古代・中世インド文芸世界のなかにみる聖典：羽衣伝説モチーフと『阿弥陀経』を例として=Interpretations of Some Passages from the Sacred Texts in Ancient and Medieval India as Literary Works: The ‘Stealing Clothes Motif’ and the Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha
The ‘Vastra-haraṇa’ （Kṛṣṇa’s stealing clothes） motif in the Bhāgavata-purāṇa （10th century, in south India） must have pertained to the Paiśācī sentences（1st century BC）quoted by Bhoja （11th century） in his Śṛiṅgāraprakāśa and can be traced back to the Vedic “Purūravas and Urvasī story,” which is considered the global origin of the swan-maiden motif （that is, stealing clothes motif） in tales of marriage between a human and a nonhuman being. According to the ‘ākhyāna theory,’ we can observe that the authors adopted such a motif from vernacular folktales into the sacred Sanskrit books.
In some Buddhist texts, four kinds of lotus flowers in the pools in paradise have been depicted with their indigenous flora names; utpala-, kumuda-, padma- and puṇḍarīka-. However, in the Smaller Sukhāvatīvyūha, they are depicted with the adjectives blue, yellow, red and white. After confirming that kavi-samaya （poetical convention contrary to real-life experience） is for drawing the supernatural world, we conclude that the author of this sacred work might have tried to equate the four color’s adjectives with Śūdra, Vaiśya, Kṣatriya and Brāhmaṇa in the caste （varṇa） system, based on the methods of kavi-samaya.
