Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India

Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India. BY ANNE E. MONIUS. OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2001.

Imagining a Place for Buddhism focuses on the only two extant Buddhist texts in Tamil: Manimekalai, a sixth- century narrative about a courtesan's daughter who becomes a Buddhist, and Vîracôliyam, an eleventhcentury grammar (accompanied by its commentary). From these two texts, Anne Monius attempts to glean insights about the relationship between local Buddhist communities in the Tamil-speaking region of South India (especially in Kanchipuram and Kaviripumpattinam) and Buddhist practice and belief in North India, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia. In addition to providing a detailed analysis of specific Buddhist technical terms and linguistic formations, she presents the texts not merely as Tamil works but as literary endeavors within a multi-lingual literary culture, as revealed through Pali and Sanskrit literature and inscriptions.

Many of her interpretations provide fresh perspectives on literary regions during the late classical and early medieval period in South India. Despite the limited archaeological remains and the fragmentary nature of other evidence from the period, she presents an analysis that is always creative, usually persuasive, and at the very least plausible. Monius teases out insights from literary rhetoric, terminology, grammatical analysis, and quotations from now-lost texts to help reconstruct the literary world of the authors of Manimekalai and Vîracôliyam. To my knowledge, hers is the first monograph to situate the two extant Tamil Buddhist texts convincingly in a ? an- Asian Buddhist context.

Three of the book's chapters focus on Manimekalai and two chapters on Vîracôliyam. The use of two...