A History of Sanskrit Literature c23.s1.16

c23.s1.16

The process of copying, of composing verses for practice in metre without much regard to sense, and the working up of commonplaces, resulted in a large number of poetical conventions being established, which the Kāvyas repeat almost mechanically; the Cakravāka bird is parted at night from its mate and affords a constant reminder of human suffering; the Cakora is fabled to subsist on the moonbeams, and its eyes redden at the sight of poisoned food; the Cātaka drinks the waters of the clouds alone; the Haṅsa discriminates milk in water; fame and laughter alike are white; affection is redness; darkness can be handled; the mouth of envy is two-tongued and filled with poison, the toenails of the king are burnished by the crest jewels of the vassals who lie prostrate at his feet; the day lotuses close their calyx eyes in the evening; the Açoka blooms beneath the touch of the beloved's foot, and a large number of *motifs* are rehandled by poet after poet. Rājaçekhara² deals fully with these poetic conventions, which he prosaically explains as really due to observations made at different places and times from ours. Thus we find the rule that lotuses always exist in rivers, swans only in water, every mountain has gold and jewels; or, again, facts are ignored, as when the jasmine is denied the right to exist in spring, sandal trees are said to have neither flowers nor fruit, and Açokas denied fruit. Or, again, there are artificial restrictions on the existence of things; dolphins exist only in the ocean, pearls only in Tāmraparṇī. He illustrates the same style of conventions for substances, actions, qualities, and gives us the characteristics of the seasons as they are established by the poets. There is also much repetition of wider ideas, and interesting collections have already been made of variant treatments of ideas in Hindu fiction: such *motifs* are the art of entering another's body, the laugh and cry *motif*, talking birds, the act of truth, the Dohada or craving of pregnant women, false ascetics and spurious nuns, the Joseph and Potiphar *motif*, the idea of avoiding fate, the fable of the crow and the palm tree, change of sex, and many others important or trivial.¹