A Most Ingenious Work of Literature for N. Manu Chakravarthy & Eliot Weinberger

Abstract

same long dynasty that celebrated Buddha and Lord Rama. There, philosopher-poet Kumudendu watches his old king divide the kingdom between his two sons. Predictably, the siblings go to war with each other over territory. The younger son, Bahubali, wins but is so disgusted by the enmity that twisted his mind that he decides to hand over the whole kingdom to his brother and make himself a Digambara, a member of that sect of Jain monks who renounce ownership and wear no clothes. He becomes known as Gommata (and is memorialized in a fifty-seven-foot-high statue, constructed in 983 CE and long known as the “largest freestanding monolithic statue in the world,” on a famous hill in Karnataka) (See Figure 1).