Our Moon Has Blood Clots: A Memoir of a Lost Home in Kashmir

by Rahul Pandita

The eleventh century Pandit poet Bilhana had a secret affair with a king’s daughter. When it was discovered, he was thrown into prison and ordered to be executed by beheading. Even while facing the prospect of execution, he wrote poetry. It was in the darkness of prison that he wrote his Chaurapanchasika (The Collection of Fifty Verses by a Love Thief). Many centuries earlier, Kashmiri scholars made immense contributions to Buddhism, which came to Kashmir with the emperor Asoka who extended his rule over Kashmir around 250 BC. It was in Kashmir that Buddhist scriptures were written in Sanskrit for the first time. The revered monk Gunavarman, who belonged to a royal family of Kashmir from the fifth century AD, refused the throne when it was offered to him upon the king’s death as he had no interest in wordly matters, wishing only to spread the teachings of the Buddha. He travelled to Ceylon, Java and China as well, propagating Buddhism. It was Kumarajiva, a Buddhist monk, whose father was a Kashmiri Pandit, who translated the Buddhist Lotus Sutra into Chinese in 406 AD. Guru Padmasambhava, or Rinpoche, who is also referred to as the Second Buddha, spent time in Kashmir, drinking from its knowledge reservoir. A Pandit scholar, Ratnavaja, was assigned the task of rebuilding the circular terrace of the Bsam-yas monastery in central Tibet, which was burnt down in the later part of the tenth century. In the early eleventh century, a female Pandit scholar called Lakshmi travelled...