It has long been held that Dharmakirti, the great Buddhist philosopher of the seventh century, wrote a work on Alafik~rag~stra. In Subandhu's Vgtsavadattgt, 1 when the N~yaka is face to face with Vftsavadattft, a large number of comparisons are given, among which is the following: bauddhasahgatim ivMahkdrabhft.sit~m) The most natural way to understand this is that her face was adorned with jewels (alahkdra) the way a meeting (sahgati, the word need not have any technical sense; it is common enough in classical Sanskrit and the Vdsavadattd is after all not a Buddhist text) of Buddhists is adorned with (a text called) alahkara. Now the commentator Sivar~tma 3 says of this: bauddhasahgatim iv6la~karo dharmakMik.rto granthavi~e.sas, tena bhff.sitam, and this is the phrase that has led many writers (Aufrecht, Hall, Peterson, Telang and Sivaprasad Bhattacharya) to hold that Dharmakirti wrote a work called Alahkara. This seems to me (as it did to Kane) very meagre evidence, a For all that Sivar~tma says is that alahkara refers to a certain book written by Dharmakirti. He does not say that Dharmakirti wrote a work on poetics (alahkaraJ6stra), but only that he wrote a book in which the word alahkara figures in the title. Several Buddhist texts (e.g. the Mahayanasfitralahkara, the AbhisamayMahkara) use the word alahkara though they have nothing to do with poetics, and it is not impossible * Professor de Jong has very kindly drawn my attention to the following articles of