help and guide, the editor of the Series hopes to complete the version and to publish it as soon as is feasible. The text and translation will perhaps take three or four volumes.
The Pancha-tantra, according to the recension of the Jaina monk Pūrṇa-bhadra (about 1200 A.D.), critically edited in the original Sanskrit by Dr. Johannes Hertel, of the Royal Gymnasium of Doebeln in Saxony, and Dr. Richard Schmidt, of the University of Halle.
The basis of Doctor Schmidt's excellent version of the Pancha-tantra was a text prepared by him from several European manuscripts. In the meantime, Doctor Hertel has procured a very large amount of manuscript material from India, chiefly from Poona, has subjected the same to searching critical study, and is embodying his results, so far as they concern the actual readings, in a thorough revision of the printer's copy of the text. The other results of his labors have been published in several periodicals, especially the Berichte der Kön. Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften for April, 1902, and in recent volumes of the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft (lvi., lvii., lviii., lix.). The Çāradā-MS., numbered viii. 145 in the Catalogue of the Deccan College MSS. and containing the Tantra-ākhyāyika or Kashmirian recension of the Pancha-tantra, has proved to be of such great importance for the history of this branch of Sanskrit literature that Doctor Hertel has published it (Abhandlungen of the Saxon Society, vol. xxii., 1904), not as a definitive text-edition, but as part of a literary-historical investigation and as one of the essential preliminaries for the edition of Pūrṇa-bhadra's recension to be issued in the Harvard Series. It appears that the last-named recension is a fusion of the Tantra-ākhyāyika and the so-called Textus Simplicior of the Pancha-tantra.
The Pancha-tantra, translated into English from the original Sanskrit of the recension of Pūrṇa-bhadra, by Paul Elmer More, sometime Assistant in Sanskrit in Harvard University, now of the Editorial Staff of the New York Evening Post.
This version, prepared several years ago from Doctor Schmidt's manuscript copy by Mr. More, has yet to be so revised as to bring it into conformity with the meantime thoroughly revised text of Pūrṇa-bhadra's recension. Apart from the intrinsic interest and merit of the stories of which the Pancha-tantra consists, this translation makes an especial appeal to students of Indian antiquities, of folk-lore, and of the history of popular tales.
History of the Beast-fable of India, with especial reference to the Pancha-tantra and to the related literature of Southwestern Asia and of Medieval Europe, by Dr. Johannes Hertel of the Royal Gymnasium of Doebeln in Saxony.
Although this volume is primarily designed to be an introduction to Pūrṇa-bhadra's Pancha-tantra, its scope is nevertheless such that it may with propriety be entitled a History of the Beast-fable of India. The definitive arrangement of the material is not yet settled, but the general plan may be given under six headings.
I. Brief outline of the incidents of each story, together with a reference for each story to its precise place in the original Sanskrit text, the method of citation to be such that the same reference will apply with equal facility to either the text or the translation or the apparatus criticus or the commentary.
II. Tabular conspectus of strophes and stories contained in forms of the Pancha-tantra anterior to Pūrṇa-bhadra.
III. Apparatus criticus. 1. Account of the MSS. collated. 2. A piece of the text printed in several parallel forms side by side (Tantra-ākhyāyika, Simplicior, Ornatior) as a specimen, to illustrate the relative value of the several MSS. and Pūrṇa-bhadra's way of constructing his recension. 3. Readings of the MSS. Bh, bh, A, P, p, etc.
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