Dear colleagues,

I am trying to find a realistic path toward finalizing my digital edition of Vararuci’s Sārasamuccaya, an anthology of stanzas on Dharma (mainly from the Mahābhārata) transmitted on Bali, with Old Javanese paraphrase. The text was edited by Raghu Vira (1962).

Raghu Vira. 1962. Sāra-Samuccaya (a Classical Indonesian Compendium of High Ideals). Śata-Piṭaka Series (Dvīpāntara-Piṭaka), 24 (7). New Delhi: International Academy of Indian Culture.

This edition is in two scripts, Balinese and Devanagari, which need to be compared systematically because there are rather frequently variants vetween the two (suggestive of error in one of the two, my job being to determine which reading is more likely to have been found in the manuscripts). The edition has a critical apparatus that gives some variant readings for the Sanskrit stanzas and tries to match them with verses from the MBh critical edition as far as it had been published by the early 1960s. One of the most time consuming parts of my task as TEI editor is to double check the MBh parallels and encode the results of my findings.

My XML code is here:
<https://github.com/erc-dharma/tfd-nusantara-philology/blob/master/editions/DHARMA_CritEdSarasamuccayaVararuci.xml>

A provisional display is here:
<https://erc-dharma.github.io/tfd-nusantara-philology/output/critical-edition/html/DHARMA_CritEdSarasamuccayaVararuci.html>

I don’t have at my disposal a TEI version corresponding to the GRETIL file mbh1-18u.htm — can one of you oblige? As long as I don’t have one, it means that (for my XML file to validate) I need to manually apply <lg> and <l> tags and assign @n values to all <l> tags for any MBh parallel to be cited under a given Sārasamuccaya stanza. This is a lot of work and a distraction from other parts of my main task, which is to check the accuracy of the romanized Sanskrit and Old Javanese, keyed from Raghu Vira’s edition, and watching out for any differences between the Balinese and the Devanagari readings. 

In this connection, I am wondering how useful it actually is, for instance, to quote

MBh01,056.027 MBh18,005.052
yathā samudro bhagavān yathā ca himavān giriḥ khyātāv ubhau ratnanidhī tathā bhāratam ucyate

below Sārasamuccaya stanza 2

yathā samudro’timahān yathā ca himavān giriḥ| ubhau ratnanidhī khyātau tathā bhāratam ucyate||

Disregarding for now the possible existence of significant variant readings both within the Mbh transmission and within that of the Sārasamuccaya (I haven’t yet checked), and how such data might be incorporated into my edition, the utility of citing the two parallel stanzas from the MBh critical edition is presumably twofold:

(1) to communicate to the reader of my edition that the given stanza has parallels in the critical edition of the MBh and where those parallels can be found
(2) to underline the difference of reading in pāda c

To achieve purpose (1), I don’t need to quote the whole parallel. To achieve purpose (2), merely quoting the parallel is not very efficient. It would presumably be better to create an <app> inside the edition of the Sārasamuccaya and report the MBh reading as <rdg> — I am wondering if I should do all of the above or if <note corresp="MBh01,056.027 MBh18,005.052"> without actually citing the text of the MBh crit. ed. would be enough if I encode the variation of reading <app> inside the edition of the Sārasamuccaya stanza.

I would be grateful for suggestions from experienced TEI editors on how to achieve a useful TEI edition while avoiding needless work that stands in the way of my finishing the job.

Best wishes,

Arlo Griffiths