About this site

This site presents the Carakasaṃhitā, a Sanskrit treatise on medicine, together with Cakrapāṇidatta’s commentary on it, the Āyurvedadīpikā, in IAST (romanized, diacritic) transliteration. It is based on the 1941 printed edition edited by Yādavaśarman Trivikarma Ācārya.

The two texts

The root text and the commentary are the work of different authors, separated by centuries, and the display distinguishes them: the Carakasaṃhitā is set in larger type at the full measure, while Cakrapāṇidatta’s commentary is set smaller and indented behind a rule. The commentary can be hidden entirely with the control at the head of each chapter, leaving the root text to be read continuously.

This division is not editorial guesswork on this site’s part: the NIIMH source marks every word of the text as belonging to one register or the other, and that distinction has been carried through directly. The judgement about where the boundaries fall is NIIMH’s.

Other authorities — Hāraṇacandra among them — are occasionally named, but as citations within Cakrapāṇidatta’s commentary, typically to record a variant reading. They are not separate layers in this text.

The notes at the foot of each chapter (pāṭhāntarāḥ) record variant readings and comments from the source edition.

Structure

The Carakasaṃhitā is organized into eight sthānas (Sūtra, Nidāna, Vimāna, Śārīra, Indriya, Cikitsā, Kalpa, Siddhi). One irregularity worth flagging: in Cikitsāsthāna, the first two chapters — Rasāyana and Vājīkaraṇa — are each divided into four pādas in this e-text (numbered 1/1–1/4 and 2/1–2/4), rather than appearing as single chapters. They are presented here as eight separate pages rather than two, in that numbering.

Acknowledgements

The Sanskrit text was drawn from the NIIMH e-Samhita, a project of the National Institute of Indian Medical Heritage (NIIMH), part of the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS), Government of India. The NIIHM website is extremely well designed and implemented, and users are recommended to use it. The present, simplified presentation of the Sanskrit text is created for long-term archival preservation, stability, and ease of local consultation.

Known limitations

• Only the IAST (diacritical) rendering is included here; the original site also offers Devanagari and several other Indic scripts.
• Only “full chapter” view was captured; the original site’s per-passage (sub-chapter) navigation is not reproduced.
• Verse and chapter divisions follow the source edition, including the Rasāyana/Vājīkaraṇa pāda-numbering noted above.
• If you notice missing or garbled passages, please compare against the original site and open an issue at GitHub.