About this site

This site presents the Suśrutasaṃhitā, a Sanskrit treatise on medicine and surgery, together with Ḍalhaṇa’s commentary on it, the Nibandhasaṅgraha, in IAST (romanized, diacritic) transliteration.

The text is based on the 1938 printed edition and thus, in the terminology of the Suśruta Project, it represents the “vulgate” version of the text.

The two texts

The root text and the commentary are the work of different authors, separated by many centuries, and the display distinguishes them: the Suśrutasaṃhitā is set in larger type at the full measure, while Ḍalhaṇa’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 commentators — Cakrapāṇidatta, Gayadāsa, Bhāskara, Hāraṇacandra — are frequently named, but as citations within Ḍalhaṇa’s commentary. Their own commentaries 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.

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.
• If you notice missing or garbled passages, please compare against the original site and open an issue at GitHub.