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74
INTRODUCTION
not necessarily hold for the present collection. The best example of this is the verb form śiksatu in 48'. In school editions like M. R. Kala's, this is emended to the correct śikṣatām, which I have found in just one MS, namely the late and worthless Y-type fragment Nagpur 801. The remaining verb-forms in the stanza are yātu, jayatu, prayātu, so that one might see here the beginning of some form of assonance within the stanza. But the reading itself cannot possibly be contested, seeing the remarkable uniformity of the MSS. The form gacchatām in 25a is just the opposite type of error, though with correct variants - none of which can be accepted on MS evidence alono. Nābhyarthito jaladharo'pi is not a good construction in 64'; nor smitam kiñcid vaktram in 93a, though emended to mugdhana in most of S and explained as vaktram kiñcid smitan by most N commentators. Plenty of other examples could be found to prove our point,
The second main principle is that strong variation always indicates some difficulty which the scribes tended to smooth out in different ways, In 1094, the reading -sastrīşu rajyeta kah is certainly not in doubt, but the word sastrī is comparatively rare in classical Sanskrit in spite of its use by Patañjali (on Pāṇ. 2. 1. 55] and definition as a knife in Amarakość 2. 8. 92. Common enough in Prakrit as satti, about the only well-known classical Sanskrit work that gives it is Māgha's Sisupälavadha 4. 44. The confusion particularly evident in otherwise correct southern codices is thus clearly explained.
The text in general determines itself by the concordance of the overwhelming majority of the MSS, but in the really difficult places the Valentinian law of citations cannot be applied. We have first to note that the N recension as a whole is conservative, preserving archaisms and solecisms, whereas S tends to paraphrase in correct Pāņinian Sanskrit whenever necessary. The N text, in the final analysis, rests mainly upon A-E, as the other versions are not well-determined, or are contaminated by foreign readings while the Y collations made by others are unreliable. Whenever A, or even A0.1 shows agreement with any Malayalam source, I have taken the reading as original, for it could hardly have arisen otherwise al the two extremes of Bhartrhari territory. When, howevor, N and S differ en bloc, with nothing to choose between them, I have taken the N reading provisionally as a stopgap, because Blartrhari after all was a northerner according to all traditions, and the MS třaditiou certainly originated in the north. Finally, the rather intricate metres make restoration easier in some ways, for one can then constitute the text letter by letter. The wavy line is used to call attention to a strong variant which could as well have been accepted for the main reading without much violence to the canon. It could have been used much oftener, particularly in 273, where every version has its own strongly divergent readings su that the task of restoration seems quite hopeless.
4. 4. Applications of the method. The reading -ganāḥ samvāsat: jayate at the end of 33d is certainly ungrammatical, giving a singular verb with a plural subject. The major alternative in N is to take the singular -yunah, which violates the rule for compounds. Here the meaning is not
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