Project summary

The Compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā) is a world classic of ancient medicine, comparable in age and importance to the Greek Hippocratic Corpus and the Chinese Huangdi Neijing. It is a substantial treatise of 186 chapters, written in the Sanskrit language, that presents a systematic, scholarly form of medicine for diagnosing and treating the many ailments that patients presented in South Asia two thousand years ago. It is one of the founding treatises of Ayurveda, “The Knowledge of Life”, the indigenous medical system of South Asia, and it still informs indigenous medical practice in India and Ayurvedic complementary and alternative medical practice internationally. The Compendium is perhaps most famous amongst historians of medicine for its passages describing remarkable forms of surgery some of which were witnessed by British surgeons in India in the eighteenth century and subsequently formed the basis of certain types of facial reconstruction as practised even today.

The Compendium of Suśruta has a complicated and flawed history of transmission and scribal corruption. The poor state of the text creates challenges not only for the historian of medicine but also for patients who are still treated by Ayurvedic doctors today who use The Compendium as a living medical textbook.

A stunning discovery in 2007 brought a new excitement and opportunities to the subject. The Nepal-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project at Hamburg University announced the discovery in the Kathmandu library of Kaiser Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1892–1964), a former Prime Minister of Nepal, of a palm-leaf manuscript of The Compendium of Suśruta that is reliably datable to 878 CE. UNESCO has added this manuscript to the “Memory of the World” register. This manuscript pushes our physical evidence for the treatise back by a millennium. Detailed study of this thousand-year-old manuscript during The Suśruta Project (2020-2024) revealed a much earlier stage of the work’s textual development and has placed our historical understanding of this Asian medical classic on a new foundation.

This recent research has also revealed that at some time after the ninth century, an aggressive campaign of editorial revision was applied to The Compendium, pervasively altering the text and generating the vulgate version that we know from printed editions today. The present project will undertake detailed work based on much wider manuscript evidence in order to map the textual evolution of this Classic in time and across the local regions of South and SE Asia using traditional historical and philological methods coupled with the methods of digital humanities. The latter methods will allow fine control over the expected large volume of differential data between the manuscripts, and enable the generation of historical trees of relationship. The project will also transcribe and edit previously unstudied medieval commentaries on The Compendium including the surviving fragments of commentaries by Jejjaṭa (fl. ca. 800), Candraṭa (fl. ca. 900), and Gayadāsa (fl. ca. 1000). A strong hypothesis is that Candraṭa in particular was a key contributor to the rewriting of The Compendium, but this needs to be tested through detailed study. None of these commentaries has previously been published or studied.

The goal is to develop a fresh understanding of ancient South Asian medicine based on the new evidence. We will be especially focussed on highlighting the textual and doctrinal differences between The Compendium as it existed in 878 CE and the later vulgate version. Project outcomes will include critical editions and translations of the main text and its commentaries, studies of the transmission of scientific ideas within South Asia as well as to China and South East Asia, and outreach to contemporary consumers of indigenous medicine.