पृष्ठम्:Sanskrit Literature.djvu/१०९

THE GUPTAS AND THE BRAHMIN REVIVAL Nor is there any doubt that the drama must have flourished under their patronage; indeed it has been suggested that Can- dragupta's epithet rupakṛtin denotes maker of plays, which would make the king a predecessor of Harṣa as a dramatist; the accuracy of the rendering is not, however, beyond cavil. What, however, is certain is that Sanskrit was essentially the language of the court and of learned men; even Buddhists such as Vasubandhu and Asañga resorted to it as a matter of course as the means of securing a respectful hearing for their doctrines. The disputes between the rival schools were probably friendly enough; the Samkhya philosophy as expounded in the Karikā of Içvarakṛṣṇa seems to have been the Ebject of special attack by Vasubandhu, and Samudragupta's interest in these matters may have been aroused by that teacher. 77 2. Harişena and Vatsabhatti Fortune has enabled us to obtain an interesting insight into the poetry of the Gupta epoch by the preservation of two Pra- çastis, separated by about a century in time, the panegyric of Samudragupta inscribed on a pillar at Allahabad and composed by Hariṣena, perhaps in 345,¹ and Vatsabhaṭṭi's inscription in the temple of the sun at Mandasor, written in 473-4. These inscrip- tions alone would suffice to prove abundantly the existence of a developed Kavya poetry during the whole period of the Gupta power, and in the first case we actually find a poet of distinct power, though he was foreign minister and general of the king. Harişena's poem bears expressly the title Kävya, though it consists both of prose and verse. Its structure is similar to the delineation of kings adopted in the prose romances of Subandhu and Bāņa, in which all is crowded into a single long sentence, made up of relative clauses and adjectives and appositions heaped upon one another. In this case the whole poem is one sentence, including first eight stanzas of poetry, then a long prose sentence, and finally a concluding stanza. The thought is no less complex than the form, for the poet's ingenuity has been equal to the effort to connect the pillar with the emperor's fame. That, as ¹ Cf. Gawroński, Festschrift Windisch, pp. 170 ff.; The Digvijaya of Raghu (1915); Bühler, Die indischen Inschriften (1890); Smith, EHI. pp. 298 ff.