Harsha or Harsha-vardhana, and the history agrees so remarkably with that given in Hiouen Thsang of Harsha-vardhana, or Śíladitya,[1] the King of Kanouj, in the first half of the seventh century, that we can hardly feel any doubt as to their being the same person.
Now Hiouen Thsang’s account of the court of Kanouj may throw some light on these dramas. Whether they were really written by the same poet or not, they profess to be the composition of the same king; and the similarity of much of the prologue, and the identity of one of the verses, give an external appearance of identity of authorship in spite of the difference in the style; and this may have been part of the deception practised on the audience. Bána may have afterwards inserted a verse from the Ratnávalí in his unfinished Harsha-charitra, as a tacit assertion of his claim to the authorship of that work, just as Sostratus is said to have engraved his own name beneath the royal inscription on the Pharos. Still the difficulty remains as to the Hindu and Buddhist character of the plays; and I think this is much better explained by the character of the king than by assuming such an almost unparalleled versatility of faith in a poet.
Hiouen Thsang is loud in his praises of Harsha-vardhana's devotion to Buddhism; but surely his own narrative is sufficient to warn us against taking these eulogies too literally. The king may have built the hundreds of stúpas along the Ganges, he may have
- ↑ Julien's “ Voyages des Pèlerins Bouddhistes,” vol. ii. 247 ff.
