Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/100

Rh again from A.D. 191-6 the high rank of Mahākṣatrapa, and whose name may be hinted at in the use of the term rājasiṅha. That the Pratijñāyaugandharāyaṇa is older than the Svapnavāsavadattā is held to support this suggestion, but it is clearly without any merit save ingenuity.

Nor is there more to be said for Konow's other suggestions of date; the fact that the term Nāṭaka is used, and that the Vidūṣaka appears, cannot show that he is early, for they are used on continuously to the latest days of the drama, and the view that Bhāsa was an innovator who shortened the preliminaries, which is given as a reason for making him early, because the Nāṭyaçāstra gives the preliminaries in detail, is abandoned sub silentio in the author's later work, where it is candidly admitted that we do not know whether he shortened the preliminaries at all. Nor can we say anything regarding his relation to the Nāṭyaçāstra which will aid us to a date; there is even a tradition that he himself wrote on the theory of the drama. Nor can any weight be attached to the view that Bhāsa stands nearer Açvaghoṣa in technique than Kālidāsa; these matters do not permit of precise evaluation in time, and, if we place Bhāsa about A.D. 300, we go as far as the evidence allows.

3. The Dramas and their Sources

The derivation of the drama in part from epic recitations is peculiarly clear in Bhāsa, who shows the influence of the two great epics in its clearest form. In the Madhyamavyāyoga we have a reminiscence of the tale of the love of the demon Hiḍimbā for Bhīma, the third of the five Pāṇḍavas, and their marriage which has Ghaṭotkaca as its fruit, though the parents part. The play opens with preliminary rites, after which the director pronounces a benediction on the audience, and begins to address them, but is suddenly interrupted by a sound, which is revealed as the cry of a Brahmin, who with his three sons and his wife is being pursued by the demon Ghaṭotkaca. The demon has received orders from his mother to bring her a victim; he offers, there-