[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So welcome to the second talk in the third series of our podcast, some of the Dhyana and Tibet Seminar.
There will be two more excellent talks coming up this Hilary term and another four in Trinity term as well.
Um, you can keep up to date by checking the um Wolfson Tibetan Studies website.
All our talks are published as video podcasts, freely available from our website at Wolfson,
from the Oxford Podcast, pages from Apple Podcasts and other sites too.
So please try not to interrupt during the recordings.
However, the discussion periods after the talks will not be podcasts and are open to everyone,
so please feel free to express yourselves and ask questions.
Then today, we're delighted to welcome Professor John Nemec, who is Professor of Indian Religious Studies at the University of Virginia.
John did his B.A. at the University of Rochester, his M.A. at the University of California, Santa Barbara,
followed by an MPhil at the University of Oxford and a PhD at the University of Pennsylvania.
His research centres on Indian religions and South Asian intellectual, religious and cultural history,
particularly the philosophy and religious and narrative literatures of the Kashmir Valley of the ninth to 12th centuries.
He is the author of three volumes, all from Oxford University Press Ubiquitous, Shiva, Soma numbers, Shiva, Drishti and His Tantric Interlocutors,
a sequel, volume two by the same title, and Brahman and Brahmins and Kings Royal Council in the Sanskrit narrative literatures.
He has two more books in preparation, which will lead up to his major project for the coming five years,
An Intellectual and Cultural History of Kashmir.
John, many thanks for taking the time to speak to us today.
Over to you. Okay. Thank you very much.
Um, am I, uh, audible? I can be heard.
It's okay. Great. So, uh, I have many things to say at this point.
As I told Kathy and Rabindranath, thank you for the invitation.
First of all, I'm very, um, honoured and grateful to be here.
Um, but second of all, you know, I've been working on this eighth century a little earlier than I normally think about.
And what's going on in Kashmir, what's going on in the region, uh, and what's going on in Shi'ism, uh, at that period in the valley.
Um, and, uh, so there's a lot of information here that I hope to share kind of quickly.
Um, much of it or many bits of it will probably be known to many or all of you, I don't know.
Uh, so some some of what you'll see is my own learning rather than new discoveries.
Um, but I do think that it adds up to something to put it all together.
Um, uh, which I don't think anyone else has done before.
I will say, you know, the idea was to think about what we can know about Ludhiana and the famed cremation ground there, and the influence into Tibet.
I'm not a Tibetan, is there? So, you know, my ignorance is vast.
Uh, but, uh, we were interested in the connection between this place in Ludhiana,
Swat Valley in today's Pakistan and the Kashmir valley, and in turn, Tibet.
And I'll just say at the beginning that I sort of have a kind of thesis.
There's a weak version and a strong version. The weak version of my thesis, as I'll exemplify,
is that Tibetans did not need Kashmir or to go through Kashmir geographically or culturally to get to the Swat Valley.
Uh, the stronger claim, which probably we'll have to talk about more and there'll be more to learn.
But I lean toward the idea. The stronger claim is, uh, that, uh, Ludhiana in its origin, was not a Shiva site in its origin.
It was more of a Buddhist side that came to be very interesting to Shiva than Kashmiris, uh, subsequent to a kind of Buddhist.
Uh. Interest or milia.
Uh, and then, uh, the Tibetans could have had an access to Swat Valley directly.
Uh, connection with Buddhism directly outside of Kashmir.
Um, this can be modified later as we talk.
But the basic idea I'm trying to say, uh, is that what I want to show is in the geography of the world that we have.
Uh, Tibet and Kashmir are two independent concerns.
Vis-a-vis the Swat Valley. Uh, they don't have to be seen as one directly contacting the other.
Um, and what I want to do is go through the evidence, uh uh uh, that we have to think about this.
Um, and I sort of have four parts of this talk.
Let's hope that I can, um, remember what they are.
Yeah, I can do this talk in 5 minutes or 2 hours.
I have to get it to one somewhere in between. There are four kind of parts I want to look at.
Geography and trade routes. Part one political context.
Contemporaneous political context. Part two a touch of what's going on with Buddhism in Kashmir in our period in question.
And finally, I'll say a word or two about the Shi'ism of Kashmir.
Um, I would say that Ben Williams, who I think has joined the talk and he and I are friends and collaborators.
Uh, he definitely knows more about the kind of particular brand of Shi'ism that engages explicitly in discussions of Ludhiana,
this crammer tradition of the Kala movement,
uh, which I'll note toward the end, uh, and I kind of want to set the table for him, but I think [INAUDIBLE] get into more detail on this.
Um, okay. So that's what I wanted to do.
So first, let's talk about Ludhiana as a location and reference to it in Shiva sources.
The basic thing is definitive reference to Ludhiana in Shiraz.
Sources overall is late and I give you in the lecture handout item number one.
I know a few people came after we posted it onto um.
The chat. So if you want a copy of this, just email me something later, I'll send it to you.
It's not the greatest thing in the world, but here it is. I'm not going to read any of this because I have many pages and many handout items,
but this is a kind of example of an explicit, clear reference to Ludhiana as a northern, geographically northern place.
That's a kind of tantric power place. And you see this, uh, quoted uh, in the tantra local viveka of geodata.
So we're in the 13th century. I've been have a Gupta, uh, on the verge of the 11th century.
Late. That's the point that I'm making. But we have lots of these kinds of references at a later date.
The earliest place in Shi'ism where we perhaps see a reference to Udine is here in item number two, uh, of the handout.
And I'm just. Please excuse me. I'm just. Well, I guess, uh, I'm playing around, unfortunately, with the zoom formatting for my own vision.
But anyhow, item number two, this is from the Cali Castro gang in the first half of the ninth century.
Somewhere around there, verse 19. This is very, very well known.
Alexa Sanderson has a quote this and translates it in the show of exegesis.
There's an important volume, uh, of uh, uh, liberating stories, hymns, uh uh uh hymns, uh, from the shive,
a tradition that's being prepared by Hamza Stanton and Ben Williams and, uh, Chris Christopher Wallace.
Uh, Chris Wallace shared his translation of this with me, so I thank him for that.
Uh, but you see here a reference to the Maha machina.
And this may be a reference to the famed cut of era cremation ground in Ludhiana, but it's not explicit.
If it were, this would be the earliest place that we have that in China.
Sources, I think. Uh, yes, in the top of the page, it's still the this the screen move got this shared screen.
It's working correctly. Okay. Uh, there's translation here.
And you can see I refer to the, the trio of authors that are collaborating on this project.
The earliest place that I know of cited in Alexa Sanderson, uh, referring to Ludhiana.
And if you look in item number three, you'll see it's clearly geographically in the north.
They can't imagine this somehow being, you know, somewhere else, uh,
is in the Buddhist, uh, I believe it's a created 10th, rather Manjusri mula kalpa.
And here you have a direct and clear reference to it.
There's also this inscription from Gard de Gardez, uh, that was uh, studied um, by Kwei-armah in this special article here.
Very lovely article. So the citation for which is there in the handout item number four that refers to Ludhiana in the north,
in a, in a, uh, this is a, uh, inscription on the bottom of a Ganesha statue.
John, I think we can't see number three in full.
Well, you can see the slide hasn't moved yet. Uh, this is, uh.
Okay, let me try to reshare. Uh, yeah.
That's okay. Uh, okay. I'm now sharing the screen.
And do you see three and four? Okay, lovely.
Um. Uh, maybe. I'm so sorry if I'll just stop one more time and I will put the, uh, handout just one last time, because I saw someone joined.
So at least there's at least one person who wouldn't have had it, but I just put it into the chat yet again.
Um, so hopefully anyone who wants a copy of it now has it.
What I'm afraid of is that when I've changed. Uh, screens, uh, in, uh, The Acrobat that it doesn't appear on your screen.
Um, so you see handout three and four at this moment. Okay.
Um, guards, we have this, uh, Ganesha statue that was found somewhere in Afghanistan.
And the, uh, inscription, the, uh, below makes clear that this is from this Shahi turkey.
Shahi, uh, King from Ludhiana Odeon, uh, synonym of Udine, or another orthographic way of representing it.
Uh, and so this makes clear that this is in the north towards Swat Valley.
The reason now, do you see a map in front of you? Kathy did a change.
Okay, so somehow we've made it work. Uh, if I can quickly find the place where this is mentioned.
Uh, yes. There are many other places that Diana has been identified where Diana has been identified.
Alexa Sanderson again notes this in the Deccan text.
Montana. Bit of and elsewhere. Uh, Jason Schwartz has followed up on this.
Ludhiana is said to be in the Deccan.
Now just we don't have to get into all the details.
Uh, but just quickly to say the earliest scriptural sources in Shi'ism that refer to Ludhiana as a power place.
They. Sanderson has come to show actually are of a definite middle of India provenance and not from the north.
And they later on kind of, I would say retro fit to make the Udine they're talking about be geographically in the North.
This is an important little bit of evidence that the earliest places in Shive ism,
where we're talking about Ludhiana is not talking about Ludhiana in the Swat Valley,
the earliest place where we have geographic reference to Indiana in the North Swat Valley type place is in the Manjusri mula kalpa.
Okay, so leaning a little toward Buddhism, let's say things about geography and trade routes.
So I wanted to mention Jason Schwartz's work because he's been working on this.
Of course, this early part of the talk leans on the work of Alexa Sanderson as well.
Let me say that Ludhiana has also been located in eastern India and conch in the far south, in Kashgar,
in China's Chinese Turkistan, and even in the French region south of the rock in today's Uzbekistan.
If you, uh, if now I may quickly turn to maps, I'll try to go relatively quickly through these maps.
Long story short, it's a much smaller world than we might think.
I've used Google Maps here. I'm not sure I fully know.
I don't know if you can see my cursor, but in the middle, centred at the bottom, there's a, uh, altitude kind of map for the route that's taken here.
This is the walking route that we have from Swat Valley to Kashmir Valley, through a place called Verum Mula or Baramulla.
And the Buddhists understood it to be Vajra mula.
Uh, anyhow, this is something like an 80 hour walk, if you believe Google Maps.
It's a modern thing. Alexa Sanderson looking at to.
She has an example of a Tibetan pilgrim who made this walk in 24 days.
I'm sorry, this will not take 24 days unless you really want to see the sights.
I think you know, it says 80 hours. I mean, people could do this easily in less than a week.
Anyone who's a Trekker knows that that's possible. Okay, let's see if my map will change.
Do you see it? It worked again. Okay. Thank you. Please interrupt if anything goes wrong, but I'm keeping an eye on it.
This is just a basic map. Uh, again from Google Maps.
I love the Google map relief map. And the point is from Larsa Tibetan Plateau, you can see the kind of sweep of the land going towards Central Asia.
If you start in the northeast corner of this map, you can see a sort of sweep from China across around the,
uh, Tarim Basin here, going this way and then up from Iran.
Turkmenistan is Pakistan, Afghanistan coming this way. You see the confluence of worlds here.
And this is really what we have, uh, in, um, the Central Asian region is the place where three major cultural,
military, political worlds, uh, can meet and collide from the Arab world, from China and from the Tibetan Plateau.
Do you see my cursor? Cathy, can I talk about what my cursor is doing?
Do you see it moving? Yes. Okay. So here's the Kashmir Valley here.
Okay. Uh, and so we have movement like this from Tibet, uh, movement like this from China,
and then movement coming up from the west southwest from, uh, uh, Islamic, uh, Middle East, if you like something like that.
Persia. I here have a relief map, modern with political boundaries highlighted.
What can we do of the Kashmir Valley? I don't want to say much about this one.
I'm going to go to the next slide. This one I drew in some things.
If you can see these arrows. Uh, three on the western side and one if you like, on the eastern side.
These are major passes into the Kashmir Valley.
If you look here, there's a kind of circle diagram type of thing to the central eastern end of the valley that's modern day Srinagar,
and indeed the ancient city as well. I've tried to put a little dot here where bottom line is,
this is the easiest place to get into the valley because it's not a high pass to enter coming from the west.
Then I have a dot here in the Kargil valley and yet another one here.
This is lay in Ladakh, the boundary between the kind of Tibetan world, Tibet and then subsequently Tibetan Buddhist world,
and the sort of Brahmin world of the Kashmir valley is in a high pass that's just here, really only a few dozen.
I don't know how many kilometres from the Kashmir Valley itself, this area here.
So the mountain ranges really create a boundary. Couple things to say about Kashmir.
Very rich. One of only three places in the world where you can grow saffron.
It has timber. These were great export crops. Easily defensible.
With these Devadas or Dors either passes into Kashmir.
This is an important part of it. Uh, and, um, there was gold in the kitchen Ganga River valley here, just north of the valley.
Gold was found there. Uh, very easy to find gold there.
It's sort of, you know, nuggets on the surface and that kind of thing.
So I'm trying to say that it was a resource rich region, highly defensible, agriculturally self-sufficient,
and close, as you saw on the previous slide to Central Asia in the trade routes.
I'll quickly go through these again. I used Google Maps to think about passage to Kashmir Valley from, uh, from Ley.
And you can see that this isn't a very long walk. Matter of days, not weeks.
Let's go to the next one. Here. I wanted to point something out.
If we want to imagine going from the Tibetan Plateau to Swat Valley.
Have a look at this map. This is actually the map of following by way of the Indus Valley River riverbed.
And, uh, if my, uh, Google map, uh, research is correct, this would take something like 303 hours.
You can see it here. I thought that they would want a little detour to Gilgit here, this little branch, uh, spur here on the route.
Gilgit was such an important centre. I put it into the calculation.
If you look at the elevation relief, it's downhill. It's a nice passage.
They said something like 300 hours. Uh, if you go the route via through, uh, Cargill, through Lake Cargill, that way down into the Kashmir Valley,
out Baramulla, and then over like that, it's shorter by some 50 70km, but it's only maybe 50 hours walking time.
Less distance. This is a short, quick way of saying that the way to swat from Tibet is probably not through Kashmir.
It doesn't have to be, and it's probably faster and easier to just follow the Indus riverbed, which I have mapped here in the handout item number 11.
I think that this is what people probably would have done, particularly when we get to the politics of the, uh,
Kashmir in the time there was a lot of rivalry in the eighth century, uh,
seventh, eighth century, uh, between, um, Kashmiri kings of the Kota dynasty.
They were version of us were coming to them in a moment. They fought with the Tibetan Empire.
Um, so what I have here is just the, uh, uh, map I found somewhere online of the riverbed of the Indus.
Uh, I wasn't aware of this. The Indus is the river that goes to lay and, uh, Ladakh valley there.
Um, and so this would have probably, I think, been the route. Certainly it's a possible route, no question.
So once again, the weak argument is Tibet doesn't need Kashmir to know Udine.
The strong argument is I think Ludhiana and its origin was more of a Buddhist site,
uh, that subsequently subsequently became very interesting to Shiv, as in Kashmir.
And maybe those shavers in Kashmir influenced Tibetans later on, but I don't know.
We'll talk about that someday, I suppose.
Uh, but what I'm saying is, in the earliest moment in the eighth century, the evidence leans fairly strongly towards a Buddhist milieu.
Okay. That's okay. That's my geography, I.
My geography talk. This map is from this lovely book by Yuri Briggle, an Historical Atlas of Central Asia.
And I'm only pointing here to this little neck of the Tibetan Empire in Little Poland.
Uh, it the, uh, political context.
Sorry, I need to look at my notes here.
The political context in the seventh through ninth centuries was one of a geopolitical fight for control of Central Asia, with Arab caliphates.
The Tang dynasty of China and the Tibetan Empire disputing the region has produced various alliances,
including Chinese protectorates across Central Asia and into even the Indian subcontinent.
I think it's 722 c ad uh, the car Quarter King sends an emissary to, uh, to Tang Dynasty.
And there's a kind of vassalage of the Kashmir Valley, even in an alliance against, uh, Arab Caliphate forces trying to enter the region.
The Tibetan Empire and Tang dynasty. Some of you will know this much better than I do.
Fought for suzerainty over the Gilgit-Baltistan area.
And indeed, by seven 5751, it's the Tibetan Empire that had control of this area, little below their Gilgit area and just to the north of it.
And uh, in 721, I think it is. Anyway, early eighth century Ladakh falls into the hands of Tibetan Empire.
And my point is from here circumventing in that U-turn kind of thing we saw with the Indus Valley,
it's just miles a couple of days maximum to the Swat Valley from this, uh, extended region of the Tibetan Empire.
Is this okay? Kind of, uh, short hand, uh, who was ruling in, uh, Swat Valley at that time?
There's it's this Shahi dynasty that was Buddhist that had connection over across into today's Afghanistan and Kabul area.
Um, the Rashid Khan Caliphate, then the Umayyad Caliphate, then the Abbasid Caliphate were fighting, uh, these Central Asian.
But Asian Buddhist kingdoms are those that gained alliance with the Tang.
Uh uh, yes, I already mentioned the 755.
Tibet had control over today's Gilgit-Baltistan region.
And before that, 719, 720, the duck was absorbed into the Tibetan Empire.
All right, let's go further. This is, uh, in my deep Wikipedia research, you'll find this very inaccurate.
But does the job map? Uh, somewhere around eighth century Tang dynasty.
And you can see the kind of reach it's surprising.
Uh, so take this for what you will. I'm sure it's inaccurate in its details.
In many, many ways. I can find a few on my own. But what I really want to say here is we.
By which I mean I. My own shortcomings are that I have a kind of imagination of the ancient world that's limited.
I think of okay world. They knew about one another a little kind of sort of.
But geography was kind of destiny. It's not entirely true.
In fact, it's the opposite. Um, I was at a conference in Wisconsin and a slight anecdote, uh, and there were these, um, scientists who study sites,
and they're looking at the purity of iron in second century Buddhist stupas in just Swat Valley area.
And I talked to them and said, know, can you date things by the purity of the iron in this kind of thing?
And what what he told me, the scientist, is that in the first second centuries, the best iron.
This isn't the important point, but the best iron came from India and the Roman Empire.
This is the important part. Romans wanted to import iron from Greece if they could get it.
But if if at all possible from India, I would also.
So we're talking about not bringing a gold coin or something like this.
We're talking about industrial trade, that kind of thing. So the world was quite connected.
And this Wikipedia map, for all its shortcomings, I think,
shows us we're looking really at a large part of the world and the connections between Tibet and empire,
uh, the caliphates that are coming from the other direction, uh, and, uh,
dynasty from China, Tang dynasty, these are worlds that are closely interacting.
Kashmir, happily for itself, stays away from any of these kind of dynastic occupation for many, many, many centuries.
Uh, and this has everything to do with geography. Is this this is enough on this point.
Um, yes. Let's come to politics.
Uh, again, uh, I'm not going to, uh, say too much.
I just want to talk about the information I've put here on, uh, the screen.
Uh, we know that the reigns of kings in seventh into eighth and through the eighth century were those of a dynasty, uh, called the Calcutta dynasty.
These are Kashmiri. Vishnu was worshippers of Vishnu.
Uh, uh. So that's one thing to keep in mind.
Another thing to keep in mind is overall, Calcutta Rural was quite stable.
Uh, we definitely have issues through the entire history of, uh, Kashmir, uh, political history of Kashmir violence all the time.
As Walter Sliwa has said, uh, there's hardly a period of any singular lifetime, any one person's lifetime.
If you lived a moderate length, you would have seen real political instability.
Um, some of this happens, too, in these middle years of, uh, uh, uh, the Calcutta dynasty.
And toward the end, you have, uh, maternal uncles assassinating their nephews and taking the throne,
etc., etc., etc. however, there are some really strong kind of golden ages as well.
The dynasty is founded by this man. Uh, does that highlight for you?
I suppose it does, yes. Uh, during Liber Vergina, uh, swansong, uh, visited his kingdom.
He had amicable relations with the Buddhist Shah. He's in the Swat Valley at that time.
Uh, they shows, uh, shrines and returns in 643 and sees that Daulat and I had extended Kashmiri rule out of the valley through that Baramulla,
probably, uh, dura through that gate, out the valley up to the Indus River.
So that means up to the edge of the Swat valley there. Um, and generally had good relations with the Buddhist there in that area.
Um Pratap added to the second door. Lavaca, his son, uh, hosted rich trade in the valley.
This is, uh, cited by this man, uh, steward Mark, uh, who did this book on, um, the bronzes, a Buddhist and Hindu bronzes of Kashmir.
It's quite a beautiful book. Um, but many, many things coming out of the Raja Terengganu.
I should mention this. Uh, Kalama is the author.
12th century. He writes a history of Kashmir. I don't know if a history of the kings of Kashmir.
So Raja Terengganu, he literally means the wave of kings.
But it's really the chronicle of the lives of the kings of Kashmir.
And in the fourth Tharanga, the fourth wave or the fourth chapter of the book, he deals with the Calcutta's.
And it's from here that we know that there is a kind of historical accuracy verifiable to what he does,
because we have Chinese sources against which we compare, none of which I've.
This is one of the shortcomings of my talk today. Um, there are also there's also coinage and there's sort of, uh,
archaeological evidence and material evidence by which we can date and compare, uh, colonised information to our own.
It's a fascinating book. I've been reading it for years, is something I actually know a little bit about.
I've written about it. Others have two. Uh. It's poetic.
Catherine is a beautiful writer with a really unique style of Sanskrit.
Uh, and this is where much of our information is coming from on the Calcutta dynasty.
Perhaps that will, uh, suffice for what to say about it.
Let me say a couple about a couple of markings here.
The one's highlighted. Chandragupta. Right.
Uh, had an embassy sent to Tang Dynasty because he was worried about this Arab caliphate coming from the west.
And in 720, there was a brief kind of vassalage.
It's an alliance. But I can tell, uh, with China, as it were, against, uh, these Islamic caliphates coming from the other direction.
Uh, uh, Kalona, I would just mention here gives a slightly different dating than the dating that we have, the cause of this being, um, who knows?
But when you cross-reference with Chinese sources and some dated coins and so on, they've managed to refine, uh, the dates.
I put this vertical line here, I won't go into much more detail.
I'm going to quickly skip on. But this is to suggest that I had three sons and Tara to lead for a short while.
But then we have this man, Lalit Aditya mukhtar.
Peter. Lalit. Aditya is the third son. This is said to be a Kashmiri Golden age.
Uh, he sends an emissary to China. He goes out and conquers the world.
And I'll give subsequent several slides to look at some of the things he did, because it's astounding.
And he was very good to Buddhist there.
He also, as this quotation says, sealed off five entrances to Tibet in alliance with the king of central India,
uh, the king of Kannauj, uh, and blocked the expansion of the Tibetans.
And this is well known. He talks about it, uh, he makes and Karna makes many, many claims for his reign.
I think this is very much in the perfect period we want for what we're thinking about.
724 to 761 ADC. Please excuse me.
I'm just going to move my notes along. Uh. Uh, yes.
Uh, but we have to be cautious about how wide his kind of conquest was.
Um, for the convenors, I sent the full paper that I have.
And you'll see there a footnote to someone named Michael Meister.
He's an architectural historian at Penn. Uh, retired some years ago, uh, who taught me.
And, uh, he wrote this beautiful article on a stone carve out temple, uh, that's in the Pahari region of south of Kashmir Valley.
And he says, hey, uh, the Raja Terengganu, he says Mukhtar Pita conquered the world, etc., etc., etc.,
including conquering the doubters, i.e. the Buddhists, etc. but if you look at temple architecture outside the valley.
But close to Kashmir. It looks like plains of India architecture, not the other way around.
We don't see an expansion of patronage of physical construction between a Kashmiri style.
Rather, we see a Plains of India style moving very up toward the frontier of the Kashmir Valley itself.
So take with a grain of salt how much he did. However, he certainly did, uh, win military conquest.
Nobody doubts that, uh, it was a kind of golden age, as I said.
Global trade is going on all the way through these kings. Uh, and then in addition to that, uh, Mukhtar,
Peter did much for an ecumenical support of religious traditions that we're going to go look at in just a moment.
The last person I want to mention on this slide in These Kings, uh, is J.R. Peter.
Uh, he's been written about many, many times. I gave you Yigal Bronner.
Many others have written about him, too. Absolutely. Fascinating figure.
Um, I've written about him as well. Um, he was a great patronage of the arts and letters.
Probably the most important one in the entire history of Kashmir.
But toward the end of his life, he started to plunder the wealth of the people of his own kingdom.
And he really, uh, turned evil. There are a pair of verses in the adjective organi that describe this change, that are a slasher,
or a double entendre verse that has three separate meanings in the verse, comparing him to pani one comparison.
Good. He's as brilliant as Panini. The second comparison bad.
He turned into this plunder of his own people. So you have triple meaning in one verse, one meaning for panini, one for good, JP, one for bad.
JP that's really quite a lovely thing. Um, and Stein figured this out.
R.L. Stine, who did this translation, uh, of Raja Sarangani with an addition.
Um, and then I read, retranslated it. Okay.
Lots of political instability in Kashmir all the time.
But overall, corporate ties are quite strong. Let's look at a few things we have in common.
Is Raja Terengganu on Mukhtar Pita. I won't again belabour the point.
I think it's okay for time. Things are proceeding pretty well.
Um, but I'll just, uh, read here. Uh, yes.
This isn't the one I wanted to read out loud. There's a very beautiful verse coming up in a moment.
Not that these aren't, but we only have so much time.
I just would point out that, you know, there are some problems with what he says in each of these two verses,
but it gives you a sense of, uh, Mukhtar Pita and how Hanna saw him.
The king, eager for conquests past his life, chiefly on expeditions moving around the earth like the sun.
Okay, uh, the sun doesn't move around the Earth, but. Okay.
Fair enough. Uh, then the second one, he talks about the water's potable water.
But, uh, words for Buddhists or Tibetans rather.
Excuse me, um, that are used in Sanskrit in this period.
And he says the anxiety felt by the boaters could not be seen on the faces which are white in their original state.
Do you see again, item number 15 on the screen?
Yeah. Okay. I don't know what you heard me say before.
These are two verses about Mukhtar Pita. Probably I deserve to be cut off because one of them is scientifically inaccurate.
Having the, uh, sun rotate around the Earth and the other one's kind of racist.
So, you know, uh, what are you going to do? He says, uh, this thing in the second verse, I think I won't say anything more about,
uh, that now, but the point is that he struck fear into the Buddhists.
Uh, and sorry, my dear, but someone is texting me saying that I disappeared off the screen.
Hopefully it's fixed now. Um, so he struck fear into his Buddhist opponent.
Uh, his Tibetan opponents. He struck fear into the Tibetans, and he conquered the world.
That's the only point to this slide.
I give the note that, uh, Stein gives at the bottom of this slide about, uh, these terms for Tibetans that we have, uh, and let's move forward.
Can you see the image here? Uh, I managed to go here first time in my life to, uh, in contemporary mutton in the Kashmir Valley.
Uh, this is the Ma tanda, sometimes spelled Ma Tonda Sun Temple, the temple to the sun god Vishnu in the form of the sun god.
Uh, this was it's absolutely massive and spectacular.
Unfortunately, earthquakes and other problems destroyed much of it.
But the core part of the structure, uh, remains. And this indeed was built, uh, by Lalit Aditya mukhtar.
And I wanted to give, uh, an image of it because you can see the kind of how wealth managed to create this sort of religious patronage.
Let's move forward. Uh, here there's, uh, just about the, uh, production of the temple.
That it's wonderful. And so on. Uh, and that the town around it is swelling with grapes.
I thought it was a lovely passage. Um, let's leave it at that.
I gave information about the site, uh, that is there in Stein as well, uh, which I suppose people can peruse at their pleasure.
Let's move forward. Uh, yes.
Well, he also built a city called para hacer para the happy city, I suppose.
Uh, and he funded Buddhist sites there, including a vihara.
And I wanted to read this first because I think it shows a little, uh, Calvinist style.
He says. Check, check to Chala.
But check. Bridgehead. Janaki Raja Raja Vihar items being Raja set technology time so you can hear the
alliteration in the second verse and the repetition in the first verse of.
They had kind of a beautiful verse and he says uh uh uh uh uh uh.
Peter, Jaya, uh, Lalita, Aditya, mukhtar. Peter.
This king in the golden age, that king was free from passions and built the ever rich Raja Vihara,
the royal vihara with a large quadrangle, a large cheetah and a large image of the Buddha, the Jina.
The second verse we have here, with just as many thousands of as of copper as he spent in Palace of Silver on the party,
has occasion for the statue he made the glorious statue of the Great Buddha, which reached up to the sky.
This is a very famous passage that there seems to have been quite a glamorous, expensive statue of the Buddha.
Keep going. Am I? I'm still here. Uh.
Uh. Okay. Uh, I wanted to mention that this site, uh, today has a parade, just maybe 15, 20km northwest of today's Srinagar.
Downriver. Uh, there are some there has been some archaeological work done here.
I'm looking at Ramchandra Cox. Ancient monuments of Kashmir.
I like this reproduction because it's so raw.
Uh, the basement of the stupa has a. This was sponsored by a Turk minister to the king.
And I give the verse there. Uh, chaturanga for verse to 11.
The Turk, Jungkook, who founded the champ, Kavi Hora, made a stupa loftier even than the mind of the king.
And he made golden images of the genius of the Buddha as well.
Uh, there has been archaeological work done here since.
And I'm giving you here just a page out of the Archaeological Survey of India.
In this handout, item number 20. They seem to be further along, uh, in the repairs that are made, um, uh,
in this area than we saw in at the time that Koc was writing, which is, you know, that three quarters of a century ago.
Um, I didn't know about that. So next time I go to this part of the world, I definitely want to go and see this site.
Uh. Let's see. Uh, there are other things to mention, uh, that probably it's not worth mentioning first at this moment.
Uh, so let's leave that there. Um. Uh.
I should read out a little bit here. Also under his robe.
Mukhtar. Peter. Lalit. Aditya. It is said that Raja strongly 209220 ten.
Chapter four. One of his ministers, Mitra Sharman, funded a shy of a say,
while the king of Lata named Kaya in turn financed both the version of a site and a Buddhist one,
a Buddhist vihara, the latter said eventually to have been the home for some time at least.
Another man in other than Guyana, Sri Mitra.
Uh. I think we can go to the next slide here.
Uh, in Raja chair, I'm getting 4.209 to 210.
I give you this passage itself. Uh, his minister, Mitra Sherman, to put up the Shiva Linga called Mitra.
Shraddha, the king of Lata, called Kaya, made the famous shrine of Vishnu Kiya Solomon.
So Shiva sites are something each for a nation recites or something.
Swami. Uh. By this very king was also built the wonderful and famous Kiya Vihara.
Uh, where subsequently the big shoe sort of a job Mitra resided who appeared as another Jana.
Uh, I should say by this very minister. That's a mistake in my text.
Uh. It's okay, Cathy, I'm still here. No one's frozen or anything.
Excellent. I'm getting paranoid. Please excuse me. Item 22 is a side note in a sense, but it's important for a very important,
very famous piece of evidence of support of Buddhism in the Kashmir Valley in this period, the remote terror.
The famed logician enters the valley, as is memorialised in Roger 24.4 98.
And the king here, who is, uh, JP, the other one, who funded so many arts and so many letters and then subsequently plundered his people.
A little bit later period. Then Mukhtar Peter. He has a kind of dream of the arrival of some exalted teacher in the West.
And the exalted, exalted teacher is named Dharma Takaya.
And it's as if in his dream the sun rose in the west when demoted or arrived.
Now, digging a little deeper, there have been several things made of this verse.
One is, maybe Don Otero was a Westerner and came actually from the West, maybe from the Shanghai Turki Shahi area where we have the Swat Valley.
Uh, Sliwa points out this is probably unlikely, because the likeliest and most common way to enter the valley from the Indian subcontinent,
from the plains of India, was by the west and Baramulla because easy to get in.
No high mountain passes to cross. Number one. Number two.
Sliwa makes a strong argument that this verse suggests.
Not that. The entrance of Dharma terror into the valley was a good thing, but a frightening, terrible thing,
because sun's rising in the West are actually portents of evil turn turns of events.
So what Sliwa is arguing is JP may have welcomed thermo terror with open arms JP funds v Hadas and but as statues in the rest of it,
just as well as his predecessor that JP is ecumenical and supportive of all religions
until he becomes very kind of like certain political leaders we know today.
Um, but in his good days, uh, uh, Jayapal welcomed and it was ecumenical and people crossing boundaries of religion.
And he didn't mind having a Buddhist. But sly as argument is, Carl Hanna noted that this was not a good thing.
Is it right? Is it wrong? We can make up our own minds individually, but I thought I would mention it's really quite a fascinating, um, uh,
verse and passage of text and, uh, similarly shows the support of Buddhism in the valley in our period in question now.
Okay. Uh, I've been speaking for 40 minutes.
A few more things to say. There's a work entitled The Neela martyr put on.
This is definitely a local purana. This is a work that talks about the Kashmir Valley.
Uh, it talks about the rivers of the Kashmir valley, the Nagas.
It comes from the nuggets who lived there at the time, then shared the territory with, uh, humans.
Six months at a time each. There was a whole back story to it.
Uh, begins with a question. Why didn't Kashmir fight in the Mahabharata war?
It turns out that the then king of Kashmir, uh, went to a swam.
But I went to a place where you, the bride, chooses her husband.
And the then king of Kashmir got into a fight with Krishna, who crushed him and killed him.
Uh, because they both wanted the wife. Krishna won. Uh, but then, out of respect for him, he made the the widowed.
Wife of the once king of Kashmir to be Queen of Kashmir, and she had a son named Goh Nanda.
Then the narrator says, why would he do that for Kashmir?
You know, just crush him. Who cares? He says, oh, because the Kashmir Valley itself is uma.
It's the wife of Shiva. It's the goddess. And out of respect for the holiness of this site, he supported them and gave them this lovely possibility.
Okay. It said that Kashmir originally was a lake.
That's the Nagas live there. These snake beings who are kind of semi-divine.
Uh, and then it is drained. This is, of course, uh, historically accurate going back millennia, just like Kathmandu Valley.
I think the same is said about that valley. Uh, and you have this world described in of Kashmir.
This text goes on to give many, many details about the Kashmir Valley.
Uh, let me give you a little taste of that. Is there time?
Uh, it says, uh, after this frame story, it says, uh, in 13 verses, verses 14 to 26, uh, that Kashmir is praised in all kinds of ways.
It's full of rice fields and bears, all kinds of fruits.
The people perform the Vedic sacrifices there. It's full of sacred sites, and hermitage is it's unconquerable by enemy kingdoms.
It is rich in cows, horses and elephants and other creatures.
It's not moistened only by the rains. It has water flowing through it and therefore is not dependent on an unreliable monsoon.
It produces all grains, is richly populated, full of gardens and pleasure groves,
little laden with flowers, fruits, trees, creepers and medicinal herbs, as well as wild beasts.
It's enjoyed by Sid Does his accomplished beings, and Chiron has maybe wandering sages.
That could be what it means. And Kashmir is said to be full of the sacred sites associated with Nagas.
And finally, the B test a river through flowers through its middle.
I love these early verses. It's really quite beautiful.
But, uh, there's a thought, this text, uh, seventh century, most likely.
Uh, vade Kumari. She made this, uh, two volume, uh, translation and edition of it, uh, which I've followed.
Uh, John now do also cites passages from this, including one we'll look at in a moment.
Uh, I think it's a beautiful text, quite interesting, but probably possibly sponsored by the first Kircher character, King developer Verdana.
Uh, and there's a version of a valence to the text, but also this shy, the element you see here, the whole Kashmir Valley is uma.
And then it also says something else about Shiv ism in handout item number 24.
And if I've given anything actually new in this talk, it's actually identifying this passage.
Uh, I would mention, um, our colleague Florinda de Simone, who's at uh, Napoli, University of Naples.
Uh, and she, by our good fortune, uh, agreed, uh, under our invitation to come here to Virginia.
And she's just here now, speaking in the afternoon about the Shiva Dharma, this early lay brand of Shiv ism.
And this passage here is, if it's read the right way, slow tavion Shiva down.
Mash chat. If this means Shiva Dharma should be obeyed or listened to you, should you know.
Here, then this is a very early reference to Shiva Dharma, a late form of Shi'ism, probably having its origins in.
I think she would say she knows better than I do, but I think it's 67th century, something like that.
So here we have a passage saying, hey, Shi'ism is being practised, uh, among the populace,
the Shiva Dharma, uh, tradition is one that is a little more inclusive.
Generally speaking, their complications,
they're more inclusive at the level of caste and at the level of gender than what I would call mainline biomedical tradition.
Uh, that you see best exemplified by a work like man of a Dharma Shastra managed committee, which can be, I would say, Orthodox.
I'll describe it that way. Is it possible I have?
It's Cathy. I'm still here. I'm still alive. Yes.
Is it possible that we have in popular. Sorry.
In material evidence. Also indications of what the religious world might have been at that time.
Here I was fortunate.
I have a colleague, Tanenbaum, who is really just wonderful, our historian, uh, who, uh, made me aware of this in a private collection here,
actually, in Charlottesville, I managed to take a photograph of a marble statue, uh, of, uh, Umar Mahesh Farah, uh, the god Shiva with his wife.
Uh, this is a formulation that you see in Shiva Dharma works, uh,
that's datable to the late eighth or maybe early ninth century Calcutta ran
into the dynasty that comes after with of antivenom in the diamond dynasty.
There's much, much more work to be done fully to understand, uh, the religious history of Kashmir, uh, and religious history in India more generally.
But this, uh, item measures an 11.5in, excuse me, inches.
Not centimetres by 12.5 by 3.9. Something like this.
It's a personal item. Uh, not in a public giant temple or anything like that.
So to give you a flavour of some of what was going on in Shibe ism, in the ecumenical support of different,
uh, religious traditions by the two kings of Kashmir in our period.
All right. We're moving closer and closer to the end here.
I've put here these famous verses, uh, that are cited in John now do, uh, and have been known for many,
many years, uh, where the Buddha is mentioned in the near Lama to put on.
Now, uh, it's important to note here that, uh, the Buddha is counted as an incarnation of Vishnu.
Uh, that's not an unusual thing. Uh uh, and, uh, of course, if the matter put on, it was royally sponsored.
The Kakarot has their version of us. So there's a kind of continuity here.
Uh, Vade Kumari, the translator. She notes that what we have here fits.
Around 550 AD, we start to have the idea that the Buddha is an incarnation of Vishnu and the incarnation, the idea of being an avatar.
It's a form of Vishnu that crosses down into the world.
This is also an early attestation to that idea because they don't use the term avatar, they use the term uh,
pride or blue pride or bhava uh, which is an earlier way of talking about incarnation.
So again, indication that nila Mata put on might be an early work seventh century or something like that,
maybe a little later than that, but right in the period that we want.
So we definitely see here I highlighted things that are obviously kind of Buddhist in terms of art that work for for Buddhist tradition.
And you can see that clearly here. We have people doing Buddhist things in the Kashmir Valley in the eighth century.
Shall I go forward? All right.
Now, the last two parts of my talk are very short.
Each of them. Many, many, many, many more things can be said.
I can only see the shortcomings in what I've offered you.
I think I wrote them out in a nice, uh. Uh, well, let me say a couple of things here.
Okay. Here on item number 27, I think I've outlined everything wrong with this.
So let's do it that way. These are some, not all, some prominent Buddhists, uh, who were Kashmiri or Kashmiri,
is writing about, uh, Buddhism around the period of study, and I've just included some of them.
This has been gone over by. You'll now do as well.
There's also a very recent article in 2025, uh, by Jonathan Silk and Walter Sliwa about Buddhism in Kashmir.
I looked at that. And then for Oxford Bibliographies Online some years ago,
I made a an entry entitled Kashmir and looked into a lot of this kind of thing for that article.
So between those three sources,
I've pulled out some of these very famous names of people who wrote about Buddhism or Buddhists who are writing in Kashmir.
So everyone's Kashmir definitely landed in Kashmir, no question.
Some of them are Kashmiris, some of them are just in Kashmir.
Some of them are Buddhists writing about Buddhism. Some of them are not.
But it's like Ananda Gardena, who wrote a commentary under mountain dynamo Teras Brahman of Initiate Tiger, now lost.
But he was not a Buddhist. But this Buddhist logic was very important.
So this is an example. Two last quick things to say.
One is Cambridge listed here I Tibetan.
This will all know him. Am I still alive? It's okay. Uh, people will still know him as the author of this Bodhisattva video on a cult,
but later, which becomes very important in aesthetics in Tibetan language.
Uh, he was said to be, uh uh uh.
Shiva converted to Vishnu wisdom, but wrote about Buddhism.
Uh, someone who's in the talk now, she Bahuguna is a doctoral, advanced to candidacy at UCLA, and she's working on these,
um, other Donner stories, uh, and, uh, how they're dispositive of Buddhism in Kashmir in the period.
Uh, maybe eventually, with an eye toward how it connects to Tibet.
She's working on shamans that are just now. Uh, also, there's, uh, another scholar who's interested in these kinds of connections.
A beginning doctoral student just in her first year here, Nguyen Jiang, who is interested in divination,
uh, and astrology, uh, between China and India and looking in a comparative way.
And I think these kinds of connections are very, very important. Um, yes.
But what I've given you here is hardly, uh uh uh.
A complete account of what we have. Uh, of Buddhists in, uh, Kashmir in this period, and I for it.
I wrote that this covers only the most public facing rather than esoteric tantric Shiva authors.
It's definitely incomplete. It reads from Kashmir, perhaps with an eye toward Tibet, but to the exclusion of the view of Kashmir from Tibetan sources.
It omits the early history of Buddhism in the valley, including the likely provenance there of the Mojave Bazaar and the start of ostinato,
and it fails to mine the useful Chinese sources we have for the period in question.
That that is perfect. Um. It gives you a sense of how lively and active Buddhism was in Kashmir,
in the valley, in the eighth and ninth, and then by this into the 10th centuries.
So I hope that that could suffice to make that point. All right.
Uh, the last thing I want to look at, uh, here is, uh, my item number 28, which, because it's complicated, it goes on for three pages.
Um, it's really kind of trying to map the pre tantric Shiva, the proto tantric China and the Tantric Shiva texts and traditions that we have.
This is following largely the tradition, the, uh, mapping and the historical, social, historical work done by Alexis Sanderson.
Uh, and I'll just say a few things about it.
I tried here, uh, to underline and put in bold texts that we know are Kashmiri.
Uh, and I tried to put an asterisks next to things that definitely refer to Diana.
Uh, we know that second century for sure.
Around that time, we start to have an ascetic tradition of Shi'ism with the partial Paytas.
Uh, that is kind of what to say. Mortuary in nature.
They hang around cremation grounds. They are socially nonconformist, challenging medical norms in their dress and behaviour and so on.
We have what's called the arti marga, the outer way, or, if you like, the extreme path or this high path, if you like,
uh, uh, of, uh, renunciation traditions in Shiv ism, all of them having some kind of connection to the cremation ground.
Very important, given what we have with Diana.
Somewhere after this, we have this corpus of texts that Florinda is an expert on the Shiva Dharma corpus display Shiv ism.
There are series of 123456789 texts.
Uh, the first two of which the Dharma Shastra and the Shivaji amo tera, are found, replicated, copied all around South Asia.
The rest of them only in collections, all collected together in Nepal.
Why? That is, the scholars who are working on this, uh, are working on understanding that.
But this tradition leans on Pashupati tradition and a form of Veda conforming Shiv ism from the mantra marga,
the Shiva Siddhanta that you see here below.
I think that our nila Mata Purana is citing this Shiva Dharma Shastra as I showed you a bit earlier, lay shive ism,
a bit more inclusive around women, explicit about, uh, liberation being possible for all for Varna, including sutras.
Uh, a little bit pushing against a more conservative, uh, Brahmin orthodoxy.
Uh, the Shiva Siddhanta is, uh, ritual practising, temple managing and eventually, uh, Veda conforming form of activism.
Of all the brands of Shi'ism we have, this is the one that we could say doesn't really push back and try to liberalise,
uh, mainline Brahmin ism around the area of, uh, caste differentiation and gender.
It's a little bit conservative. We know this Bridget Calo.
Tara is a Kashmiri production. It has a lot on temple design.
Libby Mills, who's at Toronto now, I've given her in the footnote here, has edited and translated the temple architecture portions of this text.
There are many, many others Shiva sit down to except only given one that we know is from Kashmir.
As the tradition develops, it's a cognisant of what comes before it, and claims to have new brands of shy wisdom that are superior to those before it.
We have this mantra pita bite of a centred, God centred switch and Tantra as a Kashmiri work.
And it does that. It's a scripture, but we can locate it to Kashmir.
Uh, the desire to more goddess centred as you go through the history of activism.
It becomes more non dualistic and more goddess centred.
That's the general model.
Uh, ultimately coming along, we have the countries that are very famous for maybe never Gupta and this famed Giger Toyama lot,
which I've done very little with myself. But Alexa Sanderson has been editing and dealing with this, and others have as well,
and it has enforced shut because there are chapters, the second, third and fourth of which are very.
I mean, they're Kashmiri. According to Sanderson, I believe him.
Much of the view we have of the precedent traditions is coming out of the later texts that talk about the earlier ones.
So this relative chronology is one built up by the attestation of the texts themselves after the, uh, mantra marga, the etymology, the mantra marga.
Then we have this kula marga, this, uh, pathway of the, uh, family, if you like, the cooler in for transmissions east, south, north and west.
Uh. Poor Virginia. It's well-established at least by the ninth century in Kashmir.
I've given some of the names of the texts here. We go to the last page and last page of the handout in general for the talk.
We have mom niya, the goddess chica. Here we have mention of Ludhiana.
Uh, this becomes very important first in the Deccan, but it's also there in Nepal.
I don't know much about the history, but there we are then.
Uttara omnia, the northern transmission of the crown of the, uh, Kala, of the Kula tradition.
And we have this tradition called the Crema, which I think Ben Williams is going to speak about at much greater length than I did.
And here we have references again to, uh, Ludhiana duction omnia, the southern transmission.
I would mention this Netra Tantra. I've just been looking at this, maybe a ninth century, early ninth century text that, um, with um,
rotation for the imagines, all kinds of pathways that might be using a Buddhist deity might be this, it might be that.
But all worked into this nature. Tantra. Um, maybe a court work.
A work that's concerned with the life of the king in the what are called post scriptural authors, authors who say, hey, I'm a human being.
I'm not. This isn't a text. That's gods from time immemorial.
These are human beings writing. They put themselves into, uh, history we have given in nature in the ninth century, the Kali Castro.
And here we come around to where we began. He mentions the Maha Sharma Shana.
Uh, perhaps a reference to Indiana. No, nothing definite there.
This is one of the earliest places that we have a concern with the matter that we're all attentive to today.
And then coming very back to the beginning of my talk. Tantra loka.
Tantra loka viveka. We have Ludhiana mentioned.
Uh, uh, I've been have a Gupta as a 10th 11th century.
Um, this is really all I would say about this material.
There's much, much more to be done.
Uh, in fact, uh, I want to go and look again in the ancient Loka and make sure that Orianna is explicitly mentioned in the Tantra loka,
and not just in the viveka. And I'm starting to hesitate on that.
I have to go and do a little bit more homework. Okay.
So summing up, I've been speaking for an hour and one minute, but I also fell off line, so hopefully, uh uh.
I'm not over time. I just want to give my conclusion, which is there are a lot of things to suggest that Swat Valley, Indiana,
in the eighth century was balanced in Buddhism rather than, uh, Hinduism, Shi'ism in particular, if I can say it that way.
Uh, the earliest reference we have to Indiana that's datable is eighth century.
The, uh, Manjusri more local part uh, the Turkey Shahi, the Shawnee dynasty at that time in the Swat Valley, supported by Buddhism.
Tibetans from the time that we date or imagine had met some of, uh, had direct access to Swat Valley via the Indus, uh, riverbed.
Kashmir and Tibet were in direct confrontation in this period.
Uh, Lalit Aditya mukhtar pita brags about beating the boats and so on.
Uh, this is not suggesting a kind of certainly political conflict, maybe not cultural flow as much from those across that frontier.
At the same time suggesting maybe Tibetans gaining an interest in Ludhiana went around Kashmir rather than through it.
And the earliest references we have to Udayan and Shive, a tradition from the Crema, uh, which Ben Williams will speak about, uh, have, uh,
evidence of a definite provenance and provenance from the Deccan plateau, uh, only later to be associated with Swat Valley and Kashmir.
Uh, so all that suggests Kashmir may not have played a direct role in the Tibetan engagement with Ludhiana, at least in this early period.
Uh, the contravening evidence. Who knows for sure. Contravening evidence is well, Lalit Aditya mukhtar pita 724 to 761.
Very good relations with the kings of the Shanghai kings of the Swat Valley.
They had good connections. So maybe that suggests interaction at the cultural level as well.
Now, of course, last point. I'm not naive enough to think that political boundaries and cultural bound boundaries are terminal.
You can have feuding states and yet cultural influence at the same time.
Just because a king supports Buddhism doesn't mean that Shiv ism isn't thriving in that valley.
The guard's inscription is of a Ganesh statue.
Uh, so we can't equate political identity with religious identity or political identity with cultural influence.
All these things are true. Maybe we'll never know for sure.
Maybe they cut away the cremation ground as it comes to be called, uh, uh, which Sanderson says, you know, is direct.
Talk about it. But that's late. It's 13th century, something like that.
Um, maybe it was always inter religious, I don't know,
but what I do know is when you really dig around Chavis sources and you really dig around Kashmir in the period in question,
it's not suggesting this heavy, heavy influence, uh, interest and influence in Indiana till a later date.
So that's, uh, note that. See what we want to do with it.
I'm perfectly happy to be wrong. I'm just trying to collate the evidence that we have, uh, can to date and, uh.
Yes, that's all I have to say. Thank you so much. I hope I didn't go over too much.