A History of Indian Literature v2.c19.s6.t3.86

v2.c19.s6.t3.86

According to Hsüan-Tsang,³ Kumāralāta was the founder of the Sautrāntika school, and came from Taxila. In the work itself, the masters of the Sarvāstivādins are honoured, and many of the stories in the Kalpanāmaṇḍitikā are taken from the Canon of the Sarvāstivādins.¹ King Kaniṣka plays a part in two narratives, and he appears as a king of a past age.² Hence the work must have been written some considerable time after the death of Kaniṣka, and the poet could not have lived earlier than the end of the second century, when Aśvaghoṣa was already a very old man.³ As far as we are able to glean from the few fragments extant, the language of the work is perfectly correct Sanskrit, and there are seldom deviations from grammar. It is a curious thing that, in one passage,⁴ there are two Āryā verses in Prākrit in the midst of the Sanskrit verses. At all events it is very regrettable that we no longer possess the greater portion of the Kalpanāmaṇḍitikā in the original. It is not only in itself a work of literary distinction, the merits of which (as Lévi rightly remarks) are still recognisable even after two processes of translation; but also from the point of view of the history of ancient Indian literature and culture, its importance should not be undervalued, for it mentions the epics Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa, it confutes the philosophical doctrines of Sāṃkhya and Vaiśeṣika and the religious views of the Brahmans and Jains, and it contains all kinds of references to script, art and painting.