Based on what may be inferred from his writing, he was a very well-educated courtier whose audience consisted of young men in the lower nobility with plenty of leisure time and a fondness for amusing stories involving warriors and courtesans.
They appear to have been part of a large corpus of Kathā (narrative tales) about Vikramāditya that were first written down in Kashmir during the eleventh century.
[2] In Śivadāsa's version, King Vikramāditya's kingdom is endangered by the machinations of a powerful necromancer.
He is then told twenty-five stories, each of which end with a riddle he must solve to prove his wisdom and knowledge.
The story is told in the Champu literary style, (a mixture of prose and verse), which suggests the possibility of Jain influence.