Beauty and Words Relating to Beauty in the Ramayana, the Kavyas of Asvaghosa, and Kalidasa's Kumarasambhava

Abstract

This paper examines particular words for beauty in four Sanskrit poems (Vālmīki' sR āmāyaṇa, Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita and Saundarananda, Kālidāsa's Kumārasaṃbhava) and discusses the changing role of beauty in Sanskrit poetry. Building on Ingalls' study of words relating to beauty in the Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa, it is shown that beauty becomes increasingly important and present in classical Sanskrit poetry as exemplified by the Kumārasaṃbha- va. Various words are studied in detail as they occur in the four poems. Śrī, royal beauty and success in the epics, comes to express the rule of beauty within kāvya from the time of Kālidāsa. Śubha has a moral sense prior to Kālidāsa, but this is not evident in the Kumārasaṃbhava. Clearly important is the notion of shining, where existence itself is to shine. Kāvya comes to inhabit a wonder- world, where light itself is solidified. Localised instances of beauty in Vālmīki and Aśvaghoṣa become pervasive in Kālidāsa. However, Kālidāsa's increasingly beautified world is kept from absurdity by the human touches he scatters through the Kumārasaṃbhava, most notably in the unmade bed that comes at the end of the poem. This enquiry into the vocabulary of beauty and into beauty itself was written in preparation for the translation and edition of Kālidāsa's Kumārasaṃbhava that I undertook for the Clay Sanskrit Library. 1 As part of a general survey of Kālidāsa's use of words, I here look at words relating to beauty in the Kumārasaṃbhava in con- text, and also at those words' frequency and usage in Aśvaghoṣa's two mahākāvyas, and in the Rāmāyaṇa (see fig. 1). 2 I have not taken Kālidāsa's other works into account. Other than the texts under consideration, my starting point for this paper was Ingalls' well-known essay on words for beauty in classical Sanskrit poetry (kāvya); 3 and more generally with as ever inspiration from Renou's wide-ranging essay on the structure of kāvya based on an examination of Bhāravi's Kirātārjunīya. 4 Ingalls' procedure was to cull from a fourteenth century anthology, the Subhāṣitar- atnakoṣa, 'all the expressions which refer to anything covered in any way by English or Western European notions of beauty'. 5 Ingalls showed that 'Almost all forms of beauty as conceived by the Sanskrit poets begin with an appeal to the physical senses, but this appeal usually carries on to a wider effect, to involve the heart