Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c5.s1.27

c5.s1.27

9. *Dṛḍhabala*. In the second place, Dṛḍhabala is anterior to Vāgbhaṭa II. The latter, in one of the concluding verses of his Compendium,² refers to the very insufficient character of the information on the diseases of the eye to be found in Charaka’s Compendium as compared with that given in Suśruta’s Compendium. Seeing that that information is contained in one of Dṛḍhabala’s complementary chapters,³ Vāgbhaṭa’s remark proves that he was acquainted with Dṛḍhabala’s completion of Charaka’s Compendium. Moreover, Vāgbhaṭa II not infrequently revises the versified form in which prose passages had been quoted by Dṛḍhabala from the Summary (*Saṃgraha*) of Vāgbhaṭa I.¹ Lastly, it may be noted that Aruṇadatta, in his commentary on Vāgbhaṭa II’s Compendium, expressly refers to Dṛḍhabala’s edition of the Compendium of Charaka as the source of one of the verses of Vāgbhaṭa II.² This last point is particularly effective. The verse in question occurs in the introductory portion of the nineteenth chapter of Charaka’s Compendium on the Treatment of Chronic Diarrhoea³ (§ 99, cl. 2). In that portion Dṛḍhabala summarizes in versified form the prose account of the subject in the Anatomical Section of the Summary of Vāgbhaṭa I.⁴ That it is really a summary of Vāgbhaṭa I’s account is obvious from the fact that his terms and phrases are as far as possible retained by Dṛḍhabala. Vāgbhaṭa II still further summarizes the summary of Dṛḍhabala; and that his doubly summarized account is really based on the latter, but not on Vāgbhaṭa I, is shown by the fact that it contains none of the terms and phrases of the latter, but retains intact three of the verses (among them the