Mind and Heart in the "Buddhacarita"
Mind and Heart in the "Buddhacarita"

Against the Backdrop of the Sanskrit Epics

Author(s): Sven Sellmer
Subject(s): Theology and Religion
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: Aśvaghoṣa; Buddhacarita; Mahābhārata; Rāmāyaṇa; Sanskrit epics; kāvya; mind; Sanskrit stylistics
Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the relation between Aśvaghoṣa’s "Buddhacarita" and the great Sanskrit epics "Mahābhārata" and "Rāmāyaṇa" by analysing expressions containing one or more of a group of nouns designating the “mind” in a wide sense: antarātman, citta, cetas, cetanā, manas, mānasa, mati, hṛd, and hṛdaya. In this respect, both continuities and differences can be observed. The most obvious changes concern those aspects of the epic psychological language that are closely related to the peculiar features of oral and oral-style poetry and consequently tend to vanish in the kāvya style. Other aspects with a more general usefulness for poets of various styles, like the existence of a quite large number of semantically close expressions in the semantic field of “mind”, are taken over from the epic language and continued.

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