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INTRODUCTION.
xxi
The sign of an asterisk (*) has been prefixed to those Nârada's repute texts of Nârada which were found to be as a legal writer. quoted in one or several of the Sanskrit Commentaries or Digests of Law. The same method has been observed previously in the Bibliotheca Indica edition of the Sanskrit text, but a considerable number of quotations has come to light since then. The repute of Nârada as a legal writer appears to have been so great that upwards of half his work has been embodied in the authoritative compositions of the mediaeval and modern writers in the province of Sanskrit law.
Under the heading of Quotations from Nârada, all those texts have been collected at the close of the present transla'Quotations from tion which are attributed to Nârada in one or
Nârada.' several of the Digests and Commentaries, without being traceable in the MSS. of the Nârada-smriti. Between these quotations have been inserted, for the sake of completeness and in order to fill up the gaps between the single texts contained in the quotations, a number of unpublished texts from the MSS. of the minor version, and from the final chapter on Ordeals in the ancient Nepalese MS. of the Nârada-smriti1. A complete edition of that chapter will, I trust, be published by Dr. A. Conrady. The quotations have been taken from all the principal Sanskrit works on law, from Medhâtithi's Manubhâshya downwards. For a detailed statement of the particular work and chapter from which each text has been quoted, I may refer to the foot-notes. Most texts being quoted in more than one work at a time, it has not been thought necessary to give complete references to every such work in each particular case, but I have made a point of referring as much as possible to those law-books which exist in English, both for convenience of reference and in order to facilitate a comparison of the present translation with previous renderings of the texts of Nârada. All the unpublished texts have been given in the foot-notes in the original Sanskrit, together with the names of the works from which they have been taken. The MSS.
1 Regarding that chapter, see Preface to Nârada-smriti, pp. 6, 7.
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