Jyotihshastra: Astral and Mathematical Literature c2.2

c2.2

Nor has any attempt been made to deal with the literary qualities of the works discussed. The primary texts are certainly all in metrical form, but are generally written in a very crabbed and obscure style designed to stimulate the student's memory of the procedures to be followed, but frequently not even pretending to provide the full algorithm for a particular problem; that was to be found, if not in the repetitiousness of the science, in the guru's oral tradition or in the prose commentary. Thus, while cleverness and imprecision both abound in this poetry, the normal canons of *alaṅkāra* are simply not applicable; only rarely, as in the *ṛtuvarṇana* in Bhāskara's SŚB, is any poetic feeling made manifest.