Bhāmaha in Tibet

✍ Scribed by Leonard W. J. Kuijp

• Publisher: Brill
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 551 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0019-7246
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00164562

✦ Synopsis

Bhfimaha's Kdvyalam. k~ra 1 is one of the earliest Indian works on Indian literary criticism (alam. kdragdstra) and in atl probability the oldest one that has been preserved in toto. The view that has found widespread acceptance ever since it was first proposed in the first decade of this century is that the Kdvydlamkdra is chronologically prior to Dan d.in's Kdvyadarga. ~ This was also the opinion of the Sinhalese scholar Ratna~rfjfi~na (10th cent.), the earliest identified commentator of Dand.in, who unhesitatingly states Dan. d.in's opponens in the first chapter of the Kdvydclarga to have been Bh~maha. 3 Of these two oldest handbooks of poetic theory and literary criticism, it was only Dan.d.in's text which penetrated into the Tibetan, and thence, into the Mongol literary awareness. A comprehensive account of its spread in Tibet and the phases of its transmission are given by me in a forthcoming study of the first chapter of this work in Tibet which is accompanied by a text-historical edition of the same, and will therefore not be dealt with here. Similarly, I shall also not discuss the significance of, and the roles played by, the individuals mentioned in this note; the same holds for their oeuvre.

The name of Bhfimaha and several of his propositions, notably those relating to the defining features of a rnahdkdvya -similar to our epic -and of the various forms of prose, were introduced in Tibet through the medium of the RATNASRI. The first Tibetan scholar to have made extensive use of this text was the famous linguist and Sanskritist, Dpang Lo-ts~-ba Blo-gros brtan-pa (1276-1342), alias the third *Sthiramati. Of the numerous writings that issued from his pen, only two have surfaced and have been published. One of these is his well-known but rare commentary on the Kdvyadarga of which a cursive clbu-med manuscript was published in a miscellany of texts on the traditional Indo-Tibetan sciences.4 Later Tibetan commentators are quite explicit that Dpang Lo-ts~i-ba did not shy away from summarizing the pertinent points made by the RATNASR|, although the use of this work is but rarely acknowledged by him. Thus, the GZHUNG-GSAL pp. 297,307 are the only instances where, in his exegesis of the first chapter, Dpang Lo-ts~-ba makes an explicit mention of this work: His indebtedness to the RATNASRI is neither admitted in the introductory remarks to his commentary, nor is it mentioned in the concluding colophon, the usual places where Tibetan authors declare such bibliographical oddities.

The sixth and last phase of philological scholarship of the Kdvyddar~a in Tibet that was ushered in by Si-tu Pan.-chen Chos-kyi 'byung-gnas (1700-1774) and