Vajjalaggam

Author(s): M V Patwardhan
Publisher: Prakrit Text Society

Page 17

xvi
VAJJÁLAGGAM
cit. p. 3, foot. note 5) notes, from Ms A consulted by him, the reading #TIH! instead of 45/3T in stanza 794. He also notes that MSS D and F have at the end the statement 1182317 HATIT. The reading 9511fe must have been substituted for AT&T 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 consult. ed by him the number of stanzas fluctuates from 092 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 vulgate”, plus 201 additional stanzas", i.e. a total of 490 stanzas. The reason for this inflation is that anthologies by their very nature easily lend themselves to amplification by the insertion of stanzas nut 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 S 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 may 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 Häla's Saptašati, 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 it (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 ( fasturgl) 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 almost idenrical with those in the vulgate.