In one of the Nepalese manuscripts on which this project is based, the fifteenth-century Nepalese MS, MS Kathmandu NAK 5-333, there are mysterious characters at a few places. For example, on folio 371v: they are the two similar characters on the fifth line from the top, in this enlargement: and another example Here, the surrounding…
Author: Dominik Wujastyk
A conspicuous filling sign in proto Bengālī manuscripts
by Birgit Kellner (Austrian Academy of Sciences) This document is kindly contributed by Birgit Kellner, who composed it on 13 November 2017, with input from: Patrick McAllister, Yasutaka Muroya, Markus Pastollnigg, Cristina Pecchia, Serena Saccone, Ernst Steinkellner, and Toshikazu Watanabe. On Dharmottarapradīpa ms fol. 3a (Tucci photographs 1939/Ngor monastery; earlier photographs taken by Sāṅkṛtyāyana probably…
Lecture at the National Institute for Advanced Studies, Bengaluru
The NIAS in Bengaluru is running a lecture series entitled “Sanskrit Language & its Traditions”. As part of this series, Dominik Wujastyk recently contributed a lecture on the History of Ayurveda. In the last part of the lecture, Prof. Wujastyk introduced and discussed the Sushruta Project. To
Published!
It is a pleasure to announce that the paper discussed in an earlier blog post has now been published:
Fragments of a lost manuscript
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has in its collection eight pages of a lost Nepalese palm-leaf manuscript that support extracts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. The MS is accessioned as MS Los Angeles LACMA M.87.271a-g,[1]MS description at PanditProject. and images are posted on the LACMA website.[2]The overview photograph (view 1) lacks one page, which is…
Who was Bhoja?
The Nepalese manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā include Bhoja as one of the great, ancient authorities of Ayuveda. The recent post by Jason Birch discusses this point. In this post I would like to give some information about this figure in medical history. The remarks below are based on the research of Meulenbeld . Date First,…
An anusvāra and the goals of editing
We have a reading (SS.sū.1. 9 … upaśamakaraṇārtham) where the final -m is an anusvāra in the earliest witnesses, K and H (in “Orthographic variants”, switch off “filter final anusvāra variants”). We want our edition to represent the earliest known transmission of the work. Scribal usage of daṇḍas is variable and not a determining editorial…
An unknown early commentary on the Suśrutasaṃhitā
A new article by Andrey Klebanov has recently appeared in the Festschrift to Prof. K. G. Zysk . Klebanov studies a manuscript in the Government Oriental Manuscript Library in Chennai that is titled simply “A commentary on Suśruta” (Suśrutavyākhyā). The manuscript is MS Chennai GOML R 3422 and has 220 pages. The Chennai MS is…
An Ancient Pandemic Story
Earlier this year, Dominik Wujastyk was interviewed for the Bangalore-based Scrolls & Leaves podcast series curated by the science journalists Mary-Rose Abraham and Gayathri Vaidyanathan. He spoke about the description of epidemic disease in the Carakasaṃhitā, the sister treatise of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. Atreya, the renowned teacher of Ayurveda, is walking with his pupils on the…
SS.1.1.0-1.1.3
SS.1.1.0 The opening scribal invocation of KL 699 dedicates the work to Kamalahasta “him with the lotus hands.” This is an honorific title used for the Buddhist Padmapāṇi or Avalokiteśvara. SS.1.1.1 MSS K originally read ādhyāyam, but a scribe corrected it to adhyāyam. N reads the ungrammatical ādhyāyam. Perhaps N was copied from K before…