Walter Slaje has asked me to forward a further message to the list.

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Having been disconnected from the list for a while, it may have escaped my notice if the reading -chakuna- has been adopted text-critically from among other variants, or if it is an only reading from a unique manuscript. That would certainly change the starting point of this discussion.

We can of course never exclude the possibility that the syllables under consideration were physically damaged in the exemplar a scribe had had in front of him and which he supplied in his own copy with a wording (“śakuna”) that seemed reasonable to him. Then however, and without further evidence, anything could be explained by wild guesses of that sort. Moreover, an unsubstantiated assumption that ccha-ku-na was mistaken for ttha-kka-na is, as I should like to repeat, baseless in the Śāradā script. I am not prone to consider such an argument as valid until its likelihood has been more convincingly demonstrated. For, what other script should we suppose in use in the Greater Kashmir region in the tenth century, if not Śāradā?

The Śāhi ruler Thakkana “may have been some small chief in a neighbouring hill region“, to quote Stein on RT 6.230. Thakkana was conquered and captured after an invasion of Kashmiri forces in his “country, which is difficult of access on account of its streams and mountains“ (Stein). The difficulty of access mentioned here points to the Dardic territories north of the Kashmir valley proper, where Hindu Śāhis had been ruling, too. There were indeed no safe and easy passes to cross the mountain range to the north. Hence, the Greater Kashmir region is our most likely candidate, which is the homeland of the Śāradā script.

As to my hypothesis that śakuna may have deliberately been used instead of thakkana by the author himself with a view to avoiding an inauspicious name in the beginning, a beginning which is by all means supposed to be auspicious, let me add that he was writing at the court in the company of contemporaries who certainly knew him as a dependant of his patron quite well. Sure, at their time, the audience could immediately savour the applaudable elegance with which he had turned the unhappily named Thakkana into, and immortalized him as, a Śakuna king (by which he won his favour).

If otherwise, could anyone supply evidence for a maṅgala or a dedicatory verse containing unfavourable words or ominous names?

Until counterevidence, would someone on this list earnestly believe that a medieval Indian author might have addressed his patron as “illustrious liar king”?

Thank you again for your attention,