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The eleventh century poet Bilhan : a's magnum opus, his Vikramā _ nkadevacarita, quickly became one of the most admired and quoted examplars of a newly emergent genre in second millennium Sanskrit poetry, the patron-centered court epic-an extended verse composition dedicated to relating the deeds and celebrating the virtues of the pet's own patron. But Bilhan : a's verse biography of his patron, the Cālukya monarch Vikramāditya VI, while ostensibly singing his praises, is colored throughout by darker suggestions that Vikramāditya may be less than the moral paragon it proclaims him to be, and that the power of poetry lies precisely in its ability to fabricate royal virtue where none exists, and to wash clean the reputation of any king, regardless of his actual deeds. He makes these insinuatons through a variety of formal and narrative techniques, most strikingly by his persistent suggestions that Vikramāditya has perhaps less in common with Rāma, the archetypal paragon of royal virtue, than with his demonic antagonist Rāvan : a, and, even more corrosively, that Rāma's own reputation may owe more to his panegyrist's skill than to his own virtue.

Studies of Indian philosophy have generally overemphasized the consistency of philosophical systems over time, and consequently slighted later works as derivative. This paper seeks to reassess the ''system'' as a basic category for analyzing Sanskrit philosophy, in particular by examining the changes that took place in hermeneutics, or Mīmām : sā, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when it became commonplace for Mīmām : sā authors to criticize long established Mīmām : sā positions. At first this criticism is selective and largely directed at more recent authors, but the margins of acceptable criticism are gradually broadened to the point when even the foundational works of the tradition are routinely attacked, and works are produced whose sole purpose appears to be to attack established Mīmām : sā tenets, sometimes without even attempting to replace them with a more workable set of views. It becomes increasingly difficult to see what if anything one must believe to be considered a Mīmām : saka.

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