Lightbulb Moment

When I was editing the ninth chapter of the Kriyākālaguṇottara for my MA thesis, I spent several hours trying to figure out pāda 25d, which I ended up marking as corrupt. The palmleaf manuscript, the oldest of the group, was indeed corrupt and hypometrical: kimedaṃ vikaryate. I speculated about taking edaṃ as some kind of Middle Indic pronoun, on the effect of non-standard sandhis—anything that would help me draw some sense out of it. In retrospect, the corruption of the palmleaf manuscript lead me astray in transcribing the other manuscripts, and the true reading was further obscured by several things: lack of word division in the manuscripts, lack of discrimination between va and ba akṣaras, use of anusvāra for any nasal, and the inconsistent differentiation of pa and ya. In error, I transcribed the reading of the “Beta” manuscripts thus: kimetadaṃ vikāpate. I reviewed the passage with my advisors–some of the world’s leading Sanskritists–to no avail, they too were misled because of my interpretation, my “transcription.” Transcription is usually thought to be a fairly cut and dry affair. You put into roman or typed Devanāgarī exactly what is written in the manuscript, and faithfully record that in your critical apparatus and even if you choose the wrong reading then at least future scholars can disagree and accept a variant reading from the critical apparatus. In fact, it is always an interpretation. How do you transcribe a letter that looks like a hybrid pa/ya? I am not aware of any critical edition that list variants without any spaces between words, but I am seriously considering adopting this convention for my own work. The real reading for the pāda, in the Beta manuscripts now seems so obvious: “kimetadaṃvikāpate” or formally “kim etad ambikāpate.”