The Exact Date of Harivilasa and its Author

This short communication addresses the chronology of the Sanskrit poem Harivilasa and its author, Lolimbaraja. The author notes that A. B. Keith’s History of Sanskrit Literature gives conflicting dates, placing Lolimbaraja around 1050 in one passage and in the eleventh century in another. To resolve this, he consults two manuscripts of Harivilasa in the Bhandarkar Research Institute that contain a chronogram verse. The verse records the composition year by means of numerical symbolism, yielding the date Saka 1505, corresponding to A.D. 1584. The author argues that this date should be accepted because it is confirmed by the manuscript itself. He further examines whether the Lolimbaraja who wrote Harivilasa and the Lolimbaraja who authored the medical treatise Vaidyajivana are the same person. Citing catalogues and editorial comments, he suggests that both works are likely by the same author. This implies that Lolimbaraja flourished in the late sixteenth century and wrote both a devotional poem and a medical compendium. The note thereby corrects earlier assumptions that placed him much earlier.

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