The first of these is specially interesting as it represents a type of which we have otherwise no earlier specimen than the Prabodhacandrodaya of Kṛṣṇamiçra. We find the allegorical figures of Buddhi, wisdom, Kīrti, fame, and Dhṛti, firmness, appearing and conversing. This is followed by the advent of the Buddha himself, adorned with the halo which he borrowed from Greek art. We do not know whether he appeared later in actual conversation with the allegorical figures, but for this mixture of the real and the ideal we have to go beyond Kṛṣṇamiçra, who represents all his characters as abstract, Viṣṇu for instance by Faith in Viṣṇu, to Kavikarṇapūra's glorification of Caitanya in the sixteenth century, in which allegorical figures are mingled with Caitanya and his followers, though they do not actually converse together.[1] It must remain uncertain whether there was a train of tradition leading from Açvaghoṣa to Kṛṣṇamiçra, or whether the latter created the type of drama afresh; the former theory is the more likely. The characters all speak Sanskrit, but the fragments are too short to give us any real information on the general trend of the play.
The other drama gives us more interesting matter. It is one in which figures a hetaera named Magadhavatī, a Vidūṣaka named Komudhagandha, a hero styled only Nāyaka, but probably named Somadatta, a Duṣṭa, rogue, without further name, a certain Dhānaṁjaya, who may possibly be a prince if the term 'king's son' (bhaṭṭidālaka), which is recognized in the Naṭyaçāstra as the style of the younger princes of the blood, applies to him, a maid-servant, and Çāriputra and Maudgalyāyana. The drama was doubtless intended for purposes of religious edification, but what we have is too fragmentary to do more than show that the author was possessed of humour and that the Vidūṣaka was already a hungry soul. The drama alludes to an old garden as the place where part of the action passed, as in the Mṛcchakatikā, and also as in that drama the house of the hetaera served as the scene of another part of the action. The characters are often introduced as entering in vehicles (pravahaṇa), a further point of
- ↑ In the Jain Moharājaparājaya (below, ch. xi, § 3) the real and the ideal characters converse.
Sūtrālaṁkāra, which is preserved in the Divyāvadāna (pp. 356 ff.; Windisch, Māra und Buddha, pp. 161 ff.); cf. Huber, BEFEO. iv. 414 f.
