*Note Special Date*
 
The Suśruta Project Group Presentation
https://sushrutaproject.org/
 
Dominik Wujastyk (University of Alberta), Deepro Chakraborty (University of Alberta), Harshal Bhatt (The Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda), Vandana Lele, and other Suśruta Project Group Members TBD
 
The Turco-Afghan invasions of northern India in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries destroyed several monastic libraries in North India and ended a long tradition of Buddhist learning in Bihar and Bengal. However, for geographical reasons, Nepal was spared these depredations and many manuscripts were preserved in temples, monasteries, royal libraries and private homes. The Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (1970-2002) and Cataloguing Project (2002-2014) revealed an extraordinary wealth of previously-unknown early Sanskrit manuscript material preserved in Nepal and made it available to modern scholarship through microfilms and digitization in collaboration with the National Archives in Kathmandu. This has led to a renaissance of historical and cultural scholarship in numerous fields such as Buddhism, puranic studies, Śaiva and tantric studies and now the history of medicine.
 

Manuscript Kathmandu KL 699, discovered by the Nepal-German projects, presents a version of The Compendium of Suśruta (Suśrutasaṃhitā) that is physically dated to 878 CE, just a few hundred years after the work was completed. This work is world-famous for the insights it offers into the practice of medicine in ancient Asia, including detailed chapters on diet, lifestyle and surgery. All the printed editions of this famous work are from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are based on a tiny number of nineteenth-century manuscripts. So KL 699 offers a time-machine that allows us to see what The Compendium of Suśruta looked like a thousand years ago. A Canadian government grant from 2020-2024 enabled a team to study this manuscript and the text it transmits to us today. We are now able to see that the text has changed in major and minor ways over the centuries. This CHSTM session will present a discussion led by project participants exploring our discoveries.

 

Project members:

  • Jan Gerris - Reflections on Suśrutasaṃhitā's chapters on human reproduction.
  • Vitus Angermeier - will join the meeting and participate in the open discussion after presentations.
  • Paras Mehta - ... would like to speak about his immense learning on the project: The deep exposure to Newari script, the use of Digital Humanities tools such as Oxygen and Saktumiva, and the translation of an ancient Ayurvedic text.
  • Harshal Bhatt - "The text and translation of Vātavyādhinidāna based on the Nepalese version of Suśrutasaṃhitā."
  • Dominik Wujastyk - "Toxic Histories: Translating the oldest Poison Treatise in the World"