Mortal Combat and the Hereafter: <i>saṃparāya</i> and <i>sāṃparāya</i> in Sanskrit Literature

Sāṃparāya is a comparatively rare word in Sanskrit literature that has been translated in various ways, among them ‘battle’, ‘the next world’, and ‘transit to the next world’. It is a nominalized adjective derived from saṃparāya , which is in turn derived from the rarely used verb sam+parā+i (to pass away, to decease). The aim of the present paper is to establish the basic meanings of sāṃparāya as well as of its base, saṃparāya, and to investigate how they are used in Sanskrit literature. To this end, text passages from a range of sources are discussed. It is shown that in pre-medieval literature, saṃparāya and sāṃparāya are generally used as variants of one and the same noun, and that this noun has two basic meanings: ‘mortal combat, battle’ and ‘the postmortal, the hereafter’. The plethora of meanings recorded in modern dictionaries were mostly derived from later, highly context-specific commentaries.