The History of Indian Literature c9.74.3

c9.74.3

But a date long subsequent to this will have to be assigned to the Mṛichhakaṭí, since the vernacular dialects it introduces appear in a most barbarous condition. Besides, we meet with the very same flourishing state of Buddhism which is here revealed in one of the dramas of Bhavabhúti, a poet whose date is fixed with tolerable certainty for the eighth century A.D. The Rámáyaṇa and the war-part of the Mahá-Bhárata must, to judge from the use made of their heroes in the Mṛichhakaṭí, already have been favourite reading at the time when it was composed; while, on the other hand, from the absence of allusion to the chief figures of the present Puráṇas, we may perhaps infer with Wilson that these works were not yet in existence. This latter inference, however, is in so far doubtful as the legends dealt with in these younger Puráṇas were probably, to a large extent, already contained in the older works of the same name.∗ The two remaining dramas of Bhavabhúti, and the whole herd of the later dramatic literature, relate to the heroic tradition of the Rámáyaṇa and Mahá-Bhárata, or else to the history of Kṛishṇa; and the later the pieces are, the more do they resemble the so-called 'mysteries' of the Middle Ages. The comedies, which, together with a few other pieces, move in the sphere of civil life, form of course an exception to this. A peculiar class of dramas are the philosophical ones, in which abstractions and systems appear as the *dramatis personæ*.