Prakrit Verses in Sanskrit Works on Poetics Part 02

Author(s): V M Kulkarni
Publisher: B L Institute of Indology

Page 11

Author's Preface
The publication of this volume, originally planned for 1986, had been delayed by unforeseen and unavoidable contingencies. While in some respects unfortunate, this delay has been of advantage in giving me opportunities for further investigation and improvement and addition of comments on certain difficult passages and restoration of quite a few verses which were to me quite obscure through the help of Professor M. V. Patwardhan, who alas, is no more with us, my learned friend, Dr. H. C. Bhayani, and Professor A. M. Ghatage, my former teacher. I wish to acknowledge here, for which I cannot find words adequate enough, my sense of deep gratitude to them. Even amid the pressure of multifarious duties or project work on hand, they always spared time and energy ungrudgingly to consider difficult and corrupt readings, parts of verses and obscure verses which I referred to them. I have indicated in the notes my indebtedness to them.
Distinctive Features of the Present Edition : The speciality of this edition lies in the following respects: (i) For the first time Prakrit illustrative verses from a score of noteworthy Sanskrit works on Poetics are presented here as a treasury. (ii) a determined effort is made to trace the illustrative verses to their sources as far as possible and these sources are noted just below the concerned Prakrit verses accompanied by their Sanskrit chāyā. (iii) the texts of a very large number of Prakrit verses, especially from Kuntaka's Vakroktijīvita, Bhoja's Sarasvatikanthabharana and Smgăraprakāśa, Ruyyaka's Sahityamīmāṁsā and Sobhakara's Alamkararatnákara have been for the first time, satisfactorily restored in the light of their context, metre, and their general import and I feel confident that the readers who have so far read the text in the corrupt form in the available editions should quickly see the difference to make which obvious I should have placed both the texts side by side. But the constraints of space have prevented me from doing this. The sahrdaya readers should forgive me for this. (iv) However, quite a few verses are restored only tentatively. In the case of these verses, there are possibilities of alternative or even better restorations. (v) Noteworthy variant readings are taken note of and discussed in the Notes. (vi) A considerable number of illustrative verses, Skandhakas drawn from Sarvasena's Harivijaya (now lost) and illustrative găthas not found in Gathāsaptaśati and Vajjālagga, but cited in works like Srrigāraprakāśa, Sarasvatīkanthābharana, Alamkararatnākara, etc., are translated here into readable English for the first time. (vii) An attempt is made