Love or Leave Bhartuharis Dilemma

Author(s): Ashok Aklujkar
Publisher: ZZ_Anusandhan

Page 20

अनुसंधान - १७•20
a profound attraction to sensual beauty and the yearning for liberation from it. In a classic style and refined language, Bhartrihari shows how creative the tension between these opposing lives could be. And not in these lives alone for they help us to understand how most great Indian art could be at once so sensuous and so spiritual." Cf. also Kosambi 1948 Editor's Preface: "Bhartṛ-hari's poetry..." Miller 1967:xvi:".. ...a tone of irony, skepticism, and discontent..."
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2.The implicit reference here is to works such as śṛngāra vairāgyatarangini. At least two compositions go by this name: (a) Somaprabhācārya's, printed in Kavya-mālā, gucchaka 5, pp. 142-165, with Sukha-bodhikā vṛtti, Bombay: Nirnaya-sagara Press, 1888. (b) Diväkaramuni's, published by Abhaya-candra Bhagavana-dāsa, probably in Ahmedabad, and distributed by Śri-Yašo-vijaya-Jaina-gratha-mälä Office, Khara-geta [=Khargate), Bhava-nagara, Kāṭhiyāvāḍa, 1916. 3.I do not know if such a poem actually exists, but I am sure the Sanskrit poets were capable of writing one, given the success they have registered in narrating two of more stories simultaneously with the same sequence of syllables. If paranomasia could enable them to cover the stories of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahabharata with a common phonetic continum in compositions like the Raghava-pāṇḍaviya, I do not see why, if they put their mind to it, they could not write texts that served as a locus for both the ecotic and the ascetic content. 4. Alternative spellings: Gorakha-natha, Gorakh-nath.
5. The stories alluded to here can be found in Gopinath 1896:4-8, 1923, 43-39; Kosambi 1948: Introduction pp. 79-80, Cort 1983:7-9, Miller 1967:xvi-xvii and Miller 1990:3. It should, however, be noted that in providing these references I am confining myself to the publications referred to elsewhere in this article. The actual body of literature collecting BH stories and discussing them is much larger. 6. Older spelling: I-tsing.
7. In my experience, loss of writing strokes occurs much more commonly in manuscripts than the addition of strokes. Both "hari" and "hara" being very common words, a scribe can easily write one under the influence of the other. Seeing a predilection toward Hara in the Satakatraya stanzas (1, 317, 325, 338, 339, 344, 347 etc.), a scribe could have changed "hari" to "hara", but a similar explanation cannot be given for the attestation of "hari".
8. (a) This article is not the occasion to enter into a full discussion of BH as a historical personality or of the identity of the various BHs that our