Author: Dominik Wujastyk

Based on the dated manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā listed in PanditProject.

In the standard, printed edition or vulgate text of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, chapter ten of the Sūtrasthāna is dedicated to the topic of becoming a professional physician . The title of the chapter is interesting: “how to enter the roadway,” (विशिखानुप्रवेशनीयमध्यायम्). Commentators and dictionaries interpret the word विशिखा to mean “path, road.” This sense is not…

All the blog posts from the start of this project until today are now available in a single, downloadable PDF file (93 pages, 20.3MB).

Here is a twelve-minute podcast episode about poisons in the Suśrutasaṃhitā. It was generated automatically by notebooklm.google.com. I uploaded the PDF of the Kalpasthāna translation from the Suśruta Project and notebooklm did the rest.

In December 2024, I was interviewed by Andrew Mason, the researcher and publisher on South Asian alchemy and medicine and director of the Netera publishing project. Here’s the interview:

Candraṭa was a Sanskrit author on medical topics who lived in the period 900-1050 CE . He is perhaps best known for writing a commentary on his father Tīsaṭa’s treatise, Cikitsākalikā. But Candraṭa wrote several other works, and of most relevance to our project is his “Editorial Corrections to the Suśruta text” (Suśrutapāṭhaśuddhi). Candraṭa himself…

We are delighted to announce the publication of this project’s first book: Wujastyk, Dominik, Jason Birch, Andrey Klebanov, Madhu K. Parameswaran, Madhusudan Rimal, Deepro Chakraborty, Harshal Bhatt, Vandana Lele, and Paras Mehta. 2023. On the Plastic Surgery of the Ears and Nose. The Nepalese Version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā. Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1203. The…

I am pleased to report that a major project milestone has been reached. Last week we completed the transcription of all three Nepalese manuscripts of the Suśrutasaṃhitā that form the basis of our project. All files have been uploaded to GitHub, and a “version release” of the files has been issued, version 3.0. This has…

I asked BAIChat, “In textual criticism, what are the theoretical problems surrounding the issue of and “original” text.” The issue of the original text is a central theoretical problem in textual criticism, and it raises several complex issues. Firstly, the concept of an “original” text assumes that there was a single, definitive version of the…