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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
INTRODUCTION
I. PLAN AND EXECUTION OF THE PRESENT CATALOGUE
The present Catalogue is based on materials left by the late Mahamahopadhyaya Haraprasad Shastri, whose widely comprehensive erudition in the various fields of Sanskrit literature and Ancient Indian History and Culture is well known. The present editor was entrusted with the task of revising and seeing through the Press the late MM. Shastri's notes. These consisted of slips containing descriptions of the various MSS., which were in the handwriting of MM. Shastri's assistants working under his direction. The present editor as far as possible did not disturb the notes as he received them, but where discrepancies were revealed on actual comparison with the MSS. themselves, these were rectified. Quotations in the descriptive slips were verified, and sometimes these were curtailed or elaborated as circumstances connected with the importance or otherwise of the work or the MS. demanded. The present editor also compared MSS. of works in the Government Collection with others in the Indian Museum, Society's own collection or in that of other institutions (e.g., the Bangiya Sāhitya Parişad, the Sanskrit Sāhitya Parişad and the Sanskrit College) which were accessible to him, with a view to make the descriptions full and complete. Apparent copyists' mistakes in the Sanskrit of the MSS. have been silently corrected in the Catalogue. A uniform system of plus signs, simple and square brackets, has been followed in the present catalogue to indicate illegible or obscure akşaras and redundant words or aksaras, as well as emendations and allowable conjectures made by the editor to make clear a quoted passage.
About a dozen MSS. belonging to subjects other than the Tantra were through some inadvertence included within the Shastri slips, and these have duly been taken out. A few nevertheless escaped the attention of the editor as the work was printing: these have been sorted out in the Addenda et Corrigenda printed at the end. On the other hand, the present editor has included descriptions of some fifty newly acquired Tantra MSS., occurring within the present Collection, for which no materials left by MM. Shastri were available.
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