Indian Origins of the Sūtra
Mahāyāna sūtras first appeared through the medium of revelations after the tradition of written sūtras had developed. These sūtras appeared in various Buddhist traditions and in various locations.5 Mahāyāna sources show doctrinal similarities to the Mahāsāṃghika tradition.6 The Mahāsāṃghika was especially prevalent in southwest India, and a substantial number of Mahāyāna sūtras have indications of a South Indian provenance, with passing references to South Indian music, or, to take the Samādhirāja Sūtra7 as just one example, to a prominent South Indian personage, in this case the ṛṣi Ananta. Similarly, much of the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra takes place in South India, depicting teachers who appear to operate independently of Buddhist communities in the north. Douglas Osto echoes Qobad Afshar in suggesting that the site of Dhanyākara referenced in the Gaṇḍavyūha is in fact Dhānyakaṭaka/Dharaṇikoṭa, an ancient city that existed on the banks of the Kṛṣṇa River in the southern region of Andhra. This place, Afshar and Osto believe, was probably where the Gaṇḍavyūha was first composed.8
In terms of its language, the Sanskrit of the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra has numerous nonclassical Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (BHS) features and vocabulary. This is especially true of the verses, which are less prone to revision to Classical Sanskrit than the prose. It is frequently the case that the verses in a sūtra are older than the prose that accompanies them, or they at least retain the original form of the language in which the sūtra was composed. In the Gaṇḍavyūha, they favor the -u ending for the nominative case, where it would be -a in Sanskrit, -e in the ancient northeastern dialect, and -o in that of the northwest (and its continuation in Pali). The difference between these two kinds of Sanskrit is not evident in the Tibetan or the English translations.
Concerning the relative chronology of the Gaṇḍavyūha, chapter 41 makes a clear reference to the Satyaka Sūtra (formally known as The Teaching of the Miraculous Manifestation of the Range of Methods in the Field of Activity of the Bodhisattvas),9 which describes a Jain master by the name of Satyaka, who advises a king on the polity of rulership10 and is eventually revealed by the Buddha to be a bodhisattva who takes on various forms in order to benefit beings.11 The Satyaka Sūtra briefly presents the single-yāna view that was expounded in The Lotus Sūtra,12 but it goes further by stating that all religious traditions in India occur through the blessing of the Buddha and are therefore included within the single yāna.13 This view of the Satyaka Sūtra is crucial for understanding one of the surprising elements in the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra—some of Sudhana’s teachers do not appear to be following a Buddhist path. There is the ṛṣi Bhīṣmottaranirghoṣa, who is teaching young brahmins; and Jayoṣmāyatana, who is following the non-Buddhist ascetic practice of “the five heats” (sitting amid four fires under the noonday sun); and there is even Mahādeva, also known as Śiva. Therefore, in terms of the succession of sūtras, it would appear that the Gaṇḍavyūha postdates both The Lotus Sūtra (though not necessarily its later chapters) and the Satyaka Sūtra.
The depiction of the bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara in the Gaṇḍavyūha is surprising in that he is presented as an apparently human guru living on the Potalaka Mountain in South India, with no mention of his association with Amitābha’s pure realm of Sukhāvatī, where earlier sūtras locate him. The Potalaka Mountain was an important place of pilgrimage for both the Buddhists and Śaivites of South India, as the abode of both Śiva, who was known as Lokeśvara (Lord of the World), and Avalokiteśvara. This earthly abode of Avalokiteśvara, in Tibet known as the Potala Mountain, would become prominent in Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, as evidenced by the Potala Palace in Lhasa and Mount Putuo Island in China.
The Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra first existed in India as an independent sūtra and still exists as an independent sūtra in Sanskrit manuscripts. The successive Chinese translations reveal a gradual growth in the contents of the sūtra, with the addition of more teachers in the Indian version before its eventual translation into Tibetan. Even so, the number of kalyāṇamitras met by Sudhana is still smaller than the number that Maitreya, toward the end of the sūtra, proclaims that Sudhana has met on his journeys—110.
There was an Indian version longer than the one that was translated into Tibetan, though no Sanskrit manuscript of this version has survived. It is known only from the version sent to China by the king of Orissa, who gave a copy to the Chinese emperor in 795.14 This version was translated by the Kashmiri monk Prajñā in 798, two or three decades before the Tibetan translation was made. The Chinese translations also indicate that the Gaṇḍavyūha had a different title in the seventh century, which can be reconstructed from the Chinese 入法界品 (Ru fa jie pin) as Dharmadhātupraveśana (Entry into the Realm of the Dharma).
Earlier versions concluded with the Maitreya chapter. The Mañjuśrī and Samantabhadra chapters were added subsequently, and finally the sixty-two-verse “Prayer for Completely Good Conduct,” which has continued to exist as an independent text, was added as the sūtra’s conclusion. This prayer was translated into Chinese in a forty-four-verse version by Buddhabhadra in the early fifth century. Amoghavajra’s (705–74) eighth-century Chinese translation of the prayer has sixty-two verses because of the addition of fifteen verses on Amitābha. This longer version appeared as the conclusion of the Buddhāvataṃsaka in the translation into Chinese made in 798 and in the early ninth-century translation into Tibetan. “The Prayer for Completely Good Conduct,” particularly its first twelve verses, is regularly recited in Tibetan Buddhism, and it also exists independently in the Kangyur with an additional concluding verse.15
There are no surviving Sanskrit manuscripts of the Gaṇḍavyūha from the first millennium, but there is a complete Sanskrit text that dates to 1166 ᴄᴇ, three hundred years later than the Tibetan translation. It consists of 289 palm-leaf pages and was sent from Nepal to the Royal Asiatic Society in London by Brian Houghton Hodgson (1800–1894) in the early nineteenth century. Cataloged as Hodgson 2 (A), this is the earliest extant Sanskrit manuscript of the Gaṇḍavyūha.16 The Sanskrit Buddhist tradition has continued in Nepal, where the Gaṇḍavyūha remains one of the nine central works of Newar Buddhism.17