthly "Potalaka" to actually *be* the (spiritual) Potalaka of the Avatamsaka Sutra. Though not all Buddhists take it literally.
- HOWEVER: Scholars, including a translator of Hsuan-Tsang's writings, have concluded that Hsuan-Tsang never actually visited the place that he chose to designate as Potalaka. His descriptions are from HEARSAY.
- Next, the only part of his description that is not seen through his Bauddhifying glasses can at best only mark out the place that he alludes to as a Shaiva sacred site: he admits that, from the hearsay he received, the devotees sometimes got to see the temple deity appear to them in the flesh as "Ishwara"/a "PAshupata Yogin" (elsewhere translated as "Shiva-PAMshupata"). HT *chose* to interpret this as a syncretist Buddhism, i.e. as Avalokiteshwara, the Buddhist clone of Shiva. He interpreted the descriptions of the site as matching that of Potalaka.
What I'm saying is that: the descriptions that Hsuan-Tsang documents from hearsay are of a real place in India - and specifically a Shaiva place - but he mistook it for the Buddhist Potalaka or a syncretised variant.
- HT's descriptions of the place he alleges as the Buddist "Potalaka" are actually not very precise - this is not a crime, except it invites to much speculation.
As seen from the fact that the Japanese scholar (Shu, mentioned in an earlier post of mine on the subject) placed it in a real, existing Hindu temple site at Podigai/Potiyil part of TN, even as the scholar admitted that originally it was a Hindu site and that the locals remained Hindu and did not buy into any attempted Buddhist syncretism on Shiva there; while Lokesh Chandra has sought to place it in Ayyappa's Shabarimalai abode in Kerala.
[This is beside some northern Indian neo-Buddhists nowadays claiming that Tirupati is Potalaka, and E Asian Buddhists having variously identified Potalaka in their own backyards.]
Modern Buddhist writers, often western, argue that references to other Bodhisattvas designated with the qualifier "Potalaka" may indicate that this was an earthly locality where these were worshipped. If it were Hindu, this may be the case. But Mahayana bodhisattvas like the "Potalaka Bhagavati" need not be grounded*: e.g. Indra and Indraani are regularly referenced with Swargam - or the quarter of the heavens (Vasava) that is their abode - as their locality identifer. It does not follow that the locality is *earthly* geography.
* Unless, of course, they were specifically created as Buddhist attempts at localised syncretism on (aka Buddhist clone of) a local Bhagavati=wife of Shiva, as the equivalent for Buddhism's Potalaka Lokeshwara [Avalokiteshwara] as a replacement-via-syncretism on Shiva in some region. Since Shiva always exists with his wife, so Mahayana Buddhism would have been forced to introduce the Bauddhified Tara, or equivalent Buddhist clone, to mask Shiva's Wife.
3. I will treat "the Hymn to the Thousand-Armed Avalokitesvara" and Lokesh Chandra's speculations (which he based on both this hymn and the above 2 sources) together. Lokesh's speculations on the subject of Ayyappa/Shabarimalai's alleged connection to Buddhism/Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka are in his book "The Thousand-Armed Avalokiteshwara". His conjectures are also not admissable as evidence, let alone justifying the additional spin-off speculations indulged in by those that have bought into his Mere Hypothesis.
Subsequent posts will contain the relevant screenshots from Lokesh's book where he tries to Ayyappa/Shabarimalai with Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka. Summary of the issues:
- Lokesh admits his choice to identify Ayyappa at Sabarimala with Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka is but speculation - "Lord Ayyappa of Shabarimala, [...] could have been the Potala Lokesvara of Buddhist literature" - a hypothesis thatis itself based on comparatively late Buddhist speculation - such as especially by Hsuan-Tsang - that Potalaka may be real worldly geography, which HT had conveniently located in India based on hearsay.
(And uh, wasn't Potalaka from Buddhist literature - still pre-Hsuan-Tsang - supposed to be IIRC an island? If people are going to try pin-pointing it geographically, it sounds more like Malaysia or a Mahayana Buddhist claim on Theravadan Sri Lanka.)
- Also relevant is that from the same Buddhist sources, most especially Hsuan-Tsang's third-hand hearsay account of a real place in India, Japanese scholar Shu, also in search of HT's particular earthly Potalaka, came to different conclusions from that of Lokesh:
+ not only did Shu identify a Hindu temple site in Tamil Nadu as his probably Potalaka, and as having experienced a "syncretist Hindu-Buddhist" past therefore, but
+ Shu even derived the origins of the word Potalaka differently. But just like Lokesh, he too derived the word in such a way as to suit/support his choice of Potalaka.
- Lokesh bases his identification of Ayyappa/Shabarimalai with Avalokiteshwara/Potalaka on 5 points he advances, and which he derives from the 3 sources (the Sutra, Hsuan-Tsang's description and the Hymn to the 1000-armed Avalokiteshwara) and Chinese translations thereof.
+ 3 of these 5 points are about the meaning of the name Potalaka as *he* interprets it based on the 3 sources. His interpretation of the etymology of Potalaka seems more sound than that of the Japanese scholar - both of whom derive widely-different origins for the word, as will be seen further below, though both have come up with their etymology so as to forcefit/make it conducive to fit the different geographic location each has identified in south India as HT's Potalaka. Having said that, however, Lokesh's etymological derivation of the word becomes much weaker than that of Shu when it's time for him to plead that this would refer to Shabarimalai.
+ the remaining 2 (of the 5) points Lokesh submits in building his 'argument' do no more than show that Buddhism had encroached on Shiva and his personal names for Avalokiteshwara.
- Lokesh makes too much of the real Buddhist appropriation of both Shiva and Vishnu that's seen elsewhere (such as in Lokesh's argument of Indonesia) and tries to introduce it unnecessarily into this particular context, in order to use it to tie it back to Shabarimalai. That is, Lokesh uses Harihara to forcefit his theory on Ayyappa (since Ayyappa is Hariharaputra). In this too he departs from the Japanese scholar, who does not feel the need to introduce Buddhist appropriation of Vishnu or Vishnu-Shiva into Avalokiteshwara (and others scholars dealing with the same Buddhist sources don't either - no more than they bring up Hindu Gods in general as being formative influences behind the Buddhist Avalokiteshwara), because the Hindu temple site *Shu* chose to identify as being possibly Potalaka was largely a Shaiva site.
As for the Buddhist Padmapani form: it's true that Buddhism regularly tried to encroach on Shiva using Padmapani, e.g. it was one of the major means with which Buddhism tried to encroach - euphemised to "syncretism" by modern amnesiac/revisionist/Bauddhified "Hindus" - on a very particular famous manifestation of Hindus' Shiva as Guru in several temples. So Hindus of that time eventually dropped the (traditional, Hindoo) use of padmam in his 4th hand when making vigrahas of that Shiva manifestation, for the express reason that Buddhists tended to use this route for inculturation/encroachment/forced merger via Padmapani. [Such a last-ditch reaction by native heathens to Buddhist inculturation is also seen in E Asia, BTW.]
- Lokesh makes elementary mistakes :
+ in the section where he wishes to recount the popular variant of narratives on Ayyappa, he refers to a MahiShasura instead of the MahishAsurI/MahiShI, who (representing the ignorance clouding the aatman) was defeated and the lady inside (the pristine jeevaatman) got liberated by Ayyappa. Another error is that Lokesh swaps leopards for tigresses. And he keeps speaking of "Hari and Hara" as Ayyappa's literal parents, when it is specifically Hara and Mohini-Hari - Vishnu's Shakti form, i.e. his female aspect. But Lokesh needed to forcefit Buddhism onto Ayyappa using the Buddhist encroachment on Vishnu-Shiva seen in other Mahayana Bauddhised countries, so Mohini would not have been handy for his purpose. All these differences are not nitpicking: they do matter to all but unHindus, and no Hindu would get it wrong.
Maybe all the above mistakes are because Lokesh's ancestry is in the now-Pakistani part of Punjab: Lokesh himself was born in Haryana but his dad, an indologist/Sanskritist, is from Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Both are a long way removed from Ayyappa's traditional homegrounds in the south of the Hindu subcontinent. So it may be understandable that Lokesh doesn't really know/care about the tradition (beyond his interest in how much it can be made to fit his Buddhist theories), though a scholar would have made it a point to find out, and ethnic Hindus from anywhere would have made certain to get it right.
+ Then there is that tell-tale error - one repeated by Rajeev who appears to have parroted Lokesh: Lokesh's conclusion that Dharmashaastaa "must be" a reference to the Buddha merely because Buddha in time came to be referred to as "shaastaa" too (but the name shAstR^i means: teacher and commander/ruler. Like the word Guru, its meaning is general. It is also the personal name of the Vedic God Dharmashaastaa aka Ayyappa, like Brahmashaastaa is the name of Murugan.*) Although I've already covered this false conclusion in detail in an earlier post (somewhere between 105 to 111), what is notable that it is an error made peculiarly by Buddhists and the Bauddhified, who are always more familiar with Buddhist history and backprojected history than with Hindu religio-historic originals.
And this last is my own speculation (based on prior experience):
Lokesh Chandra - whether he is named after the original Shiva the Lokeshwara (one of his names), or after Shiva's later Buddhist clone Potalaka Lokeshwara/Avalokiteshwara - certainly has the hallmarks of a researcher of Buddhist leanings/tendencies: his field of research=his field of interest = Buddhism, his need to identify Hindu temple sites as Buddhist even if it is only by means of bad speculation, his lack of knowledge of details of Hindu religion (other than parroting what is convenient) and being far removed from anything he could know by direct experience even though he will nevertheless speculate on and on from general accounts, his comparatively better knowledge of Buddhism stemming from his greater interest in it, his promoting Buddhist variations as the standard ("shaastaa" in its specific Buddhist meaning, rather than the older, general Hindu meaning of shaastaa). There is choice of topic too - the 1000 armed Avalokiteshwara for his book - and his interest in collecting Buddhist hymns in his book, both of which are features also of specifically-Buddhist western scholars.
Next to all this is Lokesh's propensity to speculate based on flimsy evidence on behalf of Buddhism (=lack of actual scholarship) - and which is somehow passed off as scholarship - and which is evident in just the section of his book that I perused. Of course, he's not the only one guilty of that crime.
This post is the long, long version of the previous one.