From Vajrayana Tara to Bengali Baul: A Computational Study of Lexical Transmission Across Buddhist, Shakta, and Vaishnava Traditions in Bengal

2026-06-25

AI Summary

This study investigates whether esoteric Buddhist terminology was absorbed into the Bengali Śākta Tantric tradition following the decline of the Pāla dynasty’s monastic institutions and quantifies lexical transmission across religious textual corpora. By constructing a corpus of 75 Sanskrit and Bengali texts spanning the 8th to 19th centuries—encompassing Buddhist, Śākta, Vaiṣṇava, and Baul traditions—and applying character n-gram TF-IDF vectorization with cosine similarity analysis, the research offers the first computationally grounded, multi-traditional, cross-century evidence of Buddhist–Śākta lexical convergence. Key findings include a cosine similarity of 0.54 between the 12th-century *Tārāsaṃgraha* and Śākta Kālī texts (versus 0 for the *Gītagovinda*), 56 occurrences of “Tārā” in 18th-century poems by Rāmprasād, and a Buddhist–Śākta transmission strength (ratio 2.0–4.0) markedly exceeding that of Vaiṣṇava–Baul pairs (similarity 0.29), indicating path-specific lexical inheritance rather than generic devotional-literary commonality.

Abstract

We present a computational corpus study of vocabulary relationships across eight tradition layers of Bengali and Sanskrit devotional literature spanning the 8th to 19th centuries, encompassing Buddhist Vajrayana, Shakta Tantra, Vaishnava, and Baul traditions. Using a corpus of 75 texts and TF-IDF character n-gram vectorization with cosine similarity analysis, we address the historically argued but previously unquantified claim that Buddhist Vajrayana vocabulary survived the collapse of the Pala monasteries and was absorbed into the Shakta Tantra tradition of Bengal. The central finding is a specificity result: the Gitagovinda (Vaishnava Sanskrit, 12th century) has zero cosine similarity to Shakta Kali texts, while Bridge Tara texts (Buddhist-Shakta transitional, same century, same language) have cosine similarity 0.54 to Shakta Kali. This 8.5-fold contrast between two Sanskrit traditions from the same century demonstrates that the Buddhist-Shakta vocabulary overlap is not a generic property of Sanskrit devotional literature but is specific to the Buddhist-Shakta transmission chain. Three Brihannilatantra Tara texts show Shakta-to-Buddhist vocabulary ratios of 2.0 to 4.0, constituting measurable evidence of lexical transition within that chain. Ramprasad Sen's 18th-century Bengali Kali songs preserve Buddhist vocabulary residue including 56 occurrences of Tara alongside 103 occurrences of Kali. The Vaishnava Bengali tradition contributes a parallel chain to modern Baul vocabulary (similarity 0.29), slightly weaker than the Buddhist Sahajiya chain via Charyapada (0.31). These results provide the first quantitative multi-tradition corroboration of historically argued Buddhist-Shakta syncretism in Bengal.

Problem

• Vajrayana
• Shakta Tantra
• lexical transmission
• Bengali devotional literature
• Buddhist-Shakta syncretism

Innovation

• computational corpus linguistics
• lexical transmission
• Buddhist-Shakta syncretism
• TF-IDF n-gram vectorization
• cosine similarity analysis