Śatakatraya

Tradition ascribes these verses to Bhartṛhari, and most modern scholars doubt that he is the Bhartṛhari who wrote the Vākyapadīya, the grammarian's treatise on language. The Śatakatraya, "the three centuries", is a collection of short poems, each complete in a single stanza, in three sets of about a hundred: on worldly conduct, the Nītiśataka; on love, the Śṛṅgāraśataka; and on renunciation, the Vairāgyaśataka. The text here holds only the first and the last, not the century on love. Tradition makes the poet a king of Ujjain, elder brother of King Vikramāditya, who gave up a life of pleasure for the forest, and a legend tells of a fruit of immortality that passed from hand to hand at his court until it came back to him and taught him the futility of love. Many of the verses read more like the work of a courtier than of a king. The worldly verses mock the half-educated: an ignorant man is easily won over and an expert more easily still, but not even Brahmā, the creator god, could please a man puffed up with a scrap of learning. Pulling a jewel from between a crocodile's teeth, another stanza says, is easier than changing an obstinate fool's mind. The renunciation verses leave the court for the forest, where the yogi has steadfastness for a father and patience for a mother, and looks alike on a snake and a necklace, a gem and a clod of earth. Their date is unknown, and the manuscripts disagree about which verses belong: together they carry more than seven hundred. D. D. Kosambi, the Indian mathematician and historian, examined 377 manuscripts for his critical edition, printed at Bombay in 1948, and found only about two hundred verses common to every version. He held that grammarian and poet were two men, pointing to grammatical slips in the poems that no strict grammarian would have let pass. The poems were among the first Sanskrit texts to reach Europe. Abraham Roger, a Dutch pastor on the Coromandel coast of south-eastern India, translated the centuries on conduct and on renunciation into Dutch from a Portuguese version made for him by a Brahmin named Padmanābha, and his widow published them at Leiden in 1651.