གླང་པའ་རྩལ་ཞས་བྱ་བ་ཐག་པ་ཆན་པའ་མད intro.17

intro.17

Turning now to the (Buddhist Hybrid) Sanskrit titles, we can see that kakṣyā is derived from the Vedic kakṣa, which indeed has the meaning of “armpit.” Based on a reading in the Sanskrit manuscript and considering the primitive form Hastikakṣa, Liu and Chen reconstruct the sūtra’s title in its Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit form as *Hastikaccha, which later was sanskritized into Hastikakṣya. Liu and Chen note the following: “We have the contemporaneous appearance of three titles: Yuxiang (*Hastyupama) and Wuxiwang (*Nāstikāṅkṣa, *Akāṅkṣa or *Asakāṅkṣa) in Taishō 813 and, according to the Catalogue, a Xiangbu (*Hastigati or *Hastivikrama). Then after more than a century, we have Xiangye (Hastikakṣa or Hastikaccha in its BHS form, Hastikakṣya in its developed Skt. form) in Taishō 814, with its Sanskrit correspondence, Hastikaccha, in the Sanskrit fragment and Hastikakṣya in the Tibetan translation. Finally, the word Hastikakṣya is transmitted into glang po’i rtsal and glang po’i rtsal lta bu (*Hasti­kakṣyopama) in Tibetan.”¹⁶ They then conclude that “with the exception of Wuxiwang, all the others can possibly be affiliated with a Sanskritization process from Middle Indic via Gāndhārī or BHS.”¹⁷ As a nominal compound, Hastikakṣya is clearly a genitive tatpuruṣa or dependent determinative compound. According to Monier-Williams’s Sanskrit dictionary, the compound hastikakṣya may have the meaning of “lion” or “tiger.”¹⁸ Next, let us look at the individual members of the compound: hasti and kakṣya. Hasti stands in the compound for hastin, which can clearly be established as meaning “elephant.” The second member, kakṣya, however, has a whole range of possible meanings. Monier-Williams notes them as “abiding in shrubs or dry grass,” “well fed,” “girth (of an animal),” “the enclosure of an edifice,” “similarity,” and “effort, exertion.” The Tibetan translation of this member (rtsal) carries similar meanings, but tends more toward meanings such as “skill,” “dexterity,” “potency,” “capacity,” “potential,” or “power.”