Dominik Wujastyk
Summary
Dominik Wujastyk is a British–Canadian Indologist and Sanskrit scholar specializing in the history of Indian medicine and the philological reconstruction of the classical Ayurvedic compendia. He holds the Singhmar Chair in Classical Indian Society and Polity at the University of Alberta and is a cofounder of the Indian Medical Tradition project. His 1998 Roots of Ayurveda, published by Penguin Classics, is the most accessible English-language anthology of selections from the major Sanskrit medical treatises. Wujastyk is methodologically rigorous about translation and textual criticism: he has argued repeatedly that contemporary scholarship on Ayurveda rests on uncritical vulgate editions, that the technical vocabulary of the classical texts is being modernized in misleading ways, and that the formula “disease is caused by an imbalance of the humors” is largely a Greek-influenced reading back into the Indian sources.
Career and Method
Wujastyk’s published voice is editorial and philological. The Roots of Ayurveda is structured as commented translations from Caraka, Susruta, the Bower Manuscript, Kasyapa, Vagbhata, and Sarngadhara, framed by an extended editorial introduction that addresses the historiography, the translation philosophy, and the textual condition of the field. The book is dedicated to making the classical sources directly readable while warning the reader at every turn against reading them with twentieth-century assumptions in place.
Out of an earlier plurality of medical practices, he argues, ayurveda emerged as a single unified body of doctrine in Sanskrit treatises and became the standard taught curriculum. (Wujastyk, 1998) The term ayurveda means literally “the knowledge or science for longevity,” defined by an ancient etymological gloss as “that which tells us which substances, qualities, and actions are life-enhancing.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
His central methodological warning is about textual foundations. The printed editions on which all twentieth-century scholarship rests, he writes, are “vulgate texts”: books printed from a small number of manuscripts from a single regional tradition, normally Bombay or Calcutta where the publishing industry was concentrated. None of the major treatises has been the object of a critical edition based on systematic comparison of all surviving manuscripts. “In the absence of such editions we cannot really say that we know the foundations of ayurveda. Our impression of the tradition is partial, fuzzy, out of focus.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
He gives a striking example of the textual instability: by the time of the eleventh- and twelfth-century commentators Gayadasa and Dalhana, many variant readings were in circulation for this part of the text. (Wujastyk, 1998) The variability was so obvious that the medieval scholar Candrata composed a Sushruta-pathasuddhi (“Correction of the Readings in Susruta”) at around the turn of the eleventh century. (Wujastyk, 1998) [GAP: The claim that the unstable text from a millennium ago is the same unstable text that lies underneath the printed editions today is not supported by the cited card.]
His warning about translation is equally sharp. Rendering Sanskrit medical terms with modern biomedical vocabulary, he writes, “must resolutely be resisted if we are ever to learn anything about medical history. It is sometimes hard to cast oneself back into a mindset predating the momentous changes that have taken place in human culture since the sixteenth century: to a time before the heartbeat had anything to do with blood, before breath had anything to do with the lungs, before germs existed, before contagion was more important than miasma, when consciousness was located in the heart, not the brain.” (Wujastyk, 1998) Older English medical terms (flux, septic, pipe, sinew) preserve more of the historical mindset than their modern biomedical replacements.
Wujastyk warns that the etymology of rasuna (garlic) from lavana-rasa-una (“lacking the salty taste”) is a folk-etymology. (Wujastyk, 1998) As is common with folk etymologies, this equivalence only works if one fiddles with several of the letters. (Wujastyk, 1998) The proper word for garlic is lasuna, not rasuna. (Wujastyk, 1998) Nonetheless, Wujastyk finds the idea of this etymology “amusing,” and notes that it draws garlic into the traditional pharmacological schema of the savours. (Wujastyk, 1998)
On the Body and Physiology
Wujastyk’s editorial introduction devotes substantial space to Ayurvedic body doctrine, presenting it as a coherent system whose internal logic must be grasped before any clinical translation makes sense.
The core humoral structure is described in the tridosa-vidya: three semi-fluid substances (wind, choler, and phlegm) regulate the body’s state and interact with seven body constituents (chyle, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, and semen) as well as with the body’s waste products. Wujastyk notes the analogy with the ancient Greek humoral system while insisting, in line with his general translation cautions, that the two traditions should not be too quickly conflated. (Wujastyk, 1998)
The body’s central process, in this framework, is digestion, understood as cooking. (Wujastyk, 1998) The Sanskrit words for digestion (pacana, dipana) all imply burning or cooking, and the digestive force itself is called simply the “fire” (agni) or “fire in the belly” (jatharagni). (Wujastyk, 1998) [GAP: The detailed list of body-tissue stages (chyle, blood, flesh, fat, bone, marrow, semen) is not supported by the cited cards.] Wujastyk notes that the chain of body tissues is male-centric: Ayurveda’s picture of female physiology includes no obvious equivalent to semen. (Wujastyk, 1998)
At the apex of the tissue chain stands ojas, the ultimate bodily essence, described in the texts as a material substance: cold, oily, and solid. Wujastyk translates this as “energy,” a choice he justifies at some length, and reads it as the quintessence of all seven bodily tissues and the primary source of the body’s strength. (Wujastyk, 1998)
The body’s internal geography is, in Wujastyk’s presentation, organized around a network of tubes that carry fluids, humours, sensations, wind, and even mind from place to place. (Wujastyk, 1998) He flags the consequence for psychiatry: insanity is understood in Ayurveda as partly attributable to the blockage of the tubes that transport mind (manas). (Wujastyk, 1998)
Therapeutic preparation follows from this physiology. Before many treatments, the patient is “oiled and sweated,” a phrase covering a range of procedures including oral fats, oil enemas, nasal drops, poultices, steam saunas, and herbal infusions poured over the patient. The purpose, Wujastyk explains, is to open the body’s channels and liquefy blockage-causing humours so they can either be expelled or return to their proper locations. (Wujastyk, 1998)
A striking feature of the classical Ayurvedic diet, Wujastyk observes, is the straightforward endorsement of meat from many animal species, presented in Caraka and Susruta without apology or justification. The texts are oriented toward health, not toward virtue (dharma), and it is only with later commentators that the need to defend meat-eating is felt at all. (Wujastyk, 1998)
On the classical teaching of moderation, Wujastyk reads a pervasive Buddhist influence: through all the major texts, whether in food, sleep, exercise, sex, or medicinal dosage, the standard is “reasonable measure and balance,” which he describes as a fundamentally Buddhist ideal embodied in the Middle Way. He regards the full extent of the Buddhist-Ayurvedic mutual influence as still an open research question. The same framework condemns suppression of natural urges, treating such suppression as a reliable path to illness. (Wujastyk, 1998)
On the Origins Question
Wujastyk writes that the roots of classical ayurveda lie in the ascetic milieu of fifth-century‑BC North India rather than directly in Vedic religious literature. (Wujastyk, 1998) He notes that the medical material recoverable from Vedic literature does not form an obvious precursor to classical ayurveda. (Wujastyk, 1998) The Vedic claim of descent is therefore, in his reading, not evidence for medical history but a bid for social acceptance and religious sanction. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Wind is not a humoral category in ancient Greek medicine; the tridosha theory is not obviously present in the earliest Vedic literature. Wujastyk argues that the combination of wind with the hot-cold humors may therefore be “a specifically Indian and a specifically post-Vedic contribution.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
He also accepts that Vagbhata, the seventh-century synthesizer of Caraka and Susruta into the Astangahrdaya, was probably from Sind in the north, was taught medicine by a teacher with the Buddhist name Avalokita, and may himself have been a Buddhist, though he concedes that “the evidence on this issue is inconclusive.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
On the Doshas
Wujastyk’s most pointed interventions concern the modernization of Ayurvedic technical vocabulary. He has argued that the doctrine of three humors is being misrepresented in contemporary Ayurvedic literature in two ways.
First, on the nature of the doshas themselves: “Some modern authors have argued emphatically that the dosas are not humours in the classic sense of physical air, choler, and phlegm, but rather that they should either be identified with biochemical substances or else be interpreted as something more abstract or metaphysical. Some have interpreted the dosas as ‘ghostly’ entities which work through physical organs and substances, but are themselves essentially spiritual. The original Sanskrit texts of ayurveda do not present the dosas in these ways, but describe them clearly as physical substances, with particular textures, colours, tastes, and location in the body. The discourse surrounding the dosas in Sanskrit texts is not different in kind from that surrounding the humours in Greek and later pre-modern medical writings from Europe.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
Second, on the formula “disease is caused by an imbalance of the humors,” which he describes as “the platitude that one finds repeated numbingly without exception in all secondary sources on ancient Indian medicine.” Disease etiology in the original texts turns more on misplacement and inflammation of doshas than on simple imbalance: a humor collects in the wrong part of the body and becomes prakupita (literally “angered”). The balance idea is present in Ayurveda, but the exclusive focus on it in secondary literature is, in his reading, “a reading back into Indian medical history of Hippocratic or Galenic thinking, in the Aristotelian interpretation.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
Susruta’s chapter on wind has prompted Wujastyk to make a structural observation about the Indian humoral system. Wind is presented in Susruta in strikingly theological terms (“this holy wind is God … eternal and omnipresent”) and given primacy over choler and phlegm. The system, he writes, “is really a two-plus-one theory: with wind being added to a more tightly-bound duality of choler and phlegm.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
Sarngadhara teaches pulse diagnosis at the base of the thumb, using animal-gait similes for each humoural state: leech/snake gait for inflamed wind, sparrow-hawk/crow/frog for choler, swan/pigeon for phlegm, bush quail/partridge for all three. (Wujastyk, 1998)
On Surgery and the Body
Before addressing the surgical content, Wujastyk establishes the compositional history of the Susruta-samhita. The text’s kernel probably began some centuries BCE as a work focused primarily on surgery, but was heavily revised and supplemented in the centuries before AD 500. The sixth and last part of the Compendium is generally regarded as a later addition by the same reviser who added material elsewhere; G. Jan Meulenbeld has suggested this reviser may have worked before Drdhabala completed the Caraka revision, placing him before roughly AD 500. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Wujastyk’s editorial commentary on Susruta makes two claims about Indian surgery that bear on the broader history of medicine. First, that Susruta’s school was “almost certainly the most advanced school of surgery in the world” of its day, with detailed accounts of ophthalmic couching, perineal lithotomy, splinter extraction, suturing, and a notably modern approach to surgical training on substitutes (gourds for cutting, leather bags for splitting, dead animals’ ducts for piercing). (Wujastyk, 1998) The training method is explicit: a pupil “who has heard a great deal, but who has not had any practical experience, will be inept when it comes to performing operations,” and so practical work on ash gourd, watermelon, leather bags, and dead animals’ ducts is required before operating. (Wujastyk, 1998) Susruta’s splinter-removal chapter is singled out by Wujastyk as an index of the text’s surgical range. The chapter lists fifteen removal methods organized by the physical situation of the splinter: letting it fall by the natural force of tears or a sneeze, inducing sepsis to loosen it, drawing it with a magnet, treating a “splinter of grief” lodged in the heart with joy, bracing one’s feet and pulling with a tool, and, in the most elaborate procedure, tying the splinter shaft with bowstrings attached to a horse’s bridle and striking the horse so that it rears and pulls the object free. (Wujastyk, 1998)
On bloodletting, Wujastyk notes that Susruta presents it primarily as an elimination therapy: the purpose is to remove blood that has become corrupted, and its benefits include lightness, pain relief, reduction in the force of illness, and mental clarity. The text explicitly distinguishes Susruta’s bloodletting from Galenic phlebotomy, which was primarily concerned with correcting a pathological excess of blood (plethora). The Susruta chapter ends with a statement that positions blood itself as fundamental: “Blood is the root of the body. Survival comes from realizing that blood is life.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
Second, that surgery effectively migrated out of orthodox vaidya practice and into barber-surgeon castes after Susruta’s time, partly because rigidifying caste taboos resisted intimate physical contact and cutting into the body. The sociological displacement meant the theoretical aspects of surgery continued in the textbooks while practical surgery left the learned tradition. (Wujastyk, 1998)
The Susruta tradition also provides, Wujastyk notes, an early description of rhinoplasty using a cheek skin-flap along with two tubes inserted to maintain airway during recovery. The Sanskrit is “unfortunately not unambiguous” on whether the flap remains attached to its original site on the cheek, which matters for establishing how far the text anticipates the vascularised pedicle-flap technique that transformed European plastic surgery after Carpue’s 1816 publication. (Wujastyk, 1998) A related procedure, the repair of split ear-lobes, is described with fifteen named techniques, one of which is entirely explicit about maintaining the blood supply to the grafted tissue, Wujastyk reads this as a more unambiguous early reference to vascularised flap grafting than the rhinoplasty text. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Susruta’s poison chapter presents a structurally interesting case study in textual stratigraphy. Wujastyk notes that this section proceeds “almost entirely without dosa-theory mediation, moving from symptom directly to remedy”, and uses kapha and pitta as ordinary anatomical words (saliva, bile) rather than as technical humoral terms. He reads this as evidence of “a particularly ancient set of medical traditions” embedded within the Susruta text. (Wujastyk, 1998) The cross-cultural reach of the Susruta poison tradition is visible in the Arabic Kitab as-Sumum (Canakya’s Book of Poisons), where portions of Susruta’s poison chapter were translated almost word-for-word into medieval Arabic toxicology, manuscripts of which survive across Cairo, Istanbul, Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, and Jerusalem. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Wujastyk’s commentary on Sarngadhara’s compendium draws an important distinction between the Ayurvedic body and the tantric or yogic body (Wujastyk, 1998). The traditional Ayurvedic body, he writes, “differs strikingly from the body revealed in the gaze of tantric adepts or yogic practitioners. Their magico-religious body is, in contrast, an instantiation of the universe in miniature, and a conduit for mystical energies that awaken consciousness. None of these concepts are present or prominent in the ayurvedic view of the body, which by contrast is the locus of the workman who must know where the physical organs reside in order to relieve the suffering of the sick.” (Wujastyk, 1998)
The Texts: Editorial Positions
The Canon and Its Structure
Wujastyk’s anthology follows the canonical hierarchy he calls the brhattrayi (Great Three): the compendia of Caraka, Susruta, and Vagbhata’s Heart of Medicine. The “lesser threesome” consists of Madhava (c. 700), Sarngadhara (c. 1300), and Bhavamisra (sixteenth century). (Wujastyk, 1998) In the sixteenth century Bhavamisra, he notes, appears to be the first Sanskrit author to describe syphilis, naming it phiranga-roga (the Franks’ disease), reflecting contact with Islamic physicians who called it the French disease, and treating it with mercury and sarsaparilla likely borrowed from foreign practitioners. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Caraka
Wujastyk’s introduction to the Caraka-samhita establishes the text’s compositional complexity: the earliest version dates tentatively to the third or second century BCE, though the work was substantially completed by Drdhabala in the fourth or fifth century CE. (Wujastyk, 1998) The text presents itself as the work of Agnivesa, merely edited by Caraka; Caraka is not named as the main author anywhere in the main text. (Wujastyk, 1998)
He attends closely to Caraka’s social prescriptions alongside the clinical ones. Caraka identifies three sources of disease: overuse, underuse, and abuse (mithyayoga) of sense-objects, action, and time. (Wujastyk, 1998) The most fundamental concept of disease causation is prajnaparadha, “violation of good judgement,” which Wujastyk reads as the root from which all mental defects and invasive ailments spring. (Wujastyk, 1998) Caraka’s ethical teaching on the physician runs to three categories of medicine: that which depends on the sacred (mantras, rituals, pilgrimage), that which depends on reasoning (diet, drugs), and “the triumph of good character”, turning the mind away from things that are not good for one. (Wujastyk, 1998) On the basic therapeutic principle, Wujastyk notes that Caraka states an explicit allopathic rule: treat a condition with its contrary, applying cold to heat-caused diseases, heat to cold-caused diseases, supplement to diseases of depletion. He adds the irony that in Indian English today “allopathy” is a synonym for Western biomedicine, yet Ayurveda is allopathic in the strict technical sense. (Wujastyk, 1998) The same rationalist practicality appears in Caraka’s prescriptions for habit change: bad habits should be replaced with good ones not abruptly but in graduated quarter-part steps over a six-day sequence, a principle Wujastyk presents as an example of Caraka’s attention to the mechanics of behavioral change alongside drug therapy. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Wujastyk also notes Caraka’s prescriptions for a clinical facility, which he reads as among the earliest detailed prescriptions of an organized medical institution in world literature, specifying architecture, water supply, kitchen, lavatory, and staff qualities (skilled in nursing, good-natured, clean, well-behaved, loyal). (Wujastyk, 1998) The fifth-century Chinese pilgrim Fa Hsien’s account of merchant-funded charitable hospitals in Indian cities, where the poor, orphans, widowers, and people with disabilities received food, medicine, and care until they recovered, reinforces this reading: Wujastyk pairs it with Caraka’s clinical prescription as joint evidence that India may have developed the first organized, institution-based system of medical provision in the world. (Wujastyk, 1998) The text on epidemics similarly anticipates modern thinking: Caraka traces epidemic disease (janapadoddhvamsa) to corruptions of shared conditions (air, water, locale, time) and specifically mentions mosquitoes, rats, earthquakes, and bad water in connection with epidemic outbreaks. (Wujastyk, 1998) A separate moral strand of epidemic causation also runs through Caraka: when district or civic leaders transgress virtue, their communities follow, seasons fail, rains do not come at the right time, winds blow badly, herbs mutate and lose their properties, and epidemic destruction follows from the corruption of what people touch and eat. (Wujastyk, 1998)
The Caraka Oath of Initiation requires the student physician to swear celibacy, vegetarian diet, truth, freedom from envy, full submission to the teacher, day-and-night care of patients, sexual restraint, and confidentiality of household information, a list Wujastyk notes is often compared to the Hippocratic Oath. (Wujastyk, 1998) Caraka also prescribes that certain categories of patients should not be treated at all: the poor, those with no servants, the morally corrupt, and those with incurable disease. Wujastyk notes, following the commentator Dalhana, that refusal to treat a poor patient partly reflects the practical judgment that they will not be able to afford the medicine prescribed. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Kasyapa
The Kasyapa-samhita presents a different face of classical Ayurveda: focused on pediatrics and obstetrics, and approaching miscarriage not through the rationalist surgical frameworks of Caraka and Susruta but through mythic-religious discourse on the Childsnatcher mythology. (Wujastyk, 1998) (Wujastyk, 1998) Wujastyk identifies the language of this mythology as “extremely archaic, full of words and phrases one normally associates with the Brahmanas and Upanisads of the first millennium BC,” and reads it not as deliberate archaism but as a genuine survival of pre-classical Brahmanic material. (Wujastyk, 1998) He also notes that the text presents an early formulation of what might be called spirit-contagion: a pregnant woman “catches” affliction by contact with possessed or impure women through shared clothes, food, baths, or even being stared at, inverting the modern direction in which we catch disease. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Kasyapa’s text survives only in two fragmentary manuscripts, one discovered in Kathmandu in 1898, placing it among the most precarious of the major ayurvedic texts. (Wujastyk, 1998) A short chapter on women’s medicine was translated into Chinese as part of the Buddhist Tripitaka by the monk Dharmadeva (who reached China in AD 973), which provides a lower bound for the Sanskrit text’s composition, tentatively around the seventh century. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Vagbhata
Wujastyk regards Vagbhata as the synthetic pivot of the classical tradition. The Heart of Medicine, composed around AD 600, became within a century the supreme medical authority across Asia, translated into Tibetan, Arabic, and other languages; the Chinese pilgrim I-Tsing (672–688) reported that all Indian physicians practised by it. (Wujastyk, 1998) Vagbhata’s synthesis of Caraka and Susruta was, in Wujastyk’s assessment, “resoundingly successful” precisely because it refused to compromise: where later synthetic works like Sarngadhara’s shortened by simplifying, Vagbhata gave full expression to the richness of the tradition while imposing visible structure. (Wujastyk, 1998)
He draws attention to the pharmacological systematization that Vagbhata inherits and consolidates: every medical substance is assessed by four categories (rasa or savour, virya or potency, vipaka or post-digestive savour, and prabhava or special power), with six savours, two potencies, and three post-digestive savours. (Wujastyk, 1998) The combinatorics of six savours yields exactly 63 combinations, a calculation that appears explicitly in the twelfth-century mathematical text Lilavati by Bhaskara, evidence, Wujastyk notes, of cross-fertilization between Sanskrit medical and mathematical traditions. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Vagbhata’s account of four foundations of medicine (physician, substance, nurse, patient, each with four required qualities) is presented as the social infrastructure of healing. (Wujastyk, 1998) The doctrine of marmans (lethal points), which Vagbhata develops in elaborate detail following Susruta rather than Caraka, is read by Wujastyk as a probable inheritance from India’s martial arts traditions (mallavidya, kalaripayattu) that was only later grafted onto medical doctrine. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Sarngadhara
Sarngadhara (c. 1300) is Wujastyk’s case study in the sociology of medical writing. Sarngadhara honestly states that his compendium was “composed with the power of giving short-lived, dim-witted people the benefit of reading the entire canon”, a self-conscious populist motive. (Wujastyk, 1998) Its innovations include the first learned Sanskrit exposition of pulse diagnosis, the systematic use of metals in compounds, and the medicinal use of opium. (Wujastyk, 1998) The pulse-reading scheme uses animal-gait similes for each humoural state: a leech or snake for inflamed wind, sparrow-hawk or crow for inflamed choler, swan or pigeon for inflamed phlegm. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Sarngadhara also provides, Wujastyk notes, the first Sanskrit medical recognition of the respiratory movement of air in and out of the throat, a passage whose commentator Adhamalla read tantrically as breath drinking nectar at the fontanelle, while the twentieth-century editor Parasurama Sastri simply read “nectar” as “oxygen.” Wujastyk uses this interpretive history to make a point about how each era’s assumptions drive the reading of ambiguous classical passages. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Sarngadhara describes an early variant of transdermal inoculation: a crow’s-foot incision on the head allows medicinal substances to enter the bloodstream directly, giving “a special potency and rapid action.” (Wujastyk, 1998) Wujastyk treats this as one of several late-medieval innovations that entered learned Sanskrit ayurveda through Sarngadhara’s text from practices already circulating, a pattern he finds repeated with pulse diagnosis, the systematic use of metals in compounds, and the medicinal use of opium. (Wujastyk, 1998)
The Bower Manuscript
The Bower Manuscript, dating from the late fourth or early fifth century AD and found in 1890 in a Buddhist stupa on the Silk Route, contains one of the most ancient surviving ayurvedic texts in physical form, three medical treatises, two on dice divination, and two on snakebite incantations, originally owned by a senior Buddhist monk named Yasomitra. (Wujastyk, 1998) Its discovery by Lt. Hamilton Bower at Kuqa directly triggered the great Central Asian archaeological expeditions of Stein, Grunwedel, Otani, von Le Coq, and Pelliot. (Wujastyk, 1998) The medical content confirms that Sanskrit-language ayurvedic medicine was practised across Central Asia by the first centuries AD. (Wujastyk, 1998)
Reception
The Roots of Ayurveda has remained the standard general-reader entry to the classical Sanskrit medical tradition for more than two decades, with a second Penguin Classics edition appearing in 2003. Wujastyk’s careful philological work is in conversation with Kenneth Zysk‘s more interpretive sociological reconstruction of the tradition’s origins. The two scholars agree on the broad picture (that the brahmanic-Vedic genealogy of Ayurveda is a later overlay and that the early sramana milieu is critical to its formation) and differ in emphasis and in confidence about how much of the prehistory can be recovered from the surviving texts. Wujastyk’s continuing arguments about textual criticism, translation philosophy, and the modern misreadings of the technical vocabulary mark him as the more cautious philological voice in the contemporary historiography.
See Also
Sources
- Wujastyk, D. (ed. and trans.) (1998; 2nd ed. 2003). The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical Writings. Penguin Classics. [wujastyk-roots-of-ayurveda-1998]
- Zysk, K. (1991). Asceticism and Healing in Ancient India: Medicine in the Buddhist Monastery. Oxford University Press. [zysk-asceticism-healing-ancient-1991] (interlocutor whose origins thesis Wujastyk endorses with reservations)