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Sivasvamin's Kapphinabhyudaya

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Item Code: HAC457
Publisher: ADITYA PRAKASHAN
Author: Edited by Michael Hahn
Language: Sanskrit and English
Edition: 2013
ISBN: 9788177421040
Pages: 463
Cover: HARDCOVER
Other Details 9.5x6.5 inch
Weight 890 gm
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Book Description
About the Book

Śivasvamin's epic poem "King Kapphina's Triumph," composed in Kashmir in the second half of the ninth century, is one of the five extant mahākāvyas composed during the first millennium CE. Due to the bad state of the edited text and the unavailability of a commentary it has not received the attention it deserves on account of its superior poetic qualities. The discovery of most of the missing folios of the best and oldest manuscript from Nepal and of a second complete manuscript made it possible to prepare a new edition in which most of the gaps and mistakes of the first edition could be removed. This book contains the first Devanāgarī version of the improved text.

The content of the poem, based on an old Buddhist legend from the Avadānaśataka, is quite unique. King Kapphina's triumph is in fact a military defeat, because he loses the decisive battle against the Kośala king Prasenajit whose kingdom he had intended to conquer. This happens because Prasenajit is saved by the miraculous power of the Buddha in the very last moment. This impresses King Kapphiņa and leads to his spiritual awakening and conversion to the doctrine of the Buddha. In the last consequence the Kapphiņābhyudaya can be called a pacifistic poem.

About the Author

Prof. Michael Hahn (1941-2014) taught Indian and Tibetan studies at the Universities of Hamburg (1968-1972), Bonn (1972-1988), and Marburg (1988-2007), where he fostered a number of students and contributed numerous books and articles. He specialized in classical Sanskrit Literature, particularly in the poetic and didactic literature of Indian and Tibetan Buddhism. For his doctoral dissertation, he worked on the Tibetan translation of the Vrttamālāstuti and continued to work on that text till his last days. Among his important publications are Candragomin's Lokānandanățaka, Haribhatta and Gopadatta, Der große Legendenkrans, Poetical Visions of the Buddha's Former Lives: Seventeen Legends from Haribhatta's Jätakamālā, and Kapphiņābhyudaya of Śivasvāmin.

Preface

The number of extant works belonging to the mahākāvya genre is rather limited, at least as far as the older period of classical San- skrit literature concerned. Even smaller is the number of works that are regularly read and studied. Quite often we encounter the term "Pañcamahākāvya," as if this were a fixed, logical, and co- herent set of works. The term usually refers to the two ornate epics Raghuvamśa and Kumārasambhava by Kälidāsa, Bhāravis's Kirātārjunīya, Māgha's śiśupālavadha, and Harşadeva's Naişadha- carita. Somewhat reluctantly, as it seems, traditional scholars ad- mit that Kālidāsa might have had at least one predecessor, the Buddhist poet Aśvaghoșa, to whom we owe the Buddhacarita (only partly preserved in its original Sanskrit) and the Saundarananda. And if one studies the more comprehensive histories of Sanskrit literature, one will find that there are at least four more works composed in the first millennium of the Common Era, which could or should be classified as mahākāvya: Kumāradāsa's Jānaki- haraņa, Bhatți's Rāvaṇavadha, Ratnākara's Haravijaya, and Śivas- vāmin's Kapphiņabhyudaya.

Acknowledgement

Apart from the people and institutions I have already gratefully mentioned in the preface to the Japanese edition, it is my pleasure to thank Dr. Lata Deokar (Pune; currently Marburg, Germany) for assisting me in the proof-reading of the Devanagarī text (cantos i- xvii and xx). Prof. Dr. Vijayapal Shastri (Rashtriya Sanskrit San- sthan, Vedavyasa Campus in Balahar, Himachal Pradesh) did the same for cantos i-iv and made several valuable suggestions. For all the remaining mistakes I am solely responsible.

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