The Toolbox

• Prosopography, Manuscripts, e-Texts
  • Starting points relevant to this project
  • Manuscript discovery and documentation
  • Electronic texts
• Transcription, collating, editing
  • Critical references and resources
  • General interest
• Palaeography
  • Character charts from manuscripts in China
  • Printed reference works
  • Newa script Unicode notes and standards
  • Software tools
• Tools and Methods
  • Manuscript display
  • Manuscript transcription
  • Manuscript collation and critical edition formatting
  • Palaeographical study
  • File transfer
  • Document library and version control
  • Document writing and publishing
  • Project management
  • Tools not currently selected
• Plant databases

Prosopography, Manuscripts, e-Texts

The PanditProject is a leading prosopographical resource in classical Indian studies. as its method of recording and referrring to information about South Asian intellectual history. The project is headed by Professor Yigal Bronner at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. PanditProject records biographical information about persons, their works and the manuscripts that transmit those works in a network of linked relationships. The PanditProject has been adopted as the principle prosopographical and literary reference resource for the Sushruta Project.

Starting points relevant to this project

Suśrutasaṃhitā
A list of all known manuscripts of the work (still growing). Also, links to information about the earliest commentaries on the work.

The Suśrutapāṭhaśuddhi of Candraṭa
A little-explored early work of textual criticism focussed on the Suśruta text that may have strongly influenced the post-Nepalese transmission.

A possible manuscript of the lost commentary by Jejjaṭa
Jejjaṭa is known for his early commentary on the Carakasaṃhitā, parts of which have survived in south India. It is less well known that he may have authored a commentary on the Suśrutasaṃhitā, although this may be almost completely lost. It was reported by D. C. Bhattacharya (1947) that the edition of the Aṣṭāṅgasaṃgraha by Rudrapāraśara contained citations from this commentary [note]. Recent information has cast more doubt on the survival of this commentary (2021, Madhu K. Paramesvaran, personal communication). However, the 1944 catalogue of the Anup Sanskrit library (p.337) records that this manuscript contains an Uttaratantra.” Since only the Suśrutasaṃhitā has such a section, the identity of the text in this manuscript may indeed be a commentary on the Suśrutasaṃhitā. The issue cannot be settled without inspection of the manuscript. Unfortunately, the owners of the Anup library do not allow manuscripts to be studied by scholars.

The Nyāyacandrikā of Gayadāsa, an important and very early commentary (including a previously unknown MS in Bikaner)

Manuscript discovery and documentation

• The Nepal-German Manuscript Preservation Project (1970-2002; the “NGMPP”; historical sketch by Ehrhard (1991)).
• The Nepal-German Manuscript Cataloguing Project (2002-2014; the “NGMCP”).
• The digital New Catalogus Catalogorum, a survey of works and authors in the Sanskrit and Prakrit languages. Begun at the University of Madras in 1949 by Prof. V. Raghavan and currently nearing completion in 42 published volumes under the direction of Prof. Siniruddha Dash. Now available both in print and digitally.
• Philosophy and Medicine in Early Classical India (the Vienna “Caraka Project”).
• National Institute of Indian Medical Heritage, “AYUSH Manuscripts Advanced Repository” (AMAR, launched in 2021.)

Electronic texts

• Searchable etext of the Suśrutasaṃhitā with Ḍalhaṇa’s commentary at the National Institute of Indian Medical Heritage, Hyderabad;
• Searchable etext of the Carakasaṃhitā with Cakrapāṇi’s commentary at the NIIMH;
• Searchable etext of several Nighaṇṭus at the NIIMH;
• Searchable etext of the Mādhavanidāna at the NIIMH;
• eGranthaSamuccaya at the NIIMH (includes the above etexts and several others);
• Searchable etext of the Aṣṭāṅgahṛdayasaṃhitā with Aruṇadatta’s commentary at I-AIM (FRLHT);
• Searchable etext of the Aṣṭāṅgasaṅgraha with Indu’s commentary at I-AIM (FRLHT).

Transcription, collating, editing

The following are the main sources that have informed our theoretical stance towards the tasks of this project.

Critical references and resources

• Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions, Modern Languages Association (2011). Includes an important annotated bibliography on digital methods in textual criticism.
• MLA Statement on the Scholarly Edition in the Digital Age (2016)
  The above two sources locate the present project in the history and theory of digital scholarly editions as they have evolved since the 1980s.
• The Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines on the transcription of primary sources
  A critical adjunct to the above MLA sources, since the present digital edition rests on the transcription of manuscripts using the TEI guidelines. (A gentle introduction for Sanskritists.)
• SARIT Encoding Guidelines for the TEI encoding of Sanskrit texts by Liudmila Olalde, Andrew Ollett, and Patrick McAllister (short version). (Full version.)
• Reconstructing a Sanskrit text by Charles Li.
  Documentation of the alignment, collation and stemmatic methods in Saktumiva.

General interest

• The WP page on Textual Criticism (2020-10-09).
• The Leiden Conventions.
• Parvum Lexicon Stemmatologicum. A Brief Lexicon of Stemmatology by Philipp Roelli and Caroline Macé.
• The European Society for Textual Scholarship.
• The Digital Orientalist (Indian section edited by Adrian Plau).
• DHARMA Encoding Guide for Diplomatic Editions by Dániel Balogh and Arlo Griffiths.
  Covers some of the same ground as the SARIT Encoding Guidelines above. Extremely detailed and aimed more at epigraphical sources than manuscripts.

Palaeography

The following directly-accessible resources supplement the better-known print materials by Bühler, Dani and others.

Character charts from manuscripts in China

• Akṣara List of the Manuscripts of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā and Buddhapālita’s Commentary (ca. 550-650 CE, Collection of Sanskrit Mss. Formerly Preserved in the China Ethnic Library)
• Akṣara List of the Manuscript of the Saddharmapuṇḍarīkasūtra (1082 CE, Collection of Sanskrit Mss. Formerly Preserved in the China Ethnic Library).
• Further akṣara-charts from the China Ethnic Library.

Printed reference works

• Cecil Bendall’s chart of Nepalese letter-numerals from manuscripts of the ninth century upwards.
• Cecil Bendall’s chart of Nepalese letters from manuscripts of the ninth century upwards.
• Cecil Bendall’s Palaeographical Introduction
• Bidur Bhattarai, Dividing Texts: Conventions of Visual Text-Organisation in Nepalese and North Indian Manuscripts (De Gruyter, 2020). Open access.
• Einicke, Katrin. 2014. Korrektur, Differenzierung und Abkürzung in indischen Inschriften und Handschriften. Harrassowitz Verlag. http://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=1691626.

Newa script Unicode notes and standards

• Unicode Consortium. 2020. The Unicode Standard 13.0, NewaRange: 11400–1147F. https://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U11400.pdf.

• Pandey, Anshuman. 2012. Proposal to Encode the Newar Script in ISO/IEC 10646. ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 N4184L2/12-003R2012-02-29. Michigan, USA. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2012/12003r-newar.pdf. A particularly useful document with manuscript illustrations and discussion of paratextual elements like puṣpikās and siddhir astu symbols.

Software tools

• Indoskript, an online a paleographic database of Brahmi and Kharosthi – derived scripts.
• Quick Palaeographer, by Charles Li, is an aid while learning the palaeography of a new manuscript. This enables one rapidly to build up an indexed and clickable repertoire of letter-forms from a manscrupt image.

Tools and Methods

In selecting a software environment, this project has adopted the Unix philosophy. While interesting debates surround this concept, what it means for the Sushruta Project is that we have adopted simple, short, clear, modular, and extensible tools wherever possible, with a predilection for open-access software. Conversely, we have preferred not to use large “workbench” programs or “integrated development environments” (IDE) that aim to create a total work environment for all aspects of editorial work. This policy has enabled us to select best-of-class tools for each of the separate tasks we undertake, from manuscript transcription to collation, communication, document creation, version control, project management and web publication. We are also free from a dependence on a single source of program maintenance. If one of our tools no longer meets our need, we can swap out just that component of the workflow for an alternative. It also allows project members some flexibility in choosing how they wish to work. The downside of this choice is that the working environment has several components, and that someone in the project must maintain a certain level of software expertise to get all the parts to work together and to move data between the different programs. The existence of standards such as Unicode and the TEI are critical in making this work smoothly.

Other influences on the management of the Suśruta Project include the SCRUM principles and The Agile Manifesto principles.

The following software tools are currently in use.

Manuscript display

Whatever is provided with your operating system, or the photo display facilities in Dropbox or Nextcloud. Or Quick Palaeographer (see below).

Manuscript transcription

This project uses oXygen XML editor. Alternatives we have evaluated include emacs, jedit, xmlcopyeditor, FairCopy (now free), etc. But oXygen consistently offers better stability, TEI support, online help and validation. oXygen is a commercial product, but academic licenses are relatively inexpensive. The Github-integrated Visual Studio Code has TEI plugins and shows promise as a free alternative to oXygen, as does LEAF.

Manuscript collation and critical edition formatting

SAKTUMIVA by Charles Li. A platform for producing and publishing critical editions of Sanskrit texts. For documentation, see “Reconstructing a Sanskrit text“: documentation of the alignment, collation and stemmatic methods in Saktumiva. For further discussion of the methodology behind Saktumiva, see Li 2017: 305-310 and Li 2018, ch.4.

Palaeographical study

Quick Palaeographer by Charles Li. A browser-based tool for reading MS images and developing a catalogue of character shapes.

File transfer

Filezilla for document transfer to Saktumiva.

Document library and version control

Github provides our system for document sharing, collaborative editing, security, archiving and versioning. It is open to the public. Github Desktop provides a convenient desktop graphical interface for Github (also available for Linux).

Document writing and publishing

LaTeX for document preparation. Team members variously also use their favourite writing tools, including LibreOffice, Geany, Typora, <whisper>Sometimes even vi.</whisper>. Pandoc is used to convert documents if necessary. (The more I use Typora the more I like it :-).

Regarding the style and content of the project documenation, some of the concepts developed in the Diatáxis project will guide our writing.

Project management

Qdpm for project management.

Tools not currently selected

A number of tools and systems have been evaluated but not adopted for the present work-cycles.

Plant databases

The discussion on “Flora and Fauna of India” at INDOLOGY (May 2021) led to the mention of several useful resources for identifying plants in early Indian literature. (It has long been inadequate to cite Monier-Williams.) Some of these resources have been in print for many years, others are more recent. But the links below make the search for identifications somewhat more convenient.

• Meulenbeld Sanskrit Names of Plants
• eNighaṇṭu from AYUSH
• Pandanus database

A useful key to resources for modern binomial plant names and taxonomies (that are subject to change and revision):

• World Flora Online (formerly http://www.theplantlist.org/)
• International Plant Names Index
• Annotated Checklist of the Flowering Plants of Nepal
• The Biodiversity Heritage Library is an extraordinarily rich collection of indexed and scanned botanical research books from the fifteenth century onwards. See, for example, this beautiful illustration from the Hortus Malabaricus, vol. 1 (Amsterdam, 1678).