Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s13.t4.7

c12.s13.t4.7

Perhaps more value is to be attached to the many citations of verses and parts of verses embodying a highly evolved poetic expression and metrical finish which Patañjali makes in his *Mahābhāshya*, and which should clearly convince us of the high development of Kāvya in this period. We have specimens here of verses of erotic, lyric, panegyric and gnomic poetry; of lines belonging to a poem on the Mahābhārata theme and of metrical varieties like Anushṭubh, Upajāti, Praharshiṇī, Pramitāksharā and Vasantatilakā; the grammatical kārikās disclose even greater metrical advancement, these employing even rarer metres, Vaktra, Śālini, Vamśastha, Samānī, Vidyunmālā, Toṭaka and Dodhaka. This metrical material surely points to the existence of prosodial treatises in these times, and we may not be wrong in assigning Piṅgala's *Chhandas-sūtras* to this period. In a verse in Rājaśekhara's *Kāvyamīmāmsā* enumerating the Śastrakāras examined at Pāṭaliputra, Piṅgala figures between Pāṇini and Vyāḍi¹, and Haraprasad Śāstri has drawn attention to a tradition recorded in the *Divyāvadāna* that Bindusāra put his son Aśoka to school under Piṅgala Nāga². In the *Abhinavabhārati* of Abhinavagupta we have quotations from an anushṭubh treatise of Kātyāyana on metres, in which Kātyāyana examines the emotional and thematic appropriateness of particular metres.³