THE SAMPUTA TANTRA: EDITION AND TRANSLATION CHAPTERS I-IV George Robert Elder Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Philosophy Columbia University 1978ABSTRACT THE SAMPUTA TANTRA: EDITION AND TRANSLATION CHAPTERS I-IV George Robert Elder This dissertation is primarily editorial in charac- tert it contains as its central contribution a Sanskrit edition of the first four chapters of an important ancient Indian Buddhist text, the Samputodbhavasarvatantranidna~ nanBkalpar®ja, a title abbreviated as Samputa Tantra. ‘he portion edited represents an integral unit as the first of ten parts in the entire text of forty chapters, As a tan- tric Mahayana scripture, the Samputa is of the Anuttarayoga class, of the Mother type, and is a Shared Explanatory Tan- tra, Specifically, this classification places our text within the literary cycles of the two Root or milla Tantras the Cakrasamvara and the Hevaira. The literary location is significant in part because the Hevajra Tantra has already been edited and translated into a Western language; our work, then, advances Buddhist scholarship precisely at that point, The materials for editing consisted of three San- skrit Mss. of late date and the much earlier Tibetan trans- lation of the Tantra found in the Canon as Yah dag par sbyor ba Zes bya ba'i rgyud chen po. In addition, use was made of a Tibetan translation of an early commentary on thework by Siiravajra -- his RatnamBl4 or Rin chen vhren ba. The contents of the dissertation are as follows: (1) historical considerations providing an overview of the literary history of the Buddhist Tantras and of the Samputa Zantra in particular, (2) philological considerations de~ scribing the nature of the materials for editing, the char- acter of corruption, and the special problems involved in the editing of very corrupt Sanskrit Mss., (3) the Sanskrit edition with an apparatus fully discussed, (4) the Tibetan translation, corrected with an apparatus, and (5) an English translation without annotation. As for the contents of the text, the first chapter ovens with the standard Anuttarayoga niddna sentence. While certain terms within this sentence are explained immediately by the Bhazavat, a remarkably full tantric explanation of each term and of each syllable is given in the fourth chap- ter. Following a voidness contemplation, the creation of the body-mandala is described along with production of the bodhicitta element and manipulation of the "winds" among the nine orifices. In a closing section parallel to lines in the Hevajra Tantra, the Passion deities are presented, Chap- ter two teaches the thirty-seven Dharmas Accessory to En- lightenment in a standard non-tantric Mah@yana Buddhist fashion but concludes with the tantric teaching of the Joys, emphasis that Buddhahood is located in the "body," and an enumeration of the thirty-two channels within that "body," a list essentially identical with that found in the Hevajra.