ABSTRACT
In the ninth century in southwest India, the Digambara Jain-poet Jinasena wrote a Sanskrit poem entitled the Ascent of Parshva (Pārśvābhyudaya; 840 ce) based on the biography of the twenty-third Jina Parshvanatha. Through a poetic device called samasyāpūrti (stanza completion), Jinasena incorporated the entirety of Kalidasa’s Cloud line-by-line into his new composition—the first Sanskrit poem to incorporate another poem entirely in this way. To wed together these two narratives, he improvised with the standard biography of Parshva by focusing on the last incarnation of a cluster of transmigrating souls that culminates in his liberation.
At the center of this cluster are two souls incarnated as Parshva and Shambara, previously born as the brothers who fell out over a woman and continue their fraternal strife. Kalidasa’s Cloud Messenger is radically recast as a phantasm in which Shambara attempts to lure Parshva into battle to kill him with the possibility that, upon his death, he will be reborn as a cloud sent to see his former love. Jinasena transforms Kalidasa’s poem about love-in-separation into one about hate, its proximity to love, and its affective resolution in religious devotion. The device of the samasyāpūrti and Jinasena’s novel interpretation of the Cloud produce a poetic slipperiness that allows the characters and their karmically enduring affects to blur and transform, ultimately revealing the spiritual efficacy of hate.
