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86 : Sramaņa, Vol 61, No. 3 July-September 10
introduction to the texts3 and can be viewed as a model of objectivity and rigorous argumentation. In the absence of any internal information which could help solving the problem, Tessitori makes use of all the available external data which he submits to a very strict cross-examination, and reaches the conclusion that the Uvaesamālā dates back to the first half of the 9th century, or possibly a little earlier. The observations presented by Tessitori's contemporaneous specialists, whether in Europe (Jacobi, Leumann, Guērinot) or in India (by Vijayadharmasūri), show that his conclusions were rather well received. The willingness of these scholars to pass on to Tessitori additional information which could both corroborate his views and make them even more precise was a sign of their positive reactions. On the whole, these views still hold true today: the Uvaesamālā cannot be as old as the Jaina tradition wants it to be; the fact that the first available commentary dates back to the end of the 9th cent. (and not earlier), and the fact that a work completed in 858 A.D. clearly refers to the Uvaesamālā confirm Tessitori's deductions about its time of redaction.
There is a simple fact which is very significant: the edition of the Uvaesamālā provided by Tessitori can be considered as the editio princeps of this text. (It was preceded by a so-called Indian edition published in 1878, to which Tessitori had access, but we can believe with closed eyes Tessitori's statement that it was not better than any manuscript, or even worse"). Secondly, although an editio princeps, it is a critical edition in the full sense of the word, and not only because it makes use of several manuscripts, namely five: three from the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, which was the normal place where Tessitori got the manuscripts he needed, and two from the British Library. The collation was done very carefully, and always with a critical eye. The critical apparatus is both sober and adequate, insofar as it also records orthographical variants. In the case of a text written in Prakrit, as the Uvaesamālā is, a clear picture of these variants is
