महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

Preface [xxxiv I owe the loan of the important Old Javanese version of the Rāmāyaṇa which he had secured from Java. Professor H. Kern of Utrecht, the editor of that version, very kindly supplied me with certain items of information about it. My college friend, Mr. R. D. Ranade of Poona, and my brother-in-law, Dr. N. G. Sardesai, have kept me constantly supplied with books and information of all kinds, which, but for them and at such a distance from India, I should not have been able to obtain. The suggestion to edit this play for the Harvard Oriental Series came first from Professor James Haughton Woods of Harvard University, whose acquaintance I made while he was studying philosophy in India, and who, both at the inception of the work and in its progress, has given me his help and his whole-hearted sympathy. To the Controller of the Oxford University Press, Mr. Horace Hart, M.A., my thanks are due not only for the typographic excellence of the work, but also for the promptness with which he printed it. This work, while yet incomplete, was submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University. There is yet one more name which I must mention, and which I have purposely kept to the last. It is impossible to express adequately all that this edition owes to the sympathy, the assistance, the almost fatherly care that it has received from my honoured teacher, Professor C. R. Lanman, the editor of this series. When in India, I had made some sort of a plan for bringing out an annotated edition of the Uttara-Rāma-charita. I cannot say what that edition would have been like; but if the present form of the work is in any way an improvement on my earlier plan, as it undoubtedly is, the difference is all to the credit of Professor Lanman. He assisted me in my work most unselfishly. There was no detail too slight to escape his attention, and on every point he would bring to bear all the mature results of his wide experience as a scholar and an editor. His criticisms were always judicious and sympathetic; and I have profited as much by what he taught me expressly in the way of western scientific methods of research as by the indirect inspiration that I derived while observing him at work upon the Visuddhimagga. As the work was born and has grown, so it is natural that it should also go forth into the world under Professor Lanman’s guidance, and I congratulate myself upon having succeeded in overcoming his reluctance to have this work dedicated to him. S. K. BELVALKAR. HARVARD UNIVERSITY, April, 1914.