“Transmitting the Carakasaṃhitā. Notes for a History of the Tradition”, in Dominik Wujastyk,...

CP

Transmitting theCarakasaṃhitā: Notes for aHistory of the Tradition

The theorist of textual criticism, Giorgio Pasquali, remarkedthat the best editor of an ancient work that is transmitted,for instance, in medieval manuscripts, will be the one whoknows the work, its language, its time and the languageof its times, and, at the same time, the time in which themanuscripts were produced. This reflection is the reason

The present research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)within the research project P, Philosophy and Medicine in Early Clas-sical India II, based at the University of Vienna, under the direction ofKarin Preisendanz, with Philipp A. Maas and the present writer as col-laborators. My gratitude goes to the Arya Vaidya Pharmacy for its gen-erous invitation to the Conference “The History of Medicine in India:Past and Present Theories and Practices in the Light of the Classical Tex-tual Sources,” held in Coimbatore, August , where a previousversion of the present paper was read.

Paraphrase of Pasquali : : “Il miglior critico di un testo grecodi tradizione bizantina sarà quello che, oltre a essere un perfetto gre-cista, sia anche perfetto bizantinista. Il miglior editore di un autore latinotrasmesso in codici medievali o postmedievali sarà colui che, quanto ilsuo autore e la sua lingua e i suoi tempi e la lingua dei suoi tempi, al-trettanto bene conosca il Medioevo o l’umanesimo.” Pasquali adds thatsuch an editor is an ideal that nobody can perfectly embody, but every-one should strive to come close to it (“Un critico siffatto è un ideale che

Transmitting the Carakasaṃhitā

why the history of the work’s tradition is a subject of studyfor those who approach a work from the point of viewof textual criticism. Both manuscript and printed booksare one of the main subjects of study for the history ofa work’s tradition, and even more relevant in connectionwith the paucity of other primary sources, namely archivedocuments like private papers, account books and businesscorrespondence, as well as sources like histories of librariesand manuscript collections. Raising the issue of the work’stransmission is also, of necessity, an exploration in the his-tory of education and scholarship, in the wider intellectualand cultural history of specific geographical areas, groupsof persons and institutions in South Asia.

The considerations that I shall present concern the his-tory of the transmission of the Carakasaṃhitā (henceforthCS), more in particular the Vimānasthāna, which is the sub-ject of a critical edition under preparation at the Universityof Vienna. I shall analyse philological activities, seats oflearning, patronage structures, and so on. The object ofanalysis and interpretation will be limited to one type ofproduction of the textual transmission, namely the manu-script books. I leave aside at present the category of prin-ted books, which also requires observations concerning thehistory of printing in India and therefore a partially differ-

nessuno può incarnare in sé perfettamente, ma al quale ognuno ha ildovere di cercare di avvicinarsi.’’).

A classic work that exposes the processes by which Greek and Latinliterature have been preserved and transmitted is Reynolds and Wilson.

See preliminary note, p. above.The word “manuscript book” is used with reference to a set of sheets

of paper, or other material, that is a text-bearer. No reference is made tothe aspect of binding. Throughout the present paper, the word “manu-script” will be freely used in the sense of “manuscript book.”

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ent range of information and methods of analysis. Fur-thermore, I shall address the question of research strategies,also pointing out problems and limits in the sources fromwhich interpretations arise.

Manuscript books as sources for the history of a textualtraditionManuscript books bear information on different levels, ac-cording to “their bifunctional role,” namely as both archae-ological object, or “container,” and as intellectual message,or textual “content”. When we consider a manuscript as acontainer, we examine it from a codicological and paleo-graphical point of view; that is to say, we examine the man-uscript from the point of view of its materiality and graph-ical representation of the text, including scripts, signs, seals,and so on. When we investigate the content of a manu-script, we analyse the text that is contained in it, also includ-ing scribal colophons, which can be a particularly precioussource. In the case of the CS, they are not always present.

This will be the subject of a future publication, that will address thespatial-temporal coordinates in which the data of the transmission of thework should be placed.

See Scherrer-Schaub and Bonani : .In the field of indological studies, the discipline of the study of man-

uscripts as cultural artifacts is called, for some reason, “manuscripto-logy,” using a neologism (maybe on the basis of the German word Hand-schriftenkunde?), instead of “codicology,” which is the existing currentdesignation. Muzerelle has fixed the technical terminology of codico-logy in his major publication; its language is French, which, for his-torical reasons, is one of the main vehicular languages of the discipline.Based on Muzerelle’s work, a codicological vocabulary is being estab-lished in other languages.

Colophons in medieval European texts have long been a separatesubject of study. This kind of analysis is also being developed in thefield of Tibetan studies; more recently, see Clemente . With regardto manuscripts containing Sanskrit texts, Banerjee provides some


This fact is also a result of the fragmentation of the workin individual sthānas, which, especially if they originallybelonged to the wider framework of the Saṃhitā, were notclosed by the copyist by means of a colophon. The scantynumber of scribal colophons is also the reason why the pre-cise date and place of production of many manuscripts re-main unknown.

Manuscript books, furthermore, have spatial-temporalcoordinates, which reveal information about the time andcontexts in which they were produced, acquired, used, ex-changed, preserved, etc., and which allow some inferencesregarding, for instance, how the work circulated and wasperceived. The information we can gather from these in-vestigations goes under four main categories: time, places,agents and modalities of the transmission.

Only some reflections deriving from this very widespectrum of data and observations will be exposed in thefollowing.

The Carakasaṃhitā as a composite work

At present, manuscripts containing the CS are known.Most of them are known through direct record in cata-logues and hand-lists, and some through their being men-tioned by editors of printed books of the CS. Among them,forty-nine copies of manuscripts containing the Vimāna-sthāna are available for the critical edition under prepara-tion. These copies are in different materials, namely paper

examples and related reflections. The same author repeats most of them,with slight changes, in his article.

In the following, I will refer to material that Karin Preisendanz, ErnstPrets and Philipp A. Maas collected for the research project P, Phi-losophy and Medicine in Early Classical India I, funded by the Austrian Sci-ence Fund (FWF); Yasutaka Muroya photographed one manuscript onbehalf of the same project.

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copies, microfilms and digital copies; another five manu-scripts kept in the Anup Sanskrit Library at Bikaner couldbe only collated on the spot. About ten manuscripts thatare kept in public and private libraries in India could not beused so far. The original manuscript books are written onpaper and in different scripts, namely Devanāgarī, Bengali,Śāradā and Kannaḍa.

A first remark regarding these data is that the text ofthe Vimānasthāna is only contained in a few manuscripts.In fact, only a minority of the manuscripts containing theCS includes the entire work, while many manuscripts onlycontain one or more sthānas. This shows that the CS, at leastat a certain point of its history, also circulated as a com-posite work, as a set of texts, each sthāna being a distinctunit. In fact, we have manuscript books that contain indi-vidual sthānas, but sometimes their foliation or paginationsuggests that they belonged to a larger book, because thefirst folio does not bear the number one. It is likely thatthe work was fragmented in connection with either a “pre-servation policy,” or a “market policy,” or just on practicalgrounds. Furthermore, the undoubted fact that some booksbear two foliations, namely one for the entire book and onefor each individual sthāna, indicates that the work was per-ceived as a set of independent parts. This way of perceivingthe work facilitated and legitimized its circulation by wayof individual sthānas.

Time of the manuscript transmission: the documentedperiodWe have a huge chronological gap between the composi-tion of the Vimānasthāna, which approximately goes back tothe second century CE, and the oldest dated available man-uscript, Alipur, Bhogilal Leherchand Institute of Indology


, which was copied in . The manuscripts thathave no date, which are approximately %, do not presentsigns of considerable antiquity. Neither the material, northe types of scripts indicate that the witnesses might beolder than the th century. The most recent manuscripts,on the contrary, are unusually late. Even though they arenot dated, they may be assigned to the beginning of theth century. Two of these manuscripts are preserved inJamnagar, at the Gujarat Ayurved University Library,

and share some similarities with another manuscript thatis dated st November . Therefore, the directly doc-umented history of the manuscript transmission of theVimānasthāna spans more than three centuries and beginsat the very end of the th century. Other sthānas havea different history. The Cikitsāsthāna, in particular, is at-tested in a manuscript kept in Kathmandu, the NationalArchives, Durbar Library -, dated CE, written inold Devanāgarī on palm leaf.

The available manuscripts of the Vimānasthāna presup-pose a long chain of copies, of which just the last part isextant. The critical reconstruction of the text has thus torely on witnesses that belong to a much later historicalperiod and are actually the result of processes by whichthe text was molded over the centuries. The conditions ofthe manuscript tradition suggest that, in the course of itshistory, no dramatic break occurred, but different lines oftransmission crystallized. The fact that books containingthe entire CS, including the Vimānasthāna, appear at theend of the sixteenth century firstly indicates that the workwas copied several times in that century; secondly, thatmanuscripts were relatively well kept. In fact, manuscript

They are the manuscripts GAS and GAS .Jamnagar, Gujarat Ayurved University Library, GAS .

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books of the Vimānasthāna consistently appear in a periodin which courtly or state institutions support, control andorganize the intellectual inheritance of their territory, asthe existence of a preservation policy shows.

It would be difficult to place a substantial appearing ofmanuscripts of the entire CS in a period different from thatin which textual foundations of knowledge-systems are notonly recuperated with new textual and stylistic attention,but they are also seen for the first time as part (indeed thefundamental centre) of a tradition from which the idea ofinnovation cannot be dissociated.

As stated by Sheldon Pollock, the two centuries fromabout to “witnessed a flowering of scholarship,[…] including a degree of attentiveness to the historicityof intellectual life previously unexampled.” Furthermore,a “revitalized interest in textual foundations seems to be ahallmark of the early-modern knowledge-systems.”

The places of the transmissionThe present provenance of the manuscripts of the CS,namely the public or private libraries and collections inwhich the manuscripts are found now (see Appendix,p. ), can offer an approximate indication of the area oftheir primary provenance. This consideration also impliesthat there is no reason why the manuscript copies of a

In the present sentence, I have paraphrased, mutatis mutandis, a pas-sage in Antonelli : , in which the author shows the link betweentradition, interpretation and textual criticism in the culture of medievalEurope by referring to some types of manuals on textual criticism, writ-ten in twelfth-century Rome. It is worth noting that the problematicof language and science, which is exposed by Pollock (especiallypp. –) with reference to early-modern India, is also a major subjectin thirteenth-century medieval Europe.

Pollock : . See also Pollock .Pollock : .


work that are preserved in a library should be related toeach other in terms of genealogy. The actual origin of amanuscript remains to be inferred by means of the manu-script itself, namely by means of the information that canbe gathered from the manuscript both as archaeologicalobject and textual content, especially when other primarysources for the book-history are missing.

The provenance of the Vimānasthāna manuscripts first ofall reveals that this text is almost absent in the libraries ofSouth India, except for a very recent and incomplete copythat is kept at the Oriental Research Institute of Mysore. Thetype of ink, paper and script, a very cursive Kannaḍa, seemsto suggest that the copy was most probably written in theth century. Furthermore, the presence of some forms ofparatext, like chapter titles, indicates that it is not a moderntranscription of an older manuscript, or, at least, certainlynot only a transcription. Two other fragments of the CS,which, however, do not contain the Vimānasthāna, are keptin Madras: one at the Archaeological Department (no. )and another at the Government Oriental Manuscript Lib-rary (no. ). Except for these very fragmentary copiesfrom Madras and Mysore, the most “Southern,” so to say,manuscripts of the Vimānasthāna, but also of the CS, comefrom the Asiatic Society of Bombay (dated śaka , i.e., CE) and from the Bhandarkar Oriental Research In-stitute and the Ānandāśrama in Pune. This fact indicatesthat at a certain point, in South India, the CS’s popularitydeclined. Most likely, the dominance of another work be-longing to the same discipline caused a decrease in the pro-duction of new copies, to such an extent that the number ofcirculating manuscripts was not sufficient to guarantee thepreservation of the work.

See Pasquali : , n. .

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By looking at the list of the extant manuscripts con-taining the Vimānasthāna (see Appendix, p. ), their placesof provenance are distributed over two main geographicalareas, namely Bengal and North-West India. They roughlycorrespond to the areas of the Kaśmīri recension and theEastern recension, namely the two main versions of the textthat can be identified through the textual critical work. Bothversions, however, circulated in the whole northern area.For some textual features, namely variant readings andtypology of scribal errors, suggest that a few manuscripts,which are written in Devanāgarī and preserved in librar-ies of North-West India, derive from a Bengali version. Inthis regard, we can suppose a few scenarios: manuscriptsthat had a specific version of the text and were written inBengali script were copied in Devanāgarī and eventuallyarrived in North-West manuscript collections. Anotherpossibility is that they migrated towards North-West India,where they were either faithfully copied in Devanāgarī,or, by conflation, partially incorporated in a local extantversion of the text. We have also to assume the oppositedirection of migration, because two manuscripts in Bengaliscript show very strong features of the Kaśmīri recension,mixed with those of the Eastern recension; they are theVaranasi manuscript, Sarasvati Bhavan Library , andthe Calcutta manuscript, Asiatic Society G /.

C : I

It is reasonable to assume that the written transmission ofthe Vimānasthāna and CS in South India had already brokenup before the middle of the th century, when a numberof scholars went in search of manuscripts in different areasof the Indian subcontinent, collecting the manuscripts andwriting Reports and Notices on their activity. Their main im-


pulse was the wish to take possession of the Indian knowl-edge, which was still deposited in the form of manuscriptbooks, not in printed books. This wish was also inspiredby “a purely utilitarian principle,” as we can read in the fol-lowing statement by the Major-General H. M. Durand:

I am not in favour of devoting exorbitant sumsto the sentimental nurture of Sanskrit or Arabicliterature; but, so long as both these languagesremain what they are, — the radical sources ofenormous spiritual influence on millions underour rule, — I am averse, even from a purely util-itarian principle, to neglect their ancient utter-ances; for they remain a living power amongthose millions.

The search continued for many years and in large areas, be-cause it became clear that various sources had to be reached,from private collections to libraries connected to differentcultural institutions.

A large quantity of manuscript books, which were theresult of this search, constituted the main, or even the firstfund of public repositories of manuscripts. In Calcutta,for instance, “[t]he collection of Ayurvedic manuscripts ofthe Asiatic Society can be traced as early as CE, whenthe ‘Notices of Sanskrit Manuscripts, Vol. I’ was publishedby Sir Rājendralāla Mitra.” The five manuscripts contain-

The concern for the loss of “Indian” knowledge appeared also morerecently, in terms of loss of a system of knowledge, in Vatsyayan : in particular.

“Minute by Major-General the Hon’ble Sir H. M. Durand, C.B.,K.C.S.I., — dated Simla, the th August ,” in Gough : .I would like to thank Thomas Kintaert (University of Vienna), whoprovided me with this book.

See Sarma : f., and Patel and Kumar : .Bandury and Gupta : viii.

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ing the CS that are kept at the Bhandarkar Oriental ResearchInstitute, Pune, were collected by R. G. Bhandarkar duringthe years – and by Abaji Vishnu Kathavate dur-ing the years –. The collection at the GujaratAyurved University Library in Jamnagar, with manu-scripts of the CS, was most likely enlarged in connectionwith the edition and translation of the CS made by theShree Gulabkunverba Ayurvedic Society, whose result wasthe work’s publication in , in Jamnagar. Some of theJamnagar manuscripts are twentieth-century transcriptionsof older manuscripts. In the case of the Vimānasthāna, onemanuscript was certainly directly copied from a manuscriptthat is now kept in Bikaner and another one was most prob-ably copied also collating the same Bikaner manuscript.

The Gulabkunverba Ayurvedic Society represents a re-cent case of “courtly” patronage. For patron of the Societywas His Highness Namdar Maharaja Jam Saheb Shree andpresident of the Society was Her Highness Maharani ShreeGulabkunverba Sahiba of Nawanagar.

C : -N-W I

Large manuscript collections were established in court lib-raries of North-West medieval India. They normally con-tained books that were an exclusive product made for thepatron, i.e., the Mahārājas’ families, who were interestedin collecting works belonging to various fields of knowl-

Bhandarkar : .Kathavate .The book contains the edition of the Sanskrit text and translation in

Hindi, Gujarati and English. The names of the members of the editorialboard are listed at pp. – of the first volume.

See Pecchia , §§ . and ..See Patel and Kumar : –.


edge as part of their larger enterprise of collecting the con-tents of the intellectual culture produced in their kingdoms.Bikaner and Jaipur, for example, were and still are greatrepositories of manuscript books. Ayurveda was an im-portant knowledge-system of the time, because each man-uscript collection contains many Ayurvedic works.

Jaipur The Mahārājas of Jaipur had an active role as “cul-tural entrepreneurs”. Their collection of manuscripts andpaintings was constantly enlarged by acquisition and pro-duction. They also had a refined system of maintenance,preservation and classification of manuscripts. Surely,their library (pothīkhānā) testifies to their interest in Ayur-veda and other systems of medical knowledge. MirzaRājā Jay Singh (–) was the first ruler who prop-erly organized the collection of manuscripts he had inher-ited from his forefathers. His son Ram Singh I (–)

continued the family tradition concerning the increase ofthe manuscript production and the organization of the lib-rary. Ram Singh I also used to put on his manuscripts hisown seal, which has, from the top to the bottom, rāma, a

For information about the Mahārājas’ dynasty, their literary activ-ity and heritage, see the first section, “Literary Heritage of the Rulers ofAmber and Jaipur,” in Bahura .

See Bahura : – (first section). Bahura also reports, “it hadbeen a practice among the princes and the potentates to store such ob-jects [i.e., manuscripts and paintings] close by their bedrooms.” (ibidem,p. ).

See Bahura : – (second section “An Index to the register ofmanuscripts in the Pothikhana of Jaipur – (i) Khas-mohor”), in whichBahura provides an alphabetical Index of the Sanskrit Works accordingto the Register of Manuscripts.

See Bahura : and – (first section). For the genealogy ofthe rulers of Amber and Jaipur and their reigns, see Bahura : .

See Bahura : , and – (first section).

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lion and the case-ending sya; at the top, split in two parts,the date (vikrama saṃvat), that is CE.

Based on Ram Singh I’s seal, a terminus ante quem can beassigned to the undated manuscript Maharaja Sawai ManSingh II Museum , in Jaipur. We may conventionallyassume that the date before which the manuscript musthave been written is CE, namely after the death ofRam Singh I, because we do not have any precise inform-ation regarding the span of time in which the seal wasactually used. However, it seems to be unusual that RamSingh I used for many years a dated seal of the time inwhich he was not yet a Mahārāja.

The next generations of Mahārājas maintained and en-larged the library, in which medical texts had a conspicu-ous role. Sawai Pratap Singh (–) is also said tohave composed an Ayurvedic work, the Amṛtasāgar (“Oceanof Nectar,” ), even though, most likely, somebody elsecomposed it for him.

An interesting aspect of these early Mahārājas of Amberand Jaipur is their contact with the city of Kāśī. Mirza RājāJay Singh, in fact, founded a college in Kāśī, in which alsohis son, the future Ram Singh I, studied. Furthermore, bothrulers were associated with pandits and poets who lived inKāśī; hence the implication that they held Sanskrit literat-

See Bahura : (first section) and Plate VI.b. This date showsthat he began organizing his library when he was not yet the ruler ofAmber (the capital was moved to Jaipur by Sawai Jai Singh II, reign –).

The reign is taken from Bahura : . The date that is given inStark : , seems to put together Sawai Prithivi Singh’s and SawaiPratap Singh’s reign.

See Bahura : (first section), Stark : , and Meulenbeld–: IIA, et passim.


ure and language in high esteem. This fact gives evidenceof a vital cultural exchange between Rajasthan and East-ern India (with special reference to the cultural centre ofKāśī) and can be related, and supposed to be the cause of,the exchange that is observed in the textual tradition of theVimānasthāna (see above, p. “The places of the transmis-sion”).

Another interesting aspect of the early Mahārājas ofAmber and Jaipur is their contact with the Bikaner rul-ing family. Ram Singh I, in particular, was Anup Singh’s“friend and fellow bibliophile” and they also exchangedmanuscripts.

Bikaner Bikaner is the place in which the highest numberof manuscripts containing the CS or sections of it is pre-served. The city has at present two libraries, in which man-uscripts are kept: the Rajasthan Oriental Research Instituteof Bikaner, where the Shree Motichand Khajanchi Collec-tion is preserved, with three manuscripts of the CS, andthe Anup Sanskrit Library, which has manuscripts ofthe CS, although only two of them contain the completework. The Anup Sanskrit Library houses the collection ofmanuscripts assembled by Anup Singh (also spelt “Anū-pasiṃha,” reign to ) and the following Mahārā-jas of Bikaner. One important feature of this library is thatit contains many manuscripts that come from the Deccan.There was, in fact, “a vast influx of scientific texts from theSouth into Rājasthān” when Anup Singh was campaign-

Bahura : and (first section), and Pingree : .See Bahura : (first section) and Pingree , ibidem.See Pingree : . See Pingree : – for a survey of Anup

Singh’s activity as collector of manuscripts, with special reference tothose of jyotiṣa texts.

Pingree : .

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ing in the Deccan together with Aurangzīb’s army. Asfar as the CS is concerned, however, the Rajasthan copiesdo not reveal any particular influence or direct provenancefrom traditions different from those transmitted by othernorthern copies.

Bikaner was most probably a centre in which Ayurvedicmanuscripts were also collected from other areas. For amanuscript in Śāradā script, which is now in the collectionof the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune, wasacquired in Bikaner by Georg Bühler during his search ofSanskrit manuscripts in –. However, because ofits script and the vertical format of its folios, it is reasonableto assume that the manuscript was produced in Kaśmīr.

Patrons and copyists of the Vimānasthāna: some casesPAs the manuscript collections in the libraries show, theprofessional hand-written production of books was a flour-ishing activity in th–th century India. This activitywas sponsored, or mainly sponsored, by cultural and polit-ical institutions, which, aiming at preserving, transmittingand developing different knowledge-systems, also set upor supported the book production. The presence of a gen-erous patronage involved the presence of professionals ofwriting (lekhaka); for they can only exist if a significant cat-egory of people who commission manuscripts exists. When

Pingree : .The manuscript corresponds to no. of the – list by Bühler

(: xxxvi) and belongs to the Deccan College Collection. It was cata-logued by Sharma (: p. , #). The manuscript was copied in CE.

For the general remarks contained in the following paragraphs, Imainly consulted Bühler , in which the production of the Europeanfifteenth-century book is under examination.


such a category of professionals of writing is established,then it is available on the market of the book productionand can be employed by wealthy people who want to havetheir own library.

Somebody who commissioned a manuscript book willnot necessarily make use of it, but he, or she, may just wantto possess a copy of a specific work. Therefore, the exter-ior and physical conditions of the manuscripts not onlyprovide some quite accurate information about the kindof copyist who produced them, but also, if this is the case,about the patronage that supported their production. Somemanuscripts of the Vimānasthāna, which are in very goodmaterial conditions, show that they were not intensivelyused, or even not used at all. This fact suggests that themain purpose of the persons who commissioned the cop-ies was simply the possession and/or preservation of thework itself. If this is typical of royal patrons, it must havebeen true also for other types of wealthy patrons, who or-ganize and maintain large libraries, because royal patronscommissioned only a minority of the extant manuscripts.

Among other possible sources of patronage for the CS,we should take into account also the specific category ofphysicians. They might have been interested in commis-sioning copies of the work on practical grounds, namelyin order to use it as a reference book in the medical prac-tice and in the teaching activity, both for themselves andfor their students.

P The task of professional copyists consisted in reading andcopying the text of their exemplar; it was distinct from theact of understanding the text’s content. As readings in themanuscripts show again and again, professional copyists

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were often not much conversant with the language of thetext they were copying. This fact allows us to infer that alow level of linguistic competence was not an obstacle tothe profession. Furthermore, the act of writing was not anelite intellectual activity in itself, but also “just a job.” Con-versely, Sanskrit was deliberately administered as an elitelanguage. The competence in writing is very specific, butthis does not per se imply that writing is an exclusive activ-ity of the intellectual elite. The activity of writing can cer-tainly be the distinctive feature of an elite group, but the onethat is chiefly defined by the fact that it exists in a contextof illiteracy.

The manuscripts of the Vimānasthāna are, in most of thecases, produced by professional copyists. The typical fea-ture of their work is that the general exterior aspect of themanuscript looks nice and neat and its script regular, withno particular inclination and with no unbalanced distribu-tion of letters in the line; however, the manuscript may eas-ily bear an inaccurate text.

The copyist of the Pune manuscript Ānandāśrama (dated ), for example, explicitly states the limits of histask, which he duly performed. For he writes in the colo-phon a śloka that is a copyists’ standard phrase:

yādṛśaṃ pustakaṃ dṛṣṭvā tādṛśaṃ likhitaṃ mayāyadi śuddham aśuddhaṃ vā mama doṣo na vidyateAs I read the book, so I have written it.If it is correct or incorrect, it is not my fault.

The copyist clearly distinguishes between the material andtextual aspects of the book. By means of the former aspect, a

See Filliozat : xviii, Banerjee : and : , for similarsentences in other Indian manuscript books and Bühler : for Me-dieval European manuscript books.


manuscript serves its function of exemplar and is the objectof the copying activity (likhitaṃ). The latter aspect does notbelong to that activity; this is the reason why the copyist isnot responsible for the correctness of the text, about which,however, he raises doubts.

An extreme case of the combination of nice appear-ance and inaccurate text, as well as of the copyist’s aware-ness of the specificity of copying, is the manuscript Bi-kaner, Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute (RORI) ,in Devanāgarī, dated CE. In the colophon, the copy-ist says his name, Tṛpāṭhī Raghunātha, and place of ori-gin, Saravāḍa, which might be the modern Sarwar, nearAjmer. On the basis of the colophons of these two Bikanermanuscripts, we can say that, at the end of the th century,a place called Saravāḍa was a centre of the MS productionand the Carakasaṃhitā was one of the texts that were com-missioned there. Its copyist just wrote what he could readin his exemplar, sometimes producing sequences of lettersthat do not make any sense. Analysing a sample sectionof the Vimānasthāna, namely .–, the manuscript has anumber of individual erroneous readings that correspondsto % of the text. The appearance of the folios, on thecontrary, is good and the style of writing very clear and

Banerjee’s interpretation of the copyist’s intent in this śloka differsfrom the one I exposed. He says: “Here the copyist frankly admits thathe is not always competent enough to discriminate between what is cor-rect (śuddha) and what is incorrect (aśuddha) in the MSS. It appears thatit was not possible for one to judge the correctness of the language of aMS with the content of which he was not always conversant.” (Banerjee: ).

saṃvat [.. .ke] vaiśāṣaśuklapaṃcamī somabāre liṣitaṃ | tṛpāṭhī raghu-nātha saravāḍamadhye ||

From the same place another copyist comes: Pujārīgopālaḥ, whowrote the MS preserved in Bikaner, Rajasthan Oriental Research Insti-tute, no. (/ CE), containing the Cikitsāsthāna only.

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regular. About the reasons why a manuscript bears a textwith so many errors, it can be assumed that the copyist notonly made orthographical errors, as it is usual, but he alsoread an exemplar that must have been very bad in termsof text and also physical conditions. For it is clear from thevariant readings that the copyist interpreted sequences ofakṣaras as mere visual objects, and not as units bearing ameaning, to such an extent that it is plausible to assumethat he was forced to do so from the bad quality of what hecould read in his exemplar. This “bad” exemplar was mostlikely the final result of a long sequence of reproductions,in which involuntary orthographical errors induced by fea-tures of the handwriting were multiplied by the featuresof a script that represented a writing system different fromthe one adopted by the copyist. Some readings in the Bi-kaner manuscript can be explained, in fact, as the result ofa sequence of errors in reading and writing that developedfrom one act of copying to the other. Yet, one can recognizesome traces of a previous exemplar that must have beenwritten in a kind of Devanāgarī with pṛṣṭhamātrā “e,” orin a Bengali script, in which this kind of “e” is the mostcommon.

This Bikaner manuscript also evidences the conditionsin which some representatives of the CS tradition wereat the end of the th century. Moreover, considering thetextual meaning one can gain from this copy, it is evidentthat the actual content of the manuscript was not a primaryfactor for the one who commissioned it. We may thus inferthat he wanted to have a copy of the work in his personallibrary, but not necessarily in order to consult it. Aboutthe reasons why the exemplar of this Bikaner manuscriptwas valuable enough to be copied, one can speculate thatits provenance made it valuable, or its being a unique copy


of the CS in the area in which it was copied. It is highlyprobable indeed that the commission was due to the ma-terial conditions of the book, which had already reacheda critical stage. Copying the manuscript was the only wayto save it. Indeed, copying also had the specific functionof reproducing an existing manuscript book, whose valuewas the text as such, no matter what the letter of the text ofthe work was.

S- A second category of copyists is that of the semi-professionalcopyists. In the case of Ayurvedic works, we can assumetwo main types: ) physicians who were not scholars, whocopied the text to have it as a reference book at their dis-posal, and ) students, who copied the work in order tostudy it, or for their teacher. A case in point seems to be themanuscript Pune, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute,no. of the - list by Kathavate.

L : -Because writing was also a competence of learned people,we may find copyists for whom writing is not exclusively,or not at all, a work occupation. They represent the cat-egory of the “learned” copyists, who may transcribe booksas professionals, but also as part of their wider intellec-tual activity. In fact, learned copyists can be copyists “forthemselves,” who copy texts for their own use. With re-gard to Ayurvedic works, they may typically be scholar-physicians, who also copied texts to make them availableto their students. The work of copyists for themselves canbe sometimes recognized through the mere appearance of

See Colas : .

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the book. For these copyists can neglect the formal aspectsof the books: because they were much poorer in meansthan the institutions, they might transcribe the text theycopied just for their own use on a cheap material, witha bad quality ink and, especially, with an irregular andinaccurate way of writing. Furthermore, copyists forthemselves employed the margins as space to note downpersonal comments as well as paraphrases and quotationsfrom other works.

An important feature of learned copyists and copyistsfor themselves is that they may easily manipulate the let-ter of what they read in their exemplar, either according toother copies available to them or according to their own un-derstanding, going through aware or unaware processes,from deliberate alterations to Freudian slips. For thesekinds of copyists the priority is the manuscript as a bearerof content, and not as a material object. They also show thatthe tradition of the work is alive, that there are scholars whostudy the work.

An example of a copy made (also) for personal use ismost probably Varanasi, Sarasvati Bhavan Library ,which is written in a very cursive Bengali script. The man-uscript, which contains many glosses written in the mar-gins, was evidently a copy used to study the work, mak-ing comments here and there on the folios, without pay-ing attention to the way in which the manuscript would ap-pear afterwards. This copy bears striking textual similar-ities to the manuscript Varanasi, Sarasvati Bhavan Library

This description of a type of learned copyist is a paraphrase fromPasquali : , n. .

It cannot be excluded that marginal notes contain information de-riving from the oral tradition.

Timpanaro () offers interesting considerations of the subject ofthe Freudian slip as applied to textual criticism.


, which belonged to Gaṅgādhara, the author of theCS’s commentary Jalpakalpataru and first editor of the CS;for his edition of the Sūtrasthāna of the CS appeared in ,in Bengali script, at the Samvadajnanaratnakar Press (Cal-cutta). The next edition, which contained the entire CS to-gether with Gaṅgādhara’s Jalpakalpataru was published byDharanidhar Ray Kaviraj and printed by PramadabhanjanaPress, in Bahrampur, Saidabad, in / (saṃvat ).

ConclusionEven though there are so many gaps in our knowledge ofthe history of the CS’s manuscript tradition, certain patternsare discernible and point to a diversified, but unbroken, tex-tual tradition. Through the different lines of transmissionthat are witnessed by the genealogical relationships amongmanuscripts, we still have traces of the interpretative actsthat were performed in the course of the transmission andtraces of the changes in the perception of the text that schol-arship and education brought about. The reproduction ofmanuscripts by professional copyists, because of the pat-ronage that they presuppose, shows that Ayurveda was notonly a practice, an applied knowledge, with a set of effic-acious preparations, but also represented a specific systemof knowledge, with a body of works in which this knowl-edge is contained, also including foundational works. TheCS is an instance of this kind of works, because it has a bi-directional function: it has a content that bears a specificscientific value and, at the same time, it is an authoritat-ive representative of a specific knowledge-system, system-atized by somebody called Caraka. The foundational roleof the CS, together with the awareness of the existence of aspecific medical system, was uninterrupted over centuries,

See Meulenbeld –: IB, .

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and so was the transmission of the work. One may specu-late about the reasons of the awareness of the specificity ofone’s own tradition. One of the possible reasons is that italso developed because of the contemporaneous presence,in the same place, of other medical traditions, with regardto North-West India, especially the Unani system.

AppendixList of the extant manuscripts available to the project (seepreliminary note, p. and footnote ) containing the Vi-mānasthāna

. Ahmedabad, B. J. Institute ofLearning and Research

. Alipur, Bhogilal LeherchandInstitute of Indology

. Alipur, Bhogilal LeherchandInstitute of Indology

. Alwar, Rajasthan OrientalResearch Institute

. Baroda, OrientalInstitute

. Baroda, Oriental Institute,Ayurveda –

. Bikaner, Rajasthan OrientalResearch Institute

. Bikaner, Anup SanskritLibrary





. Bombay, Asiatic Society

. Calcutta, National LibraryRDS

. Calcutta, Library of CalcuttaSanskrit College

. Calcutta, Library of CalcuttaSanskrit College

. Calcutta, Asiatic SocietyG /

. Calcutta, Asiatic SocietyG /

. Calcutta, Asiatic SocietyG

. Cambridge, Trinity CollegeLibrary R .

. Chandigarh, Lal ChandResearch Library

. Ilāhābad, G. Jha KendriyaSanskrit Vidyapeetha

. Ilāhābad, G. Jha KendriyaSanskrit Vidyapeetha /

. Ilāhābad, G. Jha KendriyaSanskrit Vidyapeetha

. Jaipur, Maharaja Sawai ManSingh II Museum




. Jammu, Raghunath TempleLibrary



. Jamnagar, Gujarat AyurvedUniversity Library GAS


. Jamnagar, Gujarat AyurvedUniversity Library GAS /


. Koṭa, Rajasthan OrientalResearch Institute

. Kathmandu, Nepal GermanManuscript PreservationProject E-

. London, Indian Office Library,Sanskrit

. London, Indian Office Library,Sanskrit

. London, Indian Office Library,Sanskrit b

. Mysore, Oriental ResearchInstitute (,)

. Pune, Bhandarkar OrientalResearch Institute



. Pune, Ānandāśrama . Tübingen,

Universitätsbibliothek I.. Tübingen,



Universitätsbibliothek I.. Udaipur, Rajasthan Oriental

Research Institute . Varanasi, Benares Hindu

University, Gaekwad LibraryC

. Varanasi, SarasvatiBhavan

. Varanasi, Sarasvati BhavanLibrary



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