Prospects of intertextual relations between Aśvaghoṣa’s Buddhacarita and Saundarananda rhetorical-stylistic forms and epic sources

Aśvaghoṣa (1st-2nd century CE) is the earliest known author of Indian poetry (kāvya) and a major contributor to the Brahmanical and Buddhist cultural and literary heritage. Nevertheless, we still do not have a clear picture of the sources that may have primarily influenced the composition of his works - namely the two court epic poems (Mahākāvya) Saundarananda 'Handsome Nanda' and Buddhacarita 'Acts of the Buddha' - and even less certain are the ways in which Aśvaghoṣa may have interacted with the epics, viz. e. the Mahābhārata 'The Great Bhārata' and the Rāmāyaṇa 'Rāma's Path'. Although the contribution of epic sources to his works has often been debated in the field of cultural-historical reconstruction studies, it has never been approached from a strictly philological-textual perspective. The present study provides a comparison of one hundred stanzas of Aśvaghoṣa's poems and the epic sources to demonstrate that an intertextual philological relationship between them is indisputable. The chosen methodological approach focuses on cross-referencing the main rhetorical and stylistic forms in the epic sources, the so-called alaṃkāras 'ornaments' used in the Mahākāvyas - i.e. the simile (upamā) and the metaphor (rūpaka). It analyses the logical structure of the ornaments that make the poems and epics similar, namely the relationship between the subject of comparison (upameya), the object of comparison (upamāna) and the common property (sādhāraṇadharma). This could help to determine the role that the two epics played in influencing the compositional process of Aśvaghoṣa, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Furthermore, the analysis of cross-references can lead to the identification of the sections from which Aśvaghoṣa may have borrowed. By presenting the most striking case of intertextuality, centred on the ornaments mentioned above, the proposed approach examines the ways in which Aśvaghoṣa seems to rework, adapt and manipulate the epic model from a diachronic perspective. The underlying aim is to shed light on the general framework of the dynamics surrounding the genesis of the Mahākāvya genre itself, which is so intertwined with the epic (Itihāsa).