कौषीतकि ब्राह्मण (शाङ्खायन ब्राह्मण - उदय प्रणीत व्याख्या सहित सटीक)

PREFACE
In 1956 at the Adyar Library, Madras, I had the opportunity to go through
the brittle leaves of the palm-leaf manuscript containing Udaya's exhaustive
commentary on the Kauṣītakibrāhmaṇa. (See No. 59 on p. 24 of The Descriptive
Catalogue of the Adyar Library, Vol. 1, Vedic, 1942.) Its lucidity and particularly
the method of giving detailed information about the procedure of rituals attracted
my attention, and I had a mind to bring out an edition of this work.
In 1965, when I got an invitation to West Germany as a visiting Professor at
the Institut für Indologie, Albertus-Magnus-Universität, Köln, through the good
offices of Prof. K. L. JANERT, I decided to make use of the leisure I might have
for one year to edit Udaya's commentary.
For this purpose I procured a copy of the same in a well-preserved palm-leaf
manuscript in Malayāḷam characters from VARIKKĀŚŚERY Mana, a family of
traditional scholars, from a place near Ottapalam in Kerala, and copied down
most of the work in Devanāgarī script.
The Institut für Indologie procured for me a microfilm as well as a photo-copy
of the Adyar manuscript referred to above. But when the question of editing the
commentary was seriously taken up, I found that the work was based on a text
of the Kauṣītakibrāhmaṇa (KB) which was in several points different from that
which was edited by B. LINDNER in 1887 (L) and also from that printed in Poona
in 1911 (P) under the title Ṛgvedāntargataṁ Śāṅkhāyanabrāhmaṇam (Ānan-
dāśrama Sanskrit Series, No. 65).
On examination I also found that the readings of the recension of the KB on
which Udaya's commentary was based were decidedly superior to those in the
two printed editions (L and P), and I began to search for manuscripts of the KB
from Kerala and succeeded in that effort.
Even before that, the Institut für Indologie, Albertus-Magnus-Universität,
had kindly procured for me a microfilm as well as a photo-copy of the manuscript
of the text of the KB in Malayāḷam characters (IO) from the India Office Library,
London, which had been consulted by LINDNER. Going through the text I could
realize the significance of A. B. KEITH's statement that LINDNER could have
made use of this Malayāḷam manuscript much more effectively. For now it be-
came very clear to me that without editing the text of the KB based on this
recension from Kerala there was no point in publishing Udaya's commentary.
Through my teacher Mr. K. P. NĀRĀYAṆA PISHAROTI, I could get transcripts
of two manuscripts, one of the complete text of the KB (BM¹) and the other of
the commentary for ten chapters (viz., chapters 20–30), both belonging to the
Brahmasvam Maṭham of Trichur. With this material I began to work on the
text of the KB and could finish copying down the whole text before I left Köln
for India in January, 1966.