who is, as we have seen, none other than Muñja, the patron of Dhanaṃjaya.[1] This statement, together with the fact that the work contains (at 2. 65) a quotation from Padmagupta’s Navasāhasāṅkacarita (a poem published after 995 A. D., in the reign of Sindhurāja), enables us to assign Dhanika’s commentary approximately to the end of the tenth century.[2] It is consequently not at all impossible (though I do not regard it as probable) that our commentator is the same person as the Dhanika Paṇḍita to whose son Vasantācārya a tract of land was granted in 974 A. D. by King Vākpati (=Muñja).[3] This conclusion as to the age of the Daśarūpāvaloka would seem to be invalidated by the occurrence, at the end of the first book (1. 129, com.), of a quotation from Kṣemendra’s Bṛhatkathāmañjarī, a work composed about 1037 A. D., but the four lines in question occur in only one of the manuscripts and are generally admitted, for this and other reasons, to be a later interpolation.[4]
It has been suggested, because of the similarity of the names and the identity of the patronymic, that the author of the Daśarūpa and its commentator were one and the same person.[5] This view is supported by the fact that the Daśarūpa is usually referred to in later treatises as the work of Dhanika[6] and that the commentary seems to form an essential part of the treatise. On the other
- ↑ See page xxi, above. Dhanika quotes one of the king’s stanzas in two places in his commentary (DR. 4. 66, 67).
- ↑ According to Jacob, JRAS. 1897, p. 304, Dhanika is quoted 16 times in the Sarasvatīkaṇṭhābharaṇa (written about 1025 A. D.).
- ↑ Cf. Ind. Ant. 6 (1877), pp. 51–53; Archaeol. Survey of Western India, vol. 3 (Burgess), London, 1878, p. 100. This grant was first described by Hall, Journ. As. Soc. Bengal, 30 (1861), pp. 195–210.
- ↑ Cf. Hall, Vāsavadattā, Calcutta, 1859, p. 55; Lévi, Journal asiatique, 8. série, 7 (1886), p. 221; Bühler, Sb. Akad. Wien, 116 (1888), p. 622, n. 2; Lacôte, Essai sur Guṇāḍhya et la Bṛhatkathā, Paris, 1908, p. 14. The two ślokas are quoted also in Dhuṇḍhirāja’s commentary on the Mudrārākṣasa (ed. Telang, p. 53; ed. Kale, p. 12).
- ↑ Wilson, Theatre of the Hindus, 1. xx. Cf. also Lévi, Journal asiatique, 8. série, 7 (1886), pp. 220–221.
- ↑ As, for instance, at SD. 313, 316, etc., and in other works. Cf. Lévi, Le Théatre indien, p. 17.
