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planned incorporation into the body of the Viy, of practically the entire text of Pannav. and Jiv. Of course there is one way of interpreting this fact without giving up the theory of XXV being an accretion: the said references may have been interpolated subsequently to the addition of XXV.
Another fact may be mentioned here. As will be explained below in § 21 (end) and § 22 (XXV) the numerical series used as an ordering basis in XVIII-XX very probably goes on in XXV.
Future investigation, as I said, will have to solve these problems. At present, considering the arguments in favour of and those against the originality of XXV, I would tentatively say that the latter seem to be slightly more convincing.
8 8. Characteristics of the Nucleus. I shall now pass to the so-called nucleus of the work viz I-XX to which, as was pointed out in the preceding paragraph, XXV must be added provisionally.
In the accretions, so we found, vast yet well-delimited doctrinal domains are systematically explored in the course of wholly uniform dialogues, Mv. answering Goy.'s questions at Rāy.; they are catechisms as it were of which the would-be dialogue only serves didactic purposes.
The sayas of the nucleus, then, present from the very outset a totally different picture. Here we do not only visit many other towns, meeting there a great number of other interlocutors, but in complete contrast with what happens in the secondary pannattis, totally different subject-matters here succeed each other at every moment, without ever being linked up in a real train of thought, the selfsame topics over and again cropping up at short or long intervals. This is true even in most of the sections--by far the greatest in number also in the nucleus sayas—where, as is the case in the accretions, Goy. questions Mv. at Rāy. To quote one example out of a hundred, in X 3 Goy. starts questioning his master on the relative magic powers of gods and goddesses (a question that he will again, in a slightly different wording, raise in XIV 33), then jumps to the wind kavvada that is heard between the heart and the liver of a galloping horse and, in
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