Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c5.5.2

c5.5.2

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;