Reference

Brihat Samhita

Brihat Samhita — what it is, what it added, and what we retired from it.

Brihat Samhita — Varahamihira, translated by V. Subrahmanya Sastri and M. Ramakrishna Bhat.

Edition consulted: Bangalore 1946, Sanskrit with facing English translation and notes.

What kind of text this is

The author states at CVII.13 that the work has 100 adhyayas; the edition prints 107 and its own editors flag seven as ‘apparently not his’, including CIII printed as ‘(of Vindhyavasin)’. Roughly 7% of what circulates is disclaimed by its editors.

What it contributed

motivated-translation — novel. BS II.14 printed twice in one 1946 volume in incompatible renderings - the body softens ‘mleccha’ and keeps the Brahmin-supremacy conclusion; the introduction keeps ‘Mlechchas’ and drops the conclusion.

A fifth mechanism by which claims distort: selective rendering inside a single edition.

acknowledge-then-stigmatise — refinement. BS II.14 concedes the science is established among the Yavanas, then demotes them in the same verse.

The corpus’s clearest PRINTED PRIMARY instance of the pattern; prior instances were a translator’s note and a Greek-authored text.

samhita-is-the-measured-branch — novel. The same 6th-c. author’s non-natal work - rainfall, soil, rock, gem weight, market price, plant water-indication. Author states 100 adhyayas at CVII.13; the edition prints 107 with seven flagged by its editors as ‘apparently not his’.

Lets us watch one mind operate in two modes, and adds a fifth instance of textual instability.

What we do not carry from it

• 53.12-13, 53.15 — A cap on how large a house a person may build, by birth, enforced by the claim that exceeding it is inauspicious. The commentary extends it to storeys and absolute height, and 53.15 gives arithmetic for mixed-caste entitlements. Nothing in any graha essence implies it. This is the clearest instance in the corpus of sumptuary law wearing an omen’s clothes - which is exactly the mechanism the project exists to name, so it is retired loudly, not quietly.
• 53.91, 53.94-96, 53.98-100 — Colour, smell, taste, ground-slope and body-part all mapped to varna, in the same pit and with the same instrument used two verses earlier for genuine soil tests (53.92-93). The Purusha-sukta body hierarchy is reproduced verbatim in 53.98-100. Social ordering, not observation. Diamond colour by caste (80.11) retired with it.
• 70.16, 70.19-20 — Twenty-six slokas of body inspection fixing a woman’s chastity, fortune and danger to her husband’s family - with no graha anywhere in the chapter, so it fails the essence-test trivially. Worse than the stri-jataka material retired from BPHS, Saravali and Jataka Parijata, because it needs no astrology at all and licenses declaring a named woman unchaste on the evidence of her dimples. Palm-line longevity (70.13) and thumb-line child count (70.14) retired with it, and are excluded upstream by product architecture anyway.
• 74.1, 74.5-6, 74.12, 74.15, 74.16 — Recorded rather than resolved, per method rule 4 - both halves are the text’s. The defence is real and is not modern projection, but it is inseparable in the same chapter from a possession frame and an endorsement of sati, and it stands sixty verses after the bride inspection of ch. 70. Neither ch. 70 nor ch. 74 is carried. Quoting only 74.6 would be exactly the selective use this project accuses the tradition’s marketers of.
• note to 74.15 — A 1946 apologetic gloss, printed three verses above a passage endorsing sati that the same editors elsewhere annotate ‘In the days of Varahamihira, Suttee must have been in great vogue.’ The editorial layer of this edition needs dating and judging separately from the 6th century text, exactly as the introduction’s anti-Greek polemic does.
• 2.2 (prose) — A birth bar, a beauty bar and a disability bar on professional competence, justified by the claim that character is read off the body. The technical qualification standard in the rest of ch. 2 (2.4-13 - the five siddhantas, time measures, eclipse computation, latitude, the ability to reconcile authorities against observation) is worth keeping and is recorded separately; this verse is not.
• 2.13-14 (slokas) — Ritual precedence assigned by birth, and the a-fortiori conclusion drawn from the Yavana concession. The transmission content of 2.14 is carried separately (bs-2-14-*); the caste conclusion attached to it is not. Nothing in any graha essence implies either.

Reading the text yourself

We quote and cite; we do not republish. Most translations in this corpus are in copyright, and the public-domain ones are better served by the Internet Archive than by a copy here. Citations give chapter and verse so any claim can be checked against your own edition.