The Rise of Wisdom Moon. Krishna mishra

Rise of Wisdom Moon” and works resembling it.7 Nevertheless, allegory had in fact been used by Indian authors from the earliest times. The image of the twoheaded bird, for instance, first found in the Rgveda (i.164. 20), was taken over in the Mundaka Upanisad as an allegory of the dimorphism of the soul. By citing this famous passage in act six (6.112 [20]), Krishna·mishra in effect plants the roots of his inspiration deep in the most ancient strata of Sanskrit literature.

      Fragments of early Buddhist dramas, dating to the first centuries ce, also make use of allegory, and include characters with names like “Fame” and “Pride.” Nevertheless, these plays, so far as we can now know them, do not appear to have been sustained allegories, that is, they were primarily stories of Buddhist saints, in which some episodes took allegorical form. And there is no evidence of knowledge of these works among later Indian writers, much less of their exerting any influence upon the way they wrote.8

      At the same time, regarding several of the devices he em- ploys in developing his allegory, Krishna·mishra’s debts to earlier dramatic writing can sometimes be discerned. One example is to be found in his satire of the three heterodox schools—Jainism, Buddhism and Kapalika Shaivism—in the third act. In this case, the inspiration of the seventh-century farce Mattavilasa, the “Madman’s Play,” of Mahen- dra·varman seems unmistakeable.9 And in Krishna·mishra’s incorporation of elements of philosophical debate and dialogue into the drama at several points, he may well have the model of Jayanta·bhatta’s Agamadambara, “Much Ado ________

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      About Religion,” in mind.10 In sum, although Krishna· mishra’s contribution to Indian literature was not the invention of allegory as such, he may nonetheless be credited with introducing its employment in order to structure an entire literary work from beginning to end. That the tradition itself recognized this to be an original contribution may be gathered from the fact that several of the later Sanskrit allegories, and more than a dozen are known, explicitly refer back to “The Rise of Wisdom Moon,” often underscoring this fact by the use of clearly imitative titles (Krishnamachariar 1970 [1937]: 675–85).

      Allegory, however, is an unfortunate genre. It suffers from the constraint of its major premise, for it must tell a story that is in fact a second story, a double task restricting the author’s free creation and often lending to allegorical works a rigid, contrived quality, as we know from European medieval mysteries like “Everyman,” or from Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress.” That Krishna·mishra succeeded in his task better than most is demonstrated by his work’s enduring success. However, it is difficult in this case not to concur with the assessment of one of the path-breakers in the study of Sanskrit literary history, S.K. De:

      With … abstract and essentially scholastic subject-matter, it is difficult to produce a drama of real interest. But it is astonishing that, apart from the handicaps inherent in the method and purpose, Krsnamisra succeeds, to a remarkable degree, in giving us an ingenious picture of the spiritual struggle of the human mind in the dramatic form of a vivid conflict, in which the erotic, comic and

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      devotional interests are cleverly utilized. (Dasgupta & De 1962: 483)

      As De rightly stressed, the demands of Krishna·mishra’s subject-matter, the attainment of spiritual peace in the soul’s liberation as understood within the tradition of the nondualist school of Vedanta (advaita vedanta), both pose a challenge to the author in relation to properly literary expression and at the same time inhibit the reader’s properly literary reading of the text. An unfortunate result has been that modern readers have sometimes taken the work merely to be an elementary primer of Advaita philosophy, almost entirely ignoring its literary qualities. In the present translation, therefore, I have sought to lay stress on “The Rise of Wisdom Moon” as a clever and often quite funny play, quite apart from its message per se.

      The message, however, is essential for any understanding of the work, and in seeking to address it in dramatic form, rather than in a formal theological treatise, Krishna·mishra was accepting a considerable risk. For above and beyond the difficulties inherent in dramatizing spiritual growth, he was taking a forthright stand in regard to one of the keenest disputes in classical Indian literary theory. In essence, the critics wished to establish whether, besides the aesthetic sentiments with which we are generally familiar—erotic love, humor, horror, and the like—is there additionally a distinct sentiment of peace?11 Can the mystical realization of oneness and the void be the subject-matter of great literature, or does its awesome depths compel only a surpassing silence, from which no literary art can emerge? Krishna·mishra was ________

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      among those who affirmed that a sentiment of peace can serve as an appropriate focus for literary creation, and he tells us this explicitly, affirming at the outset that he has written “a play conveying the sentiment of peace” (1.7).

      But how to convey such a sentiment? To elicit horror, one can show frightening things, for humor things that are funny, and so on. The attempt to display peace directly—perhaps by depicting a group of persons in silent meditation—is guaranteed to be merely a bore. The only strategy that might work is to arrive at peace through contrast. Peace becomes dramatically interesting only in relation to its opposites: war, struggle, the erotic distractions, and so on. Krishna·mishra very well understood this and, using the contrastive categories underscored in Indian traditions, sought to realize the sentiment of peace as the conclusion of a journey through what peace is not.12

      In order to achieve this end, Krishna·mishra’s work depends on one of the fundamental dichotomies informing classical Indian thought, that between pravrtti and nivrtti.13 The pair is often translated, misleadingly I think, as “activity” and “inactivity.” It is important, however, to gain a more nuanced sense of their meaning, as this provides an essential key to understanding the play as whole.

      To begin, we may cite a popular verse that states: “I know the dharma, but it is not what I engage in; I know non-dharma, too, but it is not what I desist from.”14 Here, I have translated pravrtti as “what I engage in” and nivrtti as “what I desist from.” The relevant contrast is not one between activity and inactivity, but between the forward, outgoing channeling of energies into a particular pattern ________

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      of action, and, oppositely, the withdrawal or turning away from that course. Though the verse nicely introduces the terms as they apply to our individual, active undertakings, we must recognize further that the distinction in question may be invoked in some rather different contexts. In Buddhist idealist philosophy, for instance, it pertains to perceptual processes, pravrtti referring to the proliferations of consciousness which constructs the world as we perceive it, and nivrtti to the inversion of that process in meditation, where our constructions are dissolved as tranquility and insight develop.15 We should be aware, too,