The Classical Doctrine of Indian Medicine: Its Origins and its Greek Parallels c6.52

c6.52

It is difficult to accept the attribution of all these texts to the Buddhist savant. The majority of these have nothing Buddhistic about them and some are ascribed to other authors, if we are to trust the colophons of certain manuscripts containing these texts. This is how the Yogaśataka eventually passes as a work of Vararuci while the Kacchapuṭa and the Rasaratnākara (sometimes their titles are interchanged) are ascribed to one Siddha Nityanatha.¹ The alchemical Rasaratnākara could really go back to the period of the Buddhist Nāgārjuna (IInd century A.D.) if it has really been imitated, as thought by L. Wieger, by the Chinese Taoist alchemist of the IIIrd century A.D., Ko-Hong, surnamed Pao-p' on-tseu.² The Yogaśataka is of a later date if the Chinese pilgrim Yi-tsing, writing in the VIIth century A.D., wrote about this text, as being an abridged text of medicine very popular and recently composed. He, however, does not give the name of this manual.³ But as Yi-tsing has not mentioned the name of the author, we do not know if this work was at first ascribed to a Nāgārjuna, who, in this case, would be a more recent homonym of the Buddhist savant, or if the real author has been later dispossessed of his work to the benefit of Nāgārjuna. That is why we do not know if we can identify the "reconstructor" of the Suśruta-saṃhitā mentioned by Dalhaṇa, with the author of the Yogaśataka belonging to the VIIth century, or that it should be believed that the assigning of the name of Nāgārjuna is only an echo of the legend describing the great Nāgārjuna as a master of medicine and alchemy.