184. The Buddhist Merlin

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0:29Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnens. And me, William Durrumpel. I know I've said it before. I do know I've said that this episode is going to be a bit like Game of Thrones. And it kind of is going to be a bit like the Game of Thrones because this is an episode, my friends, which will have wizards, sorcerers, apprentices, dragons, oh, there be dragons, spells. And I mean, it is exactly the kind of fantasy that people expect now George R.R. Martin to churn out. But this is a really interesting story. What are we talking about this week? So we're talking about one of the most extraordinary characters of this period, and he is a Buddhist tantric magician or sorcerer called Vajrabodi.

1:13And what's lovely, I'm nice writing this book, The Golden Road. This is a period of history where there are huge gaps in the historical record. There are no really good chronicles telling this whole story like you get in the Mughal period or during the British period. You're trying to piece together archaeological evidence, inscriptions, pieces of pottery, epigraphy. And then suddenly, out of all this sort of puantilis mix of different art and tiny inscriptions and so on, we get one whopping biography of a magician. Hooray! I remember sort of cheering when I was researching this. And it's been recently retranslated, The Life of Vajra Bodhi.

1:56And it's a cracker of a story. So Vajra, first of all, I mean, translates as magic wand, doesn't it? So he is the wisdom of the wand, Bodhi meaning the wisdom of. So the wisdom of the wand. Yeah, it's a magic wand. I think it's more Harry Potter than Game of Thrones, actually, this episode because he has a magic wand. He is a good magician and he's sent on a sort of epic undertaking overseas. I will rip up my Game of Thrones analogy and I will slap down a Hogwarts on the table. Fine. Done deal. So we're talking about Vajrabudhi, a South Indian. Not only is he a South Indian, he's wonderful for my book because he's a cousin of my other favorite character we talked about in the last episode, Mahendra Pallava.

2:39Mahendra Vaman Pallava. Ah, okay. He's from the royal family. The one who's a right laugh. Who has himself depicted with his two girlfriends and he's telling a story and he writes some sort of Beckett-like plays about sort of monks and bars. So he's the great exporter of Hinduism and this is his first cousin. First cousin, really, wow. What a family. But his first cousin is Buddhist. And this is, again, a measure of the sort of complexity of the time. Not only a Buddhist, but he's a great Buddhist magician. And remember that just like Merlin, you know, appears at this time, because this period of history, similar sort of time to King Arthur, fifth, sixth centuries, that everyone, you know, wanted a magician to help run their armies and win their battles for them.

3:19The same is true in early India. And you have a kind of competition growing because the Buddhists, who've been slightly too abstract for people's taste, you know, the wonderful stories of the Hindu pantheon, the stories of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are so seductive and so sexy and valorous and exciting. They've got monkeys setting fire to islands with their tails. You know, it's really visual. Exactly. And, you know, just sort of meditating on the interior doesn't quite match that in terms of spectacle. Yeah. And so Buddhism, almost as a sort of… Pushback. Yeah, pushback. Yeah. Comes up with a form of Buddhism called Tantric Buddhism, which contains its own magic.

3:59And Vajrabodi is one of the great examples of this. He is famous not for feats of meditation or high philosophy. He's famous for his magic spells. Like what can he do? He's like a fantastic marvel character. He has the power to create downpours with the aid of magical rain dragons. Oh. And he knows mantras, which is basically spells. capable of destroying entire armies and even bringing the dead back to life. We're talking a quantum leap from the rabbit in the hat. This is like serious magical stuff. This is a full Dumbledore. This really is. Right, okay. And he is someone who was famed for having gone to Nalanda, the great Buddhist university, the Harvard or the Oxford of its day, at the age of 12, and to have passed out in his teens, and then gone south again to Tamil Nadu, his home, where he was initiated into secret tantric rituals of power in an iron stupa.

4:58I love that detail. So are we talking about drawing things on the ground and doing tantric reciting at the same time? Is that what these spells are going to be? Is that what they'd look like? Yes, exactly that. What you have at this period, I mean, it's still there in modern Buddhism, but you have the building of mandalas. And mandalas, you know, you'll be familiar with if you just Google them. If you're even slightly a hippie, like a tie-dye, you'd know a mandala. So these are these close geometric shapes that are enveloped in a circle. Well, just like Western witches and magicians use pentagrams as sort of symbols of power, which concentrate their spiritual power.

5:35So in Buddhist tantric magic, magical shapes, alignments, cosmic diagrams, and colored sand or painting can be transformed by magic rituals to initiate adepts into higher levels of spiritual power. And so if you are a full-on tantric magician like Vajrabodi, you not only know secret tantric texts and yogic formulae, you also know mandalas of power. And according to one of his contemporaries, there was nothing in the treasury of the Buddha's secrets he did not master. So this guy is already making quite a name for himself. And then he's summoned south from Nalanda by his cousin, the Pallava king, to lead an important embassy to China.

6:23And two things have happened, very importantly, which mean that the king of South India wishes to ally with the emperor in China. And now he knows that China has become very Buddhist. This again is the period of Wu Zetian. Wu Zetian's son is still on the throne at this period. He knows that the ideal ambassador to send to this court is a Buddhist wonder worker. Yeah, Buddhist to Buddhist. Yeah. And so he summoned south to Kachipuram. And first of all, there's a drought going on. So he's asked to produce rain and he does his magic tricks. Get your dragons out for the lads. Yes. He gets the dragons out.

7:01And having successfully created a monsoon out of season for his cousins. He's then sent off with the chief general, and this is their mission. Two things are threatening both the kings of South India and the emperor of China. One is the Tibetans. This is the period of one of the great moments of power, when the Tibetan kings are riding down on the plains of China, looting and pillaging the boots on the other foot at this period of history. It's just a tiny kingdom even then, isn't it? Tibet is not tiny. Tibet is a vast, vast kingdom. them. How big are we talking about Tibet versus China? The entire Tibetan plateau.

7:37Right, all united and all acting as one and all acting against China's interests. Interesting. But also riding down both sides. So they're not only erupting into the plains of China, but they're erupting down from the hills into India. And it's sufficient enough to worry the panovers that they want to make a lot. But there's a second thing that's happening. And this is, again, more familiar in modern geopolitics of India, the armies of Islam have arrived and got as far as the Indus. This is the moment, this is two or three generations after Muhammad and the Caliph Omar lead this extraordinary eruption of horsemen and warriors out of the Arab Peninsula.

8:15They sweep through Palestine and Syria, through the Persian Empire, and through what's now Afghanistan. And although this is a little bit the future, they will fight the Chinese at the Battle of Talas, and the Arabs will defeat the Chinese. They don't know that yet. They don't know that yet. One of the things that will happen with this is that Chinese prisoners of war allegedly will bring the secret of papermaking to Baghdad with them at this point, meaning that paper moves westwards. This is the outcome of this. Right. Okay. So you've got both India and China being pressed upon by the Tibetans, who are all united in one massive muscular kingdom, and you've got the Arabs pressing in on the other side.

8:55So my enemy's enemy is my friend. This forge is a relationship, does it? So what you do, you send Vajrabodi, your leading wizard, to go off to China. But Vajrabodi has his own interests and his own authority. So he's not going to just simply do someone else errands for it. So when he leaves Pallava Kanchipuram and probably sails from the port of Mamalapuram that we mentioned last time, which is the great Pallava port with all these wonderful sculptures and temples. He also has his own agenda. So the first stop on his journey is Sri Lanka. And the king says to Vajrabodi, your studies have now been completed.

9:34Go to the Middle Kingdom and pay your respects to the Bodhisattva Manjushri, whose shrine on Mount Wutai has become a major site of pilgrimage. You should go and spread the teachings and save all beings. And then he gives him the other instructions. So first stop is Sri Lanka, which has now become in part a palaver colony. The palavers have invaded part of Sri Lanka. And what Vajrabodi wants to do is to go and see the Buddha's footprints on Adam's Peak. And one of my favourite passages in this biography is this description. Can I read it? Yes, do. It is fantastic. Go on. That mountain had many ferocious beasts, lions, poisonous snakes, savages, and rakshasa demons.

10:18Dark winds and a cruel fog constantly protect the rare treasures on the top of the mountain. Unless one is paying one respects to the sacred sites, it is not possible to climb this mountain. His reverence, Vajrabodi, burnt incense at the foot of the mountain and made obeisance. Immediately, the sky cleared, the fogs dispersed, and the ferocious beasts hid themselves. Ascending, they turned towards the northwest, exploring hanging valleys, grasping lianas, and hanging on to creepers. There was a spring, and in it there was nothing but lapis lazuli, gold, silver, jewels, and blue lotus flowers. They came across caves where earlier monks had cultivated the way.

11:03They climbed for seven days, and only then did they reach the top of the mountain. The Buddha's right footprint was hidden on top of the stone. So he goes there. He goes and sees the Buddha's footprint. Then he comes down to this great Buddhist monastery in Sri Lanka, Abhyagiri, which is in the capital Anuradhapura. And Abhyagiri seems to be in the center of Buddhist magic. They had all the main sacred texts there. And everyone who wants to know the secrets of mandalas or mantras goes to Abiyagiri. And he stops there for a bit, he copies out texts, and he takes them with him. And then he sails on to Sumatra, which is a very important part of the story, part of the maritime empire, these sort of sea lords of Srivijaya, what they call a Thassalocracy or Confederation of Sea Lords, which has its center in Palembang, which is a riverine port perched on wooden piles emerging from the River Musi.

12:00And it's there where he's stopping halfway to China in Palenbank that he meets his future apprentice. The sorceress apprentice, hello. Indeed it is. It's sort of the Harry Potter to Dumbledore. And this is a young man called Amogravadra who becomes the most powerful of Vajrabodi's pupils and will in turn take on his legacy. I really want to know more about Amogavadra. I mean, where is he from? How much younger is he than his teacher? So his teacher by this stage must be in his 40s. And he, I think, is 14 or 15. He really is an apprentice. And we have two biographies of Amogavadra and both give him different origins.

12:45One says he's from Sri Lanka. The other says he's a Sogdian from Central Asia. Either could be true. And we just don't know. So these two head on together now from Sumatra by sea to China. And of course, the demons of the sea don't want them to reach China. So an enormous storm comes up. And there's this description of, we were crossing in a convoy in the very middle of a great ocean when we ran into a typhoon, wrote Vajrabodi. All the ships were tossed about. And the ship that I was on was inundated. At that time, I always kept two scriptures nearby so I could do the requisite offerings. I aroused my mind in meditation, performed the tantric rite for eliminating disasters, and the typhoon immediately abated.

13:33And for a quarter of a mile around the ship, the water did not move. So, I mean, he clearly believes that he can do this magic. Yeah. No, he's had no doubt about his own powers. This is not cynical stuff. This is, you know, he believes he has this power and those around him believe he has this power. So, I mean, as he travels, I mean, news of his conquest over the elements is going to spread like wildfire, isn't it? People are going to talk about this. Exactly that. And he arrives in China just after the death of our old friend, the Empress Wu Zetian, who we talked about a couple of episodes ago.

14:06And Wu Zetian, who was this extraordinary woman who poisoned and murdered her way to supreme power, but then became one of the great rulers of Chinese history, fighting successful battles and running very efficient administration for close on half a century. She has just passed away and her son is now the ruler. And when he arrives, as had been the case in Kachipuram, just as he was leaving, there's a massive drought. So what do they ask him to do? Could you please get your rain dragons out? We've heard you've got rain dragons. I'm going to read you again. I love this passage. Okay. Since the first moon of that year, it had not rained for five months, wrote one biographer of Vajrabodi shortly afterwards.

14:48Prayers were offered at the sacred temples of mountains and rivers without result. So the emperor asked Vajrabodi to set up an altar to pray for rain. Northwest winds began at once to blow so heavily that the tiles of the roof were lifted off and trees were uprooted. The clouds dropped their rain. People far and wide were astonished. A hole was torn in the roof above the altar and heavy rain poured into the hall. Next morning, people of high and low degrees in the capital asserted that Vajrabodi had seized a dragon, which jumped up through the roof and thousands of people daily sought to see it in the palace.

15:27Brilliant. So what is going on here? Is this like sort of mass hysteria or storm clouds that look like things? I don't know how you interpret this. I don't know how you interpret it either. But the idea certainly is, this is the important point, that this guy, Vajrabodi, and his sorcerer's apprentice, Amoghra Vajra, get regarded as supreme wizards and magicians. And they become the two most powerful monks in Chinese history of the period. But what's important, I think, is that these guys, you know, in the sources of the time, they are remembered mainly for their magic tricks. But these are major Indian scholars, and they bring Indian ideas, not just of magic and rain dragons and all this sort of stuff, which is what their biographers get most excited about.

16:12But they're actually bringing ideas of cosmology, reincarnation, drug prescription, astronomy, horoscopic astrology, ritual magic, calendrical computation, and planetary prediction to the Chinese court from the learning of Nalanda. So this is one of these moments when you're getting a massive transfer of Indian knowledge into China, coming through the person of this sort of charismatic magician. I mean, you're sort of saying it in a slightly disapproving way that we're all concentrating on his magic because it's so thrilling. I love it. What was he most remembered for then? Well, I suppose his main trick was defeating the invading foreign armies.

16:53and I think driven by the armies of Islam, there'd been this major eruption of nomads in Central Asia into China from the West and they're defeating all the Chinese troops in the border regions. Well, I mean, not themselves, surely. So they have retinues with them and armies with them. I mean, how are they defeating them? He's not doing it with magic, is he? He is doing it with magic. No, that's absolutely what he does do. What? He hasn't got his own private army. He's actually what? Waving his wand of power. He's waving his wand. I'll read you the account. So at this point, he's passed the banner on to the assistant, Amogravadra.

17:27The apprentice, yeah. Amogravadra is asked to do this piece of military magic. And Amogravadra has to go back to Sri Lanka to get the text from the monastery of Abiyagiri. And he comes back to China on his own and is summoned to the court where this nomad invasion is taking place. And this is the account that he leaves. An edict was issued summoning Amogravadra to court, as the city of Anshi had been surrounded by enemy troops of the five nations. Amogravadra said, your majesty should carry an incense burner to the place where I will conduct the ritual, and your majesty should pray to the heavenly king of the north to send divine troops to save them.

18:11The emperor quickly entered the ritual area and prayed. Before Amogravadra had recited the secret words twice seven times, the emperor suddenly saw two to three hundred divine beings wearing golden armour. In the fourth month of the year, a memorial came from Aanchi, which said that on the same day that Amogravadra had prayed, to the north-east of the city, dark cloud and fog had appeared. In the fog were beings who were 10 foot tall and all wore gold armour. After dusk came the sound of drums and loud cries. The trembling of the earth stopped after three days. The frightened troops of the five nations all retreated.

18:55Moreover, golden rats chewed the strings of their bows and crossbones and destroyed their weapons so none could be used. So that's how you do it. That's how you do it. Let's take a break. Now, join us after the break where our magical heroes, well, we have one for only a little while longer, but we see what his apprentice gets up to.

19:22Welcome back. So, just before the break, we had giants 10 feet tall, hiding in storm clouds, defeating great armies and chewing through bowstrings. I mean, I'd just love to know what was actually going on there. But look, Vajrabudhi only has a little more time on this earth. He's the Dumbledore in this pairing. He's now got his young acolyte with him. How long does he have, and what happens when he's gone? So I love these stories as much as you do, and one can read them in a variety of ways. But what I think is absolutely fascinating is something that scholars are only now realising, that for all this talk of magic and everything, and for all these tall tales, There's one very, very solid memorial to these extraordinary pair and indeed to one of their pupils.

20:08And the latest research in the last few years has managed to show that it's in fact a pupil of Vajrabodi and the Mogravadra, who is responsible for the plan and the design of the greatest Buddhist monument ever built, Borobudur in Java. Now, I want to know all about Borobudur. You've mentioned it before, but I want to know what it looks like. You've been there. What does it look like? What does it feel like to be in this incredible structure? So Borobudur is, for my money, and I think most people would agree with me, the greatest Buddhist monument in the world. And it's two different things put together.

20:49The climax of it is a stupa at the very top, but it's set within a massive mandala, one of these sacred diagrams for which Vajrabodhi was famous. The sacred circle, the magic circle. I've just worked out, it's a magic circle. It is a magic circle. Yeah. It's not actually a circle, this one. This one has a square base and ends up circular at the top, but it has a square base. Right. And it's a colossal structure. You can see it from across the island. It's set in this fantastic landscape of Java, which is dotted with vast volcanoes, but is incredibly fertile soil, giving this very lush and tropical vegetation all around it.

21:30You've got forest and green and really sort of verdant grass. us, yeah. Forest and green and beyond the sea glinting in the horizon and extraordinary effects of mist and clouds swirling around this. And I got to see it, as I said in an earlier episode, in the middle of lockdown. Yeah, I mean, I'm just looking at pictures because I haven't been lucky enough to go there. But what is striking? First of all, the different layers and levels of it. And then you've got these enormous flat plateaus with these huge sculptures, not just of the Buddha, but what looked like upturned bells, you know, bells sitting on the widest part of them with the hand-holding bits sticking up into the air.

22:07But these all seem crafted. They're huge, but intricately. Everything is geometric. Everything is balanced. There are so many tourists who take pictures of the sun setting behind these things. And in silhouette, they are even more extraordinary than in the light. It's exactly that. And I mean, I cannot recommend this site enough. It's one of the great sites. It also has some very, very beautiful hotels nearby, including a very nice Amun resort, if you ever want to visit it. And what we know about it is almost nothing in terms of solid evidence. We have a single inscription that the kings of Shalendra, the lords of the mountain of Java, had built a sacred site here, but we don't know the nature of it.

22:47But recently, new archaeological excavations have found a fragment of what they call a a Buddhist mantra or spell within the site of Borobudur that links exactly to the texts of Vajrabodhi and Amogravadra. And it seems likely now that the architect of Borobudur was one of their Javanese tantric disciples. And there's even a likely candidate who's only known under his Chinese name, but he was originally from Java, and his name is Bian Hong. And he is one of the star pupils of Amogravadra. So he's, if you like, the sorcerer's apprentice apprentice. He's one generation down from Amogravadra. And the stories told about him is that he was determined to travel to India to gain admission in one of these powerful tantric Buddhist lineages.

23:44But then he heard that a Mogravajra was teaching in China. So he goes over the seas and he meets a kind of magical being who tells him that he needn't go to India. But if he wants to gain access to this lineage and learn what is called Vairachana's Mandala of the Great Matrix of Compassion, that he needs go only to China over the waters. And he said, these teachings have already been taken to China by Acharya Moghavadra, who is living in the lands of the Great Tang, in other words, in China. And his pupil, Huego, is presently in the capital in Chang 'an. If you go there, you will be able to receive instruction, but otherwise it will be difficult to obtain.

24:29And when he had finished speaking, the man vanished. So again, more magic. I see. Yeah. But what I like, I mean, is that, you know, all of this may be hokum and men vanishing. But the quality of their architecture, the geometric, deliberate planning of these things certainly suggests they believed it. These are built along magic lines, whether we believe in them or not, they believed in them. They certainly did. And what you've got is various Buddhist texts in stone. You've got first of all the life of the Buddha, then you rise up to a next layer. And there's another tale about a merchant prince who goes off in search of the truth, looking for the Bodhisattva.

25:07And there are thousands of different theses about what Borobudur exactly is about. Is it the three realms of Mahayana Buddhism or the six or the ten perfections? Is it a sermon on the nature of causation? Whatever it exactly is, you can see very clearly this mandala shape. And it's just absolutely beautiful. But also, I mean, the corridors have, apart from, you know, these things, which I find it hard to get my head around anything spiritual at all. But there are carvings from, you know, court drama, in royal palaces, animal fables, morality tales in pictures. So it is like walking through a comic book of epic proportion as well, which everything is illustrated, right?

25:46And they're very large. Yeah. They're life-size. You walk through these sculptures, which are like the Parthenon marbles or something. They're 10, 12 feet high. They're intricately carved. There's miles and miles of them. So, you know, there are just parrots on rooftops, monkeys in treetops. And just if you are walking around and you're looking at this kind of splendor, which is larger than life, it's awe-inspiring. So it does somehow change your mind from what it came in as. Yeah, it's deliberately formed in such a way that it not only tells the different Buddhist scriptures, but is a sort of course in Buddhism.

26:23And the higher levels are filled with this extraordinary esoteric text called the Gandhavayua, which tells the story of Prince Sudhana, a pilgrim prince inspired to take to the road by the Bodhisattva Manjushri, and whose life is a bit like a sort of Buddhist odyssey. It's like sort of Odysseus. He's always traveling by boat and wrecking it and landing ashore on an island. And at the very end, he meets the Bodhisattva and is elevated out of the cycle of rebirth. I have attained an enlightened liberation with higher knowledge of the arts, he says. My illusions have dropped away, and I've entered a door of transcendent wisdom called the sphere of totality.

27:01I love this sort of stuff. I really do urge you to Google it, because we're not doing it any justice with words. You have to look at it and feast on it with your eyes. But I mean, is this a UNESCO World Heritage site? Is it one of the wonders of the world? Because it's huge, it's extraordinary, and it's beautiful. What is its position in world heritage? Do you know? It's the great monument of Indonesia and World Heritage Site. But what was particularly wonderful was that a few years ago, strange porcelain objects started appearing in the junk shops and antique shops in Singapore. And sooner or later, the police got suspicious about all these masterpieces turning up.