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Preface
The text edited below deals with the story of young Nāciketas, who, cursed by his father, visited the world of Yama, and afterwards returned, safe and sound, to our earth.
What we have before us, is but a modern recension of this well-known old apocalyptic legend, the history of which can, by means of the so-called 'Brahmānda-Purāņa-recension' (edited by Belloni Filippi ), of the older recensions of the Vārāha-Purāna and Mahābhārata, be traced back through about two and a half thousand years as far as time-honoured Kathopanişad and even more timehonoured Taittirîya Brāhmaṇa ( III, II, 8, I ff.), whereas, on the other hand, it can be followed down to the recent Hindi tale 'Candrăvati athavā Nāsiketopākhyāna', which, in the beginning of the last century, Sadala Miśra composed as a standard of Modern Hindi prose.
But interesting as our text may be with regard to its literary antecedents, and attractive as the development of its matter throughout so many centuries, and in so various stages may be to the student, all this would never justify the bringing out of a critical edition and an exact interpretation. For the recension represented here and by the parallel text partly edited by Tessitori is but a short abstract of a source closely akin to the so-called 'BrahmāndaPurāņa-recension', and its literary value is only small.
Much more valuable is our text from the linguistic point of view. For, written in rather an archaic shape of a modern Indian vernacular, and handed down in a good old manuscript exactly dated, it allows us to study a certain earlier stage of development of a certain modern Indian dialect.
The importance of this argument is clear, if we remember that nothing is known of the time when, and the manner in which the
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