THE MIRROR: TIBETAN INTELLECTUALS IN PURSUIT OF INDIC POETICS (1250-1800)

This dissertation provides a complete bibliographic overview of Daṇḍin’s Kāvyādarśa (The Mirror) — an Indic treatise on poetics— in Tibet from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries to understand how Tibetan literati received and engaged with Indic poetics. Although in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the pursuit of literary arts was always couched within the Buddhist rhetoric of omniscience, I argue that the mastery of literary arts, particularly The Mirrror, led to the development of a distinct Tibetan idea of the poet, rooted in Indic figures of speech, style, and thought. The knowledge and mastery of The Mirror became a key factor in gaining “respect,” “admiration,” and “elite intellectual status” among the learned community as a poet. After the initial fervor for Indic literary studies from the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries, Tibet experienced a brief pause in the study of Indic literary learnings until in the seventeenth century, when there was a renewed interest in poetics that owed much to the centralization of power in Lhasa under the Fifth Dalai Lama, whose government not only had the capacity to institutionalize the study of poetics and other forms of knowledge, but to promote and produce texts at historically unprecedented rates. One result was that a new interest in poetics spread beyond the confines of Central Tibet into Kham (Sichuan, Yunnan), Amdo (Qinghai, Gansu), Mongolia, and Himalayan regions like Ladakh and Bhutan; a new, trans-Tibetan Buddhist intellectual community emerged. Connections to South Asia that were mostly imagined in the two preceding centuries became embodied, as travel and intellectual exchange between South Asia and Tibet resumed. The exchange of knowledge and information allowed Tibetan intellectuals, such as Situ Paṇchen (1699-1774) and Khamtrul Choekyi Nyima (1730-1780), to travel within and without Tibet, to gain the ambition of recovering neglected trends in Sanskrit language, learning, and texts in Tibet, and to correct mistakes that had crept into Tibetan translations and commentaries on Indic poetics through a renewed emphasis on critical scholarship.