पृष्ठम्:बृहद्देवता.djvu/६

MITRA'S EDITION [Introduction In 1886 Professor Lanman contemplated the work of editing the Brhad- devată; but the difficulty of obtaining access to some of the indispensable MSS., together with the pressure of other work, obliged him to desist from the enterprise. He then asked me to undertake the task of editing the text critically, together with a translation and various appendices, for the Harvard Oriental Series. I gladly accepted the offer, as I had already collated a number of passages in the work for my edition of Sadgurusisya¹, as well as for an article published in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society2, and was, moreover, generally familiar with the auxiliary literature of the Rg-veda. Prof. Lanman accordingly handed over to me in 1897 his material, comprising Kuhn's collations and notes, together with a modern MS. (k) which Kuhn had obtained from India. 2. Rajendralala Mitra's edition. While Professor Lanman was still contemplating doing the work him- self, the late Dr. Rajendralala Mitra began, in 1889, to bring out, in the Bibliotheca Indica, his edition of the Brhaddevatā, the last fasciculus of which appeared in 1892. Soon after I had set to work on the text, I mentioned to Prof. Bühler, in the course of conversation, the task on which I was engaged, and I well remember his asking whether I really thought it worth while to edit the work afresh. Indeed, a cursory examination of Mitra's edition, with its array of critical notes, might easily lead one to suppose that little remained for a second editor to do, at least in regard to the constitution of the text. Such a supposition would, however, be very erroneous. Mitra's edition is in reality entirely inadequate and altogether untrustworthy as a basis for further research. Its value I estimate at less than that of a single good MS.; for it is full of defects from which such a MS. would be free. Besides a large number of misprints, it contains many impossible readings taken from incorrect MSS., omissions of lines, repetitions of lines, insertions of undoubtedly spurious lines, and lacunae. Thus, for example, in the second Adhyāya (p. 56) seven ślokas (128-134) are repeated, without word or comment, in promiscuous order, from among the preceding thirty ślokas; and in the fifth Adhyāya (p. 148) there is a lacuna of fifteen ślokas3 due to pure carelessness, for there is no sign of any such lacuna in any of the nine MSS. I have examined. Mitra's edition is, moreover, eclectic on no recog- 1 Kätyāyana's Sarvänukramani, with ex- tracts from Sadgurusisya's commentary; Anecdota Oxoniensia, Oxford, 1886. 2 Volume for 1894, pp. 11-29: 'Two Legends from the Brhaddevatā.' s Brhaddevatā v. 112-126 in my text.