Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c6.s1.t19.3

c6.s1.t19.3

2. The text of the statement on the skeleton has not been preserved in a quite perfect condition in any of the three Versions. Several of the corruptions now found in them, e. g. the misplacement of No. 19, palatal cavities (tālūṣaka in §§ 4, 12, or No. 15 in § 16), are of a very ancient date, going back at least to the fourth century A. D., seeing that they appear in the Law-book of Yājñavalkya which belongs to that century (§ 14). Fortunately (as may be seen by comparing § 4 with § 7), with the exception of one, none of these corruptions is of any great importance. Being clerical errors of misplacement or duplication they merely affect the external form of the statement. The single exception which affects the substance of the statement is the error concerning the number of the wrist-bones (maṇika), which is said to be two instead of four (No. 9 in §§ 4, 12). That there existed in the medical manuscripts, in this particular place, a more or less serious corruption of the text from a very early date, is shown by the fact that in the fourth century A. D. Yājñavalkya, in preparing his Law-book, apparently was unable to make anything of the medical text which was available to him, and thus came to omit from his Non-medical Version all mention of the wrist-bones. Nevertheless, as will be shown in § 52, with a little attention to the actual structure of the skeleton, it is easy enough to detect and remedy the error. As has been shown in § 23 (p. 63), the error was detected and corrected by the unknown author of the ‘Anatomy’; and it is one of the merits of Gaṅgādhar’s edition of the Compendium of Charaka, that in his otherwise much misconceived reconstruction of Charaka’s Medical Version (§ 8), he made the number of the wrist-bones to be four.¹