Interpreting the Image of the Human Body in Premodern India

This paper sets out two main arguments. In part one, a description of the adherents of the various intellectual disciplines and religious faiths in premodern India is given, each having developed distinct and different imagined bodies; for example, the body described in Tantric circles had little or nothing in common with the body described in medical circles. In part two, an account is given of the encounter between Ayurvedic anatomy and early colonial European anatomy which led initially to attempts at synthesis; these gave way to an abandonment of the syncretist vision of the body and the acceptance of an epistemological suspension of judgment, in which radically different body conceptualizations are simultaneously held in unacknowledged cognitive dissonance

Three Versions of Crow Omens

This paper examines three versions of crow omens composed in Sanskrit verses of anuṣṭubh metre from two different sources, one Brahmanic, Gārgīyajyotiṣa, and the other Buddhist, Śārdūlakarṇāvadana. Their similarities in language and content leave little doubt that they had a common source that was probably located in the northwest of the Indian sub-continent sometime around the  beginning of the Common Era

Doṣas by the Numbers : Buddhist Contributions to the Origins of the Tridoṣa-theory in Early Indian Medical Literature with Comparisons to Early Greek Theories of the Humours

This paper explores the origins of the Indian medical nosology involving the three doṣas from the perspective of its formulation into three or four distinct types. The essay compares similarities in passages from three different literary sources: Pāļi texts of early Buddhism, early Sanskrit medical literature, and Greek texts from the Hippocratic Corpus and the Anonymus Londiniensis. The study reveals that the tridoṣa-theory, common to āyurvedic literature from an early time was based on the adoption and then adaption of ideas nourished by an intellectual exchange with the Greek-speaking world

Garga and Early Astral Science in India

This article forms a preliminary report on the work by an international group of scholars on Garga, an important early authority on astral science (jyotiṣa). Reviewing past research on the texts associated with this figure, we focus especially on the earliest text, the Gārgīyajyotiṣa (ca. first century CE?), a compendium of material on astral and terrestrial omens, ritual, horoscopy, and astronomy, that prefigures Varāhamihira's well-known Bṛhatsaṃhitā. The contributions include text-critical observations based on select chapters, remarks on astral omens and their relevance to the possible dating of the text, and a discussion of the text's potential for the study of Hindu ritual. The article also begins to disambiguate the broader Garga corpus by including a chapter summary of a somewhat later Gargasaṃhitā, containing mainly astronomical materials