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Some Notes on the Bauddha Sahajayāni Siddha-Natha Tradition
H. C. Bhayani
1. Saraha's मातृका - प्रथमाक्षर - दोहक in Apabhramsa
Mātṛkā or Kakka (The Alphabet) has been a favourite type or genre in early Indian regional literatures. In 1997 we edited and published its earliest known instance so far, viz. Barahakkhara-kakka of Mahacandra Muni. A paper mostly based on its Introduction was read at the Eighth International Conference on Early Indian Regional Literatures, held at Venice in 1996. Therein we had drawn attention to the fact that in the biography of Gautama Buddha given in the Lalitavistara it is stated that when the teacher began teaching the Alphabet to the boy Gautama, he immediately recited verses in which the first words began with the letters of the Alphabet in their traditional sequence.
Now the Barahakkhara-kakka was in post-Apabhraṁśa language and although we had listed the Mātṛkā poems known till now in Gujarati, Rajasthani, Hindi etc. no instance of an Apabhraṁśa Kakka was known. Somehow we missed one such Apabhramsa poem, that preceded Mahācandra's poem by several centuries and that was published as far back as 1957! Only quite recently I came to know about a Buddhist Sahajayāni Siddha's poem belonging to this genre. In his Dohākośa Rahul Samkrityayan has published (pp.129139), on the basis of the Tibetan Tanjur (Stan'gyur), that is an old collection of Tibetan translations of Indian texts, the
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