Page:The Sanskrit Drama.djvu/48

 Religion and the Drama 43 the attitude of the Buddhists towards it. The extreme dubiety of the date of the Buddhist Suttas renders it impossible to come to any satisfactory decision regarding the existence of drama at any early date, while the terms employed, such as Visūka- dassana, Nacca, and Pekkhã, and the reference to Samajjas leave us wholly without any ground for belief in an actual drama. We see, however, that the objection of the sacred Canon to monks engaging in the amusement of watching these shows, whatever their nature, was gradually overcome, and it is an important fact that the earliest dramas known to us by fragments are the Buddhist dramas of Açvaghosa. With the acceptance of the drama, the Lalitavistara2 does not hesitate to speak of the Buddha as including knowledge of the drama as among his accomplishments; the Buddha is even called one who has entered to gaze on the drama of the Great Law. The legend is willing to admit that even in Buddha's time there were dramas, for Bimbisāra had one performed in honour of a pair of Naga kings, and the Avadanaçataka, a collection of pious tales, places the drama in remote antiquity. It was per- formed by the bidding of Krakucchanda, a far distant Buddha in the city Çobhāvati by a troupe of actors; the director under- took the rôle of the Buddha himself, while the other members of the troupe took the rôle of monks; the same troupe in a later age, under Gautama the Buddha himself, performed at Rājagṛha, the actress Kuvalayā gaining enormous fame, and seducing the monks, until the Buddha terminated her career by turning her into a hideous old woman. She then repented and attained the rank of a saint. The same idea of a play bearing on the life of the Buddha himself is preserved in another tale in Tibet where an actor from the south sets up in rivalry with the monks in giving representations of the life of the Buddha. These Buddhist dramas have left their imprint on the form of the Saddharmapundarika, the Lotus of the Good Law, itself, which has none of the epic character of the Lalitavistara, but is pre- 1 Lévi, TI. i. 319 ff. That any of the early Buddhist texts (e. g. Padhanasutta, Pabbajjäsutta; Marasamyutta, Bhikkhunisamyutta; Chaddanta-, Ummadanti-, Maha- janaka-, or Candakinnara-jätaka; Theragatha, 866 ff.; Therigäthä, 912 ff.) is really dramatic is out of the question; cf. Winternitz, VOJ. xxvii. 38 f. 2 xii. p. 178. Drama is alluded to in Divyavadana, pp. 357, 360, 361. 3 Schiefner, IS. iii. 483, Indian Tales, pp. 236 ff. ii. 24 (75).