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PREFATORY NOTE

T

his volume is substantially the work of Friedhelm Hardy. When he died suddenly in 2005 on his sixtieth birthday, he left a vast amount of unpublished papers, including a large number of editions and annotated trans- lations of Sanskrit and Prakrit works. Though all the work was legible, none of it was dated, and where there was more than one version, it was usually not possible to tell which represented his final wishes.

For Go·vardhana he left well over a thousand pages. He evidently changed his mind more than once about the form in which he wanted to publish them. He wrote perhaps half a dozen introductions, none complete. Many of the verses he translated twice, but about fifty of them, scattered through the work, apparently not at all.

Three CSL editors, Richard Gombrich, Sheldon Pollock, and Somdev Vasudeva, have primarily shared the task of putting the work that Fred (as we knew him) left unfinished into presentable form. We hope—albeit with little confidence—that he would not have been too cross with our inadequate efforts.