Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c5.5.1

c5.5.1

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.