Alf Hiltebeitel

George Washington University | GW · Department of Religion

This essay asks what the terms mokṣa and dharma mean in the anomalous and apparently Mahābhārata-coined compound mokṣadharma, which provides the title for the Śāntiparvan’s third and most philosophical anthology; and it further asks what that title itself means. Its route to answering those questions is to look at the last four units of the Mokṣadh...

In Indian mythological texts like the Mahabharata and Ramayaa, there are recurrent tales about gleaners. The practice of "gleaning" in India had more to do with the house-less forest life than with residential village or urban life or with gathering residual post-harvest grains from cultivated fields. Gleaning can be seen a metaphor for the Mahabha...

The Mahābhārata royal patriline is tracked and contextualized here in relation to two prominent themes: its concept of a divine plan (somewhat paralleled in the Rāmāyaṇa) and its chief genre term itihāsa or ‘history’. It is found that these two themes intersect in the Mahābhārata at the point where the goddess Gaṅgā ‘descends’ into the royal line a...

From a verbal root meaning "to hold" or "uphold," dharma is taken to have been the main term by which Buddhism and Hinduism came, over about five centuries, to describe their distinctive visions of the good and well-rewarded life. From about 300 BCE to about 200 CE, Buddhist and Brahmanical authors used it to clarify and classify their mutual and c...

It has long been felt that in the formation of boundaries between the religious traditions of South Asia, the composers of the Mahābhārata would have played a considerable role in generating the dynamics of what was to become Hinduism. But since the Mahābhārata is quiet if not exactly silent on the non-Brahmanical traditions, and particularly about...

This chapter examines dharma in the Bhagavad Gītā. The Bhagavad Gītā makes a number of philosophical points, and no one would deny that it also deserves a reputation as a text about dharma. Yet it really says only a few things about dharma per se. Most of its prominent references to dharma occur in what will be called an informal ring structure: no...

This chapter looks at King Aśoka's dhaṃma. Aśoka was not just a king but an emperor, and he used his edicts to broadcast an imperial program. Chronologically, Aśoka's edicts were written between about 260 and 240 BCE and can be traced through that part of his reign. In using the term dhaṃma, Aśoka is familiar with its having some specific connotati...

This chapter discusses Rāma and Yudhiṣṭhira's dharma biographies, concentrating on their parts in killings in the two scenes where the morality of their doing so comes most into question: Rāma's killing the monkey king Vālin from ambush, and Yudhiṣṭhira's lying to enable the killing of the Brahmin Droṇa. Unlike Yudhiṣṭhira, Rāma feels called upon t...

This chapter explores the earliest meanings of dhárman and dharma in the larger Veda or full Vedic “canon.” The term dhárman is far more common and loaded with meanings in the Rigveda than the terms dhárman and dharma are in subsequent Vedic texts, where they seem stripped of their Rigvedic depth and begin to take on a few of the specialized meanin...

This chapter looks at the post-Vedic texts in which Brahmanical dharma developed: the dharmasūtras, Manu, and the two Sanskrit epics. These texts open up the concept of dharma for what will come to be called Hinduism. If Indians recall the epics for their manner of relating dharma to what is familiar in everyday lives, they tend to cite Manu for it...

This chapter studies the relationship between dharma and bhakti in epics. There are two interrelated practices or discourses where dharma and bhakti coincide that go to the heart of what epics are about: hospitality and friendship. In reformulating hospitality and friendship as dharma, the dharmasūtras and Manu all sought to harmonize custom with V...

This concluding chapter examines dharma in the twenty-first century. Lately, the United States has become familiar with dharma within a suggestive meaning-spectrum. Jack Kerouac's Dharma Bums described the heyday of mid-twentieth-century America's bohemian sages or Ṛṣis. The TV situation comedy Dharma and Greg, now in reruns, is about a free-spirit...

This chapter investigates Buddhist understandings of dharma in the three baskets of the early Buddhist canon, taking them as an intentional organization of three different understandings of dharma that developed over time. The “three basket” division is not established until about the first century BCE, but it is anticipated in early references to...

This chapter focuses on Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita, “The Adventure of the Buddha,” which offers a dharma biography of a prince who becomes a Buddha. In making epic and other Brahmanical mythological allusions, Aśvaghoṣa brings across a realization that, no matter how illuminating heroic, sagely, and divine precedents may be as parallels, they are ult...

This chapter focuses on Sītā and Draupadī's dharma biographies, which introduce two exemplary strands of women's spirituality. Their spiritual life comes to be intertwined with bhakti, “devotion”—and devotion not only to one's husband but to God. Sītā would be bringing her two types of spirituality together in her devotion to one figure: her husban...

This article takes up passages that allow for comparison of Buddhist and Brahmanical ‘law’ in dharmasastra (including the early dharmasutras) and Vinaya. The discussion of Vinaya draws on Steven Collins’s demonstration of Vinaya allusions in the Aggañña Sutta. The article revisits the advocacy for a pre-Mauryan dating of this sutta, arguing that it...

This introductory work proposes a fresh take on the ancient Indian concept dharma. By unfolding how, even in its developments as "law" and custom, dharma participates in nuanced and multifarious understandings of the term that play out in India's great spiritual traditions, the book offers insights into the innovative character of both Hindu and Bu...

This chapter discusses a unit of the twelfth book of the Mahābhārata, the Nārāyan{dot below}īya, for its bearing on the textual and religious history of post-Vedic and classical India. Although no portion of the Mahābhārata has been considered so axiomatically "Gupta" as the Nārāyan{dot below}īya, the evidence for such dating-furthered most recentl...

Without Abstract

This article on India’s two Sanskrit epics, the Mah� abh� arata and R� am� ayan : a, will address four topics: 1 how they have been defined by scholars and by themselves; how each conceptualizes the relationship between its whole and its parts, and particularly its subtales; 2 how subtales figure in their main stories; and how each creates grand na...

The ancient Indian Sanskrit tradition produced no text more intriguing, or more persistently misunderstood or underappreciated, than the Mahabharata. Its intricacies have waylaid generations of scholars and ignited dozens of unresolved debates. In Rethinking the Mahabharata, Alf Hiltebeitel offers a unique model for understanding the great epic. Em...

Throughout India and Southeast Asia, ancient classical epics—the Mahabharata and the Ramayana—continue to exert considerable cultural influence. Rethinking India's Oral and Classical Epics offers an unprecedented exploration into South Asia's regional epic traditions. Using his own fieldwork as a starting point, Alf Hiltebeitel analyzes how the...

India's Sanskrit classical epics occupy a strange place in the comparative study of Indian myth, literature, and history. Comparisons have been made, and often at their expense. In terms of the metaphoric mapping strategy outlined by Fitz Poole (1986), the Sanskrit epics have usually been the 'target domain,' while either Greek epics, Indo-European...

Le Mahabharata est recite dans la Foret Naimisa. En outre, les nombreux puranas font de ce lieu un lieu de rassemblement pour le recit et un cadre. L'A. analyse ce lieu de rassemblement ainsi que deux conventions Mahabharata. Ce qui apparait frappant a l'A., c'est le fait que les poetes vediques conservent non seulement les rites vediques et les hi...

ALF HILTEBEITEL examines the cult of Kuttantavar/Aravan in present-day south India that derives from the "epic" tradition of the Mahabharata by exploring classical epic stories about this hero and by reconstructing the folk-ritual world of the South Arcot and North Arcot districts of Tamilnadu (Madras). Along with a rich account of oral versions of...

This is the first volume of a projected three-volume work on the little-known South Indian folk cult of the goddess Draupadi and on the classical epic, the Mahabharata, that the cult brings to life in mythic, ritual, and dramatic forms. Draupadi, the chief heroine of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, takes on many unexpected guises in her Tamil cult, but h...

This is the first volume of a projected three-volume work on the little-known South Indian folk cult of the goddess Draupadi and on the classical epic, the Mahabharata, that the cult brings to life in mythic, ritual, and dramatic forms. Draupadi, the chief heroine of the Sanskrit Mahabharata, takes on many unexpected guises in her Tamil cult, but h...

Without Abstract

The preeminent scholar of comparative studies of Indo-European society, Georges Dumezil theorized that ancient and prehistoric Indo-European culture and literature revolved around three major functions: sovereignty, force, and fertility. This work treats these functions as they are articulated through "first king" legends found in Indian, Iranian,...

Georges Dumézil's research on the myths, legends, rites, and social structures—in short, what he calls the “ideology”—of the Indo-Europeans has had, for the most part, considerable impact upon recent scholarly interpretation of the various Indo-European traditions. This holds not only for articles and monographs on specific matters. Better measure...

The preeminent scholar of comparative studies of Indo-European society, Georges Dumézil theorized that ancient and prehistoric Indo-European culture and literature revolved around three major functions: sovereignty, force, and fertility. This work treats these functions as they are articulated through "first king" legends found in Indian, Iranian,...

Thesis--Chicago, 1973. Bibliography: leaves 625-647.