2 956 900 vessels/k.sutila/ku.duba

[Harunaga Isaacson]

Quoting DEVI IFP <deviprasad at IFPINDIA.ORG>:

> Respected Sir,
> I think instead of "kutilaa" , it is wrongly written as "k.sutila".

Certainly not impossible, but (since the word you have in mind is ku.tila with
a retroflex .t) this  assumes corruption of not just one but two syllables (ku -
-> k.su and ti > .ti). Aside from my earlier suggestion to interpret the
apparently unanimously transmitted text, another possibility, involving
emendation of just one ak.sara instead of two, would be ni.hsaare (taking
perhaps as absolute locative) tu tilaakaaro (with a not very pleasing tu, which
may however be possible in this text); and yet other conjectures are
conceivable. The text-critic is often satisfied with thinking of a single
conjecture, but one should not rest there but consider others as well, for
one's first idea is not necessarily the best and is almost certainly not the
only possible one. I am still slightly skeptical, however, of that locative.
And though emendation is certainly often necessary, and may prove in the end
necessary here, it is well to first consider if one can interpret the
transmitted text in a satisfactory way (sthitasya gati"s cintaniiyaa).

In any case I think we can probably agree that there is no very good reason to
assume a lexeme k.sutila, if that is indeed, as I suspect, hitherto unattested.

Harunaga Isaacson

--
Harunaga Isaacson
South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
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