Gayadāsa's Commentary on Suśruta's Sūtrasthāna in Manuscript Bikaner Anup 4389

The Nyāyacandrikā by Gayadāsa (fl. ca. 1000, Bengal) is one of the important early commentaries on the Suśrutasaṃhitā that has largely been lost in the sands of time. I say “largely” because only a relatively small portion is known to have survived: the commentary on one of Suśruta’s six books, the Nidānasthāna, which was edited and published by Acharya Trivikramji in his 1938 edition of the Suśrutasaṃhitā (Ācārya & Ācārya, 1938).

We know that Gayadāsa’s commentary was important because it was frequently cited by Ḍalhaṇa, a twelfth-century author whose commentary came to define the version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā that was printed and widely disseminated in the twentieth century. Since Ḍalhaṇa often refers to Gayadāsa’s views and records many variant readings known to this earlier commentator, it is clear that Gayadāsa played a significant role in the transmission and interpretation of the Suśrutasaṃhitā.

Given Gayadāsa’s importance to the history of Suśrutasaṃhitā, the existence of several unpublished manuscripts of the Nyāyacandrikā should be a priority for further research on the history of this medical tradition. For this reason, I was delighted to have the opportunity to read and transcribe Gayadāsa’s commentary on the second chapter of Suśruta’s Sūtrasthāna.

My delight soon turned to anguish when I examined the sixteenth century manuscript Bikaner Anup 4389, which is held by the Anup Sanskrit Library in the Lalgarh Palace, Bikaner. The most obvious problem was the frequent lacunae in the text, which the scribe represented with a dash for each syllable that was missing. It appears that the manuscript from which the scribe was copying had already been severely damaged, because several lines of dashes, sometimes numbering up to ten or twelve, appear on every folio. Each lacuna renders sentences, compounds, and words incomplete.

Perhaps even more devastating than the lacunae, however, was the amount of gibberish spread throughout the text. Scholars who work with handwritten manuscripts of texts that have been poorly transmitted expect to encounter mistakes, and if these errors are small, they can usually be corrected so that the text can be understood, if not fully, then at least substantially. For editing purposes, one typically requires two or more manuscripts to correct a range of mistakes with some confidence.

Unfortunately, manuscript Anup 4389 contains mistakes in every sentence, some of which a later hand has attempted to correct. Many letters have been crossed out and replaced with others written in the margin or above the line. These attempted corrections sometimes render the text even more illegible. When combined with the lacunae, the gibberish makes much of the manuscript incomprehensible. The difficulty of reading this manuscript (without another copy for comparison) is particularly evident in passages that correspond to Ḍalhaṇa’s commentary. In such instances, one can be more certain of what Gayadāsa originally wrote and therefore see the manuscript’s gibberish clearly. For example,

In some cases, the manuscript reading is good enough to make sense of the text when read against Ḍalhaṇa’s parallel comment:

In other cases, however, the text is so corrupt that one cannot be certain that the passages are parallel:

I did not record the number of parallel passages between Gayadāsa and Ḍalhaṇa’s commentaries in the section I transcribed (and it would likely be more productive to do so with sections of the Nidānasthāna) but I was left with the impression that at least 20% of Gayadāsa’s commentary was close to Ḍalhaṇa’s. This suggests that Ḍalhaṇa tacitly borrowed material from Gayadāsa, in addition to the passages he explicitly attributed to him. In certain places, Gayadāsa’s commentary is more extensive, and Ḍalhaṇa seems to be summarising it. And in other places, Ḍalhaṇa expands on it.

Although manuscript Anup 4389 is unlikely to ever serve as the sole basis for a critical edition and translation, it may be possible (albeit frustrating) to use it to identify parallels with Ḍalhaṇa. Such parallels may help to elucidate the extent to which this later commentator, whose work may appear largely original, was in fact redacting material from his predecessors.

References

1. श्रीडल्हणाचार्यविरचितया निबन्धसंग्रहाख्यव्याख्यया निदानस्थानस्य श्रीगयदासाचार्यविरचितया न्यायचन्द्रिकाख्यपञ्जिकाव्याख्यया च समुल्लसिता महर्षिणा सुश्रुतेन विरचिता सुश्रुतसंहिता

   Yādavaśarma Trivikrama Ācārya and Nārāyaṇa Rāma Ācārya

   1938

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