Apart from preserving an early, unpublished version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā , manuscript KL-699 may be one of the oldest dated Nepalese manuscripts to have survived . It is written in the so-called transitional Gupta script and comprises of at least four codicological units . This means that KL-699 is rich material for the study of palaeography, and…
Category: Textual notes
For philological notes referring to the manuscript text of the Suśrutasaṃhitā.
NAK 5-333 and the so-called conspicuous filling sign
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…