English
At the instance of the Editor of this Series, Professors Brugmann, Leskien, Sievers, and Windisch, members of the Kdniglich Sdclmsche GesellscJiaft der Wissemchaften, addressed a memorial to the Kdniglich Sachdsclm Ministerium des Kultus und dffentlicken Unterrickts, with the request that the Editor of this text might be relieved of a part of his official duties until the close of these labours on the Panchatantra. The Royal Ministry assented to this request in the most generous and high-minded way, thus allowing me somewhat more of the leisure necessary for bringing these protracted and extensive investigations to an end. In this con¬ nexion my thanks are due to Geheimrat Professor Dr. Seeliger to his Excellency Geh. Rat Dr. Waentig, to his Excellency the late Minister of State, Dr. v. Schlieben, and to his Excellency the Minister of State Dr. Beck. I here record my grateful sense of this kindness. Last not least—as we Germans are wont to say—my heai-tfelt thanks are due to the honoured Editor of this Series, Professor Lanman. He has given ungrudgingly of his precious time to my undertaking; and, indeed no one who has not worked with him will guess how considerable a share this editor has in the labour of preparing the volumes of the series. To him beginners in Sanskrit, for whom this edition is in part intended owe the facihtation of theii- first progress by the division of the words which has been mtroduced into the text, and by the indication of the metres on the right-hand margm; while advanced scholars no less than beginners vriU By the Editor of this Text xvii value his wording and ai-rangemenfc of the head-lines, and his devices for distinguishing the frame-stories from emboxed stories, and the emboxments of the first degree from those of the second degree, and these from those of the third degree or even of the fourth. During the week before the Long Vacation of 1906 I had the pleasure of working with Mr. Lanman in my own home. Together we there elaborated very carefully the general plan of the volumes which are to contain the ciitical introduction and the variants and the history. We have exchanged, before and since, very many painstaking letters concerning particulars which the general reader is not likely even to notice, but which I trust will prove to be of real advantage for the final result. 1 must, moreover, thank him for I'evising my English in respect of its style, for reading a proof of pages 1 to 80 of the text, and for making it possible for me to embody the reproductions of parts of certain MSS. in this volume, and, in a forthcoming one, text-specimens of various recensions printed in poly- chromy. Without these rather expensive additions I should not have been able to show so clearly (1) the mutual relations of the best MSS. of Purnabhadra’s recension, and (2) the relations subsisting between the very various recensions of the collection as a whole. But I suspect that no public word which I can utter will touch Mr. Lanman more deeply than this, that he is a faithful executor of the intentions of his pupil and friend, the late Henry Clarke Warren, to whose enlightened and far-sighted generosity the science of Indology owes the possibility of publishing at a nominal price works which private commercial enterprise could rarely if ever undertake. Hopes and plans for future work.— Two years ago I had abandoned tho hope of carrying my studies in the history of this, one of the most cele¬ brated works of Indian literature, to a natural and satisfactory termination. But now, since the Kdniglick SdchsiscJies Ministeriv^m des Kultus und offentlichen Unterrichts has granted me the leisure necessary for this purpose, I hope to publish the critical edition of the Tantrakhyayika, and its German translation, in the course of 1909; and to conclude these studies by bringing out, after the critical introduction and variants mentioned above, the promised history of the Panchatantra, the printer’s copy for which will, I trust, be ready by the beginning of 1910. Johannes BteBXEL. Dobdn, c NOTES ON THE EXTERNALS OF INDIAN BOOKS BY THE EDITOR OF THIS SERIES The occasion of these notes.— It is not unlikely that the introduction of word-division into this text of Purnabhadra may call forth strong expressions of disapproval from some of my colleagues. To meet such criticism was the primary object of these remarks. In preparing them, however, it appeared to me that a careful and well-illustrated statement of some of the defects of the Indian methods of handing down their texts, and of some of the innovations, ancient and modern, in these methods, would be in itself worth while, even if drawn out at greater length than the primary purpose of this discussion^ might warrant. Granting provisionally, for the sake of the argument, that word-division is un-Indian, it should follow that, if we condemn word-division on this score, we ought also to condemn for a like reason various other departures from ancient Indian usage with respect to the externals of a book, departures, of which, however, not even the most conservative scholar seems likely to complain. Significance of Hindu conservatism,— The fear of innovation as something un-Indian is not well warranted by fact. It is true that, say for the first eighteen centuries of our era, changes in the methods of making a book have, like everything else in India, been very slow. The Hindu has held to the old, not from a conscious feeling that it would be un-Indian to change, but rather from simple inertia or from failure to find out something better, or because the old suited his habits. By habits I mean habits of body, of education, of mind, and of temper. The bodily habit of squatting instead of sitting at a table makes bound books incon¬ venient ; it is easier to hold a single leaf in thumb and finger than a heavy volume. The habit of learning a dictionary by heart makes alphabetic arrangement and all our Western contrivances for quick consultation * Facts pertinent hereto are given, with ample references, by G. Buhler, Indische Palacographie, pp. 88-95. See also R. L. Mitra’s Report in Papers relating to the collection and preservation of the records of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, ed. by A. E. Gough, Calcutta, 1878, pp. 14-25. The Report sheds a flood of light on matters which over-zealous admirer’s of things Indian as such, would do well to know. XX Notes on the Externals of Indian BooTcs superfluous. The wonders of modern science have begotten in us a curiosity of mind so omnivorous that few of us, if any, are willing to devote long years exclusively to one subject, as were the old-time Hindus. And their general temper of mind inhibited them from being in a hurry or being vexed with things that we deem intolerably inconvenient. With this in mind, let us consider the history of some of these externals of a book. What are the externals of a hookP—They include everything but the composition of its text, namely (1) the material on which the character’s are made; (2) the shape of the material; (3) the manner of keeping the leaves together; (4) the method of making the characters, whether by hand, or by lithography, or by printing; (5) the styles and sizes of the characters; (6) the distinction of verse from prose; (7) marginal words and numbers to facilitate the finding of any desired part; (8) punctuation; (9) the spacing or division of the words. 1. Material.—The Hindus have used for their writings (besides tablets of wood and copper and stone) the material that was most convenient: birch-bark in Kashmir, where birches grow; palm leaves in the south, where palm trees grow. Palm leaves were displaced in great part by the introduction of admirably good paper.^ And good paper is now in some quarters giving way to paper that is good-for-nothing. In this respect, as in others, the Hindus are (perhaps with many a sigh) participants of ‘ modern progress *. 2. Shape of the material.—Palm-leaf MSS. were long and narrow, not for any mysterious reason, but because the nature and grain of the leaf necessitated that shape. The lines run lengthwise. For similar reasons, the birch-bark leaves were of a shape corresponding to our quartos, and the lines run across the page. When paper was substituted for palm leaves, the inconvenient form was no longer necessary, but was persistently retained, and for the same reason as the two buttons on the back of a coat for evening-dress, which buttons held up the sword-belt of a former generation. Even the birch-bark leaves of the old Bower MS. are cut to the shape of a palm-leaf MS. The line of an American newspaper is about 6 cm. long; that of the oblong Bombay edition of the Maha^Bhorata of 1878 is about 33 cm. long. The eyes jump from the end of one newspaper line to the beginning of the next without conscious effort. It requires a distinct effort of the eye- muscles to direct the axes to the beginning of a new line when the jump is one of 33 cm. We need not ask an oculist why such long lines are tiresome. In the first printed Sanskrit texts (of Jones and Carey : see ' Mitra’s Report, p. 15. By the Editor of this Senes xxi below) the lines run across the page as in a European book, and this may now be said to be the prevailing fashion among the Hindus. Here again they are departing from what (in Southern India at least) was ancient usage. They are wise in so doing, and we may be sure that they do not take the trouble to console themselves with the fact that the birch-bark shape is a very old one. 3, Way of keeping the leaves together.—For palm leaves this was usually done by putting the MS. between two stiff covers, making holes in covers and leaves, and putting stiings through them, which strings were then wound around the whole bxmdie.