Hindu idea of "hidden" verses in heaven

[Dominik Wujastyk]

Interesting idea.  It raises the question, how does one know how big a
literary work is?  If the work is visible as a manuscript, then physical
size is visible.  But many works were transmitted in parts, so a MS might
be only one adhyāya, not giving a vision of the whole.  If a work is orally
transmitted, I guess its size (size?) is the time it takes to recite.

D




On 17 February 2012 21:39, Allen Thrasher <alanus1216 at yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
> It occurs to me that one reason for the topos of the successive
> condensations of an immense book, at least for narrative literature, is
> that the audience of Indic literature derived an aesthetic pleasure from
> the size of the narratives, an experience of a sort of oceanic feeling.
> Thus the presence of an immensely large work behind a merely large or
> medium-size one gave prestige to the latter, plus perhaps a pleasurable
> feeling of being plunged into a part of the largest narrative ocean, even
> though that ocean was not accessible because it had been lost or one
> couldn't afford a copy of it.  It is a radically different aesthetic than
> that of Greek and Latin literature.
>
> Allen
>


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