Risht Samucchaya

Author(s): Durgadevacharya, A S Gopani
Publisher: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan

Page 72

INTRODUCTION
Yamapurusas or the dead fore-fathers and the third section enumerates such portents as the seeing of the Svarga or the Siddhas. The common result of such abnormal experiences, visual or auditory, is, according to the YS, death. The phenomena falling under the second and the third group have also been referred to in the RS with this essential modification that the sight of the Yamapuruṣas or the Siddhas takes place in the dream and different interpretations have been put on all of them (st. 126). The Rūpastha Riṣṭa is divided into Pratyakṣa and Linga in the RS. The second is again sub-divided into Sarira-10 viṣaya and Jaladidarśana. Śarīraviṣayaka Linga Rista of the RS (sts. 130 and 136) just resembles the Adhyatmika or the physical Rista of the YS.
The RS and the MP1
The MP is as respectable as the Buddhist Canon. It is equally authoritative also. It is in the form of questions put is by a king named Milinda and answered by Nagasena. It refers to the phenomenon of dreams only casually. Thus there is no possibility of comparing the RS with the MP. It simply says whether good or bad will follow from the dreams dreamt. The Buddhist works are almost silent on the subject of omens and 20 portents. Both RS (st. 108) and MP (297-301) agree regarding the fact that the dreams take place also on account of the excess of wind, bile and phlegm but they should not be relied on.
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The RS and the Three Samhitas
The Samhitas are the oldest and the authoritative, 25 available works on medicine. Every treatise on medicine, small or great, old or new, suitably deals in brief or at length, with omens and portents as it does with diagnosis prognosis, etiology, treatment and nursing. It was essential for the physician to know the coming danger of disease and death. One of the many pleas put forth in these Samhitas was also to get a working knowledge of the evil signs which alone could prevent a physician from falling into disrepute. Thus it was in fitness of things for the compilers of the. Samhitas to acknowledge and assign an adequate place to the Ristas. Through 35 the Ristas which are outward manifestations of the internal pathological changes, the physician could correctly form his 1 See App. VIJI, p. 100.