text with its aid. Owing perhaps to the inadvertence of the scribe, or what is more plausible, to the disorderly and topsy turvy arrangement of many leaves in the original manuscript, from which the present one was copied, or to some other cause that passes our comprehension, the continuity of the text was seriously disrupted in many places. In all such places, portions of the text that followed certain other parts, had no link whatsoever with the sentences that went before, and as a consequence it was impossible to make any sense of them. We were really pained at this haphazard state of the manuscript, and at one time, even felt, that its publication, if undertaken, may be merely a thankless task.
It cost us much agonising grief and more herculean effort to bring together the scattered and mutilated parts separated by many pages in between, and insert them at their proper places. It is the sheer grace and blessing of the Bhagavatpāda that guided us to restore properly, by the maxims of सिंहावलोकन and मण्डूकप्लुति later parts of the text to their proper places at some distant earlier stage, and likewise earlier parts of the text in the correct context at some distant later stage. We had to search sentence by sentence, and even letter by letter before finalising such a change. Great indeed was the pleasure that we derived, when we found that after bringing together such parts, the continuity of the text was well maintained and the text yielded good sense. All such changes effected by us have been indicated in separate foot-notes in all the twenty different places, giving full details about the original places in which such sentences were found in the manuscript and the number of pages in the manuscript that separated them.
In spite of the fact that we have thus almost left no stone unturned in arriving at the correct text, it may be that errors have crept in unconsciously and they may have to be duly corrected by sahṛdayas in the process of study or of instruction.
We have to express our thanks to Sri V. Venkatachalam, M.A., Vedānta Śiromaṇi, Lecturer in Sanskrit, Vivekananda College, for this free English version of our Sanskrit Introduction.
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पूज्यान् पतञ्जलिव्यासशङ्करांस्त्रीन् गुरून् नुमः । |
