[INDOLOGY] Yamanaka Jyotiṣa Siddhānta?

Fri Dec 12 21:23:56 UTC 2025

Dear David,

Drang srong rgyal ba dam pa is a very common way of referring to the Jina in Tibetan as a very quick etext search shows:
https://library.bdrc.io/osearch/search?q=drang%20srong%20rgyal%20ba%20dam%20pa&etext_search%5B0%5D=true&page=2

dam pa can represent sat-, as well as -uttama and -agra. In any case, I don't see any reason to take it as anything besides a reference to the founder of Jainism. And as I suggested earlier, the Tibetans may have picked up an explanation of yamanaka from yamana, a restraint, thus meaning an ascetic, one who practices restraint. Rather than coining a new term to accommodate this, gcer bu pa, "gymnosophist," may have been adopted as a paraphrase. There are other examples of this sort of preference for a well-known term over a less favored or obscure synonym. Thus we sometimes see brgya byin for Indra, even though the lexically exact translation would be dbang po and brgya byin should be reserved for Śakra.

So, all in all, I would guess that in some milieux yavana as "GreeK" was no longer understood and so was rationalized as yamana and this was explained to the Tibetans in such a way that they associated it with naked Jain anchorites .... A nice game of Chinese whispers...

best,
Matthew

Matthew T. Kapstein
Professor emeritus
Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, PSL Research University, Paris

Associate
The University of Chicago Divinity School

Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

https://ephe.academia.edu/MatthewKapstein

https://vajrabookshop.com/product/the-life-and-work-of-auleshi/

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501716218/tibetan-manuscripts-and-early-printed-books-volume-i/#bookTabs=1

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501771255/tibetan-manuscripts-and-early-printed-books-volume-ii/#bookTabs=1

https://brill.com/edcollbook/title/60949

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On Friday, December 12th, 2025 at 9:18 PM, David and Nancy Reigle via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:

> Thank you, Bill, for your very helpful reply. The fact that no Yamana is found in the traditional list of the names of the eighteen jyotiṣa sages, occurring in the Nāradasaṃhitā, is significant. The fact that the last chapter of the Yavanajātaka could count as a siddhānta because of its astronomical content is equally significant. Thank you also to Matthew Kapstein for replying off-list, agreeing that Yamanaka is most likely just a variant for Yavanaka. This does make the most sense. Even so, before concluding that this is most likely the case, I would like to exhaust all other possibilities.
>
> The oldest available dated manuscript of the Vimalaprabhā, from 1112 CE, was scribed less than a hundred years after the Vimalaprabhā appeared in India. All known manuscripts have yamanaka, and in two different places (1.26 and 1.86). The Tibetan translations go back even further. The first one to be made was by Gyi jo, working with the Indian teacher Bhadrabodhi. From what we can gather from the lineage lists, Bhadrabodhi was one of the very first disciples of the person who wrote the Vimalaprabhā. The Shong ston and Jonang Tibetan translations are revisions of the initial one made by 'Bro lotsawa, working with the Indian teacher Somanātha. Somanātha, too, was in the first generation of disciples of the originator of the Vimalaprabhā in India. The Sanskrit manuscripts, then, would indicate that if Yamanaka is a corruption of Yavanaka, the variant form Yamanaka was in vogue in eleventh century India; and the Tibetan translations would indicate that Yamanaka was understood to mean a "naked one" rather than a Greek or foreigner.
>
> There is one more possible piece of evidence, which I did not cite earlier, because later Tibetan sources are indeed suspect. While Tibetan gcer bu pa for yamanaka likely derives from the very early Indian teachers Bhadrabodhi and Somanātha, we do not know the source for annotations by Jonang Phyogs las rNam rgyal, written in Tibet about three centuries after the Vimalaprabhā appeared in India. The Tibetan teacher Bu ston does not have any annotations on these names, but Phyogs las rNam rgyal does. The Sanskrit at 1.26 from the Sarnath edition of the Vimalaprabhāṭīkā, vol. 1, 1986, p. 77, is:
>
> siddhāntānāṃ vināśa iti | siddhāntaṃ(nto) brahma2 sauraṃ yama(va)nakaṃ romakamiti3, . . .
>
> The footnote thereon is:
>
> 2-3. atra bhoṭānuvāde catvāraḥ siddhāntāḥ 'brahmadevavādinaḥ, sūryadevavādinaḥ, acelakāḥ (śaivāḥ), rāhudevavādinaḥ' iti likhitam—gCer Bu Pa Daṅ sGra Can |
>
> We note that, although the Sarnath editors suggested yavanaka for yamanaka by the "(va)" they added for "ma" in the name, yet in their footnote they suggested śaivāḥ for the naked ones, which they retranslated from Tibetan as acelakāḥ. As with the Jaina, I do not know of a Śaiva jyotiṣa siddhānta.
>
> The Jonang translation of this line from Vimalaprabhā 1.26, with the annotations in parentheses by Phyogs las rNam rgyal (Jonang Publication Series, vol. 18, p. 199), is:
>
> grub pa'i mtha' rnams rnam par nyams pa zhes pa ni (tshangs pa la ltar 'dzin pa'i) tshangs pa ba dang (nyi ma la ltar 'dzin pa'i) nyi ma pa dang (drang srong rgyal ba dam pa la ltar 'dzin pa'i) gcer bu pa dang (dbang phyug la ltar 'dzin pa'i) skra can gyi (byed rtsis kyi) grub pa'i mtha' ste . . .
>
> We see that for brahma and saura, he annotates tshangs pa and nyi ma, respectively, the same as the Tibetan translations in the text of the Vimalaprabhā. For yamanaka, gcer bu pa, he annotates drang srong rgyal ba dam pa. Of these words, drang srong normally translates ṛṣi, rgyal ba normally translates jina, and dam pa can translate vara or parama, etc. I cite this annotation in case something like ṛṣi-jina-vara may ring a bell as the epithet of any jyotiṣa teacher.
>
> Best regards,
>
> David Reigle
>
> Colorado, U.S.A.
>
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2025 at 4:15 AM Bill Mak <bill.m.mak at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi David,
>>
>> There are various lists of authors of jyotiḥśāstra in the jyotiṣa literature. Pingree in his Jyotiḥśāstra (1981) mentioned in his intoduction names of the eighteen sages according to “medieval muhūrta treatises,” which he did not identify. Among them are Brahm(ācarya), Romaśa [sic], Yavana, Sūrya, etc. Weber was among the first to identify these eighteen sages in the Nāradasaṃhitā in his Verzeichniss der Sanskrit-Handschriften der Königlichen Bibliothek zu Berlin (1853), and noticed the different kinds of authors in possibly two layers, earlier ones like Garga and Parāśara, and later ones Yavana, Romaka, etc with Hellenistic elements.
>>
>> Since the larger subsets usually include the smaller ones, an unattested Yamanaka-siddhānta in a small set of four siddhānta-s does sound suspicious. The Tibetan translation doesn’t mean much unless one could identify a text with such name, or find an explanation of the name, which does look a corruption of Yavana(jāta)ka. Although no yavana siddhānta survived, the last chapter of the Yavanajātaka would count as one because of its astronomical content, which is indeed comprable to Romakasiddhānta, and to some extent, Brahmasiddhānta and Sūryasiddhānta in Varāhamihira’s Pañcasiddhānta in terms of astronomical concepts. All these four texts were in circulation in India.
>>
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Bill
>>
>> --
>> Bill M. Mak, PhD
>>
>> Professor of History of Science
>>
>> University of Science and Technology of China
>> Room A304, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, East Campus,
>> University of Science and Technology of China,
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>>
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>>
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>>
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>>
>>> On 12 Dec 2025, at 04:01, David and Nancy Reigle via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
>>>
>>> When the Kālacakra-tantra introduces its own astronomical calculations in chapter 1, verse 26, the Vimalaprabhā commentary thereon refers to four existing siddhāntas:1. Brahma; 2. Saura; 3. Yamanaka; and 4. Romaka. The Vimalaprabhā again names these same four at 1.86, only saying Sūrya instead of Saura. Three of these siddhāntas are of course well known: Brahma, Saura/Sūrya, and Romaka. I have not been able to determine what the Yamanaka siddhānta is.
>>>
>>> The editors of the Vimalaprabhā suggest emending Yamanaka to Yavanaka, a reasonable assumption. However, the two very old palm-leaf manuscripts of the Vimalaprabhā confirm the spelling yamanaka. Moreover, the Tibetan translations of yamanaka do not support yavanaka. The Shong ston and Jonang Tibetan translations take yamanaka as gcer bu pa, "naked ones." Elsewhere in the Kālacakra-tantra, at 3.169 and 4.217, Tibetan gcer bu translates Sanskrit nagna, confirming the meaning, "naked." The early Gyi jo Tibetan translation also takes yamanaka as gcer bu. This may suggest a Jaina jyotiṣa siddhānta.
>>>
>>> However, I do not know of a Jaina jyotiṣa siddhānta, in the full sense of a jyotiṣa siddhānta; meaning giving the movements of the planets, and not just the movements of the sun and moon, as does the Sūryaprajñapti and works following it such as the Jyotiṣkaraṇḍakam. I have considered the Bhadrabāhu-saṃhitā, but at least in the form we have it, this text seems to be ruled out.
>>>
>>> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>>
>>> David Reigle
>>> Colorado, U.S.A.
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