Pre-Buddhist India: A Political, Administrative, Economic, Social and Geographical Survey of Ancient India Based Mainly on the Jataka Stories c6.s3.62

c6.s3.62

Besides medicinal treatment, delicate surgical operations also seem to have been carried out. A surgeon once fitted a man with a false tip to his nose, which was accidentally cut by the sharp edge of a sword, and painted it so that it looked like a real nose.⁹ Sivaka was really a master-surgeon.¹⁰ The surgical operation that he successfully carried out, on the person of king Sivi, was simply marvellous. The king wanted to give away his eyes to a Brāhmaṇa who begged for them. With great pain and hesitation, Sivaka, the surgeon, sat to his work: he pounded a number of simples, rubbed a blue lotus with the powder, and brushed it over the right eye: round rolled the eye, and there was great pain..... Again he rubbed in the powder, and brushed it over the eye: the eye started from the socket, the pain was worse than before.... A third time he smeared a sharper powder and applied it: by the drug's power, round went the eye, out it came from the socket, and hung dangling at the end of the tendon.... The pain was extreme, blood was trickling, the king's garments were stained with the blood. Then Jīvaka, with his left hand grasping the eyeball, took a knife in his right, and severing the tendon, laid the eye in the king's hand. In the same way the left eye was also taken out, and both the eyes were then placed in the eye-sockets of the Brāhmaṇa who then began to see.¹ Nobody would contend, we hope, that this minute description is only an outcome of rich imagination, and has no bearing with reality.²