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The present edition of epigrams ascribed to Bhartṛhari owes its inception partly to the late Dr. Vishnu S. Sukthankar, famed for the critical edition of the Mahabharata begun under his general editorship at the Bhandarkar O. R. Institute. In discussing a literary criticism of mine on Bhartṛhari's poetry, which had upset him greatly without his being able to give a definite contradiction in any essential, we agreed that a critical edition of the gnomic and lyric stanzas transmitted to us in that poet's name was badly needed. He suggested that I should undertake it while it seemed to me that such work lay beyond my own capacities and the rudimentary knowledge of Sanskrit that had forced me to rely, like Bernard Shaw in his celebrated translation from the Greek of Cleopatra's cure for baldness, upon pure divination. Sukthankar said, in effect, that his analysis of the Mahabharata MS evidence had been confirmed by Ruben's sampling survey of passages from the Rāmāyaṇa, so that we now knew what happened in India to a large popular work in the process of transmission and inflation. But nothing whatsoever was known about the transmission of a small popular work in Sanskrit. A knowledge of classical Sanskrit could be picked up from the stanzas themselves as I went along; the work was small enough to be handled completely by one man, unaided; in any case, his own knowledge was at my disposal whenever any difficulty presented itself.
Flattered though I was by this estimate of my ability in a totally new field, I hesitated for a long time. As planned originally, this work should have begun as soon as I could round off certain mathematical and statistical investigations which had till then formed my main field of research. These occupied me till August 9, 1942. Then, as I had not
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
1 "The Quality of Renunciation in Bhartṛhari's Poetry"; Fergusson College Magazine, 1941; Reprinted in Bharatiya Vidya, vol. VII, 1916, pp. 49-62.
2 "On observe qu'en France, le plus souvent, les critiques musicaux sont sourds et les critiques d'art aveugles. Cela leur permet le receuillement nécessaire aux idées esthétiques". Anatole France, Ile des Pingouins (Préface). Not mine "the critic's well-flogged ear"; no one applied to me the singular epithet of Calligraphes!
This is best seen in Sukthankar's Adiparvan Prolegomena (Sukthankar Memorial Edition, vol. I, pp. 1-137). A knowledge of this landmark in Indian textual criticism is assumed in all that follows. Walter Ruben: Studien zur Textgeschichte des Rāmāyana (Stuttgart 1936).
1 भ. सु.
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