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V, 22. COMMENTARY.
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V, 22. COMMENTARY TO PAGE 1.
The word takmán is not mentioned at all in the Rigveda, but occurs very frequently in the Atharvan. Four hymns, I, 25; V, 22; VI, 20; VII, 116, are devoted exclusively to its curel; the word is mentioned frequently elsewhere in the Atharvan; and there are descriptions of diseases, such as are stated in AV. I, 12, which are very closely allied in character to the takmán, but the word is not mentioned in the text. The Ganamâlâ, the 32nd of the Atharva-Parisishtas, presents in its seventh paragraph a series (gana) of no less than nineteen hymns, supposed to be devoted to the cure of this disease (takmanâsana); see Kaus. 26, 1, note. Såyana to AV. XIX, 34, 10 explains takmán as follows: krikkhragivanakartaram yasmin sati krikkhrena givanam bhavati. Professor Roth in his famous tract, Zur Litteratur und Geschichte des Veda' (p. 39), published in 1846, thought that the takmán referred to leprosy because the name of the plant kúshtha (costus speciosus), the specific against takmán, is in the later medical writings also a designation of leprosy. Adolphe Pictet in an article entitled “Die alten Krankheitsnamen der Indo-Germanen, published in Kuhn's Zeitschrift, V, 337, thought he found etymological support for this view in Persian takhtah and Erse tachas, tochas, both of which refer to leprosy, or the like. Professor Weber, judging from the symptoms described in AV. I, 25, recognised fever as the chief feature of the takmán (see Indische Studien, IV, 119); after him Dr. Virgil Grohmann published in the same Journal, IX, 381 ff., a careful and exhaustive essay which corroborated Weber's view. This was still further supported by Professor Zimmer in his Altindisches Leben, p. 379 ff., and now Darila and Kesava, the commentators of the Kausika-sätra, everywhere gloss the word
* Cf. also the hymns to the kúshtha-plant, V, 4 and XIX, 39.
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