On November 29-30, 2010, the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted regular Roerich readings dedicated to Sanskrit studies, Tibetology and other areas of Yu. N. Roerich's scientific activity. They were opened by the deputy. Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences V. M. Alpatov.

The first report "Traditions of religious tolerance and universalism in Ancient and medieval India" was delivered by E. N. Komarov (Institute of Religious Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences). He defined the concepts of "religious tolerance" and "religious universalism", the differences and connections between them, as well as their social background and historical significance. Based on information from ancient and medieval sources, the speaker showed the exclusivity of India: here the preaching of religious tolerance and universalism was observed not only in protestant reformist creeds, but also at the highest state level (Ashoka, Akbar and Abu l Fazl). In his opinion, such traditions of interreligious relations have played a role in the establishment of secularism as a constitutional principle in modern India.

K. P. Shrestha (IB RAS) in the report " Nepal: from confessional compromise to secularism (some touches of the history of spiritual culture)" told about the history of relations between the main religions of Nepal from ancient times to the present day. According to the speaker, although there were some contradictions here, but over the centuries-old history of the country, it was possible to avoid acute conflicts and, moreover, religious wars. This is evidenced by some examples of confessional compromises (between Shaivites and Vishnuites, between Shaivites and followers of the Shakti cult, between Hindus and Buddhists).-

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In modern Nepal, these traditions continue: since 1990, after the restoration of democracy, the law on freedom of conscience has been in force, and since April 2006, Nepal has been declared a secular state. The speaker expressed the hope that secularism will become the basis of politics in multi-confessional Nepal, which will be fixed in the new constitution of the country.

D. N. Lelyukhin's report "The place and significance of chronology and genealogy in Sanskrit texts"was the result of working with Vamshavali Sanskrit sources ("collections of genealogies"), not only Nepalese, but also some others. The speaker entered into a polemic both with the local Nepalese historiography, which uncritically reproduces the information of such texts, and with a number of European researchers who deny any value of such sources. In his opinion, the fantastic dating given in these sources cannot be a reason for general distrust of the text. When working with such texts, the speaker urged to take into account the peculiarities of the culture of the Indian subcontinent. He showed that there is no "absolute chronology" in the Vamshavali texts, which, as is known, was not developed within the framework of classical Indian civilization due to the fact that different regions lived according to their "local", traditional time. To assess the degree of reliability of a particular piece of evidence, the speaker called for using information from other sources.

In the report " What did the people of Dasyu teach? (based on the materials of early Vedic texts)" V. V. Vertogradova (IV RAS) touched upon some lexical and semantic issues of early Vedic texts ("Rig Veda" and "Atharvaveda"), in particular about Vedic synonyms and the possibility of identifying differences between them, as well as about the" competence " of the compiler of the hymn/plot and its adept (V. V. Vertogradova analyzed a number of terms: dāsá/dásyn, vratá/avratá, tvac, etc. And on this basis, I considered an alternative to the world of traditional Vedic conceptual values.

In her report "Chinese translation of the Lalitavistara as a source on the history of the text", N. V. Alexandrova (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences) spoke about two translations of the Lalitavistara preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon: the translation of the monk Fa-hu (IV c.) and the translation of the Divakara (VII c.). There are differences between these versions of the text: N. V. Aleksandrova came to the conclusion that lists and verses are the most subject to changes in the sources, which indicates the great mobility of this part of the text, which was used in the oral tradition. Of particular interest is the version of the legend that differs from the Sanskrit version. A vivid example is the transmission of one of the central plots of the Buddhist tradition-the description of events on the eve of the Buddha's enlightenment. A comparison of the text and pictorial material (the stupa at Amaravati) shows that the images are close to the early Chinese version.

The report of A. A. Vigasin (MSU ISAA) "Several Indian words in the transmission of ancient authors" was devoted to the identification of Indian toponyms and ethnonyms. In particular, the speaker came to the conclusion that Pliny the Elder's Suari and Monaedae correspond to the Cholas and Punnadus, that is, the regions of the Coromandel and Malabar coasts of the extreme south of Hindustan. The mention of Punnadu in ancient authors is due to the fact that beryl was exported from these places (Coimbatore region).

In the report of S. V. Kullanda (IB RAS) " Scythian words in the Avesta?" Avestan lexemes that demonstrate phonetic development different from Avestan proper (where-θ - and-s - go back to Indo-Iranian, etc.) were considered. The speaker noted that among the attested ancient Iranian languages, the development of > θ is typical for Old Persian and Scythian, but, as S. Vikander noted, the studied words are more likely associated with steppe cultures, i.e. with native Scythian (or closely related to Scythian) not with Persia.

Report of S. Ch. Ofertas (IB RAS) " Who says? Interpretation of the source of speech in some Hindu tantras " was devoted to the concept of "speech "(vach) in ancient Indian systems of thought. The speaker drew attention to the fact that in the threefold description of the "human composition" - body-speech-mind (cetovākkāyam), each of the three members (including speech) appears as a certain irreducible whole. As an example of this approach, he cited a passage from the Buddhist " Sutra requested from the king of the Kinnaras "("Kinnararajaparipricchasutra"), where in response to the question: "Where do sounds come from?" "the King of the Kinnars states that all the

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sounds consist of space, they arise from it and return to it, being "neither consciousness nor an object open to consciousness." This view differs from the modern semiotic view of language as a kind of veil that does not say anything about the external world - a kind of "revealing veil" on which talking drawings draw what is happening in the world of things.

In her report "On the symbolism of Mount Meru" N. R. Lidova (IMLI RAS) showed that the cosmography of Mount Meru reproduces in detail the scheme of the sacred space of the early puja rituals, which became widespread in ancient Indian society in the middle of the 1st millennium BC and became a kind of alternative to the Vedic soma-yajna rituals. Like Mount Meru, the sacrificial pillar in puja rituals was associated with an axis passing through the center of the universe (axis mundi) and was the image of the world tree (arbour mundi). The circle of the mandala was interpreted as a visible symbol of the boundary that separated organized space from chaos, i.e. it had the same status as the giant circle described around Mount Meru. In later, medieval puja rites, this initial scheme lost its visibility. The appearance of religious buildings, which were also similar to the cosmos and identified with Mount Meru, contributed to the erasure of the original symbolism. The cosmography of Mount Meru acquired numerous details, in which the original archetype of sacred space was barely discernible.

In her report "Designating space, measures, and numbers in treatises on construction from the Puranas", E. V. Tyulina (IB RAS) noted that a huge number of synonyms are used in the texts under study. In her opinion, in the Puranas, a square construction mandala plays a primary role in describing space, divided into small squares (64 or 81), respectively, which are located 45 guardian gods of the construction site. Their names were used to indicate the cardinal directions and various parts of the building's space. Another set of synonyms gives an anthropomorphic image of Purusha, who was also depicted in this mandala. The names of the parts of his body could also be used to describe the location and designating the structural elements of the building both horizontally and especially vertically. E. V. Tyulina drew attention to the fact that the names of gods and the names of body parts are also present in the designations of various numbers and measures, which undoubtedly reflects the ideas about space.

V. G. Lysenko (Institute of Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in her report "Perception and corporeality in Buddhism in modern cognitive concepts of the repressed mind" outlined a general Buddhist approach to the problem of the relationship between body and mind, as well as body, mind and the environment. She then outlined the most important principles of the early Buddhist theory of perception based on this approach, and tried to show that the idea of a "repressed, enactive, or situational mind" fits perfectly not only with the realistic concepts of Sarvastivada and Sautrantika, but also with the concept of yogacara consciousness, which is generally considered the most idealistic system of Buddhism. Yogacara turns out to be a system in which the question of what is primary and what is secondary becomes meaningless. Consciousness and the body are inextricably linked to each other, and the world of objects is formed simultaneously with the body. The psyche "informs" us about the world, "dissecting" it in its categories. The report showed that the concept of yogacara consciousness is far from the classical idealistic systems of the West, in which the only reality is the Mind and its ideas. Here the experience of consciousness is presented much more broadly, including situational, physical and psychological aspects - what we are dealing with in real experience.
A. A. Mekhakyan (Yerevan) in his report "Philosophical application of Shiksha in Kashmiri Shaivism" spoke about the creation in Indian religious and philosophical literature of a system of identifications between Sanskrit phonemes and the structure of the macro-and microcosm, which goes back to Vedic and Late Vedic literature. This tradition was continued in the Middle Ages in Kashmir by adherents of non-dual Shaivism. Phonetics (shiksha) for them was a sacred science that allows us to adequately describe the universe. Kashmiri Shaivites built entire cosmogonic and cosmological models on a phonemic basis. At the same time, linguistic units were not assigned a human, conventional origin. They had a sacred status and were considered cosmogonic principles. The speaker saw this as a continuation of the tradition of Sankhya (literally: calculating), where the number was given a central place in philosophical constructions. In Kashmiri Shaivism, sound is added to the number (speech, mantra, vibration, pulsation). Perception of the macrocosm and man (microcosm) as an energy substance and

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According to the speaker, living vibrating reality also corresponds to the ideas of modern natural science.

The report of D. I. Zhutaev (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences) "Archeology" of the Early Buddhist doctrinal text on the example of the text about Buddhakshetras from Mahavastu " was devoted to the problems of deep text generation on the example of the sixth chapter from Dashabhumika ("Ten Stages of Bodhisattva"), an insert doctrinal work from Mahavastu, a huge biography of the Buddha belonging to the Early Buddhist School of Thought. the Lokottaravadin Mahasanghika school. According to the speaker, the" archeology " of the text (the term is borrowed by the author from M. Foucault) is the area of mechanisms and factors of a very different semiotic nature, which significantly affect the final form of the text, but are not directly present in the text and can only be detected by special analysis. Among such "archaeological" factors discussed in the report are "structural prototypes" (other Buddhist texts, or fragments of them that define the structure of the text at the macrostructure level); specific fragments of Buddhist doctrine (the early Buddhist teaching about "great earthquakes", which dictates the choice and arrangement of "episodes" or "acts"in the text from the standard biography of Shakyamuni Buddha); complex formal-semantic cultural complexes (for example, the concept of Mahapurusha - "Great Man"); purely semantic phenomena (the idea of a ritually clean and" comfortable " space, reflected in the names of these buddhakshetras).
In the report "Reception of the guest of honor - atithi in the Sanskrit text tradition (according to the Apastamba Dharmasutra)" N. A. Korneeva (ISAA) reconstructed the rite of reception of the guest of honor based on the texts of the grihyasutras, Dharmashastras and other Sanskrit monuments. She noted that the concept of "atithi" does not quite coincide with our understanding of the guest and the hospitality associated with it. In Indian culture, an atithi guest is a sacred character, a wanderer, a complete stranger. By giving him an honorable reception, the householder gains religious merit. Special attention in the report was paid to changing the circle of people who could act as an atithi guest. N. A. Korneeva suggested that initially the ritual of honoring a guest was associated exclusively with an alien, perhaps even aggressive, who needed to please, or with a shrotri brahlan. In honor of the atithi guest, a sacrifice could be performed, and later the ritual of receiving the honored guest itself was considered as a sacrifice. According to the speaker, at the time of writing the dharmashastras, the ritual of receiving an honored guest was already at the stage of destruction.

In the report "The situation of the hero's departure in classical Tamil poetry", A. M. Dubyansky (ISAA) again turned to the situation of separation in ancient Tamil lyric poetry. But if earlier in his works he analyzed in detail the final phase of the situation, here he analyzed the initial one. A number of examples have shown that the presence of certain persistent motifs characteristic of it confirms the idea of its ritualism. Among them stand out: the hero's vow (a promise to return on time), touching the wife's body with his hand, the hero's hesitation before separation, comparing the heroine with the wealth that the hero must get during his campaign. The heroine, for her part, bursts into tears and lamentations at the news of the hero's departure, which can also be considered a ritual moment. When moving on to the next stage, her behavior changes, and restraint begins to dominate. The speaker drew attention to another typical moment of the situation - the hero's conversation with his heart. He noted that this method of addressing the heart goes back to the early layers of Indian literature (found, in particular, in the poetry of the Pali canon) and needs special research.

In his report "Royal concubines in Ancient India in Sanskrit and ancient sources", E. G. Vyrshchikov analyzed an excerpt from the "Arthashastra", where some women act as bodyguards of the king. He came to the conclusion that the action takes place in the inner chambers (antahpura), the abode of queens, concubines and the king himself. The picture of the " kingdom "in this passage echoes the image of the ideal kingdom in the Ramayana. Both the context (institutional proximity to the body of the sovereign) and the term for bodyguards showed that, in all likelihood, they were royal concubines. This hypothesis is fully confirmed by Strabo's report with reference to the lost "Indica" of Megasthenes. According to Megasthenes, concubines were constantly guarding the sacred person of the king. Strabo also explained how this unusual system worked. The speaker noted that in some areas of India, this system survived at least until the mid-19th century.

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N. A. Zheleznova's report "Jakh Cult in Kacha" was devoted to the local Jakh cult in the territory of Kacha (the western part of the modern state of Gujarat). The veneration of images of 73 horsemen on horses is based on the legends sung by local storytellers, about the appearance in Kacha during the reign of Jam Pamvrao (ruler of Kacha from the Rajput Samma clan) in the X century.tall, light-skinned horsemen who arrived from across the sea, their activities contributing to the death of Pamvrao and the destruction of his residence - Padhargarh. This cult is associated with the idea of the ability of Jakhs to give children to childless families and is expressed in the annual offering of a special type of sweets, a pilgrimage to temples with Jakh statuettes.

E. S. Lepekhova (IV RAS) in her report "The image of the Dakini in Japan" told about the history of the formation of the image of the female deity Dakini (or Dakini-ten) in Japanese Tantric Buddhism. She showed that in early Japanese esoteric Buddhism, under the influence of a tradition that came from China, the dakini was considered a demonic creature that eats the life spirit (seki) of living beings. However, in the 13th and 14th centuries, under the influence of the esoteric doctrine of honji-suijaku, she acquired the status of an individualized Dakini-ten deity and was firmly assimilated with the autochthonous Shinto deity Inari. She was depicted as a young woman sitting on a white fox. The report noted the peculiarities of the iconography of this image in the Japanese tradition and their origin, and also showed the role of Dakini rituals in the enthronement rituals of Japanese emperors in the XII-XIII centuries.

A. I. Kogan's report "Dards and the country of Dards in the "Rajatarangini" Kalkhans " considered poorly studied information about the northern neighbors of the Kashmiri state, appearing in the chronicle called dārada (dards). The speaker analyzed in detail the reports about dards in the text of the monument and, based on some linguistic facts, came to a number of important conclusions. The "Land of the Dards" was most likely located directly to the northeast of Lake Woolar, i.e. to the south of the areas where earlier researchers (in particular, A. Stein) tried to place it. This area was apparently very small in area, and its inhabitants were much smaller than Kashmiris and weaker militarily. For this reason, the Darda military campaigns against the Kashmiri kings were always conducted in alliance with some more powerful political forces - either with rebellious elements in Kashmir itself, or with neighboring Muslim rulers. In general, the relations between the Dards and Kashmir were not limited to raids. Very often they were peaceful and even friendly.

In the report "Reflection of the "friend-foe" opposition in traditional ideas about land use of nomads of Central Asia" Yu. I. Drobyshev (Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) noted that the binary "friend-foe" opposition was of great importance in the traditional culture of nomadic peoples of Central Asia, including in their attitude to natural resources. "Own" land was regarded as sacred, located in the center of the universe. The good power of the Eternal Sky was poured out on it, and harmony in the relationships between people, spirits and nature was maximally manifested here. She deserved to be treated with the utmost care. The" foreign " land, not enjoying the mercy of Heaven, was deprived of divine protection and often became a victim of merciless plunder. There are plenty of examples of the nomads ' completely ruthless and consumerist attitude towards foreign lands inhabited by farmers. The well-known idea of the Mongol military leaders about turning Chinese arable land into pasture, obviously, arose precisely from the desire to make " foreign "lands similar to"their own". This was intended to create a similar ecological environment to that to which nomads were historically adapted. However, long before the Mongols, this practice was followed by the Xiongnu, who created their own states in the north of China in the IV-V centuries.

V. V. Tishin (Vl.GU) devoted his report "Kazaklyk as a social phenomenon" to the formation in the IV century in Central Asia of a powerful nomadic political association, known in the sources as zhou-zhan. According to S. G. Klyashtorny, this term meant "a certain group of steppe freemen, headed by a leader who broke away from his kind." The speaker, relying on historiography, spoke about the etymology of this and other terms meaning "people of a free state" or the way of life of a free person (Cossack, kazaklyk, batyr). He came to the conclusion that in nomadic societies there was a special social category of people who were outside the system of tribal relations and created a kind of marginal paramilitary associations. Such militant groups represent a new type, a form of social organization that went beyond the traditional shell of tribal institutions.

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E. D. Ogneva (Lutsk, Ukraine) in her report "Compositional features of the namtar "12 Acts of Buddha Shakyamuni" in the Tibetan tradition (tanks from the life series of museums of Ukraine)" reviewed the traditions of painting cycles depicting the life of Buddha Shakyamuni. Their literary prototypes are such texts as "Lalitavistara", "Buddhacharita", "Mahavastu", etc. The first and main one is a cycle consisting of four main events: Birth, Awakening, Preaching and Mahaparinirvana. To these are added four more episodes from the life of the Buddha - four miracles performed by him. Thus, the cycle "Eight great events from the life of the Buddha" is formed. These and other events are depicted on the tanks, which are part of a more detailed cycle known as the "Twelve Acts of Shakyamuni Buddha", reproducing his life. E. D. Ogneva spoke in detail about two tanks from the Bohdan and Varvara Khanenko Museum of Art (Kiev Museum of Western and Eastern Art), which can be attributed to the series "The Twelve Acts of Shakyamuni Buddha".

In the report "Sattriya: the experience of creating classical dance in modern Assam" S. I. Ryzhakova (IEA RAS) spoke about sattriya dance, which is emerging in Assam as a classical style. It is associated with both the cult of Krishna and the local tradition of peculiar "monasteries" (sattra) introduced by Sri Sankardev and developed by his disciples, especially Madhavdev. S. I. Ryzhakova studied the gender aspect of sattriya (previously, only men were dancers, but it gained popularity with the arrival of women). In her opinion, the style of the dance speaks of its certain proximity to Odissi.

In the report "The problem of dreaming and' erroneous actions 'in the Nataka Bhasa' Svapnava-savadatta ' "E. A. Yuditskaya (MSU), based on the study of Sanskrit drama and based on the idea of dreaming as a semiotic phenomenon, tried to identify the genre originality of the interpretation of dreams in drama. It was shown that in contrast to the literature of the Upanishads, where the dream is a philosophical concept, or from treatises of the scientific type, which systematically organize knowledge about the phenomenon of sleep, fiction considers the dream as a universal plot that embodies the ideological idea of the work. Using the example of nataka "Swapnavasavadatta", she showed that addressing the problems of the unconscious in the play is a deliberate phenomenon on the part of the author, that it is a compositional technique that meets the requirements of the kavya style. Magic, masquerade, visual arts, theater within the theater, and erroneous actions (which Freud wrote about) appear here as key means of expression.

In his report "Towards understanding the term buddha in the Southern Buddhist tradition", G. V. Sharygin (Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences) reviewed the term buddha in Pali texts and proposed a new interpretation. The term buddha is not used in the Pali texts of early Buddhism as the name of the founder of the teaching, which is now called the Buddha. The fact that the scientific dictionaries of Pali interpret this term in this way, the speaker considers a reflection of modern Western perception, when the name of the teaching is associated with the name of its founder ("Christianity", "Mohammedanism"). The speaker reviewed the terms anubuddha ("aware after") and buddhānubuddha ("aware after the realized"), which refer to the Buddha's disciples, and the contexts in which they are used. The latter term shows that the" enlightenments " of the ascetic Gotama and his followers were perceived as identical. This explains the fact that in the canon of early Buddhism, the term buddhavacana ("Word of the Buddha"," Utterances of the Buddha") refers to many texts describing the instructions and conversations of enlightened disciples of the Buddha, in which he himself is not present at all.

I. N. Komarova (Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences) in her report "Yuri Roerich-researcher of the Tibetan language" described the scientist's contribution to the study of the Tibetan language. She particularly noted the work " Textbook of Colloquial Tibet (Dialect of Central Tibet) (Calcutta, 1957)", the essay "The Tibetan Language" (Moscow, 1961) and the fundamental "Tibetan-Russian-English dictionary with Sanskrit parallels" (Moscow, 1963 - 1993).

A number of reports were made on the basis of archival materials and devoted to the history of Russian Oriental studies. Ya. V. Vasilkov (MAE RAS) made a report "New things about Gerasim Lebedev" and presented new information about the life of this remarkable man - a pioneer of Russian Indology. In particular, he spoke about his peculiar perception of Hinduism.

On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the Roerich Pact (on the Preservation of Cultural Values in the Event of War), A. N. Khokhlov (Institute of History of the Russian Academy of Sciences) presented to the conference participants the report "The Roerichs in Inner Mongolia in 1935", dedicated to N. K. Roerich's expedition to Inner Mongolia in 1935. -

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ancient Mongolia. The main goal of this expedition was to collect seeds and herbariums of drought-resistant steppe crops (for their subsequent distribution in the United States). The speaker introduced the participants to archival documents that have never been used by other researchers. He cited evidence of close contact between Nicholas Roerich and his eldest son Yuri Roerich with Chinese botanists, as a result of which one of the new species of local plants was named after Nicholas Roerich. The second part of the speech was devoted to the correspondence of Nicholas Roerich in the 1940s with the teacher of the Russian language in Beijing, the author of the Chinese-Russian dictionary Liu Zejing, who served during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945 in the Embassy of the Republic of China in Moscow and in Kuibyshev. The excerpts from the letters given by the speaker speak of Nicholas Roerich's deep faith in Russia's victory over Nazi Germany and Japanese militarism.

A. M. Shustova's report "Yu. N. Roerich: a Monograph on Tibetan Painting", based on archival materials and memoirs of members of the Roerich family, was devoted to the history of the creation of this book, which was published in Paris in 1925. A. M. Shustova noted the peculiarities of Yu. N. Roerich's approach to the study of Tibetan painting, and also about the collection of tanks collected by the Roerichs during their expeditions.

The organizers of the readings in connection with the 50th anniversary of the death of Yu. N.Roerich (May 21, 1960) proposed publishing a collection of articles by their regular participants.

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