पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/१००

68 AÇVAGHOŞA AND EARLY BUDDHIST KĀVYA type is sufficient proof of the spread of the use of that language for purposes of literature and discussion in the courtly circles in which, we may safely assume, Arya Çūra moved and lived. The material of the tales was doubtless ready to hand; nearly all of them are extant in the Pali Jataka book,¹ and twelve of them are also found in the Pali Cariyapitaka. Moreover, as in that book, the tales are told with the definite purpose of illustrating the various perfections (pāramitās) ascribed by Buddhist theory to the Buddha to be. Their chief defect to modern taste is the extravagance which refuses to recognize the Aristotelian mean. The very first tale, which is not in the Jataka book, tells of the extraordinary benevolence of the Bodhisattva who insists on sacrificing his life in order to feed a hungry tigress, whom he finds on the point of devouring the young whom she can no longer feed, and the other narratives are no less inhuman in the disproportion between the worth of the object sacrificed and that for whose sake the sacrifice is made. But these defects were deemed rather merits by contemporary and later taste. I-tsing mentions the Fatakamālā as one of the popular works among Buddhists of his day, and the frescoes of Ajaṇṭā include both pictures and verses, proving the existence then of the text. The date of this evidence, unfortunately, is not certain, but the style of writing suggests the sixth century, and with this accords the fact that a Chinese rendering of another work of Arya Çūra was made in A. D. 434. The author may then have written in the third, or more probably the fourth, century. Ārya Çūra's style is classical, showing command of the resources of his art, but restrained and saved from exaggeration by good taste. His prose and verse alike are careful and polished, and, though he is not averse to the use of fairly long compounds, especially in prose, he employs them naturally and is seldom obscure. His good taste is conspicuous in the lines put in the mouth of the son whose father in his insensate generosity has given away his wife and children; the child speaks in simple but pathetic words: naivedam me tathā duḥkham yad ayam hanti māṁ dvijaḥ napaçyam ambāṁ yat tv adya tad vidārayatīva mām ¹ GN. 1918, pp. 464 ff.