A History of Indian Literature v3.c35.s8.188

v3.c35.s8.188

Mūka might have been a contemporary of Śaṅkara. He has praised Devī in not less than 500 stanzas, Pañcaśatī¹. Ānandavardhana wrote also a Devīśataka², hundred highly ornate stanzas, in which he exhibits his mastery over the most complex artifices of poetics, a thing that is contradictory to his own view that suggestion and not embellishment is the essential thing in poetry. At one place in his poetics, however, he says that in prayers to gods the sentiment (rasa) is of minor importance³. Utpaladeva, the teacher of Abhinavagupta, wrote (in the beginning of the 10th century) one Stotrāvali⁴, a collection 20 stanzas written in praise of Śiva, that contains partly simple invocations and partly fully ornate verses. Before the 11th century A.D. must have lived the Vaiṣṇava saint Kulaśekhara, who wrote one Mukundamālā⁵ for the purpose of glorification of Viṣṇu, in which for example he says:—