We have to be able to realise that the religious Hindu texts that we read presently - as a given - and as comprising a knowledge system that has been handed down over centuries without alterations -is obviously a construct.
In the following extract, we only have to understand the nature of the collated texts; the translator documents the methods he used to actually arrive at a final version of the text.
THE
SÁNKHYA APHORISMS
OF
KAPILA,
WITH
Illustrative Extracts from the Commentaries.
TRANSLATED BY
JAMES R. BALLANTYNE, LL. D.,
LATE PRINCIPAL OF THE BENARES COLLEGE.
THIRD EDITION.
LONDON:
TRÜBNER & CO., LUDGATE HILL.
1885.
{reduced to HTML and edited by Christopher M. Weimer, January 2003}
ADVERTISEMENT.
THE present work, both in its Sanskrit portion and in its English, is an amended reprint of three volumes,1 published in India, which have already become very scarce. An abridged form of those volumes,2 which subsequently p. iv appeared, contains nothing of the Sanskrit original but the Aphorisms.While, in the following pages, all the corrections obtainable from the abridgment have been turned to account, an immense number of improved readings have been taken from another source. Three several times I carefully read Dr. Ballantyne's translation in as many different copies of it; entering suggestions, in the second copy, without reference to those which had been entered in the first, and similarly making independent suggestions in my third copy. All these1 were, on various occasions, submitted to Dr. Ballantyne; and such of them as did not meet his approval were crossed through. The residue, many more than a thousand, have been embodied p. v in the ensuing sheets, but are not indicated,1 as successively introduced. The renderings proposed in the footnotes are, for the most part, from among those which have recently occurred to me as eligible.
That Dr. Ballantyne had any thought of reissuing, in whatever form, the volumes mentioned at the beginning of this Advertisement, I was unaware, till some years after he had made over the abridgment of them to Professor Cowell, for publication.2 Otherwise, I should have placed at his disposal the materials towards improvement of his second edition, which, at the cost of no slight drudgery, are here made available.
The Sánkhya Aphorisms, in all the known commentaries on them, are exhibited word for word. The variants, now given, of the Aphorisms, afforded by accessible productions of that character, have been drawn from the works, of which only one has yet been printed, about to be specified:3
I. The Sánkhya-pravachana-bháshya, by Vijnána Bhikshu. Revelant particulars I have given elsewhere. My oldest MS. of it was transcribed in 1654.
p. vi
II. The Kápila-sánkhya-pravachana-sútra-vṛitti, by Aniruddha. Of this I have consulted, besides a MS. copied in 1818, formerly the property of Dr. Ballantyne, one which I procured to be copied, in 1855, from an old MS. without date.
III. The Laghhu-sánkhya-sútra-vṛitti, by Nagesa. Of this I have two MSS., both undated. One of them is entire; but the other is defective by the three first Books.
IV. The Sánkhya-pravachana-sútra-vṛitti-sára, by Vedánti Mahádeva. Here, again, only one of two MSS. which I possess is complete. The other, which breaks off in the midst of the comment on Book II., Aph. 15, is, in places, freely intetpolated from No. I. Neither of them has a date.
Nearly all my longer annotations, and some of the shorter, were scrutinized, while in the rough, by the learned Professor Cowell, but for whose searching criticisms, which cannot be valued too highly, they would, in several instances, have been far less accurate than they now are.
F. H.
MARLESFORD, SUFFOLK,Aug. 28, 1884.
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