Did poetical language and Buddhism co-create each other around the turn of the Common Era in South Asia? If so, how? And what are the implications for the beginnings of Indic literature and for the development of Buddhist, Vedic, Jain, and other literary and religious traditions of Asia? Our seminar hosts four research presentations on sources from early to early medieval South Asia, bringing them into conversation with each other through formal responses and general discussion. In this first session, Stephanie Jamison and Charles Hallisey examine the Rig Veda, Therīgāthā, Theragāthā, and other texts to revisit the historical problem of the beginnings of Indic literature and the role of Buddhist sources in contributing to forms of poiesis. Laurie Patton's and Thomas Mazanec's responses will broadly contextualize their presentations and raise questions in light of major scholarly paradigms concerning the history and development of Indic and Chinese literature.
In this paper, building on earlier work of my own, I will argue that the art poetry that dominated Classical Sanskrit literary culture, kāvya, has as its stylistic source the elaborate and self-conscious style of the earliest Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda. Despite the large chronological gap between the Rig Veda and Classical kāvya, and the apparent absence of this genre in Sanskrit in the intervening centuries, a missing link can be identified in the discourses of power in Middle Indic languages and in early Buddhist literary works. Both the similarities in poetic devices and the shaping of subject matter will be addressed, with ample examples.
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.