page_title: Charyapada
section_title: Poets
hierarchical_section_title: Charyapada / Poets
caption_attribution_description: English: Photoshot of a terracota sketch of poet and Monk Kanhapad who lived around 10th century AD. The only sketch of Kanhapad available. Not replaceable. Available in many books and websites.
context_page_description: The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism from the tantric tradition in Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.
  It was written between the 8th and 12th centuries in an Abahatta that was the ancestor of the Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Sylheti, Odia, Magahi, Maithili, and many other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, and it is said to be the oldest collection of verses written in those languages. A palm-leaf manuscript of the Charyapada was rediscovered in the early 20th century by Haraprasad Shastri at the Nepal Royal Court Library. The Charyapada was also preserved in the Tibetan Buddhist canon.
  As songs of realization, the Charyapada were intended to be sung. These songs of realisation were spontaneously composed verses that expressed a practitioner's experience of the enlightened state. Miranda Shaw describes how songs of realization were an element of the ritual gathering of practitioners in a ganachakra:
  The feast culminates in the performance of tantric dances and music, that must never be disclosed to outsiders.
context_section_description: The manuscript of the Charyapada discovered by Haraprasad Shastri from Nepal consists of 47 padas (verses). The title-page, the colophon, and pages 36, 37, 38, 39, and 66 (containing padas 24, 25, and 48 and their commentary) were missing in this manuscript. The 47 verses of this manuscript were composed by 22 of the Mahasiddhas (750 and 1150 CE), or Siddhacharyas, whose names are mentioned at the beginning of each pada (except the first pada). Some parts of the manuscripts are lost; however, in the Tibetan Buddhist Canon, a translation of 50 padas is found, which includes padas 24, 25, and 48, and the complete pada 23. Pada 25 was written by the Siddhacharya poet Tantripāda, whose work was previously missing. In his commentary on pada 10, Munidatta mentions the name of another Siddhacharya poet, Ladidombipāda, but no pada written by him has been discovered so far.
  The names of the Siddhacharyas in Sanskrit (or its Tibetan language equivalent), and the raga in which the verse was to be sung, are mentioned prior to each pada. The Sanskrit names of the Siddhacharya poets were likely assigned to each pada by the commentator Munidatta. Modern scholars doubt whether these assignments are proper, on the basis of the internal evidences and other literary sources. Controversies also exist among scholars as to the original names of the Siddhacharyas.
  The poets and their works as mentioned in the text are as follows:
caption: A sketch of Siddhacharya poet Kanhapada
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "75", "Image YResolution": "75", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:03:12 13:08:25", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "8237", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "220", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "199"}