The poetical strategy of Aśvaghoṣa: the Brahmanical image of phena ‘foam’ in a doctrinally inspired Buddhist poetry

This article aims to explore the new poetical strategy devised by the famous poet Aśvaghoṣa (2nd CE), a Brahmin converted to Buddhism, in order to promote the Buddhist doctrine: his works represent that cultural syncretism, which was supported by the policy of the Kuṣāṇa dynasty, spanning over three centuries in the northern India. Such a cultural environment stimulated new communicative strategies, especially on occasion of doctrinal debates, which must be held between the promoters of the Brahmanical counter-reformation movement, developed since the last centuries BCE – as assumable from the Brahmanical epics, especially the Mahābhārata –, and the challenging innovative Buddhist currents, such as the (Mūla)Sarvāstivāda school, attested in the Mathurā region, with which also Aśvaghoṣa must be affiliated. Against such a cultural background, the learned Aśvaghoṣa elaborated a sophisticated poetics, consisting not only of mere ornamentation, according to the earlier kāvya models, represented by the Brahmanical Rāmāyaṇa, but also of deeply complex inter-textual connections, made of flowing analogical suggestions, even inconsistent, producing a sort of ‘multistable’ perception of reality. Thus, an innovative kāvya poetry was shaped, fascinating and disorienting the educated audience at the same time. In fact, the manifold layers of reality, resulting from multi-meaning poetic expressions, suggest the main Buddhist principle which is exactly counterposed to the Brahmanical ontology: the phenomenal existence is devoid of a unique ‘essence’ itself (ātman), and is therefore ultimately unsubstantial. This peculiar poetical strategy is here probed by means of the reconstruction of the textual network of the occurrences of the term phena, meaning ‘foam, froth’, and their literary contexts. Aśvaghoṣa adopts this Sanskrit term, drawing it and the correlated imagery from the Brahmanical textual repertoire (Vedic corpus, and epics) and Buddhist scriptures (Pāli canon), so that multifaceted meanings referring to different codified literary languages are implied by the single term phena. However, an ultimate value emerges from Aśvaghoṣa’s works: it paradoxically fulfils and consummates the previous inconsistent meanings, since in the Buddhist perspective the evanescence of the foam prefigures the supreme awareness of unsubstantiality.