The Suśruta Project 2 - First Half-Year Report 2026 | The Compendium of Suśruta in Time and Space

January–June 2026

Compiled from the project blog at sushrutaproject2.github.io/blog.

Overview

“The Compendium of Suśruta in Time and Space: Mapping a Medical Tradition,” the SSHRC-funded successor to the original Suśruta Project, is now a year into its five-year term (2025–2029). The first half of 2026 was dominated by one connected strand of philological work: the recovery of Gayadāsa’s lost eleventh-century commentary on the Suśrutasaṃhitā, the Nyāyacandrikā, from its scattered and often damaged manuscript remains. Alongside this, the project identified new textual layers within the Suśrutasaṃhitā itself, published a collaborative edition with an outside scholar, put the standard 1938 printed edition online in a form linked to manuscript images, and opened a new institutional collaboration in India.

Reconstructing Gayadāsa’s lost commentary

Three posts this half-year form a single line of inquiry into Gayadāsa, a commentator active around 1000 CE in Bengal whose Nyāyacandrikā is, in the project’s words, “the oldest commentary for which we have any surviving manuscripts” on the Suśrutasaṃhitā — yet one that survives only in scattered fragments. An April post (“The Nyāyacandrikā of Gayadāsa and its Manuscripts”) maps what remains: a single witness for the Sūtrasthāna portion (MS Bikaner Anup 4389), Nidānasthāna material in Bikaner Anup 4390 plus two manuscripts in France, and Śārīrasthāna and Kalpasthāna sections preserved respectively in a Jaipur and a Bikaner manuscript both commissioned in 1468 CE. Of all this, only the Nidānasthāna commentary has ever been published, in 1938.

Two earlier posts work directly with this material. A February post on MS Bikaner Anup 4389 (Gayadāsa on Sūtrasthāna chapter 2) describes a manuscript in poor condition — frequent lacunae marked syllable-by-syllable with dashes, corruption in nearly every sentence, and heavy marginal correction — and reports a finding, credited to Jason Birch, that roughly 20% of Gayadāsa’s commentary parallels that of the later commentator Ḍalhaṇa (12th century), suggesting Ḍalhaṇa drew on Gayadāsa well beyond his explicit citations. A companion February post on MS Cambridge UL Add.2491 pursues one specific borrowing: Gayadāsa’s gloss on the Saṃhitā’s opening claim that Suśruta’s teaching was “as Dhanvantari declared.” Gayadāsa calls this a pratisaṃskartṛ-sūtram, “a statement of the reviser/editor” — a reading, again attributed to Jason Birch’s analysis, that Ḍalhaṇa appears to have absorbed into his own fourfold classification of textual statement-types, going on to identify the reviser as Nāgārjuna on grammatical grounds (the perfect-tense verb uvāca, “spoke,” conventionally marking an unwitnessed past event in Sanskrit). Taken together, these posts argue that Gayadāsa’s thought, though nearly lost, is partly recoverable at one remove through Ḍalhaṇa’s later borrowings, and that his testimony bears directly on the Suśrutasaṃhitā’s editorial history.

New textual layers in the Suśrutasaṃhitā

Two posts identify material that distinguishes the Nepalese manuscript tradition (the project’s primary witnesses) from the printed vulgate. An April post on oneiromancy (dream interpretation) in Sūtrasthāna 29 reports ten verses — numbered 1.29.71.add1–add10 in the digital edition — that appear in all three Nepalese witnesses immediately after verse 71 but are absent from the vulgate anywhere in the text; no parallel for them has yet been found elsewhere in Sanskrit literature. One of the ten (add2) refers to Dhanvantari in a role the post notes differs markedly from his role in the vulgate, adding a further data point to the Dhanvantari question raised in the Gayadāsa posts above. A June post (“The external opinions cited by the Suśrutasaṃhitā,” on the formula ity eke, “some say,” typically rebutted with tat tu na samyak, “but that is not correct”) argues in the other direction: these attributed-but-anonymous rebuttals appear inconsistently across manuscripts, turning up in the vulgate but often not in the older Nepalese copies, which the post reads as evidence of later editorial interpolation rather than original argument with contemporary rivals. Both posts treat manuscript disagreement as itself the evidence for the text’s layered history, rather than a problem to be edited away.

Infrastructure and dissemination

A June post announced that the 1938 printed (vulgate) edition of the Suśrutasaṃhitā is now available online section by section, with each portion of the mūla (base text, commentary excluded) linked to IIIF facsimile images of the original printed pages — extending to the standard edition the same image-linking already completed for the manuscript witnesses in 2025.

In January, the project reported a publication arising from its collaborations: Lisa A. Brooks’s article on leech therapy in the Suśrutasaṃhitā, in History of Science in South Asia, which edits and translates a “Nepalese version” of the leech chapter — drawing on the three Nepalese manuscripts, including the 878 CE palm-leaf witness — against the vulgate text with Ḍalhaṇa’s commentary, tracing roughly two millennia of medical engagement with leeches.

New collaboration

In February the project held a virtual meeting with the research group of Prof. Maneesh Singhal at AIIMS (All India Institute of Medical Sciences), which brings together surgeons, biotechnologists, and Ayurvedic physicians and is developing a government-funded museum of Suśruta-related surgical history, including reconstructed instruments. The two groups agreed to combine manuscript-based philology (Wujastyk’s team) with medical, surgical, and phytochemical expertise (Singhal’s team), with further meetings planned.

Looking ahead

Two posts published just after this period, in mid-July 2026, indicate where the work is heading next: one directly addresses the dating of the Suśrutasaṃhitā, and another documents the project’s early experiments using Claude as a research aid — both natural next chapters after a half-year spent recovering lost commentary and mapping textual strata.

The Suśruta Project 2 - First Half-Year Report 2026