Before Literature: Poeisis in the Poems of the First Buddhist Women and Men

In his The Language of the Gods in the World of Men (2006), Sheldon Pollock argues that Buddhists played a key role in the “the astonishing expansion of the discursive realm of Sanskrit in the century or two around the beginning off the Common Era” (75). This is not only a historical issue. Pollock begins his exploration of this expansion self-consciously by saying, “To speak of beginnings, especially literary beginnings, is to raise a host of conceptual problems” (75). This paper explores how we see important literary beginnings in the Therīgāthā and the Theragāthā, collections of poems of the first Buddhist women and men, and how we can see in them traces of the protean emergence of Literature as a cultural form of poeisis in South Asia.  This conceptual exploration focusing on Pali texts suggests that the historical problem of the beginnings of Literature in India is ripe for reconsideration.