A Lasting Vision Dandin's Mirror in the World of Asian Letters

A Lasting Vision is dedicated to the Mirror of Literature (Kavyadarsa), a Sanskrit treatise on poetics composed by Dandin in south India (c. 700 CE), and to the treatise's remarkable career throughout large parts of Asia. The Mirror was adapted and translated into several languages spoken on the southern Indian peninsula (Kannada, Tamil) and on the Island of Sri Lanka (Sinhala, Pali), as well as in the Tibetan plateau far to the north (Tibetan, Mongolian). In all these receiving cultures it became a classical text and a source of constant engagement and innovation, often well into the modern era. It also travelled to Burma and Thailand, where it held a place of honor in Buddhist monastic education and intellectual life, and likely to the islands of Java and Bali, where it contributed to the production of literature in Old Javanese. There is even reason to believe that it reached China and impacted Chinese literary culture, although far more peripherally than in other parts of Asia. It also maintained a prominent position in Sanskrit learned discourses throughout the Indian subcontinent for at least a millennium.

This multi-authored volume, organized by region and language, is the first attempt to chart and explain the Mirror's amazing transregional and multilingual success: what was so unique about this work that might explain its near-continental conquest, how was it transmitted to and received in these different environments, and what happened to it whenever it was being adopted and adapted.

Yigal Bronner is a Sanskritist whose areas of interest include literature, literary theory, and South Asian intellectual history more generally. He teaches in the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Dandin's Magic Mirror

2. “A Mirror and a Handlamp”: The Way of the Poet-King and the Afterlife of the Mirror in the World of Kannada Literature

3. “May it Always Be about Adding Beauty to Beauty”: The Story of the Mirror in Sri Lanka

4. Folding Figures: Tamil Tandi and the New Poetic Language of Ornaments

5. Sanskrit Poetics through Dandin's Looking Glass: An Alternative History

6. Mirror on Fire: An Ardent Reception in Tibet and Mongolia

7. A Faultless Science: Dandin and Dharmadasa in Burma and Bengal

8. The Mirror of the Practice: Indic Models Internalized in the Indonesian Archipelago

9. Two Mirrors, Fleeting Reflections: Traces of Sanskrit Poetics in East Asia

Contributors
Index