Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India: The Āpaddharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata.By Adam Bowles Leiden: Brill, 2007.ISBN: 978-90-04-15815-3, pp. xvi, 432. €115.00.
摘要
The didactic sections of the Mahābhārata have long been explained away as late interpolations, clumsily added to the text with no literary merit of their own. Indeed, the great Mahābhārata scholar, E. Washburn Hopkins, considered the didactic corpora to be ‘fungus’ with little or no relevance to the core epic narrative. In Dharma, Disorder and the Political in Ancient India: The Āpaddharmaparvan of the Mahābhārata, Adam Bowles not only demonstrates that the Āpaddharmaparvan is integral in terms of the ideological concerns of the text, but he also argues for its artistic integrity – that it is a unified textual unit that was composed and included within the Mahābhārata with a conscious awareness of the larger narrative strategies of the text as a whole.
Chapter One provides a survey of Mahābhārata scholarship, with particular attention to views put forth about the didactic sections. The story of Mahābhārata scholarship from the nineteenth century to the present has been visited numerous times before, but Bowles' rendition is useful …
