The Rāmāyana and the Rhizome: Textual Networks in the Work of Minakata Kumagusu

Abstract:In 1914, the Japanese folklorist Minakata Kumagusu published an essay showing that a parable in the Japanese Buddhist primer Hōbutsushū resembled the Indian epic Rāmāyana. In detailing the transit of the epic, Minakata rejected hierarchical paradigms of “source” and “adaptation” as well as nation-based models that focused on cultural indigenization. Instead, he showed that Buddhist texts across Asia built upon already transformed texts in an adaptational chain with no center. This way of reading adaptations not as local variants but as “access points” to a larger network resembles recent theories of “rhizomatic texts.” Minakata's denationalized and dehierarchized textual networks thus anticipate recent discussions of inter-connections within Asia that reject national, cultural, or ethnic unities and see the heterogeneity produced by cultural contact.