AMARA SINHA (c. A.D. 375), Sanskrit grammarian and poet,
of whose personal history hardly anything is known. He is said
to have been "one of the nine gems that adorned the throne
of Vikramaditya," and according to the evidence of Hsuan
Tsang, this is the Chandragupta Vikramaditya that flourished
about A.D. 375. Amara seems to have been a Buddhist; and an
early tradition asserts that his works, with one exception,
were destroyed during the persecution carried on by the
orthodox Brahmins in the 5th century. The exception is the
celebrated Amara-Xosha (Treasury of Amara), a vocabulary
of Sanskrit roots, in three books, and hence sometimes
called Trikanda or the "Tripartite." It contains 10,000
words, and is arranged, like other works of its class, in
metre, to aid the memory. The first chapter of the Kosha
was printed at
Rome in Tamil character in 1798. An edition
of the entire work, with English notes and an index by H. T.
Colebrooke, appeared at Serampore in 1808. The Sanskrit text
was printed at Calcutta in 1831. A French translation by A.
L. A. Loiseleur-Deslongchamps as published at Paris in 1839.
Initial text from 1911 encyclopedia -- Please update as needed
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