The first part of this chapter presents a description of the methodology that was adopted in the various stages of our research. It is—inevitably—a somewhat schematic account, which makes the whole process sound at the same time tidier and smoother than it actually was. But I expect that the lack of pathos in the following lines will be more than compensated for by the gain in clarity.

This is followed by a discussion of the variant readings that have been accepted into the received text, where our reasons for choosing a particular reading are explained.

Methodology

In the autumn of 2004, while the collection of mss was still ongoing, a template file of the psū section was prepared on the basis of one of the existing standard editions and was distributed to the different teams of collators in Pune, Pondicherry and Paris along with paragraph divisions and with a list of conventions that every collator had to adopt when recording variant readings and other features of the witness (lacunae, omissions, corrections, marginal notes, etc.) in order to ensure uniformity of notation. Thus, every time a new ms was collated, its peculiarities were recorded by modifying a copy of the template file (named after the ms siglum) accordingly, providing thereby a kind of diplomatic edition of every individual manuscript. By the time the collation process was completed, the recurrence of certain variant readings, as well as the omission of words or phrases or even whole passages, had made us aware of the problematic places in our text and alerted us to the similarities between some of our witnesses.