Permission to Visit the Birthplace of Buddha

NEPAL.

Manuscript document on paper, mounted onto an attractive hanging scroll, entitled in manuscript at beginning on outside: ネパール王族 チャンドラシタランヂ氏 招待状 [“Invitation from (?) [or] to (?) Chandra shitaranji (?) of the Nepalese royal family”].

One sheet (275 x 205 mm.), carefully mounted. [Nepal]: Vikrama Samvat 1982, Falgun 10 (equivalent to 21 February 1926).

A rare government document showing growing international scholarly and religious interest during the early 20th century in the Kapilavastu (or Lumbini) archeological site, the birthplace of Buddha, located along present-day Nepal’s western boundary with India.

This is a purji (notice) from Palhi-Majhkhand goswara (provincial office) to Sitaram Kurmi, a jimidar (a local official) of mauja (an administrative division composed of several villages) Khungai in tappa (an administrative division composed of several mauja) Rupandehi. The government order instructs a local official to facilitate the visit of a certain Mr. Yemitar (Yamitaro? Yamataro?) from Japan, accompanied by three others, who were travelling from the Indian territories into the Nepal frontier. The inscription on the outside of the scroll almost certainly refers to Chandra Shumsher, then Prime Minister of Nepal (a hereditary executive position similar to the shogunate in Japan). The bearer of this document appears to have treated it as a proof of invitation, even though technically the document is an order from one Nepali government department to another. Since it bears the seal of the issuing government department, this document seems to be an authorized copy of the original document, used as proof and corroboration.

Following the discovery of the 3rd-century BCE Ashokan inscriptions by Anton Führer and Rudra Shumsher in 1896, the Kapilavastu ruins had emerged as an important site for both pilgrimage and Buddhological research. The best-known Japanese scholar to visit this location was Kawaguchi Ekai, who was followed by Ōtani Kōzui, Shimizu Mokuji, Inoue Kōen, and Honda Eryū in the early years of the 20th century. Kawaguchi maintained close contact with Nepal’s then Prime Minister, Chandra Shumsher Rana, who, in fact, acceded to the former’s demand that ritual animal sacrifices at a Hindu temple near the site be stopped.

While the identity of the leader of this particular 1926 expedition, spelled “Yemitar” according to Nepali orthography, is not clear from the document, it does offer a ground-level view of how the Nepali state, then ruled by the Rana military oligarchy, organized visits of international scholars and pilgrims. Such trips demanded not only diplomatic consensus between the British colonial state and Nepal’s famously insular government but also coordination among numerous provincial officials. We learn from the order that its intended recipient, a local revenue officer named Sitaram Kurmi, had handled such visitors on several previous occasions. Interestingly, the document uses the Sanskrit word darśan, meaning auspicious vision of a deity in Indic religions, to describe the aim of the Japanese team’s visit.

Aided by the expansion of the Indian railway close to the Nepal frontier, and growing interest in the Kapilavastu site, a pilgrimage economy of sorts appears to have developed in the first decades of the 20th century. In addition to giving us a bureaucratic snapshot of this world, this document’s value lies also in its rarity, since similar items are extant only in Nepal’s guarded diplomatic archives, inaccessible to non-citizens.

Fine condition.

❧ Buddhist India: An Illustrated Buddhist Quarterly and Buddhist Gazette, Vol. 1 (Jan 1927), pp. 1-80. Kai Weise, The Sacred Garden of Lumbini: Perceptions of Buddha’s Birthplace (Paris: UNESCO, 2013). Richard M. Jaffe, Seeking Śākyamuni: South Asia in the Formation of Modern Japanese Buddhism (Chicago: 2019).

Price: $3,500.00

Item ID: 11172