दानसागरः- Danasagarah of Ballala Sena

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

It is almost a decade ago when in August, 1947. Dr. Suniti Kumar Chatterji, M.A., D. Litt., former President of the Asiatic Society, suggested to me the idea of preparing a critical edition of the Danasagara of Balläla Sena. It was also at his instance that the Council of the Society entrusted me in the next month with the preparation of the edition and lent me the MS. of the work in their collections. I then began my work on the basis of that solitary Society MS. but I soon found out that it would be extremely risky to do so with the help of that single MS., which was not only highly corrupt but also full of omissions. So I requisitioned through the Council of the Society the India Office MS. of the same work and collated it for my edition. During the interval of almost a year between the completion of my press copy and the beginning of printing I identified the copious quotations in the Danasagara from numerous original sources, so far as the latter were accessible in printed form. The text, covering 722 pages, has since been published in three fascicles between 1953 and 1955 as work no. 274 of the Bibliotheca Indica and the concluding fascicle, embodying the contents, bibliography, abbreviations, introduction, errata and index, is now presented to the public. This work is almost the earliest and most comprehensive digest on Dana, as the Danakanda of the Krtya- kalpataru, its only predecessor by several decades, is decidedly shorter than and has not possibly been utilised by the present work. It is, moreover, one of the six digests, pronounced authorita- tive by MM. Dr. P.V. Kane in his History of Dharmasastra vol. II (chapter on Dana) but never utilised by him in that chapter, as it then existed in MSS. only. So a complete and critical edition of this work was a desideratum, which has been fulfilled, I think, to a large extent by its preparation in collation of two MSS. of differ- ent descent, as their respective omissions and misreadings clearly indicate and also by the exhaustive identification of the quotations, helping the correction and completion of the text in many places.