Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus c4.8

c4.8

Some shattered remains of the treatises entitled *Mánasára*, *Múyámata*, *Cúsyapa*, *Vayghánasa*, *Sacaládhicára*, *Viswacarmiya*, *Sanatcumára*, *Sáraswatyam*, *Páncharatram*, and others included in both the lists, are still occasionally, though rarely, to be met with in Southern India; and notwithstanding that I have been able to procure considerable portions of the four works first named, and a few detached chapters or sections of each of the rest, it was with considerable difficulty; and unfortunately, the manuscripts which I have collected, are not of a very useful description. Mutilated as they invariably are in many important parts, almost every line of them is not only disfigured by gross errors, perpetuated by a succession of ignorant transcribers, but the technical terms and memorial verses with which the whole abounds, are so little understood either by the artists or the pundits of the present day, that it requires no ordinary exertion to comprehend and explain the exact import of even a single section.