This Sushruta Project is focussed on the earliest surviving manuscript of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, MS Kathmandu KL 699, and the two other witnesses that are textually close to it (NAK 5-333 and NAK 1-1079). This project does not have the resources to explore a wider field of manuscript witnesses to the text, but we remain interested in this question. It would be especially valuable to find futher witnesses of the old Nepalese Version, or manuscripts that reveal some intermediate stage of the transmission between the ninth century and Ḍalhaṇa in the twelfth century, whose version appears to be more or less that reproduced in printed editions from the eighteenth century onwards.^[1]I am grateful to Jason Birch for suggesting the ideas in this post during discussions in April 2022.

According to the pulished catalogues available to us, there survive at least 220 manuscript witnesses to the Suśrutasaṃhitā, although most of these only support parts of the whole text. At some point, they all need to be studied. Test-collations of selected adhyāyas will help to establish their positions in the transmission. While the Sushruta Project does not plan to undertake this work, preliminary research will likely contribute to deepening our awareness of the wider field of witnesses. This work is now possible because the Sushruta Project has nearly completed the task of transcribing the three available witnesses of the Nepalese version, thus enabling comparative work.

First, some Suśrutasaṃhitā manuscripts have been scanned and made public. Where such scans are known to us, they are signalled in the relevant PanditProject entries. Checking the readings of an adhyāya or even just a few verses of ready-scanned manuscripts can give some rapid, if shallow, information about that witness’s relationship to the tree of transmission and historical weight, in the sense of the old slogan of textual criticism: “manuscripts must be weighed, not counted” .

Second, some descriptive catalogues give excerpts from the manuscripts they describe, and these very short excerpts can in some cases give similar information. In particular, the simple check on whether the “yathovāca bhagavān dhanvantariḥ” phrase is included in adhyāya beginnings can already provide an important clue to the witness’s position .

A comprehensive archive of scanned manuscript catalogues is available via the INDOLOGY website.

This blog post will provide a growing list of such evaluations.

1. MMS Kolkata ASB G. 4384

At the Asiatic Society in Calcutta. Described by (Biswas #0170). Contains adhyāyas 1-9 of the Uttaratantra.

Beginning:

The manuscript omits the Dhanvantari attribution. Verses 1 and 2 above have a mixture of readings from Nepalese and vulgate branches. Verse 3 reads with the Nepalese version. Thus, this manuscript may be a witness to the Nepalese version, at least in several of its readings, and deserves further study.

2. MS Ramtek KKSanskUniv M 1887

This manuscript covers only the śārīrasthāna. It omits the Dhanvantari phrase. It begins:

athātaḥ sarvabhūtaciṃtā śārī kyāṃsyāmaḥ sarvabhūtānāṃ kāraṇam akāraṇaṃ santv arajastamolakṣaṇam…

The Dhanvantari phrase is also not present at the beginning of other adhyāyas.

Thus, this manuscript may be a witness to the Nepalese version. However, a cursory examination of some passages shows that vulgate readings are present too. It may be that the presence or absence of the Dhanvantari phrase has its own history independent of the variant text of the Nepalese version.

References