Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c5.5

Language: English

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3. Charaka and Dṛḍhabala. As to the latter, the Bheḍa Samhitā, we know, at present, of the existence of but a single manuscript (§ 12). The former, the Agniveśa Samhitā, has had a changeful history. In its original form it has not survived, though it appears to have still existed in the eleventh century when the commentator Chakrapāṇidatta (§ 2, cl. 11) quotes it.¹ At present it exists only in a redaction undertaken, at a much later date, by a Kashmir physician, called Charaka. He, however, appears never to have completed it. Possibly death may have intervened. In any case, the concluding portion of the redaction, about one-third of the whole work, was supplied, several centuries afterwards, by another Kashmir physician Dṛḍhabala, the son of the physician Kapilabala. The entire compendium consists of eight sections (sthāna). The portion contributed by Dṛḍhabala comprises, as we know from the same Chakrapāṇidatta,² the last seventeen chapters of the sixth, and the whole of the seventh and eighth sections. In the preparation of this portion, Dṛḍhabala, as he himself informs us,³ utilized a large number of existing treatises. Among these may have been Agniveśa’s original Compendium, but his main sources, as a comparison of their respective works shows, appear to have been the Aṣṭāṅga Saṃgraha, or Summary of Medicine, of Vāgbhaṭa I, and the Nidāna, or Pathology, of Mādhava.

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But Dṛḍhabala did not limit himself to his complementary task: he also revised the portion written by Charaka himself. He was, as he himself informs us in a passage at the end of the eighth section,⁴ a native of a settlement (pura), called Panchanada, i. e. five-streamland. In India the confluence of streams is apt to be treated as a sacred place of pilgrimage (tīrtha); and there are there several such places called Panchanada. Anciently one of them appears to have existed in Kashmir, near the confluence of the rivers Jhelam (Vitastā) and Sindhu. Its place is indicated by the modern village of Paṇtzinōr (lit. five channels), which lies close to what was the original site of that confluence, before its removal to its present site, in the latter half of the ninth century, in the reign of King Avantivarman. It is this Kashmiri Panchanada, which probably was the home of Dṛḍhabala.¹ The early commentators of the eleventh and thirteenth centuries (e. g. Chakrapāṇidatta and Vijaya Rakshita) often refer to a Kashmiri Recension (*Kāśmīra pāṭha*) when commenting on passages of the earlier portion of the Compendium, i. e. the portion written by Charaka himself.² The probability is that in all these cases the reference is to Dṛḍhabala’s Revision of Charaka’s work;

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for in references to the concluding portion of the Compendium, Dṛḍhabala, as a rule, is quoted by name as its author.³ It seems clear from their method of quotation that the medical writers of that period were fully aware of the exact share which Dṛḍhabala had in Charaka’s redaction of Agniveśa’s original Compendium. At a still earlier period, Mādhava, when he quotes Charaka’s redaction in his *Nidāna*, or Pathology, shows no acquaintance with the revised version of it made by Dṛḍhabala. At the present day the latter’s share in the redaction of Charaka is practically forgotten in India, and the whole work is there known simply as Charaka’s Compendium (Caraka Saṃhitā). In the present dissertation it will always (unless otherwise specified) be referred to under that name. For all practical purposes it may be understood that Charaka’s Compendium represents Ātreya’s system of medicine, as handed down by his pupil Agniveśa. At all events, this is certain in respect of the passages relating to the bones of the human body. For these passages are contained within that portion of the Compendium which is the production of Charaka himself; and the existence as early as the sixth century B.C., of the osteological system contained in them, is guaranteed by references to it in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, a Vedic work of that age (§ 42).