The Caryapada Manuscript and the Oral Tradition in South Asia

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Texts written in the early forms of the Eastern Indo-Aryan dialects such as Bengali are preserved in the Kathmandu Valley situated at the margin of South Asia. Above all some songs in Apabhransa and Old Bengali contained in the Caryapada and the Hevajratantra have been handed down from generation to generation by the priests of Newari Vajrayana Buddhism and are still performed as ritual accompaniment called ‘caca’. In this project, a Newari priest who hands down the caca songs was interviewed as an informant, and the mutual influences between manuscripts and oral tradition as much as the process of textual transmission were elucidated.