A History of Indian Literature v3.c35.s8.53

v3.c35.s8.53

The Sattasaī has come down to us in not less than 6 different recensions, and this points to its extraordinary popularity. These recensions differ from one another not only in respect of the form of the text and the order of stanzas, but also in that of the textual subject-matter. Only 430 verses are found in all the different recensions. From its appearance it seems that the collection originally had much of uniform character and bore the stamp of an independent work in a certain sense and it received all the form and character of a colourful anthology of Prākrit poems, first of all in the hands of the copyists, who collected Prākrit verses from miscellaneous sources and increased the bulk of the incomplete manuscript with their own collections. When we speak of the Sattasaī as a work perhaps written in the 2nd century A.D. we mean by it only the basic stock of the text. At the most only the stanzas that are found in all the recensions can be considered to belong to such a high antiquity³.