Studies in the History of Sanskrit Poetics v2.c79.99

v2.c79.99

It will be profitable, therefore, to pause and enquire if these works of Bhāmaha and others give us any indication of the stage or stages through which the discipline might have passed in the interval between Bharata and themselves. Fortunately there are passages in these writers which would give us hints as to the existence of such intermediate stages. Jacobi has already shown⁵⁵ that Bhāmaha, in his treatment of the poetic figures, groups them in a curious but suggestive way which probably indicates the different stages in the growth and multiplication of such figures before his time. Unlike later authors who, adopting some definite principle of classification, enumerate the poetic figures *en masse*⁵⁶, Bhāmaha begins (ii 4) by naming and defining a group of five such figures, and then goes on to enumerate other such limited groups of figures, taking 24 remaining figures in a final group. The first group of figures thus mentioned comprises *anuprāsa*, *yamaka*, *rūpaka*, *dīpaka*, and *upamā*, recognised, as Bhāmaha says, by others (*anyair udāhṛtāḥ*) and accepted by himself. These five correspond in reality to the four ancient poetic figures known to and defined by Bharata, viz. *yamaka*, *rūpaka*, *dīpaka*, and *upamā*; for *anuprāsa*, the additional figure mentioned by Bhāmaha, can be taken as falling in the same class as *yamaka*⁵⁷, the one being *varṇābhyāsa* and the other *padābhyāsa*, while both are what Bharata would call *śabdābhyāsa*.