Kandara Sharira in Bhavaprakasha Purva Khanda: Sixteen Great Cords, Seven Sevanis, and the One Structure the Text Refused to Count

इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ें: कंदरा शरीर — भावप्रकाश में सोलह कंदराएँ और नौ रचनाएँ

📖 23 min read · Classical text study · Bhavaprakasha, Purva Khanda

Kandara Sharira: The Sixteen Great Cords

Kandara sharira is the classical Sanskrit heading for the study of the kandaras, and the plainest English for a kandara is a great cord or tendon. The Bhavaprakasha opens the topic in its Purva Khanda with a definition that wastes nothing: mahatyah snayavah proktah kandaras tas tu shodasha. The great snayus are called kandaras; and they are shodasha — sixteen.

That single line does two jobs at once, and both are worth slowing down for. The first is taxonomic. A kandara is not a new substance; it is a snayu of a particular size. The text has already counted the snayus at nine hundred, and it now reaches back into that population and lifts out the largest members as a named sub-class. Nothing new has been introduced into the body. A category has been drawn around something already there.

The second job is the number. Sixteen is not asserted and left hanging; the next line spends itself entirely on where the sixteen are: chatasro hastayos tasam tavantyah padayoh smritah, grivayam api tavantyah tavantyah prishtha-sangatah. Four in the hands. As many in the feet. As many again in the griva, the neck. And as many joined to the prishtha, the back. Four, four, four, four.

It is worth registering how unglamorous this is, and how much that is the point. There is no claim here about what the kandaras can be made to do, no procedure attached, no promise — only a class, a count and a distribution. The Bhavaprakasha is fixing vocabulary so that later chapters have something stable to refer to.

The same sixteen kandaras appear in the Sushruta Samhita, in the great enumeration of Sharira Sthana 5, where they sit in a list beside the bones, the joints, the peshis and the siras. We have walked that Sushruta enumeration in full in our study of the Sharira Sankhya and the classical count of the body, where the kandaras appear as a single row in a very long table. What the Bhavaprakasha does here is slow that row down and give it its own paragraph — and then do the same for eight further classes that the summary tables usually compress into one line each.

Prasarana and Akunchana: The Purpose the Text Gives Them

Between the definition and the distribution the Bhavaprakasha inserts a clause that is easy to read past and should not be: prasarana-akunchanayoh drishtam tasam prayojanam. In extension and in flexion, their prayojana — their purpose, their use — is drishtam, seen.

Three things are packed into that half-line.

The first is that the text gives a function at all. Much classical enumeration is content to name and count. Here the author stops to say what the class is for, and the answer is mechanical rather than metaphysical: these cords are the reason a limb straightens and the reason it folds. Prasarana is stretching out; akunchana is drawing in. Between them they cover most of what a limb visibly does.

The second is the choice of drishtam — seen, observed, evident. Classical Sanskrit has a well-worn vocabulary for asserting things on authority, and this is not it. Drishtam claims the humblest warrant available: you can watch this happen.

The third is what the pairing explains about the distribution. Once you know the prayojana is extension and flexion, four-in-the-hands and four-in-the-feet stops looking arbitrary. The places that bend most get the great cords. The neck bends; the back bends. The four sites named are, near enough, the four regions of the body whose folding and unfolding is most obvious to an observer standing outside it. The count was derived from watching, then written down.

Nakha as Praroha: Nails as the Sprouts of the Kandaras

The commentary then adds a sentence that stops most readers: tatra pada-hasta-gatanam kandaranam nakhah prarohah. Of the kandaras that go to the feet and the hands, the nakhas — the nails — are the prarohah, the sprouts.

Praroha is a botanical word. It is what a seed does, what a shoot does at the end of a stem, what a banyan sends down. The Bhavaprakasha is not saying that nails are attached to the great cords, or that they sit near them. It is saying that a nail is what a kandara turns into when it reaches the end of its run — the hard terminal outgrowth of a soft continuous structure, in the way a shoot is the terminal outgrowth of a stem.

Soft fibre hardening into a fixed tip. Nakhah prarohah — the nails are called the sprouts of the great cords.

Two things are worth saying about this, and the second is more interesting than the first.

The first is that as an observation about continuity it is not unreasonable. Someone who had opened a hand and followed the great cords out toward the digits, and who had no way of distinguishing one dense pale fibrous material from another, might very well conclude that the cord did not stop but hardened. The Hindi bhasha commentary on the page keeps the same reading and does not soften it.

The second is that the Bhavaprakasha says something quite different about nails elsewhere in the same Purva Khanda. In the Dhatu Prakarana, nails are asthi-mala — among the leavings of the bone tissue, carried by Vyana Vayu along the sira roads to the fingers, where they become nakha and loma. We walked that scheme in detail in our study of dhatu mala and ojas in the Dhatu Prakarana. A nail cannot straightforwardly be both the sprout of a great cord and the residue of bone.

The line continues past the nails, taking in the medhra and the nitamba region, but it is the nail clause that carries the observation. It is the only place in this passage where the text says what a structure becomes, rather than where it is and how many there are.

Jala: Sixteen Networks of Sira, Snayu, Mamsa and Asthi

The next heading in the Purva Khanda is atha jalani — now, the jalas. A jala is a net.

The text describes them as nirantara, continuous or unbroken, and karkasha, rough or hard to the touch, and then gives the count in a line whose structure is itself the explanation: tani chatvari chatvari sarvani eva cha shodasha. They are four and four, and altogether sixteen.

Four and four is not a stutter. The bhasha commentary spells out what is being doubled: the jalas arise from sira, from snayu, from mamsa and from asthi — vessels, sinews, flesh and bone. There are four of each kind. Four kinds at four apiece is sixteen.

Jala, a net. Sixteen of them, four each from sira, snayu, mamsa and asthi.

Where are they? The commentary places them at the manibandha and the gulpha — the wrist and the ankle. And it describes their construction with a word the Bhavaprakasha likes: gavakshita, latticed, made like a gavaksha. A gavaksha is the pierced stone or wooden window of Indian architecture, an opening filled with a continuous perforated screen rather than left empty. The text glosses its own image as nirantara jalakara randhra nikara — an unbroken lattice-shaped mass of apertures.

So a jala, in this account, is a dense interlaced mesh at a place where a great many structures cross in a small space. Anyone who has looked at the back of a wrist or the front of an ankle will recognise what is being described, and will also recognise why the classical author reached for the window rather than for a technical term. There was no technical term. There was a lattice everybody had seen.

The same image recurs in this text's account of the dhamanis spreading from the nabhi, covered in our study of snayu sharira and the nine hundred snayus. When a classical text repeats a simile, it is usually because it did the work the first time.

Kurcha: Six Bundles, Named After a Brush

Atha kurchah. A kurcha, in ordinary Sanskrit, is a bundle or a tuft — a bunch of grass tied at one end, a painter's brush, a knot of bristles. It is one of those classical anatomical names that tells you what the thing looks like before it tells you anything else.

The count and the distribution arrive in one verse: kurchah syur hastayor dvau tu tavantau padayor api, grivayam eka ekas tu medhre sarve api shat smritah. Two in the hands. As many in the feet. One in the griva. One at the medhra. All told, shat — six.

Kurcha is an ordinary word for a tuft or a brush. The text counts six, and names each site.

The verse is followed by a line that recurs like a refrain through this whole passage: kurchah api sira-snayu-mamsa-asthi-prabhavah smritah — the kurchas too are remembered as arising from sira, snayu, mamsa and asthi. The same four sources were given for the jalas a few lines earlier.

This repetition is the quiet organising idea of the section, and it is worth naming plainly. The Bhavaprakasha is not proposing nine separate exotic tissues. It is proposing that a small number of basic materials — vessel, sinew, flesh, bone — get assembled into a small number of recognisable arrangements, and that each arrangement deserves its own name and its own count. A net is one arrangement. A bundle is another. A rope is a third. The materials do not change; the geometry does.

One caution for readers who have met the word elsewhere. Kurcha is also the name of a marma — four of them, in the classical marma lists, sited in the hands and feet. That is a different use of the same word: there, kurcha names a vital point; here, it names a structural class. We cover the marma sense separately in our study of marma sharira and the hundred and seven vital points. Classical Sanskrit reuses a good descriptive word wherever the shape fits, and a bundle is a bundle in both places.

Rajju: Four Flesh-Ropes Beside the Prishtha-Vamsha

Atha rajjavah. A rajju is a rope, and this is the shortest entry in the passage: prishtha-vamshasya ubhayatah mahatyo mamsa-rajjavah, chatasro mamsa-peshinam bandhanam tat prayojanam.

On both sides — ubhayatah — of the prishtha-vamsha, the spinal column, are great ropes of flesh. There are four. Their prayojana is the binding of the mamsa-peshis, the flesh-muscles.

Rajju, a rope. Four of them, two to each side of the prishtha-vamsha.

Four items, one location, one stated purpose, and the entry is over. But look at what the sentence assumes. It assumes the reader already knows what a peshi is and that there are a great many of them; the Bhavaprakasha counts them in its own place, and we walked that count in our study of mamsa, peshi, meda and asthi in the Dhatu Prakarana. It assumes the reader knows the prishtha-vamsha runs the length of the back. And it assumes that “binding” is a sufficient functional account.

The word choice repays attention once more. A rajju is a rope, not a cord and not a net; ropes are what you use when the load runs along one line and needs holding. A net for the wrist, a bundle for the palm, a rope for the long mass of the back — three everyday objects, each chosen because its geometry matched what was found there. This is a naming system built by people who worked with their hands.

Sevani: The Seven Seams

Atha sevanyah. Sevani comes from the root that gives Sanskrit its words for sewing, and it means a seam or a stitched join — the line where two pieces have been sewn together.

The verse is compact: sevanyah sapta … bhaveyuh pancha mastake, eka shephasi jihvayam eka. There are seven sevanis. Five are in the mastaka, the head. One is at the shepha. One is in the jihva, the tongue.

Sevani means a seam. Five in the mastaka, one at the shepha, one in the jihva.

Five seams in the head is an observation anyone who has handled a skull would make and nobody who had not could invent: the bones of the vault meet along visibly serrated lines that look, unmistakably, sewn. The Sanskrit name for the join is the ordinary word for a seam — and so is the Latin one anatomy still uses. Two traditions with no contact reached for the same tailoring metaphor.

The verse then adds a clause of a different kind: viddhi hanta kvachit — piercing them is, in some cases, fatal. The bhasha commentary keeps it: inke bedh se kabhi mrityu ho jata hai.

What the clause tells us about the text is that the structural sections and the operative sections of classical Ayurveda were written with each other in view. A list of seams is also, silently, a list of places to be careful. The Sushruta Samhita devotes a whole chapter of its Sharira Sthana to exactly that kind of care, and we have walked it in our study of sira vyadha vidhi and the twenty faulty punctures, where roughly the first third of the chapter is a list of the people it must not be done to.

Sanghata and Simanta: Fourteen Junctions, Fourteen Partings

The last two classes before the passage turns come as a pair, and they are best read together because the second is defined by the first.

Atha sanghatah. A sanghata is a joining, an assemblage, a place where things are packed together. The text gives chaturdasha asthnam sanghatah — fourteen assemblages of bones — and then distributes them: trayo gulpha-janu-vankshaneshu, three at the gulpha, the janu and the vankshana; the same again for the other leg, and the same account for each of the two arms; and then trikam shirasi ekaikam, one each at the trika and at the shiras.

Then: chaturdasha eva cha simantah kathita muni-pungavaih — fourteen simantas, and no more, are declared by the best of sages. A simanta in ordinary Sanskrit is a parting: the line down a scalp where the hair divides, and by extension any boundary or dividing line. The verse ties them directly to the assemblages: the simantas are the lines by which the sanghatas are marked out.

Simanta is a parting — the visible line that marks a junction. Fourteen, one for each sanghata.

Fourteen and fourteen. The two classes are the same objects described from opposite sides — the sanghata is the packed junction itself, the simanta is the visible line that shows where it runs. This is a real conceptual move and a slightly sophisticated one: the text has separated a structure from its boundary and given each a name and a count, and then made the counts identical because there is exactly one boundary per structure.

As with kurcha, the word simanta also names a marma — five of them, in the joints of the skull, in the classical marma scheme. Same word, different classification, and the Bhavaprakasha keeps both without confusion because the sections do not overlap. Our study of the two hundred and ten joints and the eight shapes of sandhi covers the neighbouring case: there, tunna-sevani — “stitched seam” — is the name of a joint shape, while here sevani is a structural class in its own right. The vocabulary is reused; the classifications stay distinct.

Randhra: Where the Bhavaprakasha Counts a Tenth

Atha randhrani. A randhra is an aperture — a hole, an opening, a perforation. This is the class most readers will already half-know, because the “nine openings” is one of the few pieces of classical Indian anatomy that circulates outside the texts.

The Bhavaprakasha begins conventionally enough: netra-shravana-nasanam dve dve randhre prakirtite, mukha-mehana-payunam ekaikam randhram uchyate. For the eyes, the ears and the nose, two randhras each are declared. For the mukha, the mehana and the payu, one each is spoken of.

Two, two and two is six; one, one and one is three; and six and three is nine. That is the familiar figure, and if the passage stopped there it would agree with the Sushruta Samhita, whose Sharira Sthana enumeration gives the well-known nava randhra for a man.

It does not stop there. The next line reads: dashamam mastake proktam randhraniti budha viduh — the tenth is declared in the mastaka; the wise know these as the randhras. And then: strinam anyani cha trini stanayoh garbha-vartmani — for women there are three others, in the two breasts and in the garbha-vartma.

This is a real divergence from the more familiar scheme and it should not be flattened. The mastaka opening is the fontanelle region, the brahma-randhra of the wider literature — a place the tradition regards with unusual seriousness, and which is soft and palpably open in an infant. A compiler working from observation of infants as well as from received lists would have had a plain reason to count it.

Which reading one prefers is not a question this article can settle, and it would be dishonest to pretend the texts speak with one voice when they do not. What can be said is that the difference is not a copying error: it is stated as a number-word, placed after a list that sums to nine, and carried forward into the count for women.

Srotas: The One Class the Text Refused to Count

And then, after nine classes and eight firm numbers, the passage reaches the srotas — and stops counting.

Atha srotamsi. The definition comes first, as a list of what moves: manah, prana, anna, paniya, doshah, dhatavah, upadhatavah, the malas of the dhatus, mala, mutra, and the rest. Mind. Breath. Food. Drink. The doshas, the dhatus, the upadhatus. The residues. Everything, in short, that a living body moves from one place to another.

Then the definition proper: sancharanti hi ye margaih tani srotamsi sanjaguh — the pathways along which these travel, those they have called srotas.

And then the line that makes this passage worth a day's reading: bahuni sankhyaya pravaktum naiva shakyate. They are so many that it is simply not possible to state them by number.

Branching at every scale. Bahuni sankhyaya pravaktum naiva shakyate — they cannot be stated by number.

It is worth being clear about what this is not. It is not vagueness and not a shrug: a tradition comfortable with vagueness would have written a large round figure and moved on, because round figures cost nothing. Nor is it ignorance dressed up, since the same author produced a specific number for every neighbouring class on the same page.

It reads, rather, as a judgement about the object. The kandaras are sixteen because a kandara is a discrete thing you can point at and finish pointing at. The srotas are not that kind of object. They branch; they exist at every scale; the definition given is functional rather than structural — anything along which anything moves — and a functional definition of that generality does not produce a finite list. The author appears to have understood this and to have said so.

The Charaka Samhita takes the other available road with the same material. In the Vimana Sthana its famous srotas chapter names thirteen — not thirteen channels in the body, but thirteen kinds, one for each thing that needs carrying. That is a taxonomy of function, and a taxonomy of function can be finite even when the objects it classifies are not. Between the two texts you can watch the tradition working out that when a thing cannot be counted, it can still be classified.

How These Numbers Were Read: Words, Not Digits

A note on method, because the figures above are the substance of the article and the reader is entitled to know how they were obtained.

The edition of the Bhavaprakasha used here is a scanned printing with the Sanskrit verses followed by a Hindi bhasha commentary. It carries no machine-readable text at all — the pages had to be rendered as images and read by eye. In a scan of this age the printed Devanagari digits are frequently ambiguous: single characters can be read two ways, and the verse numbers in particular are unreliable.

The rule followed throughout, and it is the reason this article can be specific at all, is: every figure is taken from the Sanskrit number-word, never from a printed numeral. Shodasha, shat, chatasro, sapta, chaturdasha, dashamam, trini, dve dve, ekaikam — these are whole words with distinctive shapes and no near-neighbours. A smudged digit is a coin toss; a smudged word is still readable.

For the same reason, verses here are cited at section level — Bhavaprakasha, Purva Khanda — with the transliterated line quoted, rather than by a verse number that this particular scan cannot support. Where a figure could not be read from a number-word with confidence, it has been left out of this article rather than guessed at. Nothing on this page has been reconstructed from memory or inferred from a secondary source.

The Shape of the List, and What It Is For

Step back from the individual entries and the passage has an argument in it, even though it never states one.

Nine classes are named. Four materials — sira, snayu, mamsa, asthi — are named repeatedly as the stuff the classes are made from. What distinguishes one class from another is not composition but arrangement: a great cord, a lattice, a bundle, a rope, a seam, a packed junction, a boundary line, an aperture, a channel. The Bhavaprakasha has, in effect, produced a vocabulary of structural forms and then gone through the body assigning each occurrence to a form.

Every name it uses for a form is borrowed from outside the body: a net, a brush, a rope, a stitched seam, a latticed window, a parting, a sprouting shoot. Not one is a coined technical term. This is how a discipline talks before it has a jargon, and it is an advantage rather than a limitation — the words stay intelligible to anyone who has seen a net or a seam.

The order is deliberate too. It runs from the largest and most discrete to the smallest and least discrete: the sixteen great cords first, then the meshes, then the bundles, the ropes, the seams, the junctions, their boundaries, the apertures, and finally the channels that are everywhere and cannot be numbered. The passage is arranged, from beginning to end, along a gradient of countability — and it ends precisely where counting fails.

What This Passage Does Not Say

It is as useful to record what the text is silent about as what it asserts, and on this page the silences are broad.

We did not find any statement in this passage about what to do for a kandara, a jala, a kurcha, a rajju, a sevani, a sanghata, a simanta or a randhra. No preparation is named. No practice is prescribed. No outcome is promised. The nine classes are defined, counted, located, and in three cases given a prayojana, and there the passage ends. Anyone looking for a therapeutic instruction on these pages will not find one, because there is not one there.

We also did not find any attempt to reconcile the two accounts of the nails, or any acknowledgement that the randhra count differs from the more familiar nine. Compendia of this kind set down the received treatment of a topic under its own heading and leave the comparison to the reader.

And there is one honest gap in our own reading. The passage names the medhra and the nitamba region in the clause about outgrowths and bindings, and the syntax there is compressed enough, in this scan, that we have described only what the number-words and the bhasha commentary support. We have not paraphrased the rest, and we would rather leave a sentence unexplained than invent a reading for it.

Where This Sits in the Purva Khanda

The Purva Khanda is the first of the Bhavaprakasha's three divisions, and its sharira material runs as one continuous survey: the tissues and their nourishment, the joints, the vessels, the sinews, the vital points, then this run of nine minor structural classes, and then the seven layers of skin. Read in that order, the passage covered here is the tidying-up section — where the compiler catches the structures too small to have earned a chapter and too definite to leave out. It sits immediately after the great counts of snayu and dhamani, and takes its four constituent materials from the sections on either side of it.

For readers following the whole survey, the neighbouring studies are:

• Dhatu poshana and the kedari-kulya nyaya — how the tissues are said to be nourished in sequence
• Mamsa, peshi, meda and asthi — the five hundred peshis that the rajjus are said to bind
• Sandhi sharira — the two hundred and ten joints and the eight shapes of join
• Snayu sharira — the nine hundred snayus from which the sixteen kandaras are drawn
• Marma sharira — where kurcha and simanta appear again, as names of vital points
• Sapta twacha — the seven layers of skin, the section that follows immediately after this one
• The seven dhatus — the tissue scheme all of this rests on
• Karma purusha — how Sushruta frames the study of the body in the first place

And for the wider frame, our guides to the Charaka Samhita and its eight sthanas and to the Ashtanga Hridaya of Vagbhata set out how the three great compendia divide the same material differently.

Curna and Arka: Two Classical Preparation Forms

A classification is not a shopping list, and nothing in the passage above points at anything that can be bought. What the classical literature does offer, in an entirely separate part of its architecture, is a vocabulary of preparation forms — the kalpanas, the standard ways of putting a material into a usable state. Two of the oldest are curna and arka.

Curna is the ground powder: material dried and milled fine, with nothing added to carry it. Arka is the distillate: the volatile fraction drawn off with steam and collected as a clear liquid. They are among the simplest forms the tradition describes, and both are still made the same way. Ayurveda Hub makes three preparations that sit in these two classical forms, and they are grouped here on that basis — by the form, not by any connection to the subject of this article.

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