Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v1.c21.16

v1.c21.16

who was this Dhvanikāra, and what date should be assigned to him? Abhinavagupta does not give us any information on this point. Jacobi, in the learned introduction to his translation of the Dhvanyāloka, and following him, Haricānd Śāstrī pose the question very ably without, however, furnishing a precise solution. Sovani's hypothesis¹ that the name of the unknown Kārikākāra was Sahr̥daya, is hardly convincing, for his grounds for this identification are that (1) one of the alternative names of the work itself is Sahr̥dayāloka and that (2) the use of the words sahr̥daya and kavi-sahr̥daya at the end of chapter iv of the Dhvanyāloka and in the beginning of Abhinavagupta's commentary is significantly corroborative. It is well known, however, as Haricānd Śāstrī points out, that the word sahr̥daya (lit. a man with a heart) is used in innumerable places in Alaṃkāra literature, as in the verses in question, to designate a man of taste, a judge of literary beauty, a connoisseur of rasa. Ānandavardhana himself discusses sahr̥dayatva at some length in his Vr̥tti (p. 160), and Abhinavagupta arrives at a concise definition of a sahr̥daya thus: (p. 11) yeṣāṃ kāvyānuśīlanābhyāsa-vaśād viśadībhūte mano-mukure varṇanīya-tanmayī-bhavana-yogyatā, te hr̥daya-saṃvādabhājaḥ sahr̥dayāḥ, a definition which became so much standardized that