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JAINA GAZETTE. [June & July prose quotatións from the Koutliya Shastra, which Pandit R. Sharma Shastri, B. A., was fortunate enough to discover recently and to publish. Hence the author entitled his work Tantrakhyikam. It has been published by the author of these lines. Though the manuscripts which he was so happy to procure for his ase contain some interpolated stories and stanzas, it is easy to show that the remaining text is the original one, the author's genuine wording, from which the first five chapters of · Kalilalı and Dimnah' as well as a North-West-Indian abstract, called Panchtantra (i. e., a Shastra consisting of five Tantras ) has followed.
About the book · Kalilah and Dimnah' I forbear to say. anything here, as everybody who takes an interest in the fate of this old Pahlavi version and of its derivatives may easily read the book of the late Mr. Keith-Falconer referred to in the above lines.
The North-West-Indian Abstract, called Panchtantra, does not seein to exist any longer in North-Western India. We know it only from very numerous manuscripts spread all over the Deccan, and from a single Nepalese manuscript which contains only the verse portions and an unique prose sentence which the copyist who made the verse abstract believed to be a stanza, but which is in reality prose quotation from the Kalliyan. This circumstance shows that the original of the Nepalese Panchtantra was a mixture of prose and verse, quite such as the Southern Panchtantra contains, from which this original differed only in a great number of characteristic readings which it shared with the Hitopadesha. But in the number and in the arrangement of the stanzas as well as of stories this original of the Nepalese Panchtantra fully agreed with the archetype (or, original) of the Southern Panchtantra. Its author only transposed Tantras I and II, as did also Narayana, the author of the Hitopadesha.
I cannot here enter into details and repeat the argumentation given in my above quoted book. Sufficè it to say that the North-Western abstract whose author must have lived
after Kalidasa as be quotes the stanza Kumar Sambhave II, 55 Shree Sudharmaswami Gyanbhandar-Umara, Surat
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