Ganitasara Sangraha of Mahavira

Author(s): Rangacharya
Publisher: Rangacharya

Page 14

vii
GAŅITABİRABANGRARA. - very keen regret that it did not please Providence to allow him to live long enough to enable me to enhance the value of the publication by means of his continued guidance and advice; and my consolation now is that it is something to have been able to carry out what he with scholarly delight imposed upon me as a duty.
Of the three manuscripts found in the library one is written on paper in Grantha characters, and contains the first five chapters of the work with a running commentary in Sanskrit; it has been denoted here by the letter P. The remaining two are palm-leaf manuscripts in Kanarese characters, one of them containing, like P, the first five chapters, and the other the seventh chapter dealing with the geometrical measurement of areas. In both these manuscripts there is to be found, in addition to the Sanskrit text of the original work, a brief statement in the Kanarese language of the figures relating to the various illustrative problems as also of the answers to those samo problems. Owing to the common characteristics of those manuscripts and also owing to their not overlapping one another in respect of their contents, it has been thought advisable to look upon them as one manuscript and denota them by K. Another manuscript, denoted by M, belongs to the Gov. ernment Oriental Library at Mysore, and was received on loan from Mr. A. Mahadeva Sastri, B.A., the Curator of that institution. This inanuscript is a transcription on paper in Kanarese characters of an original palm-leaf manuscript belonging to a Jaina Pandit, and contains the whole of the work with a short commentary in the Kanarose language by one Vallabha, who claims to be the author of also a Telugu commentary on the same