रसार्णव (शैव रस-तन्त्र - प्राचीन भारतीय खनिज रसायन, धातुवाद एवं रस-चिकित्सा सटीक)

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to procure a transcript of it in the Raghunátha Temple Library,
Kashmir, and another from the Oriental MSS. Library, Madras.
As one of the earliest works of the kind, which throws a flood
of light on the chemical knowledge of the Hindus about the
12th century A.D., Rasárnava must be regarded as a valuable
national legacy. It has, besides, the merit of being the inspirer
of several works of the Iatro-chemical period, notably Rasaratna-
samuchchaya and Rasendrachintámani."
It was thought highly desirable that the full and correct text
of this great Tantra be presented to the world, and the Pub-
lication Committee of the Bibliotheca Indica have laid me under
a debt of obligation by acceding to my request to include it in
their series. A serious difficulty, however, arose in the way of
restoring the text. The MSS. mentioned above were both faulty
and defective. I was, however, fortunate in procuring three
more transcripts from the libraries of Bikanir, the Deccan
and Mysore respectively. The text of the present work is thus
based upon a careful collation of five distinct MSS. It is a
remarkable fact that these MSS., though procured from such
widely divergent sources, often concur in repeating the same
errors. There is a close agreement between the MS. of Bikanir
and that of Kashmir--possibly they are both derived from the
same exemplar. The Kashmir MS. has been found to be on the
whole complete and reliable, and it has been mainly followed.
The other MSS. are more or less fragmentary, but these disjecta
membra have been of signal service in throwing light upon doubt-