Karn&dotbelow;a within the net of the 'Mahabharata': Reading the itihasa as literature.

摘要

Historically, Western scholarship has used an analytical, text-critical methodology to study the Mahabharata, treating the great Sanskrit itihasa as an unwieldy mass of religious, philosophical and mythological accretions covering an ancient epic core. Indic tradition, however, has always considered the Mahabharata a unified literary work. The renowned aestheticians of the 9 th and 10th centuries, Anandavardhana and Abhinavagupta, cited the Mahabharata as a supreme example of poetic unity. Reader-response criticism provides a vocabulary in harmony with contemporary scholarship whereby the tradition from which the Mahabharata has arisen may be respected and the insights of that tradition preserved. According to reader-response criticism, the role of the reader is embedded in a text; questions as to what a work means cannot be separated from questions as to what it does and how it does it---concerns shared by the rasa theory of the Indian aestheticians. A focus on the audience and author of a narrative impacts on our understanding of history. In the Indian case, that audience and author are accessible almost exclusively as the "Implied audience" and "Implied author" articulated by reader-response theory. The history of India is its literary history. Karn&dotbelow;a is the Mahabharata's pivotal character and distinctively embodies the itihasa's concerns; the implied author signals this repeatedly through a sophisticated use of narrative strategies. Karn&dotbelow;a stands for the human experience and uniquely represents the audience who receives the Mahabharata and is constructed by it. Through Karn&dotbelow;a the Mahabharata explores its overarching themes of fate, time, and death, of salvation, of class and lineage. Through this fascinating character we may begin to appreciate how the Mahabharata constructs its vast "net."