A History of Sanskrit Literature c3.5

c3.5

On the early development of the Kāvya welcome light has been thrown by Professor H. Lüders's edition¹ of the fragments found in Central Asia of the *Kalpanāmaṇḍitikā* of Kumāralāta, which is the true description of the work hitherto known to us through a Chinese translation as the *Sūtrālaṃkāra* of Açvaghoṣa. That work, it is suggested, was very different in character from Kumāralāta's. It may have been an exposition in verse, possibly with prose additions, of the Canon of the Sarvāstivādins, and it may be represented by fragments still extant; this suggestion can be supported by Asaṅga's choice of title, *Mahāyānasūtrālaṃkāra*, for his exposition of Mahāyāna tenets. But that is still merely a conjecture, and even less proved is the view that Subandhu's famous allusion² *Bauddhasaṃgatim ivālaṃkārabhūṣitām* is to such a text as that ascribed to Açvaghoṣa. Kumāralāta may well have been a younger contemporary of Açvaghoṣa, who lived after the death of Kaniṣka, a fact which explains an old crux, the difficulty of ascribing to Açvaghoṣa the references in the *Sūtrālaṃkāra* which seemed inconsistent with the traditional relation of the patriarch and that king. How the Chinese version of the *Kalpanāmaṇḍitikā*, ‘that which is adorned by poetic invention’, came to bear the style *Sūtrālaṃkāra*, remains an unexplained problem.