Website of the Arya Sanghata Sutra


Imagining the World of the Sanghata

In an effort to enrich our experience of the Sanghata, this and other upcoming pages will be devoted to providing images of scenes from the sutra, as well as other audio and visual material to enhance our connection with the physical world of the Sanghata. To begin with, we offer a page on the kalavinka sparrow and a page offering images of flowers that appear in the Sanghata (The translator is in India now, collecting photos!) In addition, read about the origin of Lake Anavatapta and the Ganges and a full description of Vultures' Peak. But Sanghata community members are more than welcome to contribute now to this effort to imagine the Sanghata! Suggestions for other pages are most welcome. Just contact us with ideas and images.

In general, when we read the sutra as a printed text, the Sanghata may appear to us mainly as letters on a page. For the many people whose main encounter with the Sanghata is through reciting the text, the experience of the sutra may  largely seem to be in the form of sound. Yet as  members of the Sanghata Sutra Discussion Forum have observed, the sutra offers a richly visual experience as well.

In fact, at moments, the Sanghata can seem positively cinematic, and increasingly so as the sutra progresses. When the Blessed One smiles, light rays emanate from the face of the Blessed One, spread out and illuminate the hell realms and the celestial palaces. Winds sweep through Rajagriha and carry off all the garbage and dust from the city. Celestial sandalwood powder rains down on the world but hovers in the air above the Blessed One's crown.

One might even say that whereas the first half of the sutra is largely concerned with the effects on people when they hear the Sanghata, the second half has a special interest in what people see.

Historically, not only was the narrator of the Sanghata interested in giving us descriptions of what was happening visually, those who copied the sutra over the centuries were also deeply interested in enhancing the books' visual component. Deborah Klimburg-Salter, a European art historian, has pointed out that the very earliest use of calligraphic writing styles in Indian scripts occured in Sanskrit manuscripts of the Sanghata, and the small drawings that appear on some Sanghata manuscripts are among the first examples in India.* For that reason, she suggests that the Sanghata itself may have somehow inspired some of the first instances of book illumination in India.

To participate in this centuries-old tradition of helping others connect visually to the Sanghata, we would like to make an appeal to members of the Sanghata community to contribute their own drawings, paintings, sketches or other visual representations of the world of the Sanghata. To talk about your ideas, or for details on how to share your artwork, please contact us.
 



 

* Klimburg-Salter, Deborah (1990). “The Gilgit Manuscript Covers and the Cult of the Book” in South Asian Archaeology, 1987: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of the Association of South Asian Archaeologists in Western Europe. M. Taddei, ed. Rome: Istituto italiano per il Medio de Estremo Oriente: 815-30.

Klimburg-Salter, Deborah (1991). “Notes on Two Gilgit Manuscript Cover-Paintings” in The Art of Ajanta: New Perspectives. R. Parimoo, Deepak Kannal, Shivaji Panikkar, Jayaram Poduval and Indramohan Sharma, eds. New Delhi: Books and Books: 521-36. 

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