Thank you all — especially Matthew, Michael, Paul, Lyne, and Dagmar — for all your ideas. It looks like saṃśamayet is an Aśvaghoṣa neologism, with a meaning similar to what you all have indicated. It is like the māraṇa by dipping the hot metal in cold water. Possibly Aśvaghoṣa is attempting to connect this to the process of śama or praśama he explains with reference to the meditative process. With thanks and warm good wishes,

Patrick

On Oct 3, 2025, at 2:18 PM, Dagmar Wujastyk <d.wujastyk@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Patrick,

the word for "killing" (or calcination) is usually māraṇa, not jāraṇa. I have not come across sam-śam as a technical term for killing (or quenching) in alchemical literature, and, just looking it up in the Digital Corpus of Sanskrit, it does not seem to occur in the alchemical works listed there. It is also not featured in Hellwig's Dictionary of Alchemy (Woerterbuch der Mittelalterlichen Indischen Alchemie). 

I would understand it as cooling down in your context. Usually, the causative of nir-vāp is used for "quenching". Heating metals and then quenching them is normally done in alchemy to break down the metal so that it can then be powdered (and used in a medicine or elixir). I think what is referenced here is tempering, which is meant to reduce brittleness. It involves reheating the metal to a specific, controlled temperature below its critical temperature and then slowly cooling it. So heating the gold too much and then cooling it down too suddenly would have the effect of making it brittle: a desirable outcome in alchemy and medicine, an undesirable one in metallurgy. So, I think it's a metallurgical reference rather than an alchemical one. 

All the best,

Dagmar

On Thu, 2 Oct 2025 at 16:13, Matthew Kapstein via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

Hi Patrick,

You may wish to look at Roy’s History of Hindu Chemistry on the topic of « killing » gold and other metals, in rasaśāstra.  The verb used is jārayed, but śam caus. can also mean to kill.

Maybe there is more recent work on this as well.

best,

Matthew 

On Thu, Oct 2, 2025 at 19:20, Patrick Olivelle via INDOLOGY <indology@list.indology.info> wrote:

Sorry, Johnston translates: “makes it too soft.”

Patrick


Dear All:

In Aśvaghoṣa’s Saundarananda, we have the following verse:

dahet suvarṇaṁ hi dhamann akāle jale kṣipan saṁśamayed akāle /
na cāpi samyak paripākam enaṁ nayed akāle samupekṣamāṇaḥ // 16.66 //

The problem verb is saṃśamayet. Covill translates: "make it cool down”; and Johnston: “bring it to maturity.” My feeling is that the term has a technical meaning within the metallurgic tradition. Someone suggested “make it brittle”, which is tempting, but I do not know that the Sanskrit term has this meaning. Any help from those of you better versed in ancient Indian metallurgy would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Patrick Olivelle



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