Yantra Vidhi in Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 25: Vagbhata's 101 Yantras and the One He Called Chief

इस लेख को हिंदी में पढ़ें: अष्टांग हृदय सूत्रस्थान 25: यंत्र विधि और वाग्भट के 101 यंत्र

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Shalya: The Word Vagbhata Defines Before He Names One Instrument

The Ashtanga Hridaya is the youngest of the three works that Ayurvedic tradition groups together as the Brihat Trayi, the great triad, alongside the Charaka Samhita and the Sushruta Samhita. It was composed by Vagbhata, son of Vaidyapati Simhagupta, and its first section, the Sutrasthana, runs to thirty chapters of definitions and method. Chapter twenty-five is Yantra-vidhi Adhyaya, and its subject is the yantra: the blunt instrument.

The chapter announces its own position in its opening line: after Tarpana-Putapaka-vidhi — chapter twenty-four — Vagbhata expounds Yantra-vidhi, “thus said Lord Atreya and other great sages.” That formula is not decoration. Each chapter of the Sutrasthana declares what it follows, so the order of the text is recoverable from a single loose folio.

What is genuinely unusual is the first substantive thing the chapter does. Before naming any instrument, before counting anything, Vagbhata defines the problem. Shalya, he writes, is the foreign body which causes trouble to the mind as well as to the body.

Shalya is the root of Shalya Tantra, the branch of classical Ayurveda that deals with extraction and its instruments — one of the eight limbs that give the Ashtanga Hridaya its name. By putting the mind into the definition at the top, Vagbhata frames a chapter of ironmongery as a chapter about relief. It is stated once, and then the tools begin.

Shalya is defined not by what it is but by the trouble it causes — to the mind as well as to the body.

Yantra Vidhi in Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 25: A Count Reported, Not Claimed

Having defined shalya, Vagbhata says what yantras are for. They are the instruments with blunt edges, used to remove foreign bodies lodged in the different parts of the body. He then widens the brief considerably. The same instruments, he says, serve to examine, to assist in the application of sharp instruments (shastra), of alkaline preparations (kshara) and of thermal cauterisation (agnikarma), and — a detail worth pausing on — to protect the other parts of the body while that work goes on. A blunt instrument in this text is as often a guard as a grip. He adds that they are used in guda vasti, uttara vasti and vrana vasti as well.

Then he names a handful by way of example — ghatika yantra, the pot; alabu, the gourd; shringa, the horn; jambavaushtha salaka, the jamun-lipped probe — and makes the statement that governs everything after it:

Only after that does the number appear, and it appears in reported speech. Some other acharyas, Vagbhata writes, opined that the yantras are one hundred and one. He does not say that they are. He records that others have said so, and then — without endorsing or rejecting it — proceeds to lay out the six-class scheme that produces exactly that figure.

It is a small distinction and an important one, and much of what circulates about numbers in the classical texts flattens exactly this kind of attribution. Vagbhata has already told you no closed list is possible; the closed list he then supplies is presented as somebody else’s convention, faithfully transmitted. The reader is left holding both statements at once.

The Six Classes of Yantra, and the Arithmetic That Closes at 101

The scheme is short enough to give in full. Vagbhata sorts the instruments into six types, and assigns each a number:

Twenty-four, two, two, twenty, twenty-eight and twenty-five. Added together they come to one hundred and one, with nothing left over and nothing borrowed. That is worth stating plainly, because it is the single strongest reason to take the figure seriously as a piece of transmitted scholarship rather than as a round number that grew in the retelling. A count that has been copied carelessly across centuries of manuscript tradition tends to stop adding up. This one adds up.

Notice also how uneven the classes are. Two have exactly two members; one has twenty-eight. This is not a tidy taxonomy imposed from above but a working inventory grouped after the fact by the shape of the thing in the hand — the svastika class is large because a crossed pair of limbs is a versatile mechanism, and the tala class has two members because there are two useful ways to make that hook. Classification in the Sutrasthana follows use, not symmetry. Readers who know Vagbhata’s sixty-two dosha combinations in Sutrasthana 12 will recognise the same instinct at work: enumerate exhaustively, then admit the enumeration is a convenience.

Twenty-four, two, two, twenty, twenty-eight, twenty-five. The sub-totals close at one hundred and one exactly, with nothing left over.

Svastika Yantra: Twenty-Four Cruciform Instruments Named After Beasts and Birds

The largest of the classes after the rods, and the one that gives the clearest view of how Vagbhata thinks about naming. The word svastika here is used in its plain geometric sense: two lines crossing, with the arms bent at their ends in the same direction. The instruments of this class are therefore cruciform — a pair of limbs meeting at a central fulcrum, which is precisely the mechanism of every pair of tongs and every pair of forceps ever made.

The chapter then gives their construction with unusual precision. They are generally made of iron (ayas). They run to about eighteen angula in length. The fulcrum sits at the middle and is described as being of the size of a masura — a lentil. The handles are either rounded off at their ends or bent at an angle, like an elephant-driver’s goad, the ankusha.

And their working ends are shaped like the faces of ferocious beasts and birds, from which they take their names:

• Kankamukha yantra — heron-faced
• Simhamukha yantra — lion-faced
• Rikshamukha yantra — bear-faced
• Kakamukha yantra — crow-faced

To which the chapter adds, as it goes on, vyaghramukha (tiger-faced), bhujangamukha (snake-hood-faced), makaramukha (crocodile-faced) and kuraramukha (osprey-faced).

Every one of those names is a picture, and not one is a claim. A simhamukha is not called that because of what it achieves, but because the jaws at its working end look like a lion’s. Anyone who has seen the instrument knows the name, and anyone who knows the name can recognise the instrument — a nomenclature built to survive being taught aloud, across generations, with no picture to point at. We will come back to it.

The class is used, Vagbhata says, for foreign bodies impacted in bone. And then he makes a distinction that is easy to read past and repays attention: if the thing is visible, the lion-, tiger-, snake- and crocodile-faced instruments are indicated; if it is invisible, the heron-, crow- and osprey-faced ones are — because those can be introduced easily, turned in every direction, and will grip firmly and draw out the object without difficulty. The sorting principle is not the object and not the site. It is whether the practitioner can see what they are reaching for.

Sandamsa and Tala Yantra: Four Instruments for the Soft Parts, the Ear and the Nose

Two very small classes, two members each, and between them they cover an enormous amount of ground.

Sandamsa yantra, the pincer-like class, is two in number: the forceps with handles and the forceps without. They run to about sixteen angula and are used where the svastika class would be too coarse — in the soft structures, which the text lists as the skin, the muscles, the vessels, the nerves and the tendons. A further variety is described at about six angula, with roughly half an angula between its two blades, the pair soldered together at one end. That one is meant for the smallest things: a thorn, a hair, a stray eyelash.

The chapter then names a related instrument, mucuti or mucundi yantra, used like the second variety of sandamsa. It has small teeth, is straight at the root, finely separated at the open ends, and carries a ring at the soldered end as ornament. Its work is the removal of sloughs and granulations from a deep-seated collection.

Tala yantra, the third class, is also two: ekatala, the single-bladed, and dvitala, the double-bladed. The name comes from a fish. These instruments, Vagbhata says, resemble the jaws of a fish — the single blade answering to one lip, the double to the entire face. They run to about twelve angula, and their use is extraction from the ear and the nose.

The nadi yantra are specified by the passage they must enter, not by the person and not by the complaint.

Nadi Yantra: Twenty Tubular Instruments Sized to the Passage

The fourth class, twenty in number, and the one where Vagbhata’s specification habit is most visible. Nadi means tube, channel, reed. The instruments of this class are hollow, open at one end or at both, and the chapter says they serve three distinct purposes: extraction from the external channels of the body, examination, and the withdrawal of fluid from cavities.

Then comes the governing sentence. They vary in length and diameter, Vagbhata writes, in proportion to the different sizes of the outer canals of the body, and according to the purpose to be served. The instrument is specified by the aperture it must enter. Not by the person, not by the condition — by the passage.

The named members of the class show what that produces in practice:

• Kantha shalya darshana nadi yantra — for viewing the throat; about ten angula long, with a circumference of about five.
• Panchamukha and trimukha — five-holed and three-holed. These exist for a very particular problem: an arrow with barbs, which the text calls “ears.” The central hole takes the shaft; the side holes take the ears. A four-eared arrow needs the five-holed instrument; a two-eared arrow, the three-holed. The design is a direct cast of the object it must accommodate.
• Shalya nirghatani yantra — closed at the top, the top itself shaped like the disc of a lotus; about twelve angula long and three wide.
• Arsha yantra — described in three structural variants: slit on one side, slit on two sides, and unslit, the last called sami yantra. Made of copper, iron or gold, or else of ivory, horn or wood. Hollow, tapering, and shaped, the text says, like the teat of a cow. The dimensions are given separately for men and for women.
• Bhagandara yantra — distinguished by a single negative specification: it should carry no ridge above the slit.
• Ghrana yantra — for viewing the nasal passage; about two angula, its lumen sized to admit the index finger, a single slit at the side and no ridge above it.
• Anguli-tranaka yantra — the finger-guard. Ivory, horn or wood; about four angula; thick, curved, and tied with a strong thread that also ties to the wrist.
• Yoni-vrana-darshana yantra — tubular, about sixteen angula long and six in circumference, built from four blades attached at their bases to a ring, tapering to a free end shaped like a lotus bud, with four rods soldered on so that pressure at the free ends opens the tip.
• Nadi-vrana yantra — a tube with a leather bag, built like a vasti yantra but without ridges at the tip; about six angula, a thumb’s circumference at the base narrowing to a pea at the tip.
• Udakodara yantra — a cannula, open at both ends, of metal — or, the chapter says, made from the hollow quill of a peacock’s feather.
• Shringa yantra — the horn, generally a cow’s; about eighteen angula, the tip narrowed to a mustard-seed opening, nipple-shaped and covered with thin skin.
• Alabu yantra — the bottle gourd, Lagenaria. About twelve angula long, eighteen in circumference, its mouth circular. A fire of dry cloth, grass or cotton is lit inside it to exhaust the air, and it is applied at once.
• Ghati yantra — the pot, given the same measurements as the gourd.

Two things stand out in that list. The first is the materials. Gold and iron sit beside horn, ivory, wood, a gourd, a clay pot and a peacock’s quill without any change of tone. The text does not rank them by prestige; it ranks them by fitness. A peacock feather is specified for the cannula because a peacock feather is a naturally formed tube of the right calibre, and that is the entire argument.

The second is the finger-guard — the only instrument in the class that does nothing to the patient at all. Its whole function is to protect the practitioner, and it is tied to the wrist so it cannot be lost inside the work.

Salaka Yantra: Twenty-Eight Rods, Probes and Hooks

The largest class of all. Salaka means a rod, a stalk, a splinter of a thing — the same word used elsewhere in the Sutrasthana for the slender applicators of other procedures. The chapter says at once that these are of many kinds and that their length and circumference vary according to what they are for, and then names the notable ones. Almost every name is a resemblance.

• Gandupadamukha yantra — “earthworm-head-faced.” Two kinds, their ends shaped like the head of an earthworm, used for probing.
• Shanku yantra — the spike. Two varieties of about ten and twelve angula, their tips shaped like the head of an arrow, used to move a lodged object in any direction; and two more shaped like a fish-hook.
• Garbha shanku — the traction hook, its end bent like an ankusha, about eighteen angula long and eight wide. The text names its use in obstructed labour, and we leave the description there.
• Sarpaphanamukhi yantra — “snake-hood-faced,” a hook of the same family with its end bent like the raised hood of a serpent, used in the urinary bladder.
• Karna-shodhana salaka — the ear-cleaning rod, its edge shaped like an ashvattha leaf and its tip like a ladle.
• Jambavaushtha salaka — “jamun-lipped,” its end shaped like the fruit of Syzygium cumini.

The chapter then adds a set of specialised rods: three for the application of kshara and three more for agnikarma, differing in being thick, thin and long. Probes used at the groin are given round and semilunar shapes at tip and base. Probes used for cauterisation in the nose are given a mouth resembling the cotyledons of a jujube seed. And the three kshara rods are specified at about eight angula, their tips likened to the nails of the index, middle and ring fingers.

Then a closing note that shows how tightly the Sutrasthana is cross-referenced: urethral probes and the rods used for anjana, Vagbhata says, have already been described in their own chapters, and he does not repeat them. The anjana salaka belongs to Sutrasthana 23, two chapters earlier, and it stays there. The instruments of dhumapana and of vasti are likewise left where they were first set out. A text that repeats nothing is a text that expects to be read whole.

Anu yantra: thread, stone, leather, a broken branch. A quarter of the inventory is whatever happens to be to hand.

Anu Yantra: Twenty-Five Accessories, Where Air and Time Are Filed

And then the sixth class, which is unlike the other five and is, to a modern reader, the most startling thing in the chapter.

Anu yantra — also upa yantra, the sub-instrument or accessory — is twenty-five in number, and Vagbhata lists what belongs to it: a magnet; thread; leather; intestine; cloth; stones; a hammer; the palm of the hand and the sole of the foot; the fingers; the tongue; the teeth; the mouth; the nails; the hair; the branch of a tree; air; time; cooking; and objects exciting happiness and fear. These, he says, are inferior to the actual instruments, and are therefore named accessories — and they may be used anywhere in the body according to necessity.

The rest of the list is just as telling in a different way. A magnet, a thread, a piece of cloth, a stone, a branch broken off a tree. These are not instruments in the sense the first five classes mean; they are ordinary things, available anywhere, pressed into service. Vagbhata grades them honestly as inferior — and then keeps them in the count. Twenty-five of the hundred and one are household objects, body parts and abstractions. Nearly a quarter of the inventory is whatever happens to be to hand.

Yantra Karma: The Twenty-Four Functions in Ashtanga Sangraha Sutrasthana 34

Having classified the instruments by shape, the chapter classifies them a second time by what they do. Vagbhata gives a run of function-names — shirghatana, unmathana, purana, marga-shuddhi, vyuhana, aharana, bandhana, pidana, achushana, unnamana, namana, chalana, bhanga, vyavartana, rijukarana — and then, characteristically, ends the list with “and so on.”

The fuller enumeration belongs to Vagbhata’s other work. The Ashtanga Sangraha, in the thirty-fourth chapter of its own Sutrasthana, sets out twenty-four functions of the blunt instruments:

Two classifications of one set of objects, cutting across each other: six classes by form, twenty-four by function. An instrument has a place in both, and the two placements are independent. A salaka may perform eshana or anjana; a nadi may perform achushana or prakshalana. The chapter never draws the grid, but it hands the reader both axes and leaves it available. Vagbhata does this often enough that it reads as method rather than accident.

Kankamukha Yantra: Why the Heron Is Ranked Above All the Rest

The chapter’s last substantive verse singles out one instrument by name. The kankamukha yantra, the heron-faced forceps, is superior to all other blunt instruments — and the reason is given in four clauses. It enters deeply into the wound. It turns around once inside. It holds the lodged object well. And it can be withdrawn without causing any abnormality.

Set that beside the earlier distinction and it clicks into place. The kankamukha was listed among the instruments for the invisible foreign body — the ones that go in, turn in any direction, grip and come out. The chapter’s highest-ranked instrument is the one designed for the case where the practitioner is working blind.

It is worth registering what this ranking is not. It is not a claim about outcomes. Every one of the four clauses is a statement about how the instrument behaves mechanically — how it enters, how it turns, how it grips, how it leaves. The superiority is engineering, described in terms a maker could act on.

Pradhana Yantra: The Hand That Is Both Chief and Least

Which brings us to the line that makes this chapter worth the reading. Immediately after recording that some hold the yantras to be one hundred and one in all, Vagbhata adds:

And then, more than thirty verses later, the hand turns up again — in the anu yantra list, between the hammer and the fingers, in the class Vagbhata has just described as inferior to the actual instruments.

Both statements are in the same chapter, by the same author, about the same thing. The chief instrument is filed in the lowest class. It is tempting to call that a contradiction and move on, but it is more interesting than that, and the chapter gives you everything needed to resolve it.

The six classes are sorted by what a thing is: a crossing, a pincer, a tube, a rod, a found object. On that axis the hand is unarguably a found object — it is not fabricated, not specified, not made by a smith to a length in angula. It belongs with the thread and the stone. The ranking of the hand as pradhana is on a different axis entirely: what a thing enables. On that axis nothing else comes close, because every one of the other hundred is inert until a hand closes on it.

So the chapter is not confused. It is holding two orders of value at once and declining to collapse them — exactly as it did at the start, when it said the instruments were innumerable and then reported a number anyway. Vagbhata seems entirely comfortable letting a classification be true on one axis and beside the point on another. The same disposition shows up three chapters earlier, in Sutrasthana 22 on gandusha and kavala, where one and the same mouthful of liquid takes two different names according only to how much of it there is — the class tracking what is being done, not what the thing is.

Named the chief instrument, and filed in the class Vagbhata himself calls inferior.

What This Chapter Counts, and What It Does Not

Numbers attached to the classical surgical literature circulate widely, and not always with their sources attached. It is worth being exact about what this chapter, in this text, actually enumerates. Ashtanga Hridaya, Sutrasthana 25 reports one hundred and one yantras — attributed to “other acharyas” — and supplies the six-class breakdown that sums to it. That is the whole of the blunt-instrument count in this text.

The sharp instruments are counted separately, in the chapter that immediately follows. Sutrasthana 26, Shastra-vidhi Adhyaya, opens by saying that in general the sharp instruments (shastra) are twenty-six in number, that they should be made by skilled smiths in the traditional manner, and that they should run to about six angula. It even specifies the colour the edge should show when properly worked — the blue of a lotus petal.

We have written separately about the Sushruta Samhita and its place in the history of surgery, and about the thirty-two tantra yukti, the interpretive devices the classical authors used to write and to read each other. Between them those two articles cover the wider tradition this chapter sits inside. For the shape of the corpus as a whole, the complete guide to the Charaka Samhita’s eight sthanas is the place to start, and the Ashtanga Hridaya’s own treatment of tridosha shows the same author working on very different material.

How We Read and Cite This Chapter

Everything above comes from a continuous reading of the Yantra-vidhi Adhyaya in an English translation of the Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana — from the chapter’s opening formula to its closing colophon, which names it as the twenty-fifth chapter and its author as Vagbhata, son of Sri Vaidyapati Simhagupta — and on into the opening of Sutrasthana 26 for the sharp-instrument figure. Three habits govern how we cite:

• Chapter-level attribution, always. A statement credited to Ashtanga Hridaya Sutrasthana 25 is in that chapter; a figure from the Ashtanga Sangraha is labelled as such, because that is a different work by the same author and conflating the two is a common error in this literature.
• Reported speech is preserved. The chapter says that other acharyas put the number at one hundred and one, and so does this article. Turning an attributed convention into a flat assertion is how a citation becomes a myth.
• Dimensions are approximate. The text works in angula, a finger’s breadth, and printed equivalents vary between editions — so every measurement above is given as “about.”

What This Article Withholds, and Why

This is a chapter about instruments used by trained practitioners in a surgical setting, and a substantial part of its content has no place on a consumer website. We have left it out deliberately, and it is fairer to say what was left out than to let the omissions pass unnoticed.

Withheld: the clinical indications given for individual instruments beyond the bare naming needed to identify them; the handling sequences; the complete dimension tables; the passages describing how each instrument is introduced, turned and withdrawn; and the procedural context of the obstetric and urological instruments, which are named above only so that the class of twenty-eight can be described honestly.

Names as Pictures: How Classical Ayurveda Names a Thing

Step back from the instruments and look at the vocabulary the chapter has built, because it is the most transferable thing in it.

Kankamukha — heron-faced. Simhamukha — lion-faced. Sarpaphanamukhi — snake-hood-faced. Gandupadamukha — earthworm-head-faced. Jambavaushtha — jamun-lipped. A tip like a lotus disc, a bud like a lotus bud, an edge like an ashvattha leaf, a tip like a ladle, a fulcrum like a lentil, an opening like a mustard seed, a bore like a pea. And on the other side, the plain compounds: karna-shodhana salaka, the ear-cleaning rod — the site, the action, the form, and nothing else.

Across one hundred and one instruments, not one is named for a result. Every name is either a picture of the thing’s shape or a statement of where it goes and what it mechanically does. That is a deliberate discipline, and it is what makes the vocabulary teachable: a name that describes matter and form can be checked against the object in your hand, and a name that promises an outcome cannot be checked against anything.

The Same Grammar of Naming, on Our Own Shelf

We make daily-use preparations. None of them is an instrument of any kind, and none has anything to do with the subject of the chapter above. What our shelf does share with Vagbhata’s vocabulary is the naming convention — each of these is named for its material and its classical form, or for the site and the plain action. That is the only connection being drawn here, and it is a connection about words.

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