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xvi
VAJJĀLAGGAM
cit. p. 3, foot-note 5) notes, from Ms A consulted by him, the reading AES instead of afla in stanza 794. He also notes that MSS D and F have at the end the statement ana997 Antit. The reading 45113g must have been substituted for haag in st. 794, at a later time when the VL no longer contained only 700 stanzas, but had been already amplified beyond that limit. The Vulgate as determined by Laber and as printed in the Bibliotheca Indica edition and in the present edition with Ratnadeva's commentary, contains as many as 795 stanzas including the last two epilogue stanzas. Laber (loc. cit. pp. 37, 40) says that in the MSS consulted by him the number of stanzas fluctuates from 692 to 889.' Ms C (No.:824, L. D. Institute of Indology, Ahmedabad) consulted by me for the present edition has 789 out of the 795 stanzas of the vulgat
cate2 plus 201 additional stanzas, i.e. a total of 990 stanzas. The reason for this inflation is that anthologies by their very nature easily lend themselves to amplification by the insertion of stanzas not included by their original compilers, but regarded as apt and beautiful by later readers and scribes. That is how the original corpus of the VL of seven hundred stanzas
1. According to Laber ( loc. cit. pp. 5, 38), the total number of all the stanzas in the 8 manuscripts used by him comes to 1330, out of which only 389 are common to all the MSS, and only these 389 stanzas can be regarded as the genuine nucleus of the original Vajjālagga. Even among the remaining stanzas there
be several more which are equally genuine, but nothing definite can be said about them. Unfortunately Laber has not indicated which these 389 genuine stanzas are. In the case of Hāla's Saptaśatī, there are, according to Dr. Winternitz [ History of Indian Literature (German), Vol. III. p. 103 ), only 430 stanzas which occur in all the recensions of that anthology.
2. The section on äz (No. 29 ) with six stanzas is absent. in MS C.
3. 195 out of these 201 additional stanzas are printed in the Appendix, and 6 (ajatust495511) are printed in a footnote (p.lvi-lvii) in the section dealing with the MSS consulted for the present edition. Out of the 195 stanzas printed in the Appendix some (about 10 ) are very similar and some ( about 9 ) are alaost identical with those in the vulgate.
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