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अनुसंधान - १७•5
with a Latin translation published in 1651 and based on what the Dutch Missionary Abraham Roger heard of the Śataka-traya stanzas from a south Indian Brahmin named Padmanabha. BH's poems are the only extensive body of classical Sanskrit literature that have a more than reasonable chance of antedating the works of Kalidasa. "In reading him, one is reminded of Omar Khayyam more than once by the poignant and novel expression that the unavoidable questions regarding 'life death,' 'permanence inpermanence' etc. receive. However, at the same time one feels that he has more varied capabilities than Khayyam. BH could have enriched the poetic conventions and techniques that the tradition made available to him, as well as set the pattern for the conventions and techniques that we find in later authors." All these considerations establish that he has a universal appeal that very few literary personalities can command. Practically, the same thing, with differend detains, will probably have to be said about BH, the Grammarian, in the next one hundred years or so (depending on how much interest the philosophy departments at Western universities take in non-Western philosophers.) He has anticipated the linguistic turn taken by Western philosophy in the 20th century in such a basic and comprehensive way, although his major aim was not to give such a turn to philosophy, that he will, if properly presented, force a rewriting of the global history of philosophy.
Thus, taking some risk, I will speak of a single revolutionary and legendary linguistico-literary as well as religio-philosophical persona called BH, born a few decades or centuries before or after the beginning of the Christian Era and ask what we learn from his Śataka-traya about saṇagāra.
31 In the legends about BH, we have a mirroring of most of the qualities I have ascribed to him so far. He loves the day-to-day world but leaves it suddenly. He epitomizes
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