113bC4l

228 ⁄ siddhas and the religious landscape
tribals in India. Moreover, the verse is a relatively transparent allegory, in
which the %abara stands for the esoteric yogin, engaging in promiscuous intimacy
with emptiness. Yet the commentator Munidatta cannot leave it there,
for his tortuous explanation runs the spectrum from excessive to obsessive, interpreting
each item as if it must denote some aspect of the yogic process. The
point remains, however, that the %abara became a cipher of both tribal peoples
and the attainment of ultimate reality. Similar values are evident in one of
Kanhapa’s Apabhram$a dohas.
A sage at the summit of the best of mountains, the %abara makes his home.
As his position is inviolable by even the “five-faced” [lion], the aspiration
(to obtain the summit) of the best of elephants is very distant. 211
The surviving anonymous Sanskrit commentary is exceedingly blunt: the %abara
is Vajradhara himself on the top of Mount Meru, and the five-faced (which can
be either a lion or %iva) cannot begin to approach him. 212 Thus the %abara becomes
an icon for the Buddhist esoteric divinity Samvara and assumes the position
of a metaphor for the myth of Mahe$vara’s humiliation and death.
Although Munidatta’s commentary views two Caryagiti verses (nos. 28 and
50) as the composition of one of the %abarapadas, there is little evidence for the
ascription beyond the content. However, at least three and perhaps more of the
Buddhist siddhas are said to have appropriated this name (or similar designations)
for themselves; their hagiographies are found in disparate sources. Perhaps
the earliest use of this appellation is for the late tenth-/early eleventh-century
teacher of the siddha Maitripada, and the Sanskrit Sham Sher manuscript
published by both Lévi and Tucci indicates that, after Maitripada’s change of
identity into Advayavajra, he studied with a %abare$vara in the south. 213 It is
open to question whether this is the personality introduced in Abhayadatta$ri’s
Lives of the Eighty-four Siddhas, who is referred to as %abaripa and for whom no
connection to Maitripada is imputed, since neither the latter scholar’s name nor
his nom de plume Advayavajra occurs in Abhayadatta$ri’s work. The literature
also includes mention of a %awari who was of the Brahman caste and who
taught the early eleventh-century Shangpa Kagyüpa founder, Khyungpo
Neljor. 214 There is furthermore a late eleventh-century %abare$vara identified as
both the teacher of Phadampa Sangyé Kamala$ila and the author of an intriguing
and difficult poem on the secret nature of the mind. 215 In addition to these
individuals is a much later %avaripa acting as the esoteric preceptor for Vibhuticandra,
the late twelfth-/mid-thirteenth-century Indian scholar of the Kala-