page_title: Saraha
section_title: Doha, Caryagiti, and Vajragiti
hierarchical_section_title: Saraha / Doha, Caryagiti, and Vajragiti
context_page_description: Saraha, Sarahapa, Sarahapāda, or in the Tibetan language The Arrow Shooter, was known as the first sahajiya and one of the Mahasiddhas. The name Saraha means "the one who has shot the arrow.". According to one, scholar, "This is an explicit reference to an incident in many versions of his biography when he studied with a dakini disguised as a low-caste arrow smith. Metaphorically, it refers to one who has shot the arrow of non duality into the heart of duality."
  Saraha is considered to be one of the founders of Buddhist Vajrayana, and particularly of the Mahamudra tradition.
  Saraha was originally known as Rāhula or Rāhulbhadra and was born in Roli, a region of the city-state of Rajni in eastern India, into a Shakya family and studied at the Buddhist monastic university Nalanda. According to Sankrityayan and Dvijram Yadav, Saraha was born in Raggyee village of ancient Bhagalpur, the then Capital of Anga Desh.
context_section_description: In the oral and literary traditions of South Asia, there are at least three classifications for the tantric compositions and teachings of Saraha: doha (poetic couplets), caryagiti (performance songs), and vajragiti (adamantine songs, which are classified according to the content, not the form).
  As one scholar writes:
  Saraha's transmission does not consist merely in his presence--past and present--but also in the corpus of his work. As befits a mahasiddha, his method of teaching was spontaneous, inspired, and challenging. Saraha is said to have uttered collections of esoteric verses designed to directly point to the nature of mind and reality. Despite the size of the corpus (there are twenty-four works attributed to him in the Tengyur alone, the only ones that have received any serious attention to date are his Doha Trilogy (Doha score sum; grub snying), a trilogy of songs that have eclipsed everything else attributed to the master Saraha. His King and People dohas have been translated numerous times into English and into other Western languages and have been the subject of major studies. Saraha's Adamantine Songs, however, have scarcely been touched.
  Doha are a form of couplet poetry and a portion of Saraha's doha are compiled in Dohakośa, the 'Treasury of Rhyming Couplets'. Pada (verses) 22, 32, 38 and 39 of Caryagītikośa (or Charyapada) are assigned to him. The script used in the doha shows close resemblance with the present day Kaithi, Ang lipi, Assamese, Bangla and Odiya scripts which imply that Sarahapa has compiled his literature in the earlier language which has similarity with both Odiya language and Angika language.
  In the opinion of Rahul Sankrityayan, Sarahapāda was the earliest Siddha or Siddhācārya and the first poet of  Oriya, Angika and Hindi literature . According to him, Sarahapāda was a student of Haribhadra, who was in turn a disciple of Śāntarakṣita, the noted Buddhist scholar who traveled to Tibet. As Śāntarakṣita is known to have lived in the mid-8th century from Tibetan historical sources and Haribhadra was a contemporary of Pāla king Dharmapala (770 – 815 CE), Sarahapāda must have lived in the late 8th century or early 9th century CE. From the colophon of a manuscript of Saraha's Dohakośa, copied in Nepali Samvat 221 (1101 CE) and found from Royal Durbar Library in Nepal (most probably the earliest manuscript of Dohakośa), by Pt. Haraprasad Shastri in 1907, we  know that many doha-s of Saraha were extant by that time. Thanks to the efforts of a scholar named Divakar Chanda, some of them have been preserved., and were printed and published first in the modern Bangla font by the Bongiyo Shahityo Porishawd in 1916 along with the Dohakosh of Sarahapa in Bangla font, the Sanskrit notes of the dohas of Sarahapa also in the Bangla font, the Dakarnab adage-poems, the dohas of Kanhapa or Krishnacharyapa or Kanifnath and the Mekhla notes. The mouthpiece was by Haraprasad Shastri who had found the manuscript at the Royal Durbar Library of the Nepal kingdom in 1907.    
  The following song and poem of Saraha are from the original Apabhramsa or Aangi or Modern Angika (the language Saraha most often wrote in) is no longer extant but we have the Tibetan translation:
  Tibetan in Wylie transcription:
  la la nam mkha'i khams la rtog par snang
  gzhan yang stong nyid ldan par byed pa de
  phal cher mi mthun phyogs la zhugs pa yin
  English translation
  Some think it's
  in the realm of space,
  others connect it
  with emptiness:
  mostly, they dwell
  in contradiction.
  Here is one scholarly interpretation of the above verses:
  "space: In Indian thought, especially Buddhist, a common metaphor for the objective nature of reality as empty or unlimited, and the subjective quality of the mind that experiences that emptiness...Space also is one of the five elements recognized in most Indian cosmologies, along with earth, water, fire, and air. In certain contexts... "sky" is a more appropriate translation for the Apabhramsa or Tibetan original. emptiness: According to most Mahayana Buddhist schools, the ultimate nature of all entities and con
caption: Resemblance of Oriya script in Dohakosa by Sarahapada