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TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE.
of the sovereign reigning in Gujaráth at the time, is an important element here, for there are two Dhruva Senas among the Balabhi monarchs, who, at the period above specified, swayed the sceptre in that part of India. The first, indeed, is too early for our purpose, but allowing the second of that name to be in the last year of his reign, as he well might, having lost a grown-up son, then on an average of twenty-one years to him, and his four predecessors, there will be an exact coincidence between our date of the first public reading of the Kalpa Sútra, and that found on the Gujaráth copper-plate grants of the first Sridhava Sena*. In accordance with this early date, the state of civilization described in this work is higher than we have any reason to believe has existed among the Hindus, since the first centuries of our era, and the state of Brahmanical literature, as here depicted, without any mention of the Puráns, tends to the same conclusion. The commentator, indeed, in this latter
* Dated Samvat 375, i.e., A.D. 318, i.e., 5 x 21=105, which, added to 318, gives 423-411 x 12. There is no such name, we may remark, as Dhruva Sena in the modern or restored Balhára dynasty.
