________________
APRIL, 1968
235
As is the practice with Hemacandra, he has sought to be exhaustive on the subject of metres in his Chandīnusāsana In this brief study wo shall compare its contents as regards Sanskrit metres with those of the two popular text-books the Chandamanjart of Gangadasa and the Vitta-ratnākara of Kedara, which is earlier Pingala has treated Vedic prosody as well as the prosody of the classical Sanskrit In what follows, we shall mostly confine ourselves to the samavettas It may be noted here that in the classical literature we meet with only about twentyfive metres Poets like Magha and Bharavi composed verses in rare metres to show their metrical skill. But even then this brings in at most thirty more, briaging the total to about fiftyfive only. In Chandamanjari we find 122 metres defined by the author himself of which he has given illustrations as also some 104 more defined by Kedara or his commentator which the author has not illustrated in the following table we shall state the number of metres defined by Gangadasa and Kedara and also by Pingala and Hemacandra
Aksaras Pingala Kedara Gangadasa Hemacandra
• Keith, History of Sanskrit Literature, pp 418-21
