Book Title: Shataka Trayadi Subhashit Sangraha
Author(s): Bhartuhari, Dharmanand Kosambi
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

View full book text
Previous | Next

Page 24
________________ EDITOR'S PREFACE on similar topics, the absence of a connecting link from one stanza to the next, makes it impossible to prove by any sort of inner criticism that the line upon which doubt has been cast by the MS evidence are actually later additions; Sukthankar, whose unit was a whole passage, could invariably manage this when stripping off some striking and generally accepted episode from the Vulgato text of the Mahābhārata. The desperate efforts macle by our scribes to include every stanza they believed to be Bhartrlari's forces us to attach far more weight here to omission than to inclusion, but there is ample evidence for an earlier long period of complete neglect in which omissions must presumably have occurred. In the Pancettantra, Hertel's long series of studies had established versions which I. Edgerton (A. O. Series, vols. 2, 3; 1924 ) later combined to form a consolidated text, though we need not stop to discuss whether the critical method is identical with Suktbankar's. For me, there was no available determination of Bhartrhari versions*, perhaps because a false appearance of uniformity had been thrust upon editions in widely separated parts of the country by the accident of their having been based on what I call version W. Bhartrhari's popularity is of a different sort than that of the Mahābhārata, as it lacks the religious appeal and replaces the interminable doggerel of the epic by crisp, polished stanzas in far more elegant metres which necessarily imply a more cultured if restricted audience. On the other hand, the entire collection of three centuries is short enough to be memorized in toto, while its use as a school text has generally fixed many of the verses in the memory of any Indian who makes the loast pretence to classical knowledge. This adds to the editor's worries, in that many stanzas have undoubtedly been contaminated by such mnemonic transmission, and many have been attracted by similitude to others which were probably original. Further, the poetry shows a formative influence on classical Sanskrit, in that our lesicographers generally quota a line of Bhartrhari to illustrate the meaning of a word or a plurase, though an examination of the MS apparatus leads to the suspicion that a solecism or at least a neologism may originally have existed at the point in question. In spite of the smoothing effect of this type of popularity, solecisms do occur in any given version of Bhartrhari which the remarkable flexibility of the Sanskrit language and assiduity of our commentators cannot remove. Worst of all are the ghost readings that appear because of the copyist or reader (pathaka) having learned from another version, I can affirm from my own experience in collation that even the most carefully trained worker finds his tongue or his pen slip into the reading first learned in his student days, so that far more careful checking is necessary for Bhartrhari collations than for a work not generally # D. 1. Kosambi: Some Extant Versions of Bhartrhari's satakas: J.B.B. R.A.S., vol. 21, 1945, pp. 17-32. I hope to publish all major versions ind their commentaries in due course. My abbreviations N, S, V denote the nili, frigūra, and vairūgur śataka respectively, Jain Education International For Private & Personal Use Only www.jainelibrary.org

Loading...

Page Navigation
1 ... 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 ... 346