of K - Philipps-Universität Marburg

2
Ā. They have all been edited by E. V. V. RĀGHAVĀCHĀRYA, SHARMA in the collection Laghukāvyasagraha
(Minor Works of Kemendra, 1961).
K¤emendra’s “Minor Works” are poems or didactic works including poems of minor length, their
function being mainly to serve nīti, i.e: moral or political wisdom, or conduct of the statesman.
More generally, however, all aphoristic and ethical poetry, that is to say, verses concerned only with
a single erotic or religious sentiment could be considered as laghukāvyas.
K¤emendra mentions four kinds of composition in his work on metrics, Suvttatilaka III.2:
science (śāstra), poetry (kāvya), poetry in science (śāstrakāvya), and science in poetry (kāvyaśāstra).
His didactic and satirical works seem to fall into the third category “poetry in science”
(Suvttatilaka III.4), pertaining to the “four-fold pursuit of man” (caturvarga) and providing “instructions
to all” (sarvopadeśa). K¤emendra holds that works on science and poems which are of
Purāa-type or didactic exposition should be written in the metre Anu¤ubh (śloka).
Eleven works by K¤emendra have been published since the end of the
“BibliographyofK¢emendra’sMinorWorks”
19 th century after he was
“rediscovered” by Indian and Western scholars (cf. R. MITRA 1871, G. BÜHLER 1873). The starting
point were the editions of the satirical poem Kalāvilāsa and the critical discourse on propriety in
Aucityavicāracarcā
(Kāvyamālā poetical composition, collection, part 1, Niraya Sāgara Press,
Bombay, 1886, by DURGĀPRASĀD and PARAB).
SŪRYAKĀNTA suggests in Kemendra Studies (1954, p.1), that “most of his works, numbering
about thirty-two, have been published while some are yet in their manuscript form.” This judgement
seems somewhat overly-optimistic and I cannot agree with SŪRYAKĀNTA in this respect. To my
knowledge, no further manuscripts of K¤emendra, besides the 16 extant works and two miscellanea,
Lokaprakāśa and Nītikalpataru, have either been found or published.
While critical works on K¤emendra’s immense Buddhist kāvya, Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā2
and its Tibetan translation have been published, critical editions of the “Laghukāvyas”, besides
LAPANICH’s edition of the Kalāvilāsa (1973) and MOHRDIEK’s critical edition of chapter 1-2 of the
Darpadalana (2002), are still desiderata. Only some parts of the Daśāvatāracarita have been translated
into Italian by O. BOTTO (1951) as “Il poeta Kshemendra e il suo Daśāvatāracarita”.3
Inner Chronology of K¡emendra’s Poems
The problems of the inner chronology of K¤emendra’s works have been discussed by ŚĀSTRĪ
KAUL
(1923) in his edition of Deśopadeśa and Narmamālā. Further suggestions regarding his biography
and chronology are found in SŪRYAKĀNTA (1954), MAHAJAN (1954), DATTARAY (1974) and, more
recently, FORMIGATTI (2005). The following list of the extant works was suggested by
SŪRYAKĀNTA (1954, pp. 16ff), with some modifications:
2 Cf. KIRDE, (in German) “Bibliographie zur Bodhisattvāvadānakalpalatā”, in Śikhisamuccaya, Indian and Tibetan
Studies. Ed. by D. DIMITROV, U. ROESLER and R. STEINER. Wien (2002) (Wiener Studien zur Tibetologie und Buddhismuskunde
53), pp. 109-128, (in Japanese) IWAI S., “K§emendra no denki-teki kijutsu ni tsuite”, in Indogaku Bukkyogaku
Kenkyu (Journal of Indian and Buddhist Studies), Vol. L, 1, Dec. 2001, pp. 56-59, (in Italian) FORMIGATTI
(2005), pp. 28-38, 49-51, (in German) M. STRAUBE, Prinz Sudhana und die Kinnarī: eine buddhistische Liebesgeschichte
von Kemendra: Text, Übersetzung, Studie. Marburg 2006 (Indica et Tibetica Verlag 46).
3 O. BOTTO, “Il Poeta K§emendra e il suo Daśāvatāracarita”, reprinted in: Scritti Scelti di Oscar Botto. A cura di M.
D’Onza CHIODO, E. PANATTONI and S. PIANO. Torino (1993), pp. 44-86.