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Shri Mahavir Jain Aradhana Kendra
www.kobatirth.org
Acharya Shri Kailassagarsuri Gyanmandir
SUKHÁVAT-VYÛHA.
XV
taken very great liberties with the MSS., knowing with almost absolute certainty what was the only possible reading. I had also for these prose portions the assistance of the grammar which, though by no means Paninean, is yet not without definite rules. Another liberty I have taken was to add numbers to the long strings of names.
But in the metrical portions the difficulties are far greater. The metrical dialects of the Buddhist Satras have never, so far as we know, been studied grammatically by native scholars. For Pali and for other Prakrit dialects we have native grammarians who tell us, at all events, what they thought to be the correct forms. But for the so-called Gatha dialects we are left without any such help. The MSS. are written by scribes who, whether they were learned or unlearned, had nothing to guide them, whose great temptation, if they were scholars, was to discover Sanskrit forms under Prakrit disguises, or who, if they knew what diplomatic accuracy meant, were left to decipher, as well as they could, the very peculiar and, in some cases, very uncertain letters of the ancient MSS. before them. Burnouf ascribed the introduction, if not the invention, of new words, such as the Pali Katuranta, instead of the Sanskrit Katuranga, to the ambiguity of the letters of the ancient alphabets.
See on this point the excellent remarks of M. Senart, in the Introduction to his edition of the Mahâvastu, p. xiii.
* The following is a list of letters most likely to be mistaken for each other ; see Klatt, De Cânakyae Sententiis, 1873; Senart, Maha vastu, vol. i. p. xi :
FME
BEI
E R
21621
F Do to
近日备E日马可 可可可可可告] E奇可可
E
S
TE TE hoy here to
For he he
21 21 El Canal 4 4.
tong og feu
M
Hey
Z
1
te
3 Burnouf, Lotus, p. 582.
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