On the Textual History of the Suśrutasaṃhitā (1): A Study of Three Nepalese Manuscripts

This article presents a detailed introduction to the study of three Nepalese manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, one of which happens to be the oldest verifiably dated Sanskrit manuscript preserved in the region. The article consists of three larger sections. The first part provides a thorough critical survey of research that has been done on this material to date. The second section provides a detailed description of the manuscripts, translates and discusses their colophons and deals extensively with various problems involved in their dating. The final section of the article looks at characteristic features of the Nepalese version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā by focusing on its structure, selected structural elements and selected elements of content.

Sanskrit Medical Scholasticism —Jajjaṭa’s Nirantarapadavyākhyā and Other Commentaries on the Carakasaṃhitā, Cikitsāsthāna 2.1—

The Nirantarapadavyākhyā by Jajjaṭa (or Jejjaṭa) is one of the earliest and,therefore, one of the most important commentaries on the Carakasaṃhitā. Thiscommentary is incomplete, but sufficient portions survive to allow a study ofthe earliest form of medical commentary in India. The extant portions of thiscommentary are large sections of the Cikitsāsthāna and part of the Kalpasthānaand Siddhisthāna. The text of Nirantarapadavyākhyā by Jajjaṭa has never beencritically edited. In this paper, we present a text-critical edition and translationof the Nirantarapadavyākhyā on the Carakasaṃhitā, Cikitsāsthāna Chapter 2,Quarter 1 (CaCi 2.1) based on several copies of a lost palm-leaf manuscriptin Malayalam script and the printed edition by Haridatta Śāstrin publishedin 1941. In order to follow the intellectual development of potency-therapy(vājīkaraṇa) in the Sanskrit medical literature, the remaining three extant majorcommentaries are also translated from the existing printed editions. These threecommentaries are Cakrapāṇidatta’s Āyurvedadīpikā in the eleventh century,Gaṅgādhara’s Jalpakalpataru in the mid-nineteenth century, and YogīndranāthSen’s Carakopaskāra in the early-twentieth century.