महावीरचरितम् (महाकवि भवभूति - वीररस-प्रधान रामकथा नाटक सम्पूर्ण ७ अङ्क सटीक)

Preface [xxxiv
I owe the loan of the important Old Javanese version of the Rāmāyaṇa
which he had secured from Java. Professor H. Kern of Utrecht, the
editor of that version, very kindly supplied me with certain items of
information about it. My college friend, Mr. R. D. Ranade of Poona,
and my brother-in-law, Dr. N. G. Sardesai, have kept me constantly
supplied with books and information of all kinds, which, but for them
and at such a distance from India, I should not have been able to obtain.
The suggestion to edit this play for the Harvard Oriental Series
came first from Professor James Haughton Woods of Harvard University,
whose acquaintance I made while he was studying philosophy in India,
and who, both at the inception of the work and in its progress, has given
me his help and his whole-hearted sympathy.
To the Controller of the Oxford University Press, Mr. Horace Hart, M.A.,
my thanks are due not only for the typographic excellence of the work, but
also for the promptness with which he printed it.
This work, while yet incomplete, was submitted in partial fulfilment
of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard
University.
There is yet one more name which I must mention, and which I have
purposely kept to the last. It is impossible to express adequately all that
this edition owes to the sympathy, the assistance, the almost fatherly care
that it has received from my honoured teacher, Professor C. R. Lanman,
the editor of this series. When in India, I had made some sort of a plan
for bringing out an annotated edition of the Uttara-Rāma-charita. I cannot
say what that edition would have been like; but if the present form of the
work is in any way an improvement on my earlier plan, as it undoubtedly
is, the difference is all to the credit of Professor Lanman. He assisted me
in my work most unselfishly. There was no detail too slight to escape his
attention, and on every point he would bring to bear all the mature results
of his wide experience as a scholar and an editor. His criticisms were
always judicious and sympathetic; and I have profited as much by what
he taught me expressly in the way of western scientific methods of
research as by the indirect inspiration that I derived while observing him
at work upon the Visuddhimagga. As the work was born and has grown,
so it is natural that it should also go forth into the world under Professor
Lanman’s guidance, and I congratulate myself upon having succeeded in
overcoming his reluctance to have this work dedicated to him.
S. K. BELVALKAR.
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,
April, 1914.