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Little bits of learning
S. MUTHIAH
As I've often said before, I learn something new everyday, and that's the best part of attending various meetings or going through the responses to this column. Some recent learning was at two meetings of the Madras Book Club. Sun Shuyun spoke of travelling in the footsteps of the 7th Century monk Xuanzang who travelled to India by foot along the Silk Road and then from Kashmir to Calcutta, Calcutta to Kancheepuram, and Kancheepuram to Kashmir via Ajanta and Multan in order to discover the true meaning of Buddhism. Many today have forgotten that Kancheepuram was a major centre of Buddhist learning and that it had over a hundred monasteries and 10,000 Buddhist monks in residence. Here there had lived Dharmapala of noble birth, who had taught Shilabhadra, who had in turn passed on his knowledge of Yogacara to his sishya Xuanzang in China.
Today, I had thought, there was nothing left of the Buddhist connection in Kanchi. But when I raised the question during one of Sun Shuyun's meetings in Madras, I was told by a couple of scholars in the audience that there are five Buddhist images in and around the Kamakshi Temple. One of them, a 7-ft. tall image of Buddha is in the very first prakara — but with its hands broken. Two other statues are in the second prakara, both seated and with hands in the lap. The head of one is, however, missing. Two other seated Buddhas are to be found in the Kurukkilamarnta Amman Temple on the way to Vishnu Kancheepuram. There are also Buddha images in the Ekambareswara Temple, my informants told me, citing the work of C. Meenakshi who has made a study of what's left of its relics in Kanchi after the teaching of Shankara in the 8th Century led to the decline of Buddhism there. A China connection with Kancheepuram that Sun Shuyun recalls is that the Sanskrit for `silk', Kanchi's main commercial item, is Chinamshuka! A rather similar connection with India, I learnt from her, came from the times when China imported balls of unrefined sugar from India. The brown colour and the hardness put off the emperor, who ordered his scientists to make the sweetener white. Their work resulted in refined sugar — which India then imported! As cheeni!!
More learning was at the release of C. P. Belliappa's charming little book, "Tale of a Tiger's Tail & Other Yarns from Coorg". Call the people of Coorg a.k.a. Kodagu as Coorgs or Kodavas — never as what most of us, including your columnist, do: Coorgi — was the first lesson. The Coorgs — I'm already getting into the swing of things — are well-known for their hockey prowess with players like M. M. Somaiyya, M. P. Ganesh, B. P. Govinda, Len Aiyappa and about 40 others playing for India. As much to showcase Coorg's hockey as to bring the clans together — much like those other highlanders, the Scots, who organise the Highland Games at an annual gathering of the clans — hockey enthusiast Pandanda Kuttappa in 1997 organised a hockey tournament for the Coorg clans — the families into which the 90,000 or so Coorgs are divided. That year, 54 families contested. By the 2003 competition, 235 families were competing in the annual April festival. But what my learning was that there are 700-plus Coorg families. The aim now is to get all of them to participate in what will be a mega-mega festival.
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