In search of 'Tamil Buddhism': Language, literary culture, and religious community in Tamil-speaking South Indi

In focusing on the extant Buddhist texts composed in Tamil--the sixth-century poetic narrative, Manimekalai, and the eleventh-century treatise on grammar and poetics, Viracoliyam--this dissertation considers the role of literature and literary culture in the formation, articulation, and evolution of religious identity and community. While the intimate relationship between religion and literature has become, in recent decades, a commonplace assumption in the study of Christianity and western culture, in the study of South Asian religions relatively little attention has been paid to the many genres of belles lettres found in both translocal and regional languages. It is in the literary arena of early medieval South India, this study argues, that religious ideals and values are publicly contested; the Manimekalai and the Viracoliyam each draw upon various regional and translocal literary sources in shaping a particular vision of Buddhist tradition and community.;The first chapter suggests a reading of the Manimekalai that is attentive both to the nature of the text as a literary creation concerned, in pan-Indian poetic tradition, with evoking in its audience a heightened emotional awareness, and to its Buddhist themes of transience, interrelation, and compassion. Chapters two and three consider the several ways in which the text embodies and envisions a Buddhist community that is also explicitly made local or "Tamil." Chapters four and five then consider the Viracoliyam and its commentary, texts at least four centuries removed from the composition of the Manimekalai that in many ways reflect significant transformations in the literary and religious climate of the Tamil region. As the first Tamil grammar to declare self-consciously the grammatical and poetic compatibility of Tamil and Sanskrit, the Viracoliyam envisions a Buddhist world substantially different from that of the Manimekalai. "Tamil Buddhism," as a category tying the two texts together on the basis of language or cultural affiliation, loses its usefulness, masking important variations across a single region and over time and privileging common denominators of cultural background or linguistic medium that are less significant than a religious community's self-articulated vision of itself, its tradition, and its future.