Thus, the roles of metaphor in early Indian texts, and the related topics of simile, analogy, and semantic extension, are highly relevant to larger issues in cross-cultural interpretation as well as to critical studies in Hinduism. This piece will be a general call for further study of such comparative constructions in the light of new theories of metaphor that have emerged in recent decades. Early Indian environments provide great possibilities for doing the work that metaphor, simile, and analogy do best – that is, reaching across difference. While my hope is that these thoughts will spark some new possibilities in many areas, I will use a specific case study from the Buddhacarita as my example – it being a virtuosic text of early kavya which moves across the difference of Brahmanical and Buddhist realms, but is unadorned by the philosophical notions of later Sanskrit aesthetics.

The essay argues that two of the above works, Buddhacaritramu and Saundaranandamu, written under the influence of Edwin Arnold and Mahatma Gandhi, create a modern version of Buddhism that blends into a modern Hinduism. The essay also describes how the Nehruvian ideology of Indian nationalism incorporates both religions as integral parts of India’s great culture. The play by Buccibabu and ‘A Jataka Tale’ by Viswanatha Satyanarayana attempt a critique of Buddhism from a modernist and Brahminic point of view respectively, but they have not made a serious difference to the general nationalist approval of Buddhism.

Hermeneutics started with Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias and addressed logicians, philosophers, and students of language after which it lost its precise meaning. Louis Renou, the foremost Sanskritist of the twentieth century, revived its use to characterise a theory of metarule, a rule about rules, which flourished among ritualists and grammarians beginning with the Ritual Sutras of the Late Vedic Period.