The Sources of the Bhakti Ratnakara

The scholar M. Neog has expended considerable intellectual energy in trying to trace the source of the slokas incorporated by Sankaradeva in his Bhakti Ratnakara. He has devoted a section of his book Sankaradeva and His Times: Early History of the Vaisnava Faith and Movement in Assam[1] on this topic and, in his estimation, there are, in all, 564 sloka citations in this compilation[2] and as many as 437 are culled from the Bhagavata Purana. The Bhagavad Gita accounts for 10 slokas and Sridhara Svami’s verses in his Bhavartha Dipika, 22. In the opinion of M. Neog, ‘for the most part,’ so far as the Bhagavata and the Gita are concerned, Sankaradeva quotes Sridhara Svami’s interpretation of them.
The Ratnakara is primarily a Purana based work and Sankaradeva has drawn on, besides the Bhagavata, a number of these texts such as the Brhannaradiya Purana—which seems to range next to the Bhagavata in respect of the number of verses extracted, with 27 slokas--, the Visnu Purana, the Narasimha Purana and the Matsya Purana. Apart from the Puranas, there are also a number of other Sanskrit works which have been utilized by Sankaradeva. Some of these are extremely rare. These include the Vaisnavananda Lahari, the Santi Sataka and the Yoga Sara[3].

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[1] Chapter VI, The Doctrines of the Faith: The Bhakti Ratnakara.

[2] Here, we should take note of the fact that M. Neog has also taken into account some portions of extant copies of the Ratnakara that we do not consider to be part of the original, such as the chapters following the thirty-fifth one—on the glory of the Bhagavata Purana, yamas and niyamas and the ten types of bhakti. These chapters, it must be noted, are not taken up by Ramacarana for translation and were probably later accretions.  

[3] This work, according to M. Neog who seems to have spent considerable energy in trying to trace Sankaradeva’s citations in the Ratnakara, has become rare and is now not available. It is not the work of the same name by Vijnana Bhiksu; nor is it the one by Purusottama Tirtha. Only a few verses from it seem to have been utilized by Sankaradeva—in the twenty-second chapter of the book, on the difference between the embodied personality (jivatma) and the Lord.