“The Shattered Thighs” – Textual Variants and Readings

The following material is provided for those interested to see variants and readings that are not discussed or noted in the printed text of “The Shattered Thighs” in the Clay Sanskrit Library. Not having access to ms sources myself, I have relied on those editors who have. These are two only.

The editio princeps of Gaṇapati Sastri (G) records occasional manuscript errors or oddities inside parentheses within his printed text and these are usually accompanied by conjectural emendations. These are recorded verbatim below. Devadhar (D), the other editor working directly from ms sources, does not explicitly record ms variants at all. Occasionally D’s text diverges silently from that of G and occasionally he acknowledges an alternative reading, usually that of G, in a note and usually, we must surmise, where for his own text he has adopted either a different ms reading from G or where he makes a different conjectural emendation.

In the printed text, I have set out to translate G’s text, but on occasion have preferred D’s readings. In the printed text I have noted all variant readings, either way, where they involve differences of meaning. Below I have noted all remaining instances where D printed a reading that I did not prefer. In any case, all these differences are minor, affecting single words in all but one case.

In one or two instances I have recorded a variant found in the text printed by Bhatnagar, but only when it is particularly striking. Bhatnagar does not claim to have worked from ms sources, and thus redacted his text based on G’s, making occasional conjectural emendations. I have not in general recorded his divergences from G, which are anyway few.

The following notes are given in their order of occurence in the text, identified by reference to the lineation of the CSL text. Where there might be ambiguity I have provided first the exact phrase in which the variant occurs. Since I am using only two “primary” sources (G and D, which are each based on original mss) where a variant is attributed to just one of these, the reader can assume that the reading selected for my text is that found in the other source! Hopefully the data collected here will allow the assiduous reader to forgo consultation of the editions of G and D. Of the extremely assiduous reader who does consult either and finds errors in my record of them, I ask indulgence – from a certain perspective, I am but another scribe.

Below: B means “found in Bhatnagar’s text”; D means “found in D’s main text”; nD means “supplied in a footnote to D’s main text”; G means “found in Gaṇapati Sastri’s printed text”.