बौधायन श्रौतसूत्रम् (कृष्ण यजुर्वेद तैत्तिरीय शाखा - सम्पूर्ण प्रश्न एवं श्रौत-याग कल्प सटीक)

Digitized by Madhuban Trust

PREFACE.

In preparing the text of this second volume of the Baudhāyana- śrautasūtra the editor has had to cope with many more difficul- ties than he had to do when preparing the text of the first volume. Indeed, a few months ago I was almost despairing of obtaining sufficient material for this volume. The fact is, that the tradition of these parts of the sūtra, describing for the greater part the rituals, partly obsolete, partly less observed than the darśapūrṇamāsa, agnyādheya and agniṣṭoma, is, throughout India, a very bad one. The MSS. of Bombay, Benares, Gwalior, Dhar and Ujjain are all together more or less corrupt and seem partly to derive from one archetype, in which not only were lost the right arrangement of the materials and the numbering of the praśnas, adhyāyas and khaṇḍikās, but the text of which was also hopelessly corrupt in many a passage. And no com- plete copy of Bhavasvāmins Vivaraṇa, which would have been of paramount use, seems to be extant. Although Professor Hultzsch has taken all possible pains to hunt up more MSS. from Southern India and has set to work two pandits to unearth more material, he has, alas, not succeeded. Professor Bhandar- kar of Elphinstone College also was kind enough to provide me with more material, but it was of the same kind: on the whole corrupt from beginning to end. Nearly despairing, I wrote to Dr. Thomas, Librarian-in-Chief to the India Office, requesting him to look over, for my sake, once more the Mackenzie Collection of Sanskrit MSS. preserved at the India Office. And he was so fortunate as to light upon one MS. (cp. infra the enumeration of the MSS.) containing a wholly independent tradition of the text I stood in need of so much. This MS., too, is far from faultless, but it throws light on many a difficult passage, and, what is the main point, the arrangement of the praśnas seems to be correct in this MS. Before I knew this Mackenzie MS., I had my doubts about which part of the sūtra constituted the so-called uttarā tatiḥ. In the MS. from Benares, where the praśnas are all numbered by a secunda manus (cp. my paper "Ueber das rituelle Sūtra des Baudhāyana," p. 12), the praśna coming after the dvādaśāha and gavām ayana, num- bered here as the 17th, contains the atirātra, the sautrāmaṇī and the ekādaśinī. In the copy of Bhavasvāmins Vivaraṇa, known to me from the beginning up to the aupānuvākya (consequently giving the first fourteen praśnas complete), is found neither the aśvamedha nor the dvādaśāha and gavām ayana, but immedi- ately after the aupānuvākya comes the ekādaśinī. Now, as the MS. of Bhavasvāmin ends with the words: iti bhavasvāmikṛte

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