Lexical notes on the Khotanese Piṇḍaśāstra

The single Chinese scroll comprised of manuscripts P 2893 (Paris) and Ch. 00265 (London) contains the Late Khotanese āyurvedic text conventionally titled Piṇḍaśāstra and so far uni-dentified in other languages. As a contribution to the interpretation of the text and to the knowledge of Khotanese medical terminology, the article offers two etymologies and reinter-prets two ghostwords paying close attention to the contexts where they occur: (1) dūvara ‘wa-tery abdominal swelling, dropsy’ is a loanword from Gāndhārī *dag̱odara < Old Indian dakoda-ra and, like Tibetan dmu rdzing, translates the Sanskrit general term udara ‘abdominal swell-ing’; (2) the accusative plural pīrą̄nā and genitive plural pīrą̄nāṃ are from pirānaa ‘worm grains’, a compound of pära ‘worm’ and ānaa < Iranian *dāna-ka ‘(single) grain, seed’, re-ferring to the proglottids of tapeworms in excrement; (3) āvaṃjsä is not a hapax meaning ‘com-pact’ (Bailey) but should be read ā-v-aṃ jsä ‘or with them’; (4) bu’jsai is not a hapax meaning ‘fiery’ (Bailey) but the regular outcome of the Old Khotanese nominative plural buljse from buljsaā ‘virtue’.