Viśvarūpa and Vānara: Revelation and demonstration

Abstract

This paper proposes “epistemological function” as a comparative category for reading Sanskrit epic narrative and applies it to two well-known episodes: the Viśvarūpa of Bhagavad Gītā, Chapter XI, and the sustained portrait of Hanumān in the Sundarakāṇḍa of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. Both, in different ways, address a single pedagogical difficulty: how a mode of consciousness that exceeds ordinary egoic cognition becomes intelligible to a hearer who has not experienced it directly. Read comparatively, and not as a claim about shared authorship or historical dependence between the two epics, the Viśvarūpa performs what this paper calls cognitive boundary-expansion: a single, overwhelming perceptual event that enlarges what a conditioned mind can regard as possible, without itself supplying a durable model for everyday conduct. Hanumān, across the major movements of the Sundarakāṇḍa, performs practical-motivational demonstration: a sustained, narratively observable portrait of intelligence operating with minimal self-referential appropriation, across search, encounter, decisive action, and report. The two, this paper argues, are best understood as independently arising and functionally complementary responses to a shared communicative problem, examined through close reading of the Sanskrit text (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute critical edition of the Gītā; Baroda Oriental Institute critical edition of the Rāmāyaṇa). Its contribution is methodological as much as interpretive: it offers “epistemological function” as a reusable comparative tool, while bracketing questions of authorial intention, inter-textual dependence, and etymological claims about the name Hanumān that lie outside its evidentiary scope.