hand, there are in the commentary a number of indications of a difference in authorship,[1] and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that Dhanika, its author, was some contemporary of Dhanaṃjaya, very probably his brother, who collaborated in the production of the work.[2]
Of other works by Dhanika only a few fragments have survived to the present day. From seven couplets quoted in his comment on DR. 4. 46 it appears that he composed a treatise on poetics, entitled Kāvyanirṇaya, of which nothing further is known. His Avaloka also reveals him as a writer of poetry, since he cites twenty-four of his own stanzas, twenty in Sanskrit and four in Prākrit, as illustrations of Dhanaṃjaya’s definitions.[3] Two of these stanzas are included, under his name, in the Śārṅgadharapaddhati, and still another is found in that anthology without indication of authorship.[4] Very probably Dhanika was a poet of some repute and belonged to the literary circle at King Muñja’s court,[5] for we find his name mentioned with those of
- ↑ At DR. 2. 34, for example, Dhanika gives two possible interpretations of the text without deciding which is the correct one; at 3. 40 his explanation seems to read a technical meaning into an apparently simple line; at 4. 52 we find the form vikāsa substituted for the vikāśa of the text (this may, of course, be merely a manuscript error). See my notes on these sections. I regard Hall’s views (p. 9, notes) regarding Dhanika's interpretation of tulyasaṃvidhānaviśeṣaṇam (DR. 1. 22) as mistaken; the commentator seems to give the meaning intended by the author in this passage.
- ↑ Cf. Hall, pp. 2–4. That they were brothers is accepted, for example, by Keith, A Catalogue of the Sanskrit and Prākrit MSS. in the Indian Institute Library, Oxford, Oxford, 1903, p. 4.
- ↑ Dhanika’s lines occur in the commentary on the following sections of DR.: 2. 8, 16, 22, 26, 29, 50 (Prākrit), 51 (Prākrit), 52, (Prākrit), 57, 60, (Prākrit), 63, 64, 65, 67, 68, 79 (repeated at 4. 69); 4. 3, 34, 35, 67, 69 (three stanzas, one being a repetition of the one at 2. 79), 76, 79.—An introductory stanza, prefixed to the Avaloka in one of the manuscripts, was rejected by Hall as spurious, chiefly on the ground that its style was ‘too pedestrian for so ornate a stylist as Dhanika.’ See Hall, p. 4, notes.
- ↑ Śārṅg. 3973 (DR. 2. 16), 3417 (DR. 4. 3), 278 (DR. 4 79).
- ↑ See pages xxii–xxiii, above.
