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I HAVE been asked by Āḷkoṇḍavilli Govindācārya Swāmī to offer the following pages to the Royal Asiatic Society. The Artha-pañcaka, written in Tamil in the thirteenth century a.d. by the celebrated Piḷḷai Lōkācārya, is quite the most important summary of the modern Bhāgavata doctrine of Southern India that we possess. A Sanskrit translation of this work by Nārāyana Yati was noticed, and its contents partly described, by Dr. Bhandarkar at the Vienna Oriental Congress of 1886 (Aryan Section, Proceedings, p. 101), and the information is repeated by him in his Report on the Search for Sanskrit MSS. in the Bombay Presidency during the year 1883–4, published in 1887 (pp. 68, 69). It is upon this work, and upon another (the Yatīndra-mata-dīpikā of Śrī-nivāsa) described at the same time, that Dr. Bhandarkar founded his well-known account of the origin of the Bhāgavata religion, which has formed the basis of all researches into the subject conducted since then in Europe. |
