Textual cruxes

The project is starting to acquire a significant number of copies of manuscripts of the Śuśrutasaṃhitā (SS). Currently (August 2025), we have manuscripts from Bikaner, Calcutta, Cambridge, Chandigarh, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jamnagar, Jodhpur, Kathmandu, Kurukshetra, Lahore, London, Lucknow and Pune. We don’t have all the manuscripts from each of these places, and all the manuscripts are partial. But the archive is growing.

We need to develop techniques for triaging these manuscripts. That is to say, we are aware of a major cleavage in the history of transmission of the SS, between the Nepalese version and the vulgate. So when we look at a new manuscript, we want to have a rapid way of detecting whether it belongs to one or other of these transmissions, or to another transmission that is different from either.

At first, I thought the absence of the “yathovāca bhagavān dhanvantariḥ” phrase would be a marker of the Nepalese version. But this is not the case. Manuscripts without this phrase still have vulgate readings. That suggests that the Dhanvantari phrase was added after the vulgate branch had already separated from the Nepalese transmission. We need to look more deeply.

Therefore we want to develop a series of cruxes, that is to say bold, clear diagnostic differences between the Nepalese and the vulgate transmissions. We want to gather a list of these cruxes covering each sthāna, and perhaps several adhyāyas. This blog post will gather such passages.

List of cruxes

Sūtrasthāna, adhyāyas 45 and 46 have many verses in the vulgate that do not appear in the Nepalese version, and vice versa. Cruxes in other sthānas too are listed below. Some of the more obvious differences are as follow. This is not an exhaustive list of such differences, just some of the longer, very clear cruxes where large numbers of passages differ.