The Indian Buddhist Iconography, Mainly Based on the Sadhanamala and Other Cognate Tantric Texts of Rituals c9.s2.7

c9.s2.7

The Sādhana or the process prescribed for attaining the different Siddhis forms the bulk of the Tāntric literature of both the Buddhists and the Hindus. Thousands of Sādhanas were written, both in prose and in verse, in Sanskrit and thousands were translated into Tibetan and are now preserved in the pages of the Tibetan Tangyur. Besides, every Tāntric manuscript, cart loads of which are even to-day to be found in public and private collections, describes the Sādhanas through which Siddhis are possible of attainment. The Buddhists had a special literature called the Sādhanas and they were always written in Sanskrit by many of the well known Tāntric authors and the Mahāsiddhas. This literature is now almost lost in original Sanskrit, but fortunately for us some collections of Sādhanas are still extant. These collections were given the names of Sādhanamālā and Sādhanasamuccaya, and a critical edition of all available Sādhanas in these two collections is already published in two volumes in the Gaekwad’s Oriental Series as Nos. 26 and 41. The publication of these Sādhanas has revealed a number of hitherto unknown and important facts. The Sādhanas revealed that the Buddhists were not lagging behind any other religion in India in the matter of psychic culture as advocated in the Tantras. Secondly, as these Sādhanas contain the description of a large number of Buddhist deities it becomes possible to differentiate them from the deities of the Hindu and Jain faiths, and to determine the purpose for which they were made and what they stood for.