Is Vatsa attested as one of the Mahajanapadas? (Chinese help appreciated!)

Q & A
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I’ve been trying to chase down the name of one of the Mahajanapadas. Per my post here I think we should use Vaccha/Vatsa rather than Vamsa (or Vanga).

But I’m a bit uneasy as i can’t find any Pali readings to support Vaccha. So I’m wondering what we have in the non-Pali texts. I haven’t been able to locate a list of the Mahajanapadas in Sanskrit, but if anyone knows one that would be great. The Sanskrit texts on SC, so far as I can tells, just mention the “sixteen Mahajapadas” without naming them.

In a text called Mahāsāhasrapramardanī, Pañcarakṣā I on Gretil, about which I know nothing, I found the following list, which has fourteen Mahājanapadas associated with their local yakkhas. This partially overlaps with the Pali.

  1. puṣpeṣu
  2. magadheṣu
  3. bharukaccheṣu
  4. kośaleṣu
  5. madreṣu
  6. malleṣu
  7. pāñcāle
  8. aśvaje
  9. avanteṣu
  10. vaidiśe
  11. matseṣu
  12. sūrateṣu
  13. gāndhāre
  14. kambuṣu

Unfortunately it omits the Vamsa/Vatsas so isn’t much help.

I did come across one in Chinese, and as you can imagine it is lots of fun trying to figure out the identifications.

https://suttacentral.net/t88/lzh/taisho

Most of the names are not in DDB. As a reminder, the Pali list is: Aṅga, Magadha, Kāsī, Kosala, Vajjī, Malla, Ceti, Vaccha, Kuru, Pañcāla, Maccha, Sūrusena, Assaka, Avanti, Gandhāra, and Kamboja.

Here’s what I managed to come up with.

  1. 鴦迦 = anga
  2. 摩竭 = magadha
  3. 迦夷 = kasi?
  4. 拘薛羅 = kosala
  5. 鳩溜 = kuru
  6. 般闍荼 = pañcāla
  7. 阿波耶 = asmaka
  8. 阿洹提渝 = avanti
  9. 脂提渝 = kit-tci-lo = gandhara?
  10. 越祇渝 = wat-ge-lo = vajji?
  11. 速摩 = sok-ma ???
  12. 速賴吒 = sok-la-sa = surasena?
  13. 越蹉 = wa-sha = vatsa?
  14. 末羅 = malla
  15. 渝匿 = yona (? ddb)
  16. 劍善提 = kamboja?

Perhaps this supports a reading of vatsa, but it seems so uncertain. I’m wondering if there are any other texts or readings that might shed light on this?

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The lists of countries aren’t always the same. I.e., they have different names, not just in different orders. Makes decoding transliterated Chinese “fun” (in the Dwarf Fortress sense of fun).

越蹉 would be hwat-ts’a. The Middle Chinese would approximate a “w.”

In DA 4, the transliteration is “bwat-ts’a” (= Vatsa).

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Okay, thanks, well that shows we do have some root texts that had the form Vatsa, which makes me feel more comfortable about choosing that name.

One of the reasons I thought that variant sounded plausible was because I asked, “where are these people”? If this is a major nation within the Buddha’s orbit, surely we should know something of them. And of course, there are many “vacchas” in Pali: Vacchagotta being the best known. I think they’re from Vatsa/Vaccha/Vamsa, whose name is that of a brahmanical gotra vatsa.

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Yeah. I can’t find an attestation of the country in Gandhari, but cow is “vatsa” in the fragments that’ve been found, so that must’ve been the case for the country, too. Sometimes Gandhari sounds like Sanskrit, like here, though just as often it’s closer to Pali (e.g. Lohicca, instead of S. Lohitya). And then it also goes off on its own tangent, not having long vowels, turning “j” into “y”, not pronouncing “k”, etc.

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There is a list of the Mahajanapadas in Sanskrit in the Abhisamācārikā Dharmāḥ, a portion of the Vinaya Piṭaka from the Lokottaravāda.

Aṅga-Magadha-Mallī-Varji-Kāśi-Kośala-Kuru-Pañcāla-Ceti-Vatsa-Matsya-Śūrasena-Śibi-Daśārṇa-Aśvaki-Avanti

Two countries, Śibi/Śivi and Daśārṇa, are not include in the Pāli Piṭaka. Gandhāra and Kamboja are replaced in the Sanskrit materials from the Lokottaravāda.

In the Abhiniṣkramaṇasūtra (佛本行集經), a passage that mentions “彼跋蹉國拘睒彌城,” where Kosambī (拘睒彌) is identified as the capital of 跋蹉. Since Kosambī is the capital of Vatsa, “跋蹉 (in MA 202)/越蹉” is indeed “Vatsa”.

As for other countries, the matches between the Chinese names and their corresponding original Indian names can be seen in the appendices of source materials on the life of Buddha conducted by the Chuo Academic Research Institute of Japan.

I think most of the matches in the appendices are correct, but a few are uncertain. Additionally, I believe 速摩/蘇摩 is Suhma (according to Kogen Mizuno) or Sumbha (according to the term “sumbhakapatta” or “sumbhakaṃ ca pātraṃ”, which translates into the term 蘇摩缽).

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Pali has a tendency to sometimes phonetically simplify a consonant-cluster by replacing one of the consonants in the cluster with ṃ (this transformation is I think borrowed from Aśokan edicts where the same is sometimes done)

So you can see the Aśokan edicts write Dharma as Dhaṃma (not Dhamma as in Pāli but Dhaṃma where the ṃ stands for an original non ‘m’ sound, in this case an ‘r’).

So in the case of the janapada name Vatsa (which literally means “the Vatsa peoples”) the original ‘t’ has become an ṃ so we have Pāli attestations as Vaṃsa (or even Vamsa where the ṃ is further processed into m).

Vaccha is yet another approach used in Pāli to simplify Vatsa (‘ts’ > ‘cch’ sounds closer phonetically than ‘ts’ > ‘ṃs’). This change is attested in other Pāli words, for example tikicchā or cikicchā (from Sanskrit. cikitsā).

Vatsa as the name of a janapada is almost always found attested as such in sanskrit texts (never as vaṃsa).

Vaṅga (the sanskrit name of a janapada usually related to the modern region of Vaṅgāla “Bengal”) although I think they merely share the name but were originally not the same regions. Originally Magadha and Vaṅga were western states (west of Avanti janapada, whose capital was Ujjayinī)

Vatsa (as a common noun) simply means “young one”, so go-vatsa would mean calf of a cow (go is cow).

If the surrounding context is otherwise clear, vatsa can be used as a single word to mean whichever animal’s young one it is referring to - but if there is no context, vatsa wouldnt normally mean ‘cow’.

It is normal in Sanskrit for grown ups to call children ‘vatsa’ (“child”) - also used in the same sense in modern Indo-Aryan languages like Hindi. Derivative words in Sanskrit (and other Indo-Aryan languages) are vatsala and vātsalya (affection towards one’s offspring).

A third vatsa (besides the name of the country, and as a common noun meaning “child”) is the name of a Brahmanical gotra (family name of a clan). Someone from that clan would be called a Vātsa. In Pāli this would again become vaccha (as pali normally makes the vowel before a consonant cluster short), but in order to disambiguate it from the other 2 vacchas, this gotra name is normally called in Pāli vaccha-gotta (= Sansktit ‘vātsa-gotra’).

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Thanks for the help!

Oh, great to have the Sanskrit, or at least “a” Sanskrit version.

I didn’t know this, that makes Vaṁsa/Vatsa make sense.

Just to be clear, am I right to understand that the clan and the country are different? That is, the country named Vatsa does not mean the country named after a person of the Vatsa clan?

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There are some spelling mistakes here.

Mallī should be Malla
Varji should be Vṛji
Kośala should be Kosala
Aśvaki should be Aśmaka

Yes it looks like they were different, but I don’t know conclusively.