विष्णु स्मृति (वैष्णव धर्मशास्त्र - नन्दपण्डित कृत वैजयन्ती टीका सहित सटीक)

PREFACE.
The five MSS., which have been used for the present edition
of the Vishṇu-smṛiti and of selected portions of its old Commen-
tary, may be divided into three classes.

1. V¹ = India Office MS. 915 ; V² India Office MSS. 1544,
   1545 ; and V³ = India Office MSS. 1246-48. Each of these three
   Devanāgarī MSS. contains the text of the Vishṇu-smṛiti together
   with the Commentary of Nandapaṇḍita (N.), called Vaijayantī.
   They are from Colebrooke's collection and appear to have been
   written in North-India about the end of the last or beginning of
   the present century. The very numerous clerical errors, omis-
   sions and other defects exhibited by them are mostly common to
   all the three ; and as it is tolerably clear that they cannot have
   been copied from one another, they must at least have been copied,
   either directly or very nearly so, from one and the same
   original. Of this rather faulty codex archetypus, V¹, a neatly
   written MS. consisting of 596 pages (299 leaves) à 15 lines à
   53-56 aksharas, apparently the copy used by Colebrooke himself,
   would seem to be, on the whole, the best representative ; but in
   several places, in the Commentary particularly, the original read-
   ings have been preserved in V² and V³.*

• The statement towards the end of V¹-³, वर्षं विक्रमभास्करस्य (v. l.
  °भाखरस्य) १६७९ .. काश्यां केशवनायकस्य नृपतेराज्ञामवाप्य स्मृतेर्विष्णोर्व्याकृतिसाच-
  कार विमलां श्रीनन्दशर्मा सुधीः, which has enabled me to fix the date of
  the composition of the Vaijayantī at 1622 A. D. (see the Introduc-
  tion to my translation, vol. VII of the Sacred Books of the East, page
  xxxiii), is fully confirmed by the biographical notices concerning
  Nandapaṇḍita and his family in the Introduction to Mandlik's Vyava-
  háramayúkha and Yájñawalkya (Bombay 1880).