तनतरयकत — The Method of the Śāstras: An Introduction to the Devices of Kauṭilya, Suśruta and Caraka

Every Indian śāstra was composed, and was meant to be read, with a set of devices called tantrayukti, "the joinings of a treatise". Three classical works state them in full: Kauṭilya closes the Arthaśāstra with a whole book on thirty-two of them; Suśruta gives the same number a chapter of the Uttaratantra; and the Caraka Saṃhitā, as completed by Dṛḍhabala, names thirty-six at the end of the Siddhisthāna, each of which Cakrapāṇidatta defines and illustrates. This opening article of the series Tantrayukti Studies derives the name, presents the three lists verbatim from the e-texts, sets out what the authors themselves say the devices are for, and tests four objections in the śāstric manner — that the devices belong only to medicine and polity, that Nyāya already supplies the method of inquiry, that the disagreement over their number shows them to be arbitrary, and that a method of reading old books has no use for modern research. It argues that tantrayukti is best understood as the method of the text, as Nyāya is the method of the debate, and that read in this way the thirty-seven distinct devices of the three lists form a complete grammar of systematic writing that maps closely onto modern research method, academic writing and hermeneutics. The article closes with a concordance of the three lists and the plan of the thirty-nine articles that follow. Series: तन्त्रयुक्तिविमर्शः · Tantrayukti Studies, TY-2026/01. Loci: AŚ 15.1; Su. Utt. 65; Ca. Si. 12.41–50. Online version: https://sanskritmanthan.in/a/ty-01-tantrayukti