2 956 900 vessels/k.sutila/ku.duba

[Harunaga Isaacson]

Quoting Christophe Vielle <vielle at ORI.UCL.AC.BE>:

> - the JaiSa says that when the embryo is going out of the uterus, he has
> "the form of a k.sutila"
> ni.hsaare k.sutilaakaaro vaasanocchvaasamaatraka.h /
> what is this k.sutila (given by all the manuscripts)??

With the proviso that I have hardly read literature of this type (I'd like to
see a little more of the text), I'm willing anyway to suggest, since I have
seen no responses yet from knowledgeable people, that you may not be dividing
the words correctly. k.sutila would indeed be a strange word (for which
you, I suppose from your query, found no parallel); and the locative ni.hsaare
that your word-division seems to yield is also strange to me (though, again,
I'd want to see more of the context; this is clearly not the complete
sentence). But the first paada can be read as one compound of perfectly common
Sanskrit words: ni.hsaara+ik.su+tila+aakaaras. And this is interpretable (tila
presumably being used not in the sense of 'sesame-seed' but of 'a small
particle (roughly the size of a sesame-seed)'), and seems much more likely to
be correct than the word-division you have assumed (if you have considered this
possibility and rejected it in favour of the other I wonder why).

> - the JaiSa in its measurement of each substance of the body (a passage
> quite original in comparison with other sources) uses the term ku.duba :
> instead of the more classical ku.dava? (a dialectal/dravidian variant?)

ku.duba is recorded as a variant orthography for ku.dava in Apte's dictionary.
Apte gives no references to texts, but ku.duba (as a kind of measure) occurs I
believe in the Artha"saastra (I do not have Kangle's edition with me as I
write, so am forced to rely on the e-text input and generously made publicly
available by Prof. Tokunaga). Of course one should bear in mind that b and v
are homograph in many Indian (manu)scripts, though by no means all, and
that 'doublets' with them are often found; keep your eye out for ku.duva too,
therefore; and since ku.dapa seems to be attested as yet another orthography
(at least in Monier-Williams), ku.dupa, which seems to be recorded in MW and
Apte only in another sense, might conceivaby also occur as a spelling of your
word. I shall not speculate on dialectical/Dravidian influences/sources (I have
not so much as Mayrhofer's etymological dictionary at hand, let alone anything
on dravidian).

Harunaga Isaacson

--
Harunaga Isaacson
South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
820 Williams Hall
36th and Spruce Streets
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
USA
tel. +1 215 898 6047