198 as she is,^she quickly puts her hand over Visn^s right eye. Since Visnu is often represented as the cosmos, his right eye is the sun. When the sun sets, lotuses close their petals and Brahma will, thereby, disappear. Needless to say, the many verses devoted to travellers and the veiled invitations offered to them by horny women are not considered "obscene." Many of them are good poems 5 e,g..» the following verse from the Sapngadharapaddhati, an anthology from the fourteenth century: "Traveller, look how beautiful it is here in this bamboo forest and thicket of reeds. Come sleep for a while." This is what a young girl tending the cows told the handsome young wanderer as he sat down on the road unexpectedly./. As she spoke she could not keep her body still. And of course the many fine verses where sexual love is the main theme were in no sense censored by the orthodox tradition. I think of such verses as the following from, of all places, Hemacandra^ Prakptavydkarana IV. 397 (a grammar!): When my lover comes to me I shall do things to him never seen before. Like water that vanishes into the clay of a new earthen pot, I will dissolve all my body into his body. What then did the Sanskrit literary critics consider to be clear cases of pornography? The question is not easy to answer, for we will see the ambiguities that exist in the most famous statement of this matter, that found in the Dhvanyatoka of Anandavardhana (Kashmir, ninth century). There is, however, a passage in the Locana, Abhinavagupta^ eleventh century commentary on the above text and a work of unique importance in Sanskrit literary criticism, where Abhinava explicity calls a verse "obscene": As for what someone has given as an example of vyajastuti (apparent blame that is really praise), namely: "0 Lord, the earth was your grandmother, and then became your mother. Now, girdled with the ocean, she has become your wife for the glory of your familyn And when a full hundred years are over, she will become your daughter-in-law, free from all reproach. Tell me, is this the proper (behavior) for a family of kings, who know all the rules of morality? " This strikes me as vulgar, and makes one think of extremely pornographic things. Moreover, what king of praise is this anyway? For all the verse says is