Kamalāñjali

Kamalāñjali, “an offering of lotuses” — sixty verses in a long ornamented metre, each closing on a plea.

The first verse lays the whole Indian pantheon at the Buddha's feet: Brahmā the lotus-throned, Viṣṇu lord of the lotus, Śiva lord of the Pramathas, Indra of the thunderbolt, the lords of the dānavas, of men, of the uragas, and Garuḍa the serpent-seated. All of them bow, and the jewels in their diadems are a swarm of bees about the spotless lotus of the Sage's feet. The later verses turn inward: jananāvadhi maraṇaṃ viya maraṇāvadhi jananaṃ, “death is the term of birth as birth is the term of death; from both alike there is fear for me in becoming”.

Its language is the extreme case in this collection. It is Pali written under heavy Sanskrit influence: measured against the rest of the set, its Sanskrit kāvya vocabulary runs at about nine occurrences per thousand words — above even the Pajjamadhu, a recognised kāvya, and six times the rate of the Mahāvaṃsa.

The text names no author and no initiator, and that is a fact about the text, not a gap in the searching. A scan of its opening and closing found no ganthārambhakathā, no colophon and no place name anywhere in it, and no source on file names the work. No date can be given.