A History of Sanskrit Literature c15.s1.1

c15.s1.1

A HISTORY of Sanskrit lyric¹ and gnomic verse is impossible in the absence of any chronology, and, apart from minor poems which will be discussed later, our first great monument after Kālidāsa of these kinds of verse, in which Indian poets admittedly excel, is to be found in the Çatakas of Bhartṛhari. As we have them, they are handed down as three collections each theoretically of a hundred stanzas, in varied metres, of pictures of love, *Çṛṅgāraçataka*, of indifference to things of sense, *Vairāgya*, and of wise conduct, *Nīti*. It is obvious that a form like this allows of interpolation and addition, and the task of arriving at a definitive text which we can reasonably assert to be original is probably beyond our means of accomplishment. What we can say is that for a considerable number of stanzas in each of the Çatakas the concurrence of manuscript evidence renders reference to the original extremely probable. A perplexing fact is that the collections contain stanzas from well-known works such as the *Tantrākhyāyika*, the *Çakuntalā* of Kālidāsa, the *Mudrārākṣasa* of Viçākhadatta, and stanzas which in the anthologies are ascribed to authors other than Bhartṛhari. If the anthologies were trustworthy, it would be possible to deduce important results from these facts, but, as they are full of errors and frequently contradict themselves, it is hopeless to draw any chronological conclusions or to derive from these references or the stanzas from other works actually included any support for the theory that the collections are really an early anthology.²