This paper looks at the engagements with Daṇḍin's notion of condensed speech (samāsokti) in three texts from Sri Lanka, the Compilation of principles (Sidat saňgarā), Literary ornaments for our own language (Siyabaslakara) and Well-understood literary ornaments (Subodhālaṅkāra). The first two texts are in the Sinhala language, and the third is in the Pali language. All three texts were written within a relatively short time period, the centuries around the beginning of the second millennium of the Common Era, crucial centuries in all accounts of the vernacular millennium. All three are central to the history of Sri Lanka's own distinctive engagement with Daṇḍin's Kāvyādarśa but they are so different from each other that it is not clear in what way they can be said to be vehicles for the transmission of Daṇḍin's own ideas. Their differences suggest that the history of samāsokti in Sri Lanka can be profitably illuminated by being placed not just near or even alongside the intellectual history of Sanskrit Alṃamkāraśāstra in South Asia, but actually somewhere within that history.
目次
A Kāvyādarśa textual community 128 The playfulness of Sidat saňgarā 130 The conservatism of Subodhālaṅkāra 135 The Conceptual Innovation of Siyabaslakara 139 References 143 Primary Sources 143 Secondary Source 144
