Abstract
At the end of their life, after transferring the kingdom to their grown-up sons, several kings of the Sūryavaṃśa chose to retire from the world and devoted their last years to asceticism and meditation. The verses of the Raghuvaṃśa describing these kings show considerable variation mainly along the lines of which āśrama (stage of life) the king enters at the end of his life. In many cases the commentators discuss these variants and argue pro and contra the availability of saṃnyāsa for people of royal status, thus participating in a larger mediaeval debate observable in texts on dharmaśāstra. This paper takes into consideration former studies on the subject by Tsuchida, Olivelle and Goodall, and most importantly discusses both published and unpublished commentaries on the Raghuvaṃśa, examining what authorities they quote to give support to their views on this dharmaśāstric issue, as well as the efforts they make to present the Raghuvaṃśa as being both internally consistent and in harmony with the teachings on dharma they consider valid.
Funding source: European Research Council
Award Identifier / Grant number: 609823
Acknowledgments
I thank Harunaga Isaacson for his valuable comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer for his/her observations and suggestions. All remaining shortcomings and errors are mine.
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Research funding: The research of this article has been made possible by financial support from the European Research Council synergy project “Beyond Boundaries: Religion, Region, Language and the State”, grant agreement no. 609823.
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© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Gracefully twisting the neck: literary commentaries as a (meta)genre of scholarly discourse
- Vṛddhekṣvākuvratam. The commentators’ interpretations of the passages describing the renunciation of kings in the Raghuvaṃśa
- Jonarāja as commentator: specialized literature, philological effort, and poetic interpretation
- The application of Mīmāṁsā interpretive concepts in commentaries on plays
- Plumbing the depths: reading Bhavabhūti in seventeenth-century Kerala
- The literary commentary in Sanskrit as metalinguistic communication
- Rezensionen – Comptes Rendus – Book Reviews
- François Lachaud et Martin Nogueira Ramos: D’un empire l’autre. Premières rencontres entre la France et le Japon au XIX e siècle
- Shi, Lihong: Choosing Daughters: Family Change in Rural China
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Gracefully twisting the neck: literary commentaries as a (meta)genre of scholarly discourse
- Vṛddhekṣvākuvratam. The commentators’ interpretations of the passages describing the renunciation of kings in the Raghuvaṃśa
- Jonarāja as commentator: specialized literature, philological effort, and poetic interpretation
- The application of Mīmāṁsā interpretive concepts in commentaries on plays
- Plumbing the depths: reading Bhavabhūti in seventeenth-century Kerala
- The literary commentary in Sanskrit as metalinguistic communication
- Rezensionen – Comptes Rendus – Book Reviews
- François Lachaud et Martin Nogueira Ramos: D’un empire l’autre. Premières rencontres entre la France et le Japon au XIX e siècle
- Shi, Lihong: Choosing Daughters: Family Change in Rural China