Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the second chapter: "Buddhacarita and Ramayana II."
ALREADY the first editor of the Buddhacarita, Prof. Cowell, has shown that the myth of Rama is several times referred to in that poem. Yet, after having pointed out some two or three stanzas in which the legend of Rama is alluded to, he concluded that "these references are vague, and do not necessarily imply the previous existence of our present Ramayana." (Preface, p. XII). To be sure, this observation is pretty correct, but it does not settle the question. In fact, the references to the story of Rama's exile, occurring in the Buddhacarita, are not limited to those few quoted by Cowell. "They can be multiplied and some of them, on closer examination, do indeed prove interesting enough. To say it at once, we are able, with the help of them, to prove past all doubt that the author of the Buddhacarita was intimately acquainted not only "with the myth of Rama" as Cowell says, but with the Ramayana such as we know it to-day. This I intend to show by means of a certain number of stanzas taken from the both works and arranged on parallel columns. I shall, however, limit my quotations from the Ramayana to those parallels that are met with in Book II of that poem. And that for two reasons. First, as it is only natural that Book II of Ramayana, speaking as it does of Rama's exile and of Dasaratha's despair and lament for his departed son, should exhibit a greater parallelism with the preserved portion of the Buddhacarita, chiefly concerned with the Great Renunciation, than the remaining six which dwell at length upon subjects not treated in that poem. And secondly, because the great bulk of the Ramayana does not favour detailed investigation of such kind extending over the whole of it.
