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| 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.
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| 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.
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Prof. Diwakar Acharya and myself in Oxford
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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.
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| Yano, Kashinath, myself at the National Archive in Kathmandu, 2015 |
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| My examination of the original palm-leave manuscript of the Yavanajātaka |
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A visit to the Āśā Archives
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| 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?
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