The Compendium of Suśruta (सुश्रुतसंहिता) is a treatise on classical Indian medicine written in Sanskrit about two thousand years ago. It is one of the foundations of Ayurveda, the traditional medicine of South Asia.

Today, The Compendium of Suśruta is normally studied through printed editions from the twentieth century that were in turn based on about a dozen ninenteenth-century manuscripts. These printed editions are full of errors and difficulties.

In January 2007, the Nepal-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project announced the discovery of an ancient palm-leaf manuscript of The Compendium that is reliably datable to 878 CE, MS Kathmandu KL 699. The manuscript is part of the Kathmandu library of Kesar Shamsher Jang Bahadur Rana (1892–1964), a former Prime Minister of Nepal, and has been added by UNESCO to the “Memory of the World” register.

This manuscript pushes our physical evidence for The Compendium back by a millennium. Study of this thousand-year-old manuscript reveals a much earlier stage of the work’s textual development. This evidence, together with that of two closely-related early manuscripts in the Nepalese National Archives, places our historical understanding of this Asian medical classic on a new foundation.

The above image on this website is from MS Kathmandu KL 699.

Project completion

With the completion of this project in 2024, a complete digital diplomatic transcription of KL 699 has been published along with other project publications (see Project Outputs).

At the time of writing, in 2025, the evolving critical edition of the Nepalese version of the Suśrutasaṃhitā is available at the Saktumiva website area for the Suśrutasaṃhitā. (A backup server is also available for the foreseeable future.) Steps are being taken to transfer the critical edition to Saktumiva 2.0, which will be hosted at Github.

Archiving and long-term preservation

The original project website, sushrutaproject.org, has been archived at Archive-it.org and at the WayBackMachine. There is a copy of the website on a free hosting service, at https://sushrutaproject.gt.tc whose longevity is unknown. More importantly, the content of that original website has been transferred to this website at Github for long term access and preservation.

Successor project

The SSHRC has generously funded a successor project to The Suśruta Project, called “Mapping a Medical Tradition: The Compendium of Suśruta in Time and Space.” You can connect with the new project at https://sushrutaproject2.github.io.