A Resurgent Interest in ‘Hindu Fiction’: On and around the Kathāsaritsāgara, with Special Attention to Buddhism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Wilson's extensive remarks on "Hindu Fiction" of 1824.2The broader topicwhich we might now perhaps rather refer to as Narrative Literature in Sanskrit and Prakrit3-was one central theme of earlier periods of Indology, through roughly the first quarter of the 20th century, before interest waned.During that fruitful period considerable attention was devoted to works such as the Pacatantra, Tantrkhyna, Hitopadea, Vetlapacaviati,4 Vikramacarita, ukasaptati, and so on (and of these, versions of the Pacatantra and Vetlapacaviati are incorporated into Somadeva's compilation).5Although such literature, while never entirely disappearing from scholarly view, for long had should not overlook what does not qualify as a presentation, but may be the first Western mention of the work, found laconically in 1808, in a paper of Captain F[rancis] Wilford (1761-1822), "An Essay on the Sacred Isles in the West, with Other Essays Connected with that Work," Asiatic Researches; or, Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for inquiring into the History and Antiquities, and the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia 8: 245-376, within which is found "Of the Geographical Systems of the Hindus," pp.267-340, on p. 270 of which we read "The Vrhat-Cat'h is a collection of historical anecdotes, sometimes very interesting, and consists of 22000 slcas."As Um points out, given the number of verses cited, this can only refer to the Kathsaritsgara.In probable contrast to Wilford, however, Wilson very obviously had read the work (and it may be that he did so in a manuscript copied for him at the behest of Wilford).
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".