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have been two authors with the same attitude and capable of giving forceful expression to that attutude in easy-flowing verses in just about the same area of India in the early centuries of the Christian Era. The research on BH, the Vaiyākarana, has established beyond any reasonable doubt that some important details in I-ching's account cannot be correct. The Vaiyākarana BH is unlikely to be a Buddhist and is unlikely to have died forty years before I-ching's visit to India (691-692 A.D.). Rather, he cannot be later than 450 A.D. Also, while he was sympathetic toward and accommodative of Buddism, he was not a follower of Buddhism in the usual or 'strong sense of the word. His place of residence is more likely to be those parts of western India in which the adherents of the Maitrāyaniya branch of Krsna Yajurveda were found in significant numbers. Now, through a systematic investigation of an impressive number of Sataka-traya manuscripts, D.D. Kosambi (1948:56-57, 59, 78-79, 81) has independently suggested that the stanzas constituting the oldest core of the Satakatraya could have been composed in the early centuries of the Christian Era (although they were collected as an anthology some centuries later), that there could be one author persona behind them, and that this persona is likely to have hailed from western India.
§ 2. 3 The similarity in fundamental attitude to which I have referred can be described thus: a relentless pursuit of the meaning of life, devastating honesty, ability to rise above conventional boundaries and antinomies, repeated return to perspectivism and a never-ending engagement with the manifestations of language. BH, the poet, is very probably the most translated author next to the author(s) of the Gitā (Bailey 1994:1) Modern Europe's interest in Sanskrit literature (as distinct from Sanskrit language) began
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