The Suśruta Project

The textual and cultural history of medicine in South Asia based on newly-discovered manuscript evidence

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The Compendium of Suśruta (सुश्रुतसंहिता) is a treatise on classical Indian medicine written in Sanskrit about two thousand years ago. It is one of the foundations of Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of South Asia.

Today, The Compendium of Suśruta is normally studied through printed editions from the twentieth century that were in turn based on about a dozen ninenteenth-century manuscripts.  These printed editions are full of errors and difficulties.

In January 2007, the Nepal-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project announced the discovery of an ancient palm-leaf manuscript of The Compendium that is reliably datable to 878 CE, MS Kathmandu KL 699. The manuscript is part of the Kathmandu library of Kesar Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1892–1964), a former Prime Minister of Nepal, and has been added by UNESCO to the “Memory of the World” register.

This manuscript pushes our physical evidence for the Compendium back by a millennium. Study of this thousand-year-old manuscript reveals a much earlier stage of the work’s textual development. This evidence, together with that of two closely-related early manuscripts in the Nepalese National Archives, places our historical understanding of this Asian medical classic on a new foundation.

The background images on this website are from MS Kathmandu KL 699.


With the completion of this project in 2024, a complete digital diplomatic transcription of KL 699 has been published along with other project publications (see Project Outputs).

The evolving critical edition of the Nepalese version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā is available at the Saktumiva website area for the Suśrutasaṃhitā. (A backup server is also available.)

This website has been archived at Archive-it.org.

You can connect with the successor project to The Suśruta Project, “Mapping a Medical Tradition: The Compendium of Suśruta in Time and Space,” at https://sushrutaproject2.github.io/website/.

Recent Blog Posts

  • AI-generated promotional video
  • Graph of frequency / time of dated SS manuscripts
  • Intertextuality and the Methods of Diagnosis
  • All Blog Posts in One PDF
  • Podcast on the Kalpasthāna

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The Suśruta Project is funded as a four-year Insight Grant by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanites Research Council. Grant no. 435-2020-1077.  Dates: 1 April 2020 - 31 March 2024. Applicaton DOI.

Supplementary funding is provided for the project from the Singhmar Chair Endowment Grant administered by the University of Alberta.

This website and all files created by this project are copyrighted by Dominik Wujastyk and the Suśruta Project and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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