BANGLADESHvsWORLD

The manuscript published by Sastri and entitled Hajar Bacharer Purana Bahgala Bhasay Bauddha Gaan o Doha (Buddhist songs and couplets in one thousand year old Bengali language') contains forty-six songs and a fragment of one further song. It consists of sixty-nine folios with writing on both sides. The missing songs are nos. 24,25 and 48 and the last line of song 23. These songs are preserved in Tibetan translations. The original manuscript may have been longer, since the commentary by Munidatta to song 50 is incomplete. The colophon in the Tibetan translation is missing. The manuscript is a commentary which quotes the songs it comments on. The text of Caryagiti and Munidatta is included in the Tibetan Bstan-'gyur or Tanjur.

Besides the Sastri's discovery, Tibetan translations and Mongolian translations of the Caryagiti exist, which actually helped in the putting together of a complete anthology. It seems that Dr. Nilratan Sen alone had access to the only available Sastri manuscript of the Caryagiti, Which he published in a facsimile reproduction of the manuscript of the edition. No other author seems to have actually working with the primary source except Sastri who hand-copied the manuscript as he discovered them.

Per Kvaerne, the Norwegian scholar who translated Caryagiti wrote : The original MS utilized by Sastri has not been available for inspection. It fact, I have not been able to discover where, it at all, it is preserved.¹ In view of this comment I have brought together two manuscripts for inspection by readers and new scholars.

The Mongolian translation of the Tibetan text of Caryagiti is found in the Mongolian Tanjur vol. 49, folios 292b-345a, under the title Yabudal-un dayalal-un Sang-un tailburi. A copy of this rare Mongolian Tanjur is preserved in the State Public Library of the Mongolian people's Republic in Ulan Bator.

After an exhaustive search I have rediscovered only a few pages of the Sastri manuscripts, so long thought to be well preserved in the Nepalese Archive. The complete manuscripts exist on microfilm but the original manuscript in missing, except for a few pages which I am presenting in this text.

In 1984, I discovered a second manuscript of the Caryagiti, on paper, in the Asha Archive, a private collection in Nepal. I am presenting this second manuscript of the Caryagiti, Which has not yet been published anywhere. At a first reading the two manuscripts seem to be quite similar, including the numbers of the missing poems in the palm-left manuscripts, which are now available on microfilm. The script in the second manuscript seems well defined. Although they seem to be similar, they must obviously stand as separate sources of the Caryagiti. I am including three Caryatikas composed Atisa Srigana Dipankara which I copied from Tanjur in Bhutan and from Dr. Alko Chattopadhaya's English translations. Dr. M. Aries of Oxford University has provided me the translation and comments which I am including in the present text.

Rahul Samkrayan discovered am old palm-leaf manuscript of East Indian origin in the Sa-Skya monastery in Tibet. It includes fifteen songs by Vinasri, one by Sumai, one by Lui and one by Kanhapa. Others have discovered carya songs composed at a much later date. I am including a few pages from caryas composed after our present text, which I found in Nepal. (Illustration 5).

The Cayras were songs and were used as accompaniments for dance, as was common in trantric rites. Solo and chorus were accompanied by musical instruments such as cymbals, ankle bells, Mridonga and drums. These songs are still being in Nepal and Bhutan and are sometimes danced to by the Vajracaryas in Nepal. The dance is expressed in slow motion with complex but rhythmic movements of the entire body, and is usually performed by old tantric Vajracaryas. I had the pleasure of witnessing Vajracarya dancing and singing at the Lalitkala Academy in Nepal.

Sastri referred to the song-poems as Caryacaryaviniscaya, which means determining what is and what is not title from the accompanying Sanskrit notes by Munidatta who uses the term in the introductory verse, 'ascarya-carya-caya/' It is the Tibetan translation which gives the title of the work, Carya-giti-kosha-vrtti. Popularly the poems are known in Bengal as Carya-giti or Carya songs.

The Caryagiti are accompanied by a detailed commentary in Sanskrit by one Munidatta. Munisatta was well-versed in the writing of the siddhas - he commented on as well as reproduced the poems in a Sanskritised form. According to Per Kvaerne who has used Munidatta and Tibetan translation is more or less unintelligible without constant reference to the basic text.' It is for reason that I felt that an English translation based on the Bengali text itself will be most relevant.