Journal of Indian Philosophy (2005) 33: 513528 DOI 10.1007/s10781-005-5012-x A.

PASSI

Springer 2005

PERVERTED DHARMA? ETHICS OF THIEVERY IN THE " DHARMACAURYARASAYANAw

INTRODUCTION

The Elixir of Dharmic Thievery1 is a brief (275 or 276 lines mainly in loka meter; see discussion below) divertissement in which the wiles s of a Brahmin thief a truthful Brahmin thief, as he himself likes to point out prevail against all odds of fate, landing the hero in the enviable position of Prime Minister in a ctional Indian kingdom. Composed probably either in Andhra Pradesh or Tamil Nadu, perhaps not more than 300 or 200 years ago, and preserved in a single palm-leaf manuscript owned by the Adyar Library,2 this work, edited from a Devan"gar" copy by N.G. Narahari in 1946,3 was largely a  ignored until 1996, when Ashok Aklujkar devoted a wide-ranging paper to it.4 An edition of the original Grantha MS with translation into Italian by the present writer appeared in 2001.5

What this paper owes to Ashok Aklujkars work is obvious; less obvious is the continuing encouragement on his part which eventually led to the edition of the text, and to its translation. My warmest thanks. Phyllis Grano stands also high on my list of contracted on-s, for her help and revision of my overburdened English. 1 " "s " Dharmacauryarasayana (DCR), ttingly divided into three avasa-s, equally chapters and draughts. 2 Cataloged under No. 72486, XXVIII, A 10. See V. Raghavan et al., New Catalogus Catalogorum, Madras 1949-, Vol. 9, 244, and Descriptive Catalogue of " ": the Sanskrit Manuscripts in the Adyar Library, Adyar; vol. V, Kavya, Nataka, and _ " Alankara, by H.G. Narahari, 1951, 528. 3 " " Dharmacauryarasayana of Gopalayog"ndra. A Poetic Dissertation on the Ethics of i Stealing, Adyar Library Bulletin, 1946, pp. IX, 128. 4 " Ashok Aklujkar, Dharma-Caurya-Rasayana as a Text and as a Work of Brahmin Fantasy, in: Amrtamand" i. Dr. G. B. Palsule Felicitation Volume, Pune, akin" : Abhayakum"r Gamgadhar P"thak, 1996, pp. 239260. a a: 5 " LElisir del furto secondo il dharma (Dharmacauryarasayana), Alessandro Passi, ed., Milano, Ariele, 2001, pp. 1137.

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THE TALE OF DHARMIC THIEVING

The issue which primarily concerns us here is the ideology of this most unusual work; all questions relevant to its contested authorship have been relegated to a nal Appendix. The basic elements of the plot of the DCR may be abridged as follows:
Dharmasamgrahin, a bright young Brahmin from a respectable albeit poor family, declares to his father on the latters deathbed that he will make a living through theft, caurya, as practiced by the book, i.e. in accordance with the dharma of thieves. The father makes him promise never to tell a lie, then dies and goes to heaven. Sometime later, Dharmasamgrahin decides to make his debut in the underworld, and leaves home in the middle of the night, having made himself invisible by magical means. Meanwhile, the local king, Dharmaketu, is on secret patrol through the city streets to test the honesty of his subjects; he detects Dharmasamgrahin by means of a magical eye-salve which allows him to see invisible beings, and introduces himself as a fellowthief. The two then proceed to the kings palace, which they enter by magical means. There they nd a secret room under the kings treasury, where two demons and a monstrous cobra keep guard over a surprising booty: three magical gems, gifts of the gods, endowed with the power to grant abundance of food, health and opulence to their bearer. Dharmasamgrahin overcomes all obstacles, steals the rst gem, then leaves with his companion. When the theft is discovered the next day, the King, feigning ignorance of the nights events, sends his Prime Minister to the treasury to appraise the damage. The Minister purloins the other two gems, and reports back to the king, who immediately has Dharmasamgrahin arrested and brought to court. Dharmasamgrahin readily admits his theft of one gem, then suggests that the Minister be searched thoroughly for the other missing jewels, which turn up wrapped in his loincloth. The Minister is executed, and the honest thief is placed in his stead. King and minister enjoy many years of shared power, eventually retiring to the Himalaya to practice tapas after handing the kingdom over to their sons.

This synopsis, which might be the plot of any one of the myriad tales of India, does little justice to the intents of the DCR, the originality of which lies chiey in the unconventional approach to the subject. Not only are magical means and devices a consistent element of entertainment to the reader,6 but nothing in the story seems to suggest that there is anything grossly material in the burglars art: no violence, no breaking-and-entering (Dharmasamgrahin scorns housebreaking, 2. 8182), no fuss or lust over the heaps of riches the
6 Spells and charms for invisibility, seeing invisible beings, making people fall unconscious, opening closed doors, seeing underground chambers, vanquishing demons, etc.; the DCR seems quite in line with J.K. Rowling. In the introduction to the Italian edition, LElisir, cit., p. 76, I hastily suggested that the prevailing rasa in it " might be found in hasya, as the element of humor is certainly fresh and abundant: too hastily. I had overlooked the fact that line 3 of the rst canto quite atly states " " that the work is vismayanandadayaka. This is, if anything, directly suggestive of adbhuta-rasa.

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king has in his treasury, no personal involvement in wealth in this, the Brahmin is truly his fathers son: honest, unconcerned, completely unattached, practically aloof as to the material aspects of his trade. D.s approach to theft, when not magical, is word-oriented, and the theory which gets across is the authors personal interpretation of Steya-astra, Larceny-Lore, one of the many arts recognized as s" viable sciences in traditional India. This very peculiar twist of Indias humanum scibile has been dealt with suciently in the past, and need not be rehearsed at length. Let it suce to say that, included at times even within the ocial list of " the 64 arts, the science of stealing, cauryavidya, is Indias answer to the universally known gure of the gentleman thief or noble highwayman.7 Not unexpectedly in a society where, probably, almost all economic activity was funneled through the complex interplay of " caste, jati, prime depository of the individuals social identity, the emergence of some kind of collective self-awareness within the robber-castes was not bereft of a body of practical knowledge, a ritual, internal ethics, and probably the need to create a kind of in-house mythology to go with it all. Robbers and burglars obviously had their trade secrets, their language and signs, their heroes,8 their devotion to K"l" and Skanda and not unlike the old-style maosi a certain a amount of pride in being part of The Brotherhood: Let all people hear! says Rauhineya after his conversion to Jainism I was a thief, :
7 See here: Maurice Bloomeld, The Character and Adventures of M"ladeva, u Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 52, 1913, 616650; The Art of Stealing in Hindu Fiction, American Journal of Philology, 44, 1923, 97133, 193229; On Organized Brigandage in Hindu Fiction, American Journal of Philology, 47, 1926, 205233. " Chintaharan Chakravarti, Two new lists of Kalas, Indian Historical Quarterly, 1932, 542548; The Art of Stealing in Bengali Folk-lore, in: Siddha Bharati or the Rosary of Indology. Presenting 108 Original Papers on Indological Subjects in Honour of the 60th Birthday of Dr. Siddheshwar Varma, Hoshiarpur 1950, vol. I, 230232. Ariel Glucklich, The Sense of Adharma, New York Oxford, O.U.P., 1994, Chap. 8, Thieves and Dharma in the Story Literature, pp. 189212. Alfred Hillebrandt, Zur Characteristik der Sarvilaka in der Mrcchakatika [sic]. : " : Spuren eines Steya-astra?, Zeitschrift fur Indologie und Iranistik, 1, 1922, 6972. s" Reprint in: Kleine Schriften, Rahul Peter Das ed., Stuttgart, 1987, 461464. ` Emilio Pavolini, Vicende del tipo di M"ladeva, Giornale della Societa Asiatica u Italiana 9, 1896, 175188. 8 M"ladeva being their archetype. See Bloomeld, Character of M"ladeva, cit. u u For a description of the ways and values of the real Indian underworld in the late Victorian age, see Michael Kennedys Notes on Criminal Classes in the Bombay Presidency, with Appendices [], Bombay 1908 (reprinted as: The Criminal Classes in India, Delhi 1985), and George MacMunn: The Underworld of India, London 1933 (reprinted as: The Indian Social System, Delhi 1984).

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sprung from a thief-family, of pure thief-lineage on both my fathers and my mothers side, uncontrollable even by the gods.9 From the Masons grip to Duncans Ritual the step is not so long, especially in India: steya-astra, in the sense of both the Lore and the s" Lore-Book of Larceny, is thus a natural complement to accumulated thinking on thievery, at least as far as the literary dimension is concerned; and both constitute and dene the caurya-dharma, the dharma which is proper to thieves. Whether this was the production of guru-s working from within a community of real thieves,10 or its re-telling from the mouths of the literati, is an open question; my guess would be that there was a great deal more talk about thievery on the part of non-thieves than from the practitioners of the art, whose best chance of success lay in secrecy and non-detection. And, of course, the same could be said about many of the archetypes which populate our collective imagination from the advent of popular literature and cinema onwards: they imitate an idea of life (War, The Wild West, Law Enforcement, Man in Space, etc.), certainly not life itself. In this case, however, the remnants of one text of presumably authentic Steya"stra have actually been handed down. Incomplete, sa incoherent, extremely corrupt, the Sanmukhakalpa, Practice of the : : " Six-Faced God, would stand to mainstream sastra-s as a casual compilation of pages from a badly ruined dictionary stands to an encyclopedia. Moreover, one nds here, once again, a complete dependence of the subject-matter on the magical element. Potions, poisons, invisibility ointments and sleeping draughts make the " Practice far more similar to a manual of sorcery, abhicara, than to a treatise on stealing.11
See Helen M. Johnson, Rauhineyas Adventures, in: Studies in Honor of Maurice : Bloomeld, New Haven-London 1920, p. 189. 10 For instance, the latter-day Candravedis or Sanoriyas, a caste of professional pickpockets, vaunted a Brahmanical origin, and possessed an elaborate organization with special training for both adults and children, a hierarchy, specialized vocabulary and sign language. See Kennedy, cit., 296305. In this kind of separate society an elaboration of written tracts is not unthinkable. For Brahmin thieves in literature, see Glucklich, cit., pp. 199205 (Brahmin Thieves A Digression on Dharma Itself ). 11 See George, Dieter (ed.), Sanmukhakalpa. Ein Lehrbuch der Zauberei und Die: : beskunst aus dem indischen Mittelalter, Marburg 1966, Berlin 1991. In fact, the only systemized (though very literary) reference to the realia of burglary in Sanskrit literature is probably the quote or pseudo-quote found in Mrcchakatika, III, 12, : " : where the various types of wall and the best way of breaching them are listed, together with the use of the Brahmins thread as a measuring tape.
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In this aspect Practice and Elixir speak the same language. As was noted before, never in all of the DCR does one get the feeling that someone has to wipe the dirt from his hands, pick up a shovel or crowbar, much less face a showdown with the palace guards or eect a quick getaway. The inmates of the royal enclosure are simply rendered unconscious by a magic powder, allowing the disguised king and his Brahmin mentor in thievery free access to the premises. One can tell, or at least presume, that the authors knowledge of Steyaastra was not too dierent from the one we meet with in the s" text edited by Dieter George. But the similarities end here. The DCR takes the matter further, well within the boundaries of an unusual, almost Grecian sophistry. Several verses deal with the moral admissibility, nay even desirability, of theft, discussed both with factual and fallacious arguments in any case certainly not mainstream orthodox ones. This is by far the most interesting part of the text. As Aklujkar notes, part of the allure of the subject lies in the pleasure which a brilliant mind gets from a challenge of wit: If I put my mind to it, I can make a case for anything (Aklujkar, cit., pp. 251252). That, and a fantasy of abundance, an ideal solution to a quest that many ordinary Brahmins, committed to a vow of poverty and not infrequently suering from hunger and thirst, must have felt (Ibid. p. 251). Indeed, the specter of hunger seems to linger just under the surface of explicit narration: Dharmasamgrahins father dies a pauper, D. himself chooses, as his sole booty, a jewel which wards o hunger and thirst. In the preface to the Italian edition (Elisir, p. 34), I attempted to argue that, as Dharmasamgrahin was presumably an indigent Brah min, a benevolent interpretation might absolve him for the theft of an object which would have given him freedom from hunger. His action " could be viewed as an extreme case of apad-dharma, the restricted dharma which pertains to times of distress,12 and allows Brahmins, in certain dire circumstances, to take what is not theirs.
12 " See here Manavadharmaastra, 10. 101108. The last verse quoted mentions the s" episode of Viv"mitra and the dogs esh, Mbh., 12.139. The sage, who is s a contemplating pilfering a Cand"las fare of dog-meat to save himself and his family : :a from starving, reects: I see no fault in theft I will take away this food (na " : steyadosam payami, harisyamy etad amisam; 12.139.31cd ). See also The Sense of s " : _ : " Adharma, cit., pp. 200201 and .: Glucklichs approach attempts to explain the ambivalent fascination with thieves, who appear to break the law of dharma at will, and yet are never depicted as absolutely adharmic, by considering both the interplay " " : between svadharma and sadharana dharma, and the contingencies generated by " " svabhava and apad. In other words, just as dharma is not absolutely xed and static,

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THE DHARMA OF THEFT

Dharmasamgrahins arguments are scattered through all three chapters of the work. As they do not appear to be expounded systematically, we may follow the text in enumerating them. (i) 1. 4247 Dharmic thievery is dened as the proper knowledge of the locations which are favorable or unfavorable to stealing (caurya" " sthalasthalajn ana); ascertainment of the proper place and time (deakalavinirnaya) for a burglary; familiarity with the paraphernalia s " : which the burglar should have handy at all times: a suitable dress, elsewhere described as dark in color, wherein narcotic powder (moham"rcchac"rna) may be concealed, and a supply of invisibility u u : ointment.13 The ultimate end of dharmic stealing is to make o with a part of incalculable wealth (this is meant literally and will be explained below) without getting caught a standpoint considered similar to that of one who steals spiritual knowledge and gets away with it. (ii) The king asks the Dharmasamgrahin why steya isnt a sin. The Brahmin replies as follows: 2. 28 Steya is dharma indeed, the highest dharma. 2. 2936 It curtails pride in men whose incalculable wealth _ (asamkhyeya-dhana) would lead them to all sorts of misdeeds and to generalized thievery. Stealing from men of incalculable wealth makes the victims pure from sin. However, stealing from those who have acquired wealth dishonestly, or possess limited (again, in the sense of not incalculable) wealth is forbidden.14 Moreover, one should never steal from a righteous man. 2. 37 Within these limits, stealing is commended and should be practiced every day.

(Footnote 12 Continued). a persons character or nature ones very identity is uid and changing. The crossing of boundaries, [] and certainly the crossing of rules provide the means for transforming identity (ibid., p. 205). 13 Most Tantric magical digests and other semi-magical texts, such as the Treasure-hunters manual Nidhiprad"pa (Lamp of Treasure), have recipes for similar i "_ " _ i ointments. The DCR also mentions kankalair angul"yakaih, skeleton rings (2.11), : " magical rings presumably made from human bones, which allow the sadhaka to open closed doors by merely touching them (3.4 .; skeleton keys ante litteram), a sta (2.13), and nidhyanjana, an ointment which allows D. and the king to see underground treasures (3.1822). 14 In the former case, stealing might be said to share in the fruits of crime and have a polluting action on the thief. For the latter, see iv, on 2.6264 below.

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2. 38 Stealing is wrong when one gets apprehended or killed. 2. 39 Successful (in terms of 2. 38) dharmic stealing is blameless like the exercise of [royal] power (prabhutva).15 (iii) Dr: : anta-s, examples of righteous or at least illustrious : st " stealing. 2. 4344 Success (Kr: na and Soma) and failure (Indra and :s: R"vana) in coveting thy neighbors wife.16 The moral here is that a : what matters is not the deed committed by the god in question, but the fact that he did, or did not, get caught. 2. 4546 Stealing is inherent even in righteous actions. Thus, the sun steals darkness, God steals away sin with His grace, a guru steals ones ignorance, and a Yogin steals Brahman, presumably through meditation. So, as long as there is consensus on the object of ones theft, any thief may be the object of praise (2. 46). 2. 4753 Among those who are expected to get away with stealing, nobody steals more than rulers and wielders of power. These are the " legal thieves, nyaya-cora, who, if wicked, may completely destroy a country (2. 48). Thus, even dharmic stealing is to be practiced, within its own limits.17 (iv) The dharmic thief s eld of action in detail (2. 6071).
15 There is much left unsaid here. The underlying concept is that a kings dharma is always one with the good of the State; this allows and often compels a monarch to act in ways inadmissible to a private citizen. 16 Young Kr: na steals the shepherds wives yet his loves with the gop"-s become i :s: the paradigm of divine love. Soma, the Moon-god, seduces T"r", wife of the divine aa guru Brhaspati, but holds the honor of being the half-moon in Sivas hair-ornament. : Indras dalliance with Ahaly" results in his getting cursed by her husband Gautama, a and, of course, R"vanas abduction of S" a eventually leads to his death by the hand a : t" of R"ma. a 17 The chain of reasoning here is particularly twisted. The author makes it clear that theft practiced by evil legal thieves is unfair (2.48, where it is compared to  pralaya, the end of the world), actually a sort of murder, albeit justied by sruti (2.49). This last argument is a masterpiece of sophistry: Sovereigns who are legal thieves, says Dharmasamgrahin, rob living beings of their life, on the authority of " " ": the Revealed Word, which states that Possessions are life (nyayacoramahipalah ": " _ ": " : : ": "  " ": praninam pranaharinah / prana vai vasava iti srutivakyapramanatah //). The quote is : " ": " " _ semi-authentic see Chandogya Upanisad, 3.16.1, prana vava vasava ete h"dam i ! : _ " sarvam vasayanti and unabashedly out of context: the original means: In truth, the Vasus are the life-breaths, for they make this All to be inhabited. The conclusion (2.5052) that [such being the case for legal thievery,] dharmic thievery is [also] admissible, is abrupt and gratuitous, almost as if a verse had been left out between 2.49 and 2.50. It would seem that the author had in mind some kind of equation " between nyayacora and dharmacora; the former, despite its being unjust, is practiced openly and legally; so why shouldnt the latter be admissible? See below for possible political connotations.

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This expands and denes what was anticipated in 2. 3946. In general, the list is mixed, i.e. the author does not seem to make a clear distinction between wealth that is untouchable because it belongs to learned or holy persons (Brahmins whether learned or not, and temple beadles), wealth which is tainted by the sex or profession of those who " earn it, i.e. women, vaiya-s (!), sudra-s, money-lenders, whores (and, s " "i presumably, pimps: the term is bhagoparjitadhana, 2.61), devadas"-s, people who oer raw food, vendors of oil, grain, salt, clothes), and, lastly, wealth which is unt for dharmic theft on account of quantity. In the last instance, what matters is not whether one disposes of large or small quantities of money, but whether this amount is exactly measured. Consequently, while one obviously cannot steal from destitute, debt-ridden individuals (2. 62), the same ban applies to the owners of one thousand, ten thousand or even ten million pieces of silver, on account of their all being poor (2. 64). This is possibly the most curious statement of the whole DCR, and the explanation oered by Dharmasamgrahin would make Aristophanes Socrates proud: since even the very rich man, the lord of 10 million [pieces of silver], kot"svara, rejoices and despairs for trie gains or losses, he is : i quite on the same plane as the indigent poor, as exemplied by the widow who can aord to eat only parched rice.18 Therefore, while one may not steal from women, or poor and generally well-o persons alike (and quite emphatically so if they are also dishonest 2. 67), one is encouraged to do so from those who are blessed with riches beyond measure. In the end, the inevitable conclusion is that, though stealing righteously will make you one with the Lord,19 your sole possible victim is a king, for only a royal palace is likely to contains the kind _ " of incommensurable, asamkhyata (2. 70) wealth such an action would 20 take and it too would be o-limits if the treasures it contained were illicitly gained. Fortunately for our hero, king Dharmaketu is a
" " " " " : i 2.66, prthukaghnya vitanto ca tatha kot"svarasya ca / dhanagamapayasukhaduhs : : " khayoh ka bhida bhavet //. The Sabdakalpadruma, s.v. prthuka, mentions the : " : unsuitability of this particular nourishment (rice which is scalded, dried, and then pounded in a mortar) for brahmanical students, widows and ascetics. 19  I interpret sivam : cchati, 2.69, in this sense. r 20 To be sure, the author must have been aware, as we are, that all material wealth _ _ " is limited, even the kings. Presumably, the concept of asamkhyeya or asamkhtyata is to be meant at its exact literal meaning of wealth so vast that it may not be counted. This is very dierent from unlimited. The kings wealth is so abundant that it just rolls right o the budget sheet (in a day and age before calculating machines): for instance, in the DCR, nothing indicates that king Dharmaketu had any previous knowledge of the underground treasure chamber and the three gems.
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just and virtuous monarch, and Dharmasamgrahin feels justied to proceed.21 The whittling down of all possible victims continues until only the king is left, the very same one who is standing in front of Dharmasamgrahin in rapt admiration for his eloquence and steya competence. The elimination process does stem not so much from a specic system of values as from the patterns of plot and narration governed by adbhuta, the taste for the surprising and the marvelous. Obviously, if D.s statements were descriptive of a non-ctional ideology of caurya, there wouldnt be much room for common, dayto-day stealing at all. In the end, from the practicing larcenists point of view, the DCR s hero is like an elephantcow who laboriously gives birth to a mouse: there is very little real stealing going on, and practically no violation of (commonly accepted) dharma values. In all his dealings, Dharmasamgrahin behaves quite honorably, and is rewarded naturally, if not karmically in his installment as Prime Minister. We are thus left with a dilemma: is the text solely interested in providing us with a cleverly twisting plot, while at the same time demonstrating that Dharmasamgrahin, despite his burglars cloak, is actually the most honest of men; or is it attempting to let us on to something else? In the Introduction to the Italian edition, I briey discussed the possibility of the author having tried for a very indirect form of political criticism. Of course, Dharmasamgrahin is not Robin Hood, he does not take from the rich and give to the poor (nor was the ctional Robin Hood a political reformer, for that matter, despite his misadventures during the McCarthy era22). But the focus on the unpleasant eects of legal thievery of kings (2. 4749) is worded in strong language. Granted, it is commonly brought out by Indian literature that kings are avaricious if not downright dangerous just consider, for instance, the references to courtly life in Bhartrharis : rst Sataka. Equally widespread, however, is the lack of criticism, on
21 With a great deal of moderation. Even if one takes no account of the suggestions given above as to D.s acting under duress, the fact remains that the other two gems, the one which grants perfect health and the one which yields great wealth, will be left in their place, presumably as they are directly functional to the kings prosperity as a sovereign. 22 In 1953, a member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission tried to get the Robin Hood legend banned in schools for its communist undertones in the robthe-rich-give-to-the-poor theme. See also Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: the McCarthy Era in Perspective, New York, O.U.P., 1990, p. 34.

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the part of all literati, of the ruling monarch (usually also patron of their art), for reasons obvious. In our story, Dharmaketu is the best ruler anyone might desire, with the rare gift of a sense of humor on top of it. Nonetheless one wonders if, behind this all, our author didnt have another, nonctional king in mind when he wrote: If, when legalized thieves are wicked, one has power backed by the weight (i.e. force) of government, what result could come of it which would be any dierent from the end of the world? (2. 48).23 Of course, one might imagine the author (Dharmar"ja?!) saying, a though it is not right to steal from an unjust king, the king of my imaginary kingdom is just, and my hero can steal from him and remain honest, or at least dharmic. Now, if anyone were to ask him how this relates to the real-life kingdom he lives in, he would of course declare that the DCR is a work of ction, but that the contemporary real-life king is also just and righteous (why, of course he is, isnt he?). So well, then would stealing from him be righteous? You may decide for yourself: if it is, the DCR might be thought of abetting stealing from the Government as a form of civil disobedience, cautiously worded in such a way as to avoid the suspicion of disloyalty; if it isnt, wouldnt all this simply imply that the king is a crook?
APPENDIX: THE AUTHORSHIP ISSUE

The DCRs rst editor, N.G. Narahari, never brought up the question of its authorship, and attributed the work to Gop"layog" a ndra on the basis of the initial lines: "s " _ " avasatritayopetam dharmacauryarasayanam / _ " _ idam tavat pratidinam rasikaih parip"yatam // 1 // i " : i " " sr"madgopalayog"ndramukharakendunihsrtam / i : : " u " " " " tatak"lasya vagjalamahabhajanap"ritam // 2 // u ": _ " " " buddhijadyaharam capi vismayanandadayakam / _ ": " pibadhvam panditah sarve dharmacauryarasayanam // 3 // :: Aklujkars handling of the incipit leads to very dierent conclusions, and identies the author either in the character named in 1.2,
23 " "" u _ " nyayacoresu dus: esu rajyabharadip"rvakam / prabhutvam syad yadi prthak pra: :t : " : _ layena phalam kim u //.

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T"tak"la, or, preferably, in the Dharmar"ja son of Subbar"yakovida a u a a of Simhal"pur" by which the work, according to the colophon, was a , written (likhitam ).24 Thus, in the more probable of the two hypotheses, with which the present writer heartily concurred, the manuscript is to be considered an autograph.25 In a recent review of Lelisir del furto, Jan Houben raised serious objections to this understanding of the evidence.26 Reecting on the fact that in the rst chapter of the work the MS has two lines labeled as 1,27 and that the total number of lines is given in the colophon as totaling 275 (there would have been 276 if the compiler of the MS had counted both 1.1 and 1.2), he concludes that line 1.1 is a spurious addition,28 not included in the nal reckoning. Thus, the real incipit of the DCR, is contained in lines 1.2 and 1.3 (as
Aklujkar, cit., pp. 244246. The complete colophon reads: " _ iti r"dharmacauryarasayanagranthe trt"yavasah / ubham astu / harih om / si s : : i "s " : i _ " i " " sr"simhalapur"subbarayakovidas"nuna / u " _ " dharmarajena likhitam dharmacauryasasayanam // _ " _ " i om / ahatya lokasamkhya 275 sr". s Aklujkar pointed out (ibid., p. 245 and further personal communication) that the use of likh in relatively late texts may easily be indicative of authorship as opposed to mere penmanship, in a sense also common to NIA languages (as in Hindi lekhak, writer, author, as well as scribe). 25 If Dharmar"ja is the author, then, in the second line of the rst draught a " where the elixir, rasayana, a veritable moonshine of eloquium, is said to ow from " " the full moon-face of Gop"la-yog" a ndra (r"mad-gopala-yog"ndra-mukha-rakendusi i " u " " " " nihsrtam) the adjoining metaphor tatak"lasya vagjala-mahabhajanap"ritam, lled u : : by the word-netted great pot of T"tak"la, probably ought to be translated lled by a u " the word-netted great pot of Daddys (tata) water-hole (k"la, slope, bank, pond, u Hindi k"l, bank, shore, pond, lake, Tamil kulam, tank, pond, reservoir). The u : image seems to suggest a simple water-raising apparatus, a long lever balanced on a pivot or wedge, from the shorter side of which a large jar wrapped in rope-netting hangs. The meaning is that the elixir-tale, inspired by Gop"la Chief of Yogis (see a " below) was narrated by tata Subbar"yakovida to his son Dharmar"ja, who then a a proceeded to write it down. 26 See Jan E.M. Houben in ABORI, LXXXII, 2001, pp. 332333. This published version of Prof. Houbens review is unfortunately much abridged and edited with respects to his original text (Stealing in accordance with dharma: remarks on the " Dharmacaurya-rasayana, its extent and its author), which was graciously submitted by the author to the present writer; the latter, rather than the ABORI version, will be quoted here directly. A further review of the DCR, by Danielle Feller, may be found in Asiatische Studien / Etudes Asiatiques, LVI, 2002, pp. 938942. 27 Respectively labeled 1.1 and 1.2 in the Italian edition and in the quote above. 28 Such a singular mistake however, would seem rather unlikely at the very beginning of a work, when even a sloppy scribe may still be expected to be suciently alert to count from 1 to 2. If the repetition is not due to negligence, it must have been intended. (Houben).
24

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numbered in the Italian ed. and given above. The consequences of such re-numbering appear to be far-reaching: (1) a spurious rst stanza rules out the possibility that the colophon was in the authors own hand; (2) this, in turn, would imply that MS cannot be an autograph, and that (3) the Dharmar"ja son of Subbar"yakovida a a quoted in the colophon may not be taken as the author of the text; nally, (4) the other hypothesis, i.e. that the name T"tak"la in 1.2 a u actually indicates the author and is not just a clever epithet, comes to the fore as the only plausible one. One sees that there is considerable thinking behind Houbens reasoning, which may be corroborated, he adds, by two further considerations: (a) there are metrical defects in the colophon and perhaps, in the initial verse 1.1c (the rst number one);29 (b) the same line 1.1 is thematically largely redundant and less convincing, stylistically, for a proper incipit, than the successive two lines. The present writer has reason to believe that these arguments may be less water-tight than they seem. The metrical argument may be addressed rst. The most irregular " _ cadence is actually the one in 1.1c, idam tavat pratidinam, which is " found mostly in epic vipula-s. Moreover, there are 61 occurrences of it " " in Avaghosas Mahakavya-s.30 But the main fact, beyond the s : admittedly scarce use of this metrical clause in classical poetry, is that " " the Dharmacaurya, where the ratio of vipula-s to pathya-s is unusually high, resorts to this sequence rather frequently (with nal guru or " " " s" _ s laghu), f.i. in 1.8c, catvaro bahava iva; 1.25c vidyaleamarahitah; : " " _ s 2.15a etasminn eva samaye; 2.21a samyan nicitya tad anu; 2.54 idam " _ provaca vacanam, etc.31 Obviously, the author considered the sequence perfectly normal. As to the defective meter in the colophon " in pada c reported by Houben, and what he sees as a quite in" felicitous compound-split between pada-s in ab, I would contend that these phenomena are not all that irregular in the rst place.32
29 For the colophon, see text above; Houben sees a quite infelicitous p"daa boundary in ab and a defective cadence in p"da c, the latter being comparable a " to the cadences found in 1.1 and in 1.33a (na kvapi tucchaphalada). See discussion immediately below. 30 E.H. Johnston, Avaghosas Buddhacarita or Acts of the Buddha, New Delhi, s : Munshiram Manoharlal, 1995 (reprint of the 1936 Lahore edition), pp. lxvlxvi. 31 See also 2.48c, 2.68c, 3.21c, 3.80a, 3.83a, 3.110c, 3.115a. 32 " " The sequences in the colophon, pada c, and in 1.33a are both admissible vipula-s. See L. Renou- J. Filliozat, LInde classique, vol. III, Paris-Hanoi, 1953, p. 714. For the former, see also 1.32a, 2.3a, 2.39a, 2.41c, 3.30c, 3.32c, 3.49a, 3.123c; the fact that

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The reviewers style-criticism of the rst stanza is more dicult to assess, as there are personal elements of evaluation involved. As Houben himself concedes, a clever little pun was included in the very " rst line: the (Dharmacaurya)rasayana elixir with its three "s " draughts (avasa-s, i.e. chapters) is to be drunk by the rasika-s, connoisseurs. But, according to him, the fact that this is to happen pratidinam, every day, is exaggerated, and makes the exhortation to take the elixir, c.q. read the text, notably less convincing than the _ parallel expression pibadhvam panditah sarve in the verse following : : ": the second number 1. This is per se possible, but not at all certain: for instance, the ebullient (and not incongrous, in the light of the mock-serious mood of the text) suggestion that all pandita-s should :: go on a binge once a day, i.e. read the text often, may be especially meaningful in light of stanza 2.4041, where the plutocrat33 commends stealing as something to be done every day. In other words, the message of the incipit would appear to be: read the DCR frequently, for stealing is an everyday occurrence, and one should be wise in the ways of the world. On the other hand, were we to assume (in my opinion, not a mandatory conclusion, in the light of what was presented above) that the rst number one is indeed a copyists addition, that the copyist is not the author of the text, and that, consequently, the text is not an autograph, there is still good reason to assume that the personage referred to in the colophon, i.e. Dharmar"ja, son of Subba-r"yaa a kovida, is the most probable author, referred to by the scribe in the third person, rather than the scribe himself. Firstly, it is quite
(Footnote 32 Continued). " _ this vipula could have been easily avoided by inverting the two words likhitam " dharmarajena (Houben) actually reinforces the argument for the regularity of the original colophon. " " As for the compound name subba-raya-kovida being broken up between pada-s after subba (= Subrahmanya; in South Indian onomastics the whole name may : " " appear as Subba-r"ya [raya = Skt. raja, as in Kannada] or Subba-r"va, often as a a Subba-rao, the latter possibly through Marathi/British inuence), there does not " seem to be anything unusual about it. The DCR has several instances of mid-pada split compound (which is a common-enough occurrence in its own right): from the 3rd canto alone we nd: 2cd, 21ab, 32ab, 39ab & cd, 42ab, 55ab, 90cd, 135ab, 140ab, taking into consideration only the anus: ubh stanzas; moreover, the text does not seem :t " to shirk even from the incongruence of splitting words over pada boundaries (Aklujkar, cit., p. 242: koagaram [in 3.103cd] has been broken into meaningless s" " _ _ koaga and ram). My thanks to Naga Ganesan and Laksmi Srinivas for help in s" " pinpointing the onomastics.
33

" dhanasvamin; query Lord of riches, i.e. Kubera?

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implausible that a mere copyist would bear a dharma-name or epithet in a work wherein the title and all the positive characters are named a Dharma-something.34 The name Dharmar"ja implies a direct link between whoever is mentioned in the colophon (more arguably: the author) and a work ultimately centered on an aspect of dharma.35 Secondly, the relatively few scribal mistakes in the MS itself are more of the kind an absent-minded author would make, plausibly in an incompletely revised version of his work, and have little in common with the dumb-mechanical blunders a copyist far removed in time might be expected to lapse into.36 In the same category, i.e. defects or peculiarities which may be attributed to an author, one may place the other very real metrical aws found sporadically in other stanzas (2.16a, 2.49c, 3.129a), the inuence of modern spoken Indian languages on the text, perhaps even the coexistence of two opening lines (indecision?), and the presence of the several infelicities. These were originally noted by Aklujkar, who rst proposed that the various inconsistencies found in the DCR might indicate that the work as it now stands was in some ways incomplete and still in draft form.37 In the light of these considerations, the authorship vs. penmanship question is still, in my opinion, open to debate. Personally, despite the 1st stanza argument, I would not rule out a priori the possibility that the MS is an autograph, albeit of an imperfectly revised, vernacular-oriented text. If, on the other hand, one were to prefer the viewpoint that a scribe had a hand at the DCR (wherein one should in any event recognize a certain amount of incompleteness), it seems more than likely that he was closely connected in time and place to the author Dharmar"ja, a perhaps as secretary or learned family member. This unknown
The king, the thief and his three brothers, even the city itself in short everybody except the crooked prime minister and the thiefs father and wife (who remain anonymous) have names beginning with dharma. 35 See here Aklujkar, cit., p. 257258: [] the author could have been told the story because it could be viewed as having a bearing on his name [] An alternative possibility is that the names of the characters in the received story were deliberately altered by the author or his father so as to establish a connection with the name Dharma-r"ja. a 36 This is awkward to demonstrate in a footnote, but may be checked by perusing the text and apparatus of the Italian edition, in which see also pp. 43 . & fn. 60. 37 Aklujkar, cit., pp. 240242. See also his remark on the graceless turns of language the work displays here and there, such as the mixing of metaphors in 3.7778: " the king is rst said to be immersed in an ocean of anguish, cintambodhi, and then " "" described as burning with the ame of anguish, cintagnijvala, in the following line; see ibid., p. 259, fn. 32.
34

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copyist may have added (or adjoined) a secondary incipit, without signing his own name in the colophon.38 Houben, in his refutation of the autograph theory, ultimately suggests that the work might be older than the 200-odd years we can reasonably claim for the present (and only) MS, and should be attributed to an epic-pur"nic type of sub-standard (South Indian) a: Sanskrit rather than to a late, 17th century vernacular-inuenced Sanskrit. It is true that there are Dravidian (Telugu?) sanskritized ": " : " " loanwords in the text, such as arbhata and andolika (Skt. has andola " o:i swing, but the meaning here is more like that of Tamil ant"l", litter); but there is also a discernible amount of NIA inuence, either lexical, (cp. bhandara, storeroom, treasury) or in terms of ::" " (relative) semantic preference: thus, samarthya, competence; " aivarya wealth, krpa favor, preference, ghataka constituent s : : factor, nis: ha, devotion.39 All these elements point to a later date :t " than one attributable to an earlier epico-puranic background,40 and : so does the fact that Dharmar"ja is identied in the typical South a Indian style of the late period: place/ancestral town name authors fathers name authors personal name. 41 The fact remains, of course, that one must completely rule out from the range of possible candidates Gop"layog" a ndra. Apparently, this was the authors family guru, inspirer of the tale; it is implausible that a Yogin would unabashedly refer to himself as r"mat Gop"la, si a " King of Yogins, and mukharakendu, one whose face is like the [round drop of] the full moon (whence the elixir ows forth, Soma-like). To sum it up, here we would have a tale originally told by Gop"layog" a ndra, then narrated by Subbar"yakovida to his son a Dharmar"ja who gave it literary form and nally wrote it down. In a
_ " The scribe might then perhaps be responsible for the sentence om / ahatya  _ " i slokasamkhya 275 sr". Indeed, it appears after ubham astu harih om which the s : author could have written in the autograph. (Aklujkar, personal communication). 39 Also the disputed karna trumpet, reecting an Arabic word (qarn) which : Houben takes as coming directly from the Arabic settlements in the west coast of South India, dating from third quarter of the rst millennium onwards. But a North-Indian dissemination seems far more probable, i.e. from the Hindi-Urdu " "i " karna, qarna", a long straight trumpet for sounding the bass; in Persian, qarnay designates a staight wooden trumpet or horn. There is also some ground to warrant a folk- or cross-etymology with karn(a), ear, i.e. a trumpet or bugle in the shape of a : human ear, or an instrument meant to be heard; the retroex nasal seems to bear this out. 40 As does the possibility that the heroic, bearded mercenary soldiers guarding the palace as lions guard a forest (2.7475) are actually Singhs, i.e. Sikhs! 41 For all the above, Aklujkar, cit., and personal communication.
38

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short, there is no compelling proof that the work was written by T"tak"la.42 a u Department of Linguistics and Oriental Studies University of Bologna Via Zamboni 16 40126 Bologna Italy E-mail: a.passi@alma.unibo.it

42 As far as provenance is concerned, the city of Simhal" is dicult to trace; but cp. a the place-names Singalanthapuram in Tamil Nadu and Sinhala in Andhra Pradesh.