Rsis Imagined Across Difference: Some Possibilities for the Study of Conceptual Metaphor in Early India

Abstract

What do metaphor, simile, and analogy look like before the explicit tradition of Sanskrit poetics? How such formulations might be understood in the midst of the multiple contexts of early India, and how they might be relevant to a larger field of hermeneutics? The study of metaphor has been a staple of the broader pursuit of hermeneutics for some time now (see Dilthey and Jameson 1972; Ricoeur 1974, 1975; Calinescu 1979; Johnson Sheehan 1999, just to name a few works dealing with this topic). If Gadamer (1975: p. 430) is right that a fusion of horizons between text and interpreter is one of the primary acts of interpretation, then metaphors can be viewed as vehicles for that fusion, as well as verbal constructions that move between different points of view within the text that keep both similarity and difference in play.1 Thus, the roles of metaphor in early Indian texts, and the related topics of simile, analogy, and semantic extension, are highly relevant to larger issues in cross-cultural interpretation as well as to critical studies in Hinduism. This piece will be a general call for further study of such comparative constructions in the light of new theories of metaphor that have emerged in recent decades. Early Indian environments provide great possibilities for doing the work that metaphor, simile, and analogy do best – that is, reaching across difference. While my hope is that these thoughts will spark some new possibilities in many areas, I will use a specific case study from the Buddhacarita as my example – it being a virtuosic text of early kāvya which moves across the difference of Brahmanical and Buddhist realms, but is unadorned by the philosophical notions of later Sanskrit aesthetics.

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