INTRODUCTION 3 folio 357. Jain Devanagari script.Colophon of A:॥छ।। संवत् १५४१ वर्षे वैशाष सुदि १५ सोमवासरे अनुराधानक्षत्रे घटिका ६० मुरिताण-बहलोल-राज्ये. (marginally: ग्रं.० संख्या १२०२५'1) Thus the copying date of A. is 1541 V.S. i.e. 1484-45 A.D. Text-Constitution. At the time I started preparing a critical edition of the Vidyadhara-Kānda of PC., I could secure only two Mss., viz, P. and S. The information relating to the Jaipur Ms. was of an indefinite character. Of the two Mss. the Poona Ms. was carlier, more carefully copied and possessing thu advantages of corrections and marginal gloss. Compared with it. che Ms. from Sāmgāner indicated some carelessness on the part of its scribe, as occasionally some letters or lines of the text which, on other grounds could be shown to be genuine, were missing in it. Corsidered from the point of view of orthography also, P. in many points appeared to preserve faithfully the original spelling, while S. exhibited a strong tendency to modernize it. In the light of this comparison. I accepted P. as the basis and edited the first twenty Sandhis by collating P. and S. In the meanwhile, the information regarding the Jaipur Ms. became definite, and, with some effort, I succeeded in securing it. On examining that Ms. it was found that though its copying date was twenty years later than that of P., in many places it preserved the text of ihe original more faithfully than did any other Ms. and thus the conclusion became incvitable that A. was based on on wrigiral which was older than the original of either P. or S. The cor sequence of this finding also was quite apparent. I should constitute the text taking A., and not P., as the basis. Accordingly I reconstituted the text of the first twenty Sandhis. This fact would explain why the variant readings in the text portion in the pre est edition are recorded in the order P., S., A., though A. is accepicri as the basis. A study of the variants inakes it clear that, whenever the difference of reading is real (and not merely orthographical), P. and S. mostly agree against A., that in a very few cases there is agreciment bet vreen S. and A., and that the variants recorded by the marginal gloss in P. agrce for the most part with the readings of A. As to the orthography, the agreement obtains between A. and P., they being earlier than S. The scribe of A. appears to have been careless in the latter portion of the text edited here, as in several places A. drops one or more letters or lines. The superiority of A. over P. and S. can be established on the following grounds : 1. In many a case A. preserves e (short), o (short). Anunāsika and other such spelling features compara- tively free from modernizing influence. (1) Kaslival, 1950, 282 describes this Ms. as follows: पउमचरिय-रचयिता स्वयंभु, त्रिभुवन-स्वयंभु । भापा अपभ्रंश पत्र-संत्र्या ३७५. माइज ११४४॥ इञ्च । प्रत्येक पृष्ठ पर १३ पंक्तियां तथा प्रति पंकिा ३८-४२ अक्षर। लिपि मंवत् १५४१ बैशाख मुदी १५ । Then follows the colophon t reproduc- ed above.
