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INTRODUCTION
reasonably correct source. In the third group, stanzas found in a single determined version are generally clear, while the vast majority of these stravs occur in “deplorably incorrect” or, as in the case of Wai 2, quite hopelessly corrupt MSS. Therefore, I have had to print them in a heavily emended form whenever parallel citations from anthologies or other sources onye correct readings. The original corrupt readings have generally not been given for lack of space. However, where the correct form was in doubt, the original stanza, no matter how meaningless it seemed, has been reproduced as it stood with a few suggested emendations or a question mark [ which could have occurred far oftener), in brackets. A considerable number of these stanzas look as if some optimist had written them himself after it six-week correspondence course in Sanskrit, the most atrocious being perhaps our 700. Our major problem, therefore, lies in determining the text of group I stanzas, and of those in II which occur in almost all sources. Theoretically, the question is simple enough. Every stanza was composed by someone, the editor's task being to restore its original text. In practice, one has to deal with hundreds of divergent sources, all of which are over a thousand years later than the "original”. So simple a text as our Y1 with its commentary, less than two centuries old, preserved by a single family in a peripheral region, cannot be determined with absolute certainty from its three representatives. The text of the much more popular version E is correspondingly more diffuse, at times to the point of indeterminacy. It would need a remarkably self-confident editor to claim the restoration of the original text from such material.
4.2. Nature of the commonest variants. A great part of the actual variation in readings arises from slips of pen or of the tongue. The one ren] ambiguity in the devanagari alphabet rava-kha is excluded by the metrical nature of our text. For the rest, there is an endless chain of mislections. The commonest slip, both of pronunciation and writing, is va = ba, while a little projection carries va into ca, so that vitta and citta are confused throughout. The letters pa and ya are written almost alike, while a little pinching makes ya look like ma, which can sometimes be misread :us sa, and mispronounced as śa which in turn is close to the written form of trū. On the other hand, şa=kha is a coinmon interchange arising from Rājashāni speech, like ya saja. More complicated aro the changes due to tongue-twisters; jatharuharinuh in 239, rūvaņah in 49% are simple metathesis. The interchange 876 = 800 (whence sujana=svajana) probably goes back to the oldest form of devanāgari, when the consonant va was joined below the line like the 4 vowel mark. Writing the u sign in the line probably causes the variant viphala for vipula[294]. The readings punyair and puspair in 181" are epigraphic variants as are ittham= iccham, artha=argha.
Fortunately, not all the possible variants of this sort occur in any single manuscript, and they can generally be corrected by noting special tendencies manifested by the source; occasionally, copying from an older codex with prsthamātrās has also to be compensated. The greater number of these present no serious problem, and have generally been corrected silently when the original reading was not in doubt. Our purpose here being not only to
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