254 Hara Prasad Shastri— Old Nepalese Manuscripts. [No. 3, 1893. 
The twelfth MS. is labelled as unknown. The first page is miss- 
ing and the end is far away. On examination it is found that pages from 
2 to 210 exist, with the exception of the 129th page. The handwriting 
is beautiful, much older than the rest of the collection. On examination 
it proved to be a portion of the Vrihat-katha, about a-tenth of the whole 
work. It is not Somadeva’s Eathd-Saritsdgara, nor Kshemendra’s Vrihat- 
Kathdmanjari because in both these works the chapters are divided into 
lamb akas and tarahgas, whereas in the present MS. it is divided into 
adhydyas and sargas. The work contains one complete adhyaya and 
a portion of the second. It has altogether 26 sargas , the colophons of 
many of which do not give any information at all. But in some of 
them appear these significant words Vrihatlcathdyam-tloka-samgrahe. 
In the colophons appear the names of the sargas; they often contain 
proper names, none of which 1 have been able to identify either in 
Kshemendra’s or in Somadeva’s work. So this fragment appears to be 
a third Sanskrit redaction or version of the original Paisachi. Vrihat- 
katha by Gunadhya, and the MS. which has been labelled 1 unknown ’ 
by my Nepalese vendor, turns out to be the most important work of the 
whole collection. 
The letter in this MS. has a more archaic form than in most 
of the Nepalese MSS., which leads me to think that this MS. is of higher 
antiquity than the rest. The has the turn of the Guptalipi. I may 
therefore be allowed to venture to say that I have laid my hands on a 
work copied even before Kshemendr’a and Somadeva wrote their works 
on the Vriliat-Katlia. Biililer, in his paper in Vol. I, Ind. Ant., says that 
Kshemendra had the Paisachi version of Gunadhya before him. Might 
not he have consulted a big Sanskrit version, too, from which to abridge ? 
I have read the first sarga in my MS. It treats of king Gopala renounc- 
ing the world, because people calumniated him as a parricide, and making 
over his kingdom to Palaka, his brother, in spite of the remonstrances 
of the Brahmans. This is a very large work, the first adhyaya alone 
containing more than 4,200 slolcas. While Kshemendra’s whole work, 
according to Biililer, consists of a little more than 7,000 slolcas. I give 
here the colophons of this work. 
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