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"The Apabhraṁsa Passages of Abhinavagupta
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ledge of Apabhraṁsa grammar and metres. So ignorance of Apabhramsa combined with defective text transmission seems to have produced the sorry state in which we find the Apabhraṁsa passages in the texts of Kashmir Saivism.
The faults and errors in the Apabhramsa and Prakrit passages that are being discussed here derive mostly from the following four causes : (1) Misreading of the letters of the oiginal writing (either by
the editor or by the scribes of the Manuscripts). (2) Textual omissions (3) Incorrect word division (4) Incorrect line division.
The present attempt mostly deals with the textual faults of 'the passages due to the last two causes. The faults due to the first two causes are considered only occasionally. Further, the present paper primarily aims at identifying the metres of the Apabhramsa and Prakrit verses of the Tantrasära and Parātriņšika-Vrttia. Secondly it attempts to ascertain the general character of the Apabhramsa of these verses on the basis of their identifiable grammatical features. Those among us who had some occasion to deal with highly corrupt and obscure verse passages in Apabhramsa know that identification of the metre of a passage helps considerably in making out its word and line divisions and revealing thereby its general purport, if not its detailed verbal meaning. Similarly
ical characteristics ascertained from one segment of the passage can serve to distinguish words and forms from among the confused assemblage of letters in the other segments. These two criteria combined with the criterion of context could play quite a
seful part in establishing the correct text at least tentatively, in precisely demarcating the corrupt segments, as also in suggesting emendations. It is of course greatly desirable that these passages are now re-edited with the help of all available manuscripts. But in the absence of such an effort, it would be somewhat useful to make out whatever meaning and form we can from the muddled texts.
