The Sanskrit Drama in its Origin, Development, Theory & Practice c18.26.1

c18.26.1

To understand the Indian drama we have aid from a work of curious character and importance, the *Kāmaçāstra* or *Kāmasūtra* of Vātsyāyana,¹ which was doubtless familiar to the dramatists from Kālidāsa onwards. The world which produced the classical drama was one in which the pessimism of Buddhism, with its condemnation of the value of pleasure, had given way to the worship of the great sectarian divinities Çiva and Viṣṇu, in whose service the enjoyment of pleasure was legitimate and proper. The Buddhists themselves admittedly felt the force of the demand for a life of ease; we have preserved verses satirizing their love of women, wine, soft living, and luxury, and there is abundant evidence of the decline of austerity in the order. The eclecticism of Harṣa is sufficiently significant; the policy which at the great festival at Prayāga reported by Hiuan Tsang resulted in the dedication of a statue to the Buddha on the first day, to the sun, the favourite deity of his father, on the second, and to Çiva on the third, excludes any possibility of belief in the depth of Harṣa’s Buddhist beliefs. If there were any doubt as to the strange transformation of feeling among Buddhists, it would be removed by the benediction which opens the *Nāgānanda*, where the Buddha is invoked as rallied on his hardheartedness by the ladies of Māra’s train. The process of accommodation had evidently gone very far.