Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c6.s1.t7.7

c6.s1.t7.7

2. With regard to the term *kūrca*, as used in the recension of Gangādhar, there is a special grammatical difficulty. The clause in question, *dve kūrcādhas*, is very difficult to construe. The only construction grammatically legitimate is to supply *asthīni*, that is, *dve asthīni kūrca-adhas*, or ‘two bones below the *kūrca*’. This, however, yields no intelligible sense. In order to give the sense which Gangādhar wishes to extract from it, the clause should read *dve kūrce adhas*, i. e. ‘two *kūrca* below (*scl.* the long bones)’; and this form of the clause could become *dve kūrcādhas* only through a very anomalous double *sandhi*, or contraction; viz. *kūrce adhas* = *kūrca[y]adhas* = *kūrcādhas*. Even so, the difficulty remains that *kūrca*—a word apparently first used by Suśruta in its anatomical application—is not neuter (*dve kūrce*), but masculine (*dvau kūrcau*); see Suśruta’s Compendium, *Śārīra Sthāna*, chap. vi, clause 29 (Jīv. ed., p. 340). Avināsa Chandra, in his glosses to Gangādhar’s recension which he adopts in his edition of Charaka’s Compendium, apparently takes *kūrcādha* to be a single noun, synonymous with *kūrca*, but there exists no such noun in Sanskrit, and even if it did, the clause should read *dve kūrcādhe*.