Charyapada

The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism that evolved in present day Odisha.

It was written in between the 8th and 12th centuries in a language having affinity to present day eastern Indian languages of mostly Odia and Bengali. A palm-leaf manuscript of the Charyapada was rediscovered in the early 20th century by Haraprasad Shastri at the Nepal Royal Court Library. The Charyapada was also preserved in the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

As songs of realization, the Charyapada were intended to be sung. These songs of realisation were spontaneously composed verses that expressed a practitioner's experience of the enlightened state. Miranda Shaw describes how 'songs of realization were an element of the ritual gathering of practitioners in a ganachakra:

The feast culminates in the performance of tantric dances and music, that must never be disclosed to outsiders. The revellers may also improvise "songs of realization" (caryagiti) to express their heightened clarity and blissful raptures in spontaneous verse.

The credit of discovering Charyapad goes to Haraprasad Shastri,a 19th century sanskrit scholar and historian of Bengali literature who during his third visit to Nepal in 1907 chanced upon 47 verses at the Royal library of the Nepalese kings. Written in a language, often referred to as Sandhya Bhasa or Twilight Language, a semantic predecessor of today's Bengali, the collection which are essentially Buddhist mystical songs came to be called Charyapada' and also Chayagiti by some. Haraprasad Shastri at that time was a librarian of Asiatic Society, Calcutta and was engaged in a self-assigned mission to trace and track ancient Bengali Manuscripts. His first and second trip to Nepal in 1897 and 1898 partly met with success as he could only collect a good number of folklore written in Pali and Sanskrit. However after he discovered the treasure manuscripts in 1907, all written on trimmed palm leaves having the size of 12.8x0.9 inches, Shastri published this collections in a single volume in 1916. According to a section of historians the original numbers of verses, in all probability, were not less than 51 that were lost due to absence of proper preservation. (approx.).

The original palm-leaf manuscript of the Charyapada, or Caryācaryāviniścaya, spreading 47 padas (verses) along with a Sanskrit commentary was edited by Shastri and published from Bangiya Sahitya Parishad as a part of his Hajar Bacharer Purano Bangala Bhasay Bauddhagan O Doha (Thousands years of The Buddhist Songs and Couplets in Bengali Language) in 1916 under the name of Charyacharyavinishchayah. This manuscript is presently preserved at the National Archives of Nepal. Later Prabodhchandra Bagchi published a manuscript of a Tibetan translation containing 50 verses.

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