Following the Buddha's Footsteps - A Visit of Nepalese Consul General of Hong Kong and Friends

Consul General Udaya Bahadur Ranamagar (centre), TSM Secretary General Walter Ngai (second left), author (first right) 

On 28th May, 2021, Mr. Udaya Bahadur Ranamagar, the Nepalese Consul General of Hong Kong since 2020, came to Tsz Shan for a visit. Although this was our first meeting with the Consul General, neither Walter nor myself were strangers to Nepal. Indeed we discovered that we have more than a few common friends. Walter was a longtime friend of the local Nepali community. He visited Nepal a number of times including joining once a noviciate program in Lumbini, with many stories to share. As for myself, I too made numerous trips to Nepal both for pleasure and for work. Both my Sanskrit teachers, Kashinath Naupane and Diwakar Acharya, are Nepalese. The Consul General not only knew these two eminent Sanskritists familiar to Buddhist and Indian Studies scholars worldwide, he himself had also enrolled in the PhD program of the Sanskrit University Prof. Kashinath Naupane taught. I fondly remember this the "Valmiki Campus" of this rustic university in Kathmandu where the professors sometimes taught their classes outdoor in the garden instead of inside the classrooms!

My connection with Nepal began after I completed my Master of Buddhist Studies at the University of Hong Kong. Feeling that I had barely scratched the surface of the vast body of Buddhist knowledge, I decided to go to Nepal in search of the Sanskrit manuscript of the Diamond Sutra, whose Chinese translation I tried to learn by heart as a child when I visited the Po Lam Monastery 寶林禪寺 in Lantau Island, Hong Kong in the 1980s. In retrospect, I was woefully ignorant about my own pursuit. I nonetheless had the good fortune of meeting Prof. Kashinath at the NGMPP office in Kathmandu. Realising that despite my years of bookish study in Sanskrit, I could not even chant a śloka, guru-ji gave me my first recitation lesson - the first verse of Raghuvaṃśa. For the following week, all we did was recitation. I had just turned thirty by then and my memory no longer as good it was. His patience and kindness greatly touched me, while my love of Sanskrit recitation and the language grew. Our friendship would continue for decades up till today. In 2007, I invited Prof. Kashinath Nyaupane to China for the first Sanskrit summer camp in Baofeng Monastery, Jiangxi 江西寶峰寺. The Abbot, Ven. Yanzheng 衍真, a Peking University graduate and a lover of Pali, Sanskrit, and learning in general, kindly supported our works. Among Prof. Kashinath's many projects were his editing of the Śatasāhasrikā Prajñāpāramitā, sponsored by the monastery.

Sanskrit Summer Camp in China with Prof. Kashinath Nyaupane in  2007

My meeting with Prof. Diwakar Acharya was no less extraordinary and fruitful. In 2008 I received a Monbushō scholarship from the Japanese Government to continue my research in Buddhist Studies in Japan. My first choice had always been Kyoto and I was fortunate to be accepted into the doctoral program of the Department of Indological Studies of Kyoto University, in the beautiful, ancient capital of Japan, where I would spend the following decade first as a student, then a postdoctoral researcher, and finally an associate professor at one of the most prestigious institutions in Japan. It was during my doctoral training when I first met Prof. Diwakar Acharya, whose Sanskrit reading classes I attended for years. Among the classes I remember most fondly was the Sanskrit composition class, where I tried to compose the Dao De Jing in Sanskrit! I fondly remember also our weekend hike on the Daimonji mountain where we would chant Sanskrit verses as we climbed the hills and passed through the forests. Another decade passed and Prof. Diwakar Acharya is now the Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University. Recently, Prof. Acharya and I got in touch again to launch a truly ambitious project to edit and publish a series of Sino-Sanskrit Buddhist texts. The project will likely be an unprecedented collaboration between the Tsz Shan Monastery, the Bodleian Library of Oxford University, and the Sanskrit Text Society which is about to be established. The new Sanskrit edition of these important Buddhist texts will make use of the valuable manuscripts kept in various archives and monasteries in Nepal.

Prof. Diwakar Acharya and myself in Oxford

Among my most important contributions to academia and Indian studies in the recent years was my research on Indian astral texts, and in particular, an ancient text titled Yavanajātaka, literally "genethliacal astrology of the Greeks." The complete Sanskrit palm-leave manuscript survived only in Nepal. After Pingree's important work on this text in 1976, I produced a number of studies (2013a, 2013b, 2014) that shed new light on the dating and astronomical content of the work. In 2015, I made a visit to the National Archive in Kathmandu (after the earthquake!) with Prof. Yano Michio of Kyoto Sangyo University and Prof. Kashinath Nyaupane and I could examine the original palm-leave manuscript of the Yavanajātaka that I have been trying to decipher for years, as well as a new paper manuscript of the same text that Prof. Yano discovered inadvertently earlier in 2011.

Yano, Kashinath, myself at the National Archive in Kathmandu, 2015

My examination of the original palm-leave manuscript of the Yavanajātaka

A visit to the Āśā Archives

A visit to Prof. Mahes Pant and his extraordinary collection of jyotiṣa manuscripts

Beside our personal ties with Nepal, Walter and I were told also about the history of the Nepalese community right here in Hong Kong. It is our hope that we can further strengthen the friendship between the two peoples through meaningful projects and exchanges. Beside the Sino-Sanskrit Buddhist text project which Walter supports wholeheartedly, we have the idea of perhaps writing a book on our journeys to Nepal -- Following the Buddha's Footsteps.

How does that sound for a title?

Sun-drying and caring for Buddhist texts

A commonality between ancient and modern libraries is their capacity to house collections of books (Sometimes as thematic libraries, like the Law Library of the Congress, in the U.S.A., or as general libraries, like the Hong Kong Central Library) that are functional, and provide a space for readers to wade through their pages; in the case of Tsz Shan Monastery, our faithfulness to tradition and scholarship, together with the sustained presence of volunteers and visitors, makes it so that we do not only house numerous volumes of the Tripiṭaka (三藏/त्रिपिटक), but also that we can provide a place for such volumes, and many other books on Buddhist content to be read and studied properly.

Thanks the sustained support of our many volunteers, our collection has grown from few specific compilations of very traditional sutras to several thousand DVDs, magazines, encyclopedias and books on many different subjects, covering a wide range of themes, styles and languages, all around the subject of Buddhism. With the increase of our bibliographical collection, however, also came an increase in the elements to consider when maintaining our collection in good shape. Thanks to Dr. Bill Mak, our Principal Researcher, a project was put in motion with the objective of establishing a comprehensive, efficient and useful library for visiting researchers, while also providing a reading space for anyone interested in learning about general aspects of Buddhism, all the while keeping precious volumes of Buddhist sutras properly safeguarded.

(Chinese section of the Tsz Shan Monastery Buddhist Art Museum Research Library)

Having used the library of my university many times before, I was acquainted with some details of its classification system: Indeed, if one means to house a sizable collection of literary references, there are some international standards that can be applicable to any library, no matter the size. So when my colleagues and I were told about the necessity to revamp our library system, and about the idea of separating our collection by the type of reader that would enjoy each section of the collection, I was excited about the chance to get more closely acquainted with the Buddhist volumes at our disposal.

One of the most important steps when organizing a library is, without a doubt, making sure that the books are in good shape. For this purpose, and inspired by Buddhist tradition, we organized a sun drying (晒经节) activity with our volunteers. After receiving a lecture on the history and importance of sutra copying and drying, our volunteers helped us with three main tasks: Relocating books, sun drying and shelf cleaning.

The starting point of the activity was our Tripitaka Library (藏經閣). In there, the monastery houses some very significant collections from each of the three baskets (Discourses, rules and philosophy), and the volunteers and staff were tasked with opening the books under the sunlight (To diminish any humidity contained inside of the books), cleaning any dust that could be on the books, and arranging the new additions to the collection that would belong to this hall. Due to the contents and the religious importance of the objects, most of our volunteers took to this task, which required attentive care and mindful handling of the volumes. The end result was a tasteful, well ordered distribution, which goes well with the parallel use of this hall as meditation room for our monastic community. 

 

(Present state of the Tripitaka Library)

Next was the relocation of the volumes that would be housed in the Museum library. Being the newest collection, and soon to be of use for the upcoming research programs that will complement the development of our Museum's efforts on spreading awareness and appreciation for the rich artistic value of Buddhist art, many of the books that were originally located in the Learning Commons, and even some of the ones located in the Tripitaka Hall were transported to their new location. As many of these collection had numerous volumes (One collection of medicine sutras, for example, had 100 volumes of more than 600 pages each!), our volunteers traveled several times back and forth between venues with carts full of books, while keeping track of the intended destination for each one of them.
In this regard, however, the most challenging venue to reorganize was the Learning Commons.

The Learning Commons, which is a venue that sees extensive use by many of our volunteers and staff, houses our Buddhist books that do not belong to a specific set of sutras; instead, this collection includes many different topics and authors: From vegetarian cuisine to language learning, this collection is very varied both in content and in format, and keeping track of the location and condition of each item can be challenging at times. The answer to this test was to take stock of all the books contained in the monastery, label them, and to take note of their condition after a simple routine of maintenance, which consisted in dusting (Plus sun-drying and airing in the case of books) and relocating them in their original position. The result was a neat and symmetrical library full of interesting and enriching Buddhist content.

As the summer weather was perfect for this sun-drying exercise, everyone worked very hard to make sure that the books were taken care of in the best possible way, and it was a happy occasion to share in the care and passion that the volunteers demonstrated when being in close contact with Buddhist texts. As many times in the past history of the monastery, and as it has always been in the history of Buddhism itself, the monastic community and Buddhist institutions can grow and thrive thanks to the invaluable effort of those who selflessly and sincerely believe in Dharma: Thanks to them, and to the efforts of the many people who uphold the Teachings, sentient beings get ever closer to the ceasing of their suffering.