Studies in the Medicine of Ancient India, Part I: Osteology, or the Bones of the Human Body c7.s4.t3.13

c7.s4.t3.13

⁹ Conjectural; T has akṣakāṣ-koṣṭāmvāṃkaśayattu sandhe kīlakau; C reads akṣāv-iv-ākṣakau jatru-sandheḥ kīlakau | The reading of C conveys the impression of being a conjectural emendation of a corrupt text, perhaps made by the person who copied C for Dr. P. Cordier. It is clearly not the original reading; for (1) it is so simple and easy that it seems difficult to conceive how a copyist, however ignorant he might be, should transmogrify it into the reading of the Tübingen MS., from which it widely differs; and (2) it involves for the terms jatru and sandhi the meanings ‘collar-bone’ and ‘connecting-link’, which are quite unknown to the older Indian medical science (see § 62). Literally that reading may be translated: ‘The two axle-like akṣaka are the pegs of the clavicular connexion’; i. e. the two clavicles (jatru) which connect (sandhi) the neck with the shoulder are pegs (kīlaka) resembling the axle of a car which connects its wheels with one another, and hence are called ‘little axles’ (akṣaka, diminutive of akṣa). In the older Indian Medicine, jatru means the windpipe or neck, and sandhi denotes an articulation. See my article in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society for 1906, pp. 922 ff.