The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c9.35

c9.35

When we now try to piece together the scraps of information delivered by the texts, they appear to converge in a coherent picture of the verbal contest—question and rejoinder, praising and reviling, affirmation and denial—all turning on the essential enigma of being and nonbeing, life and death. The enigma cannot be objectively solved, it can only be circumscribed in antithetical formulations and acted out by the contending parties who, like “two on the same chariot,” are bound together by the contest.