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Amrita
purpose of the story is to illustrate the bad results of such an impious wish, which one should always try to avoid. The present work is called by the writer as a Dharmakathā, and teaching of religious principles as its avowed theme.
Haribhadra is no doubt, a great scholar and well versed in Sanskrit literature. This has made him to write his work in an elaborate and ornate style, just on the model of Sanskrit Mahākāvyas. We find him using a rich and Sanskritic vocabulary, and he follows the conventions of the writers on poetics to a considerable extent in giving descriptions of towns, lakes and gardens. But he can also become simple and effective, as when in the second chapter he narrates the story of the Tāpasa and his three visits to the King. His use of poetic figures is happy and free from the defect of too much artificiality. But his prose is marred by the use of long compounds and series of puns, rendered more recondite on account of the greater flexibility of the Prākrit language. As pointed out by Jacobi, his language shows peculiarities of Śauraseni, particularly in prose.
Close to Haribhadra, we must place Uddyotanasūri, the author of the great romance Kuvalayamālākathā, of considerable extent and written in A. D. 779. We are fortunate in having a long prasasti of 29 verses, at the end of the work, in which the author gives much useful information. In the northern part of India, there was a town Pavvaiyā near the river Candrabhāgā, and was the capital of the Yavana King Toramāna. The teacher of this King was one Harigupta of the Gupta family, and lived there. One of his pupils was Devagupta, a royal descendant of the Gupta dynasty, who, in turn, had a pupil called Sivacandra, bearing the title mahattara. In his wanderings, this Sivacandra made his residence at Bhillamāla, otherwise known as Śrīmāla, the ancient capital of Gujarat. His pupil was Yakşadatta of great repute, and had a band of pupils who are represented as making the whole of Gujarat a convert to Jainism. One of these pupils was Vateśvara who built a temple the Jina in the town of Ākāśavapra. He had a pupil Tattvācārya who was the teacher of our author. Uddyotana received the knowledge of the scriptures from Virabhadra, while he learnt logic and other sciences from the famous scholar Haribhadra.
We also know something about the secular parentage of Uddyotana. His father was Samprati or Vadesara, and the name of his grand-father was Uddyotana, who lived in the town of Mahadvāra. Our author wrote the work in the town of Jabālipura, while living in the temple of the Jina, built by his