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INTRODUCTION
20
years old) and in good order. It has lacuna in stanzas 15, 16, 20, 190, 193, and 194. The copyist is possibly careful but his. copy appears to have inherited some mistakes from the original. It opens with fo ll BTA: M : l qondagischstescura procuraramartar i and ends at CH R E Jet gernegui ace II 903 The mantra is 5 considered and numbered as a stanza (see stanza 71 ). Stanzas 125 and 127 are not found in this Ms.
There are orthographical peculiarities but they are trifling to be noted here. The Ms. preserves Saurasení characteristics as it employs द for त and इअ and त्ता (as in पक्खालिअ and बंधित्ता) for त्वा. 10 A.Mg. influence is there but it is rarely seen while Apabh. influence is abundant as in such forms as अहवइ for अथवा, जेम for यथा, जि for एव and चएवि for त्यक्त्वा. The forms like छाया in Nom. and Acc. both in sing. and plu. are, doubtless, indicative of strong Apabh. influence. It makes use of ot for initial and non-initial - and gratis is almost always resorted to.
The Ms. was of special service to me, though it contained scribal errors more than B and P. In short, it always helped me exactly at places where B and P disappointed me regarding meaning and legibility.
There were two other Mss. which also were obtained from the aforesaid Bhāņdār. The peculiarity of one contained in having a slip-shod Gujarati gloss over a line which was often misleading. Every word was an error and thus it gave me no help in editing. Moreover, it was incomplete. The other Ms. 25 was entirely of the P group and for this reason I did not utilize it. I came to know that Pt. Jugalkishoreji Mukhtar had got a manuscript of this work. I therefore approached him through Acharya Jinavijayji to whom he wrote that he would be sending a transcript only of those stanzas which were found 30 corrupt or illegible by me. I sent him, consequently, those stanzas a transcript of which was immediately and kindly supplied to me by him but it solved no difficulty of mine as I could see from the transcript of those stanzas sent to me that it belonged definitely to the P group.
2. Presentation of the Text I had to work with the scanty material afforded by these three Mss. which belong to different families. This little material also was not wholly without defects. Variants which should be called genuine or crucial are very few. Most of the
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