Ancient Indian chronotope in Pali and Sanskrit sources

Abstract

The author analyses the chronotope problem in the Ancient Indian texts written in Sanskrit (“Manu-Smriti”, “Arthashastra”, “Ramayana”, “Brihadaranyaka-Upanishad”) and Pali (“Simavisodhani”) languages. The “chronotope” is a category introduced by the Soviet scholar Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975). This category describes how configurations of time and space are represented in language and discourse. In particular, the author analyses the problem of the ideas of space regarding the “country” and “Kingdom” categories. The research has yielded two main results. In the first instance, the so-called “sacred space” in the ancient Indian texts is always represented in form of a square (or rectangle). It is similar to what is called a Vastu-mandala in the Vastu-Vidya, the traditional science of building and construction. In the second instance, thе so-called “sacred space” in the ancient Indian texts written in Sanskrit and Pali is associated with a set of heterogeneous phenomena: space, socium, time, etc. In a similar passage taken from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad the author discovers a remarkable phenomenon. In describing the spatial reality, the number of times where one refers to the category of “time” is higher than that, which refers to the spatial category. This fact invites a conclusion: in ancient Indian culture, the categories of space and time are inseparable and always go together. Therefore, the ancient Indian culture definitively included a category of the chronotope. As a result of this discovery one should not any longer take into consideration the common topic of the “ atemporal” character of the ancient Indian culture.