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…
Author: Dominik Wujastyk
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…
New article by Andrey Klebanov in press
In a new article that is to be published in the eJournal of Indian Medicine in the near fututure, researcher Andrey Klebanov does a deep dive into the Nepalese manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. Andrey has kindly shared a draft of his article with me in advance of publication, and I have his permission to report…
Pandit Project
We are collabrating with the Pandit Project as a place to keep track in a structured and relational manner of works, authors and especially manuscripts. Here is the Pandit Project entry for the Suśrutasaṃhitā and its commentaries.
Day one of this project!
[pl_row] [pl_col col=12] [pl_text] Welcome to this brand new website! We just heard the news about our project funding yesterday (April 9, 2020). As we get started, you will find reports and news here about our progress. The project will start in earnest after September 2020. We look forward to keeping you interested and stimulated…