-04_Notes on the Texts

Notes on the Mahabharata [Second Version]. This untitled essay on the Maha-bharata occupies a later part of the notebook containing the draft of "Notes on the Mahabharata" published in the last issue. It is essentially another version of the same article. A large portion of the earlier writing was evidently meant to be incorporated in the new version, either verbatim or in a rewritten form (see footnotes on pp. 124 and 145). For a discussion of the date of the article, see Notes on the Texts in the last issue. Most of the version published in the present issue appeared under the editorial title "The Problem of the Mahabharata" in Vyasa and Valmiki (1956) and later in The Harmony of Virtue (pp. 179-96). The end of the article was first published in the Supplement to the SABCL (pp. 79-82). The present text has been carefully checked against the manuscript. A table of emendations appears on the next page.

Under the heading "Mahabharata" Sri Aurobindo began to write another study of the Mahabharata problem in a different notebook. Only four pages have survived. The exact chronological relationship with the above "Notes on the Mahabharata" is uncertain, but all of these writings on the Mahabharata are found in notebooks used in Baroda after 1900 and appear to belong to approximately the same period.

The title "Notes on the Mahabharata" was used again by Sri Aurobindo for detailed but not altogether systematic notes on the first canto of the Udyoga Parva and one verse of the second canto. The notes are found, not in sequential order, in two separate notebooks. They are presented here in a slightly different arrangement from the one found in Vyasa and Valmiki and The Harmony of Virtue (pp. 200-206). Sri Aurobindo used an edition of the Mahabharata in which the line beginning etaih parapresyaniyogayuktair was included in verse 12, to which it is connected in sense, rather than forming the first part of verse 13 as in some editions. This affects the numbering of the subsequent verses. The version of Udyoga Parva 2.11 on which he has commented differs from most editions.

Record of Yoga: 10-30 June 1914. The heading "Record of Yoga. / June. 1914 -" is written on an otherwise blank page (facing the first page used for entries) of a notebook used for the Record of 10 June to 29 September 1914.

Words, letters and punctuation marks printed in square brackets in the text and not listed in this table or explained in a footnote are simple editorial interpolations, where something apparently omitted by the author (often in altering or expanding a sentence) has been supplied by the editors. Other minor departures of the printed text from the manuscript are listed below, including the removal of extraneous words and the restoration of words cancelled without substitution (CWOS). In several places in Notes on the Mahabharata, brackets and underlining are found in the manuscript which do not appear to serve the normal functions of parenthetical statement, emphasis, etc., but must have been connected with the process of revision. These marks have been ignored in the text, but are listed below.

Page	Line	Text reading	Manuscript reading
123	30	[my]	CWOS
124	4	huge	huge of
124	23	rifacimento	rifaccimento
125	29	Only a serious	(Only a serious
125	32	structure.	structure.)
126	7	which are	which which are
127	6	[more]	CWOS
127	12	raison d'etre	raison-d-etre
127	17	[or something]	CWOS
128	1	But it is	underlined
128	3	power	underlined
128	6-7	Indian scholars have	underlined
128	7	disinterestedness	disinteredness
128	31	can play	(can play
128	35	hair.	hair.)
129	31	enforce	inforce
131	34	[and]	CWOS
131	35	it would	but it would
132	4	value; one	value; One
132	24	unanalysable	unalysable
136	30	[time]	CWOS
138	11	Yudisthira[.]	Yudisthira;
139	22	them[?]	them.
140	36	a holy work	underlined
145	26	[is]	are
147	11	applied	been applied
147	17	identical[?]	identical.