महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

xliii] Bhavabhūti, his Life, and his Date the spiritual teacher or guru of Mahendrapāla of Kanauj; and this monarch is mentioned in the Siyadoni inscription ¹ with the dates 903–4 and 907–8. The date of Rājaśekhara is accordingly put at about A. D. 900. So far as these facts may determine it therefore, the latest limit for Bhavabhūti would be about 850 to 875. 11. Date of Yaśovarman of Kanauj as determining that of Vākpati- rāja.—Kalhaṇa’s Chronicle of the kings of Kaśmīr or Rājatarangiṇī, written 1148–9, states at iv. 134 that the king of Kaśmīr, Lalitāditya-Muktāpīḍa (Mu-to-pi of the Chinese Annals), subdued king Yaśovarman of Kānyakubja or Kanauj. From the Chronicle, the limits of Lalitāditya’s reign appear to be 699 to 735 A. D.; but Stein is of opinion that the humiliation of Yaśo- varman by Lalitāditya was subsequent ² to a certain embassy sent by the latter to the Chinese emperor, which embassy, according to the Annals, cannot have been earlier than 736. 12. Date of Vākpatirāja’s Gaüḍavaho not far from 736.—Yaśovar- man’s court-poet during some part of his reign (presumably the later) was a man called in Sanskrit Vākpatirāja, or in Prākrit, Bappairāa. He wrote a Prākrit poem entitled Gaüḍavaho (Sanskrit Gāuḍavadhah). This means ‘Slaughter of the Gauḍian [king]’. It is a long poem of over 1200 stanzas, devoted ostensibly to the glorification of his Royal patron Yaśovarman. It was evidently planned on an ‘enormous’ (viyaḍa = vikaṭa) scale; for, long as it is, it is in fact only a prelude, and does not even give the name of the ‘Gauḍian king’, much less any details about his ‘slaughter’. It was edited by Shankar Pandurang Pandit (Bombay, 1887), with an elaborate introduction, discussing Yaśovarman (pp. xvii ff.), his date (lxvii), Vākpati- rāja’s personal history (xxxiii and lxiv), and the date of the writing of the poem (xcvi). Other pertinent discussions are: Bühler’s paper in WZKM, Band ii, pp. 328–40; Jacobi’s, in the Göttinger Gel. Anzeigen of 1888, no. 2, p. 68; Stein’s notes to his translation (1900) of Kalhaṇa; and Bhandarkar’s 2nd ed. (1905) of Mālatī-Mādhava, preface, p. xiii. In determining the date of the writing of the Gaüḍavaho, no question could be more pertinent than this: Why does the poem, planned upon an ‘enormous’ scale, stop short with the prelude, and not even take up the slaughter of the Gauḍian king,³ that is, the very subject which, to judge from the title of the poem, should form its main substance? The most natural answer is that Vākpatirāja began his panegyric in the days of Yaśovarman’s greatest successes, and that, after writing his prelude of

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Footnotes: ¹ See Kielhorn, Epigraphia Indica, i. 171; or Konow, l. c., pp. 178–9. ² See Stein’s Translation of the Chronicle, Introduction, § 85, and cp. his notes on iv. 134 and iv. 126, and § 66. ³ For meagre and incidental mentions of him, see Mr. S. P. Pandit, Introd. p. xlii.