There are several notable things about this page, namely:

• the original paper is slightly torn at the edge
• the ink has faded in many places, especially in the first and last lines
• above line 1, in the top margin and in the right-hand margin are words the scribe originally missed out that have been added by a later reader
• yellow pigment is used as an eraser
• there is no folio number because this is a recto page and folio numbers are written on verso sides.

The red circle in the centre is a symbolic reminder of the way in which manuscripts were bound when they were on palm leaf. Here the circle is in a stepped blank space. Strings through one or more holes were used to thread together the loose folios so the reader could turn them over easily. The circle is in the place where the central hole would once have been. Usually recto sides have one such circle, while verso sides have three.

Script

The elaborate script is the Jaina Devanāgarī script, in a form which recalls calligraphy. It is used for writing many Indian languages, here for Ardhamāgadhī Prakrit.

There are a few notable features of this script, namely:

• it is an old type in the way the sounds e and o are notated when used with a consonant, known as pṛṣṭhamātrā script
• the red vertical lines within the text, which, though they are used to divide the long sentences into smaller parts, are not necessarily punctuation marks.