Annual Mahāvīra Nirvāṇa Lecture

This talk examines a masterpiece of Sanskrit literature written by a Jain poet named Somadeva in 959CE. The Yaśastilaka narrates the life and death of king Yaśodhara in eight chapters, and as a tragic tale of love, deceit, and murder, it played an important (if still unstudied) role in the development of a popular genre of storytelling about the follies of worldly life among Jains. But the poem’s most interesting and important features have little to do with its plot. The text's place at the dawn of a literary revolution in the Deccan and the encyclopedic ambitions of its author to document courtly culture and social life make the Yaśastilaka a unique and highly valuable work. But the text’s dense structure, ornate poetics, arcane vocabulary, and its extreme sentence structure (with single sentences extending at times for ten or more pages), pushes readers and translators to the very edges of translatability itself.

After the presentation, join us for a cultural program, followed by a Jain vegan dinner.

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