Consanguineous Marriage in Pali Literature

Abstract

Instances of cross-cousin marriage in Pali literature are found only in the post-canonical stratum and are unsupported or in some cases contradicted by non-Pali versions of the same stories. They reflect, therefore, the kinship practices of early Ceylon, not North India. Eighteen cases of cross-cousin marriage among Ceylonese kings are almost equally divided between the patrilateral (father's sister's daughter) and matrilateral (mother's brother's daughter) varieties, showing that the rule was bilateral. Both cross-cousin and parallel-kin (agnatic) marriages were entered into by the kings of Ceylon to insure purity of descent and the internal harmony of the large, essentially endogamous royal family.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 9 citations exist upstream.