A History of Sanskrit Literature c16.s2.53

c16.s2.53

Among many others a *Bhavānyaṣṭaka* and the *Ānandalaharī* in twenty Çikhariṇī verses are ascribed to Çaṅkara, while other famous hymns to Devī include the *Ambāṣṭaka* and the *Pañcastavī*, five hymns to Durgā of unknown authorship. To Kālidāsa are ascribed, without any plausibility, various Stotras, including the *Çyāmalādaṇḍaka* mainly in prose, the *Sarasvatīstotra* and the *Maṅgalāṣṭaka*, which can be reconstructed from the Tibetan of the Tanjur. A hymn in 500 stanzas, the *Pañcaçatī*, is ascribed to a mysterious Mūka, alleged to be contemporaneous with Çaṅkara, but this is very dubious. We are on much firmer ground regarding the *Devīçataka* of Ānandavardhana the writer on poetics (*c.* 850), whose hundred very elaborate stanzas hardly conform to his own theory that the poet who pays too much attention to ornament falls into the error of neglecting the suggestion which should underlie poetry, but the deviation is excused by his own admission that in panegyrics of the gods the sentiment is of secondary importance. But it must be added that Ānandavardhana is not a great or perhaps even a good poet, confirming the adage that critics seldom are. Utpaladeva's *Stotrāvalī* was written about 925; it consists of a series of twenty short hymns in honour of Çiva, some mere innovations, some more elaborate, but none of outstanding merit. In the same century probably the Vaiṣṇava Kulaçekhara wrote in honour of Viṣṇu his *Mukundamālā*; it is interesting to find a verse cited in an inscription of a place so distant as Pagan in the thirteenth century.