ABSTRACT
This case study examines the persuasive strategy implicit in elephant similes and associated constellations of imagery throughout Aśvaghoṣa’s Saundarananda. Taking the “Blind Men and the Elephant” as a cautionary tale, and following Sutton and Mifsud in regarding turning down others as a (literal) “catastrophe,” this chapter crafts a theoretical framework by threading together tightly the approaches that four significant studies took to examining overlapping passages. Building in particular upon the catalogs of Roshni Rustomji, complementing the close-readings of Sonam Kachru, and keeping in mind Burke’s “rhetoric of form,” this chapter will use alaṃkāraśāstra, “the study of ornaments,” to track more closely the rhetorical roles that stylistic figures play in Aśvaghoṣa’s poetic justifications.
In the Saundarananda, newlywed Nanda abandons his spouse, Sundarī, in favor of following Buddha; the present chapter focuses on the roles of lāṭānuprāsa (roughly, “polyptoton”) and upamā (roughly, “simile”) in prefiguring the pair’s split. Discussions of lāṭānuprāsa distinguish whether repeated word stems appear bound in a compound (samāse) or free to inflect (asamāse). Discussions of upamā pay close attention to whether the (grammatical) number of the object of comparison matches that of the subject of comparison. Transitions between free and bound forms and mismatches of gender and number in similes highlight the differing bases of these spouses’ bonds to each other - differences which ultimately become irreconcilable.
