Reading the Mahābhārata as Śāstra: The Role of the ‘Righteous’ Pāṇḍavas and ‘Villainous’ Kauravas in Madhva's Dvaitavedānta
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The Sanskrit Mahābhārata is considered to be a śāstra in Mādhva Vaiṣṇavism, and Madhva composed one of the earliest treatises dedicated to explaining the Mahābhārata’s deeper meaning. In doing so, he pays careful attention to the distinction between the righteous Pāṇḍavas and corrupt Kauravas—a distinction that exists in theory if not always in practice. How does Madhva demarcate the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, and why does this matter for his own theology? Looking at two episodes that either blur or upend the demarcation of the Kauravas and Pāṇḍavas, the mace-battle between Bhīma and Duryodhana (9.60) and the Pāṇḍavas’ journey to heaven (17-18.3), this article shows how Madhva’s Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya explains key tenets of Madhva’s ontology and theology. When read carefully, each episode brings out important features of Madhva’s doctrine of devatātāratamya—the gradation of gods. Rather than simply understanding Madhva’s commentary as a theologisation or vedānticisation of the narrative, I argue that his exegesis itself develops and explains central doctrines of Dvaitavedānta, particularly tāratamya and aparokṣajñāna. Vedānticization, in this understanding then, is not simply bringing forth an interpretation of the narrative that fits one's prior philosophical commitments, but it is a process of constituting theology through the narrative.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".