The thirty-two common bodies

The doctrine is the nigoda chapter's: sādhāraṇa vanaspati, the common body, is a plant in which infinite souls are born, breathe and die together. Bādara nigoda, the gross kind, is the kind that can be seen, and the thirty-two are the texts' roster of it: the roots and rhizomes that grow again when cut, the shoots before they have veins, the fungus that comes up overnight. Williams' summary is that the list picks out plants with bulbs or rhizomes or a habit of vegetative reproduction - things that grow from a piece - and that is what the six marks of the Jīvavicāra test for.

The thirty-two are in six Prakrit verses of the Pravacanasāroddhāra, and the list was conventional by Nemicandra's time. The tiles keep its order. Those that Williams identifies are named in English and Latin; four he does not, and they are marked so, not guessed. The Gujarati recitation is this list one place shifted, because it opens with savva kanda-jāi, all roots, which some commentators read as the first item and others as the heading. The tiles with something to say open their own entry: the roots, the three fresh rhizomes, garlic, radish, every new shoot, the fungi, the yams; the rest open this one.

Two things the list does not contain. The onion, which every modern list refuses first, is not named in these verses; it is refused as a kanda, a bulb, under the heading. And the potato had not reached India when the verses were written; the āluka entry has that.