CHIKAMITSU TANIGUCHI
University of Texas
Nagoya University taniguchi.chikamitsu@gmail.com
TRYAMBAKARĀYA MAKHI’S HERMENEUTICS OF THE RĀMĀYAṆA, WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO RĀMA’S MARRIAGE
This paper examines the Dharmakūta of Tryambakarāya Makhi (17th–18th c. CE; also known as Tryambakayajvan), a scholar associated with the Bhosale court of Thanjavur, and explores how this text attempts to read the Rāmāyaṇa as an “allegory” (Balasubrahmanyam 1916: ii) of dharma. Tryambakarāya has more often been discussed in connection with the Strīdharmapaddhati—a specialized Dharmaśāstric treatise on wife’s duties (cf. Leslie 1989: 12; Brodbeck 2013). However, the Dharmakūta itself has received comparatively little sustained attention and has not been closely analysed in terms of its contents, despite the interesting style noted by, among others, Raghavan (1964: 86; 1965: 111). The paper focuses on two sections of the text: (1) the general remarks (pp. 1–21), and (2) the treatment of Rāma’s marriage. At the outset of the Dharmakūta, Tryambakarāya sets out its interpretive program, and these opening pages, which include an explicit critique of earlier commentaries, are especially important for understanding how he frames the relation between epic and dharma. As Balasubrahmanyam (1916: vi–vii) already noted, the treatment of Rāma’s marriage (Rāmāyaṇa 1,67–72) offers a concrete example of this interpretive procedure in practice. By examining together the author’s programmatic reflections and their application in a specific case, this paper seeks to move beyond simply showing how the text extracts normative material from the Rāmāyaṇa and instead asks what kind of hermeneutic enterprise the Dharmakūta represents. In doing so, it aims to situate Tryambakarāya’s commentarial posture and exegetical practice within early modern Sanskrit intellectual history, while also clarifying the diversity of early modern Sanskrit epic exegesis more broadly. In this respect, Tryambakarāya may be contrasted with Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara (17th c. CE; Banaras), whose interpretation of the Mahābhārata, as I argued in my previous paper, sought to recover forms of dharma as internal to the epic itself rather than to impose a more overtly Dharmaśāstric frame upon it. Seen within a longer history of epic exegesis, this case also reopens a larger question already present in scholarship from Bühler (1892) to Kane (1962–1975: II.558, 684–685; III.845–848) and Yoshimizu (2007), especially in discussions of Mīmāṃsaka reasoning about the conduct of epic characters: namely, under what conditions, and by what interpretive strategies, epic narrative could be made to function as a source of dharma at a time when the epics were increasingly being read as texts capable of yielding normative guidance.