About the Text

Long before there was a valley, there was a lake. The Swayambhu Purana opens on that water, and on a flame that rose out of it by itself (swayambhu, self-arisen) on a jewelled lotus in the middle of the lake that filled what is now Kathmandu. The text follows that light through the ages: how the bodhisattva Mañjuśrī cut the hills open with his sword and let the water out, how the drained valley was settled and named, how a stone was finally laid over the flame to protect it, and how the stupa that stands on the hill today came to be built above it.

It is told as a set of stories inside stories. A bodhisattva asks a teacher a question; the teacher answers by recalling what Emperor Aśoka once asked his teacher; and that answer reaches back further still, to the Buddha himself speaking on the Swayambhu hill about an age so distant that the valley was still under water. The narrators change, but the subject does not.

For Newar Buddhists of the Kathmandu Valley this is the founding account of the land, of the shrines still visited today, and of Buddhism’s arrival in that landscape. It is a sacred history and a geography at once: many of the places it names are places you can still walk to.

This edition gives the original Sanskrit text as it is, translated closely rather than smoothed into paraphrase.

१.१ 1.1

श्रीमता येन सद्धर्मस्त्रैलोके संप्रकाशितः ।
श्रीघनं तं महाबुद्धं वन्देकऽहं शरणाश्रितः ॥ १.१ ॥

śrīmatā yena saddharmastrailoke saṁprakāśitaḥ ।
śrīghanaṁ taṁ mahābuddhaṁ vandeka'haṁ śaraṇāśritaḥ ॥ 1.1 ॥

English

By whom the supreme Dharma was illuminated in the three worlds,
I bow to that glorious, supreme Buddha, who is my refuge and shelter.

नेपाली

जसले तीनै लोकहरूमा परम धर्मलाई प्रकाशित गर्नुभयो,
म त्यो महाबुद्धलाई प्रणाम गर्छु, जो मेरो शरण र आश्रय हुनुहुन्छ।

Purport

The poem opens the way almost every Sanskrit work of this age opens, with a bow. Before telling us anything about Swayambhu, the poet stops to honour the Buddha, called here Śrīghana, 'the Dense Mass of Glory', as the one who lit up the true teaching across heaven, earth and the underworld. Calling the Buddha his shelter is the poet's way of saying that this is not his story, and that he is only carrying it.

Chapter one, verse one, as every verse appears.

The Ten Chapters

1,749 Verses

A Note on the Translation

I began this translation because the Swayambhu Purana is a text that belongs to the Kathmandu Valley, and yet most people who live there have never been able to read it. The Sanskrit is difficult, and the summaries that circulate flatten a strange, layered, patient poem into a few sentences about a lake and a sword.

So I have tried to give the whole thing, as it is, and to give it more than once: the Sanskrit as it stands, a transliteration for those who can sound it out but not read the script, a literal English rendering that resists tidying the text up, a Nepali translation, and a purport for the many places where a verse assumes knowledge a reader today simply does not have.

Errors that remain are mine.

— Sharad Bajracharya

स्वयम्भू पुराण

About the Text

The Ten Chapters

A Note on the Translation