viii PREFACE
German poets like Riickeit can, indeed, base excellent work on Sanskrit originals, but the effects produced are achieved by wholly different means, while English efforts at verse transla- tions fall invariably below a tolerable mediocrity, their diffuse tepidity contrasting painfully with the brilliant condensation of style, the elegance of metre, and the close adaptation of sound to sense of the originals. I have, therefore, as in my Sanskrit Drama, illustrated the merits of the poets by Sanskrit extracts, adding merely a literal English version, in which no note is taken of variations of text or renderings. To save space I have in the main dealt only with works earlier than A.D. 1200, though especially in the case of the scientific literature important books . of later date are briefly noticed.
This book was sent in, completed for the press, in January 1926, but pressure of work at the University Press precluded printing until the summer of 1927, when it was deemed best, in order not to delay progress, to assign to this preface the notice of such new discoveries and theories of 1926 and 1927 as might have peimanent interest.
On the early development of the Kavya welcome light has been thrown by Professor H. Luders's edition 1 of the fragments found in Central Asia of the K alpanamanditika of Kumaralata, which is the true description of the work hitherto known to us through a Chinese translation as the Sutralamkara of Acvaghosa. That work, it is suggested, was very different in character from Kumaralata's. It may have been an exposition in verse, possibly with prose additions, of the Canon of the Sarvastivadins, and it may be represented by fragments still extant; this suggestion can be supported by Asanga's choice of title, Mahayanasiiira- lavtkara, for his exposition of Mahayana tenets. But that is still merely a conjecture, and even less proved is the view that Subandhu's famous allusion % Bauddhasamgatim ivalamkdrabhu- sitam is to such a text as that ascribed to Acvaghosa. Kumara- lata may well have been a younger contemporary of Acvaghosa, who lived after the death of Kaniska, a fact which explains an old crux, the difficulty of ascribing to Acvaghosa the references
1 Bruchstucke der Kalfanamandttikd des Kumaralata, Leipzig, 1926.
2 Below, p. 308. LeVi (Sfitralamkara. li. 15 f.) reads saihgilim very plausibly, and holds thai a woiV of Asanga is meant. *
