The Sūtra of Eight Luminous of Heaven and Earth: a Buddhist Cosmological Model Revisited

The article discusses a Tibetan-Mongolian cosmological model of Buddhist universe presented in the Oirat translation of one of the most popular Buddhist ritual texts — The Sūtra of Eight Luminous of Heaven and Earth. Materials. The sūtra was translated into Oirat by Ven. Zaya Pandita Namkhaijamts at request of Princess Yum Agas in the 1650s, and is referred by scholars as a Buddhist apocrypha of Chinese origin. Nevertheless, in the literary tradition of Mongolic peoples it was always viewed as the authentic Word of the Buddha (buddhavacana). Results. The analysis of the Oirat manuscript of the sūtra shows that the model of Buddhist universe includes several components. The first one of Indian origin is related to the cosmology of classical Buddhism described in Vasubandhu’s Abhidharmakośa, including the astronomical conception of twenty-eight nakśatra constellations and nine planets, as well as some classes of beings of the Buddhist universe. The second component contains elements of Chinese astrology, such as the astrological diagram of the golden turtle, which encloses animals of the twelve-year cycle, and eight trigrams representing different elements. The last component belongs to original Tibetan mythology and includes a classification of supernatural beings co-existing with humans between heaven and earth — nāgas (Tib. klu), nyen spirits (Tib. gnyan) and spiritual lords of earth (Tib. sa bdag). Indian influence can also be traced in the classification of nāgas, the latter including eight great nāgas known in classical Buddhism, and five castes of nāgas structurally correlated with traditional Indian society. The detailed classification of the spiritual lords of earth presented in the sūtra was later included in the well-known Tibetan astrological work Vaiḍurya dkar po of Desi Sangye Gyatso. This classification represented in the Oirat translation includes some names which are absent in the Tibetan version of the sūtra (for comparative analysis the work examines a version of the sūtra included in the gZungs ’dus collection). This indicates that Ven. Zaya Pandita Namkhaijamts would also use another Tibetan version of the sūtra when making his Oirat translation.

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