Match the following.
(a) Varahamihira
(b) Vagbhat
(c) Ishvara Krishna
(d) Prasatapada
(i) Panchasiddhantika
(ii) Ashtang Samgraha
(iii) Samkhya Karika
(iv) Vaisheshika Sutra

Question

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Correct — option (4): (a)-(i), (b)-(ii), (c)-(iii), (d)-(iv), the straight-down mapping. Varahamihira, the sixth-century astronomer associated with Ujjain, wrote the Panchasiddhantika, which is precisely what its name says — a digest of the five astronomical siddhantas current before him — and he is equally well known for the Brihat Samhita and the Brihat Jataka. Vagbhata belongs to the medical tradition and wrote the Ashtanga Sangraha, so called because it organises medicine into eight limbs; he is the third name in the Brihat-trayi, the great triad of Ayurvedic authorities, beside Charaka and Sushruta. Ishvarakrishna wrote the Samkhya Karika, the earliest surviving systematic text of the Samkhya school and the work through which the dualism of purusha and prakriti is normally taught. The fourth pair carries a nuance the card will not paper over: the Vaisheshika Sutra itself is ascribed to Kanada, and Prashastapada — the name the booklet prints as 'Prasatapada' — is its classic expositor, author of the Padarthadharmasangraha, the commentary through which the school's doctrine of categories and atoms was transmitted. The pairing therefore works in the sense in which the syllabus uses it, associating the Vaisheshika text with the man who systematised it, and the Commission's final key reflects that reading. In the hall, none of this needs to be resolved, because the first pair alone decides the question. Varahamihira and the Panchasiddhantika are inseparable, and only one of the four printed options contains (a)-(i). Fix that pair and option (4) is the only survivor — the other three send the Panchasiddhantika to Vagbhata, to Ishvarakrishna and to Prashastapada respectively, and every one of those is a category error, moving an astronomical digest into medicine or into philosophy.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) A clean two-by-two swap that gets nothing right. It gives Varahamihira the medical Ashtanga Sangraha and Vagbhata the astronomical Panchasiddhantika, then exchanges the two philosophical texts as well, sending the Vaisheshika Sutra to Ishvarakrishna and the Samkhya Karika to Prashastapada. The first exchange is the one to notice, because it crosses disciplines: Varahamihira is an astronomer and Vagbhata a physician, and no amount of uncertainty about the philosophical pairs should let a candidate accept a swap between an astronomical digest and a treatise on the eight limbs of medicine.  (b) The complete reversal of the correct mapping — the first name is sent to the last text, the second to the third, and so on back up the column. So Varahamihira gets the Vaisheshika Sutra, Vagbhata the Samkhya Karika, Ishvarakrishna the Ashtanga Sangraha and Prashastapada the Panchasiddhantika. Every pair crosses a discipline boundary, which makes this the easiest option to discard: the four names belong to three different fields — astronomy, medicine and philosophy — and a candidate who knows only which field each name belongs to can eliminate this option without knowing a single title.  (c) Another full displacement: Varahamihira to the Samkhya Karika, Vagbhata to the Vaisheshika Sutra, Ishvarakrishna to the Panchasiddhantika and Prashastapada to the Ashtanga Sangraha. It is the option that most thoroughly ignores what kind of work each title is. The pair that exposes it fastest is the third — putting the Panchasiddhantika, a summary of five astronomical systems, into the hands of the founding author of Samkhya philosophy. Sorting the four titles by field before reading the options, rather than after, is what makes this class of distractor collapse on sight.

Concept: Ancient Indian intellectual writing is examined as three separate streams that share a matching column, and telling them apart is usually enough to answer. Astronomy and mathematics run from Aryabhata, whose Aryabhatiya set out the sine table and a heliocentrically suggestive account of the earth's rotation, through Varahamihira's Panchasiddhantika, Brihat Samhita and Brihat Jataka, to Brahmagupta's Brahmasphuta Siddhanta and later Bhaskara II's Siddhanta Shiromani. Medicine runs through the Brihat-trayi — Charaka Samhita on internal medicine, Sushruta Samhita on surgery, and Vagbhata's Ashtanga Sangraha and Ashtanga Hridaya, which organise the discipline into eight limbs. Philosophy runs through the six orthodox darshanas, each with a root text and a principal expositor: Samkhya with Ishvarakrishna's Samkhya Karika, Yoga with Patanjali's Yoga Sutra, Nyaya with Gautama, Vaisheshika with Kanada's sutras and Prashastapada's commentary, Mimamsa with Jaimini, and Vedanta with Badarayana's Brahma Sutra. Held this way, the whole column reduces to three buckets, and most matching items are decided by the bucket rather than by the title.

State PCS 2026 Q6 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2026 Q6 — Art & Culture PYQ with Answer