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A History of Sanskrit Literature c19.s4: 4. Kṣemendra's Bṛhatkathāmañjarī

A History of Sanskrit Literature c19.s4

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4. Kṣemendra's Bṛhatkathāmañjarī

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The work of Kṣemendra¹ was probably produced in his youth like the Mañjarīs of the *Mahābhārata* and the *Rāmāyaṇa* which he composed, perhaps in accordance with his own doctrine that the would-be poet ought to undertake exercises of this kind. The character of these abridgements is well known; they are dry and sober, reproducing faithfully, though with much omission and curtailment often to obscurity, their originals, but depriving them of all life and attraction. Kṣemendra has, moreover, in lieu of seeking to write interesting summaries, thought it enough to relieve the barrenness of his versions by interpolating elegant descriptions at intervals, a procedure not to be commended, as it merely adds to the bulk of the works without serving any useful purpose. But his accuracy, which we can test for the epics, is assured, and therefore we may *a priori* assume that his account of the contents of the *Bṛhatkathā* of Kashmir accords with reality.

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¹ Ed. KM. 69, 1901. Cf. Bühler, IA. i. 302 ff.; Lévi, JA. 1885, ii. 397 ff.; 1886, i. 216 ff.; Speyer, *Studies about the Kathāsaritsāgara*, pp. 9 ff.

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It appears from the coincidence of the two recensions that the original was divided into eighteen Lambhakas as its main divisions, and it is a plausible conjecture that the term applies to the victories of the hero, each section dealing with some achievement of his. As we have it in both our sources, the work begins with the Kathāpīṭha, which gives as an introduction to the tale the legend of Guṇāḍhya already noted. In Book ii, the basis of the story is furnished in the adventures of Udayana, which are carried in iii to his winning of Padmāvatī, the book taking its style Lāvānaka from the place where the first queen, Vāsavadattā, was reported to have perished, a necessary preliminary to the second espousals. In iv we have the birth of the hero, Naravāhanadatta, who is to be the emperor of the Vidyādharas. The next book, Caturdārikā, is decidedly episodical. The Vidyādhara Çaktivega comes to visit the future sovereign, and relates how he himself has reached the wonderful city of the Vidyādharas and won the four beauteous maidens whence the title of the book is derived. From this point Kṣemendra and Somadeva diverge vitally. Kṣemendra continues with the legend of Sūryaprabha (vi), a strange and remarkable tale, of how that hero rose from royal rank to becoming emperor of the Vidyādharas after a desperate struggle against his foe Çrutaçarman, who was finally induced to content himself with a minor kingdom, thanks to the direct personal intervention of Çiva himself.

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The tale is remarkable in its obvious blending of mythology involving Vedic and epic beliefs, Buddhist legends, and popular story matter; but in Kṣemendra's hands it suffers greatly from excessive condensation. The two books, it will be seen, have a certain relevance to each other and to the work as a whole, despite their episodic character; they deal with the career of other aspirants to emperorship over the Vidyādharas. In vii we return to the main story a little more clearly. The essence of the book is a long account of Kaliṅgadatta, father of Kaliṅgasenā, who serves merely to give his daughter a royal ancestry; Udayana is sought in marriage by her and he would gladly wed her, but Yaugandharāyaṇa resists the match, lest the king should become too much enamoured of his wife and neglect his duties, a ludicrous excuse seeing that he had already arranged two marriages for the prince. Doubtless in a more original form it was Kaliṅgasenā's character as hetaira which motived the objections. At any rate Udayana is induced to abandon the project, but he determines to allow her daughter to wed Naravāhanadatta, and the book carries us to his consent to a formal marriage. Book viii, which is very short, is styled Velā after the name of the character of whom and her husband a legend is narrated, quite episodically, but it ends with the vital statement that Madanamañcukā has been abducted by the Vidyādhara Mān his beloved he has to be the hero of four episodic books (ix–xii).

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In the first he is carried off in sleep and ends by espousing another Vidyādhara maiden, Lalitalocanā, with whom he spends time on mount Malaya, but is saddened by longing for Madanamañcukā; Lalitalocanā disappears, but a hermit, Piçaṅgajaṭa, comforts him by telling him the tale of Mṛgāṅkadatta, a prince of Ayodhyā, who won in marriage Çaçāṅkavatī, daughter of his enemy Karmasena of Ujjain, who gives the book its name (ix). The next consolation is administered by Kaṇva and consists in the narration of a vast cycle of legends of the emperor Vikramāditya, though it is inconceivable that Guṇāḍhya himself could have been guilty of so flagrant an anachronism; the title is Viṣamaçīla (x). In xi, Madirāvatī, the prince is encouraged to persevere by the tale of two Brahmins who by manly effort (*puruṣakāra*) succeeded in defying the decrees of fate (*karman*) and achieving their desire, and he also recovers the missing and apparently not much regretted, Lalitalocanā. Yet another episode follows: Gomukha tells the tale of the emperor Muktāphalaketu and his beloved Padmāvatī, who gives the book its name (xii).

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After this long interlude action is resumed in Book xiii, Pañca, so called because in it the prince wins five more brides, Vidyādhara maidens who are determined to espouse him. The main business, however, of the book is the effort to attain Madanamañcukā. With the aid of Prabhāvatī, a Vidyādhara, the prince penetrates to her place of confinement, using a woman’s form lent by Prabhāvatī; as she, however, has to resume it, suddenly he is discovered and Mānasavega has him tried by the court of the Vidyādharas, but will not accept their decision in his favour. Prabhāvatī takes him in safety away from the Vidyādharas; ultimately he reaches Kauçāmbī, and many Vidyādharas join him for an attack on his foes. After great efforts, he attains Çiva’s favour, and in a great battle slays Gaurīmuṇḍa and Mānasavega in single combat. He prepares to attack his remaining foe Mandaradeva in the north of Kailāsa, and marries the five damsels who seek his love. The next step ought obviously to be the attack on Mandaradeva, as it is in Somadeva, but there now occurs a long series of episodes which doubtless had been inserted here in the Kashmirian *Bṛhatkathā*. In Book xiv he marries Ratnaprabhā, whose name the book bears, and pays an important visit to the land of camphor, returning in a flying machine of the kind which the Yavanas, Greeks, were experts at constructing. In Book xv we have a sort of duplication of this adventure;

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he marries Alaṁkāravatī, and proceeds to an expedition to a White Island or Continent¹ where he worships Nārāyaṇa with an elaborate prayer written in the most finished Kāvya style; the parallel to the famous episode of the *Mahābhārata* in which sages seek the Çvetadvīpa and take part in the worship of a wonderful deity—which has been deemed a reference to actual experience of Nestorian rites or even of Alexandrian Christianity—is complete, and suggests very strongly that the Kashmirian or the original *Bṛhatkathā* borrowed the episode from the epic as we know it. The next book (xvi) is much more banal; it gives the prince another wife, Çaktiyaças, and imparts a number of unimportant episodes. We resume now in Book xvii the lost thread. Before he can attack Mandaradeva, Naravāhanadatta must receive from the sage Vāmadeva on mount Malaya the seven jewels, emblematic of sovereignty. He then reaches the north by passing under a great tunnel, and by his offer of his own head induces the dread Kālarātri, who guards the exit, to permit his passage. Mandaradeva falls, five more maidens are wed—a repetition of the *motif* in Book xiii, and the great consecration, Mahābhiṣeka, whence the book is named, is duly celebrated, the emperor insisting on his father being present. The work is now finished, but very inconveniently a further book (xviii) is necessary;

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under the style Suratamañjarī it tells how, after the death of Pradyota and Udayana, Gopāla and Pālaka resigned their tenure of the kingship of Ujjain, how Avantivardhana wedded the heroine, and how the two were protected against a jealous Vidyādhara by the emperor. The only excuse for this absurd position of the tale is the fact of the existence of Book i with its account of the telling of the tale by Guṇāḍhya. In the original, as the Nepalese version shows, the episode of Suratamañjarī led up to the telling by Naravāhanadatta himself of his adventure, which would have clashed with the version of Book i, and the old exordium was, therefore, relegated to an appendix. This view is confirmed by the fact that Somadeva in his Book vi expressly tells us that Naravāhanadatta is relating his adventures in the third person, an admission that he knew that the tale of Suratamañjarī had originally been placed at the beginning of the work. On this point Kṣemendra is silent in his corresponding Madanamañcukā book (vii), but he reveals the fact in the summary (*upasaṁhāra*) with which he ends his poem, for he tells us, for the first time, that the work is supposed to be set forth by Naravāhanadatta to the sage Kaçyapa on a visit.

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¹ Cf. W. E. Clark, JAOS. xxxix. 209-42; Garbe, *Indien und das Christentum*, pp. 193 ff.; Grierson, IA. xxxvii. 251 ff., 373 ff.

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Two other points at once stand out revealing the defect of the original Kashmirian recension. The break between the end of Velā (viii) and the continuation in Pañca (xiii) is lamentable; but its harshness is concealed in some measure by making the intervening books recognize the plight of the prince and the endeavour to console him during his search. Evidently it was thus that the compilers of the Kashmirian recension hoped to work in not too awkwardly their extra matter, and in a sense they succeeded. The same thing cannot be said regarding the interpolation of Books xiv–xvi between Pañca and the book of triumph and consecration. The break is ludicrous; Naravāhanadatta, who is left at the end of Pañca as accepted as lord by the great majority of the Vidyādharas, but who has Mandaradeva still to overcome, is now treated for three books as a prince in the home of his father, without any consciousness of his great adventures or his imperial dignity in the land of the Vidyādharas. Here the compiler had evidently not the skill to make even a passable transition, and Kṣemendra loyally followed his incoherence. This is conclusive evidence against the original *Bṛhatkathā* ever having contained this material; no author would permit himself such confusion, while a compiler could easily slip into it when he desired to knit together varying cycles of legend.

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