Could someone point me to any treatment of the question of why the Caraka Saṃhitā has come down to us with that particular sequence of chapters? E.g., why is the philosophical disquisition of the tisraiṣaṇīya chapter, the eleventh of the thirty chapters of the Sūtrasthāna, between one on the categorisation of diseases and one on vāta? Of course, the simplest way to respond to this is to think that compendia do not always obey the rules of sequence that other texts may have, and that individual chapters can be accessed as and when required. Is that in fact the most sensible way of dealing with the location of chapters? Or has anyone discussed any possible justification for seeing an architectonic in the text?

Thank you.

Ram

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad

Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy

Lancaster University