Other Kuṣāṇa-period Poets

 Aśvaghōṣa is a good candidate for the “first author” of Sanskrit literature: the first historical person who is remembered to have composed a literary text. (Earlier authors composed non-literary texts, and earlier literary texts are attributed to non-historical persons.) Of course this is not quite true: Aśvaghōṣa belonged to a community of Buddhist monks who had, for several generations, been experimenting with writing kāvya. Although very little of their work survives in Sanskrit (or other languages, such as Gandhari, in which it was composed), this talk will examine the cultivation of kāvya by Buddhist poets other than Aśvaghōṣa in the first three centuries of the common era: Saṅgarakṣa (ca. 125 CE), Mātr̥cēṭa (ca. 125 or 230 CE), and Kumāralāta (ca. 250 CE). I am primarily concerned with the general outlines of their literary program, evinced by the formal features of their works and their explicit statements about literature and speech.